I pulled off my front cover to replace a whole bunch of gaskets and parts, and as I'm cleaning it up and cleaning out the bolt holes, I stumble on a strange, sheared looking metal piece on the front cover, and on the engine front. I tapped it lightly with my screwdriver, the piece in the front cover, and it punched right out!!

Piece next to hole it came out of:
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Broken off part of piece on engine front, second hole up from bottom:
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It looks like it was a dowel piece sticking off the front of the engine that had snapped off during some previous engine work and they had left it in the hole. I'll bet this was where one of my oil leaks was coming from... This front cover has some shear marks on the outer edges of the mating joint where it looks like the old gasket must have been carelessly scraped off before.

So I'm not buying a new engine to get another dowel piece; might I weld the dowel piece back to the engine? That, some HYLOMAR blue RTV around the hole, and hope the leak stays as minimal as it was before?

Golly, it's like the more I try and repair, the more problems I run into.

 

I would work on removing the dowel piece from the block and inserting a new dowel.

 

I can insert a new dowel piece? Is it just screwed into the block then?

 

Pushed in

 

Oh man, that's great news. Any idea if these types of pins are easy to find?

 

Nevermind, found it on Atlantic British. Thanks a bunch Abran, I was about to jump off a cliff in frustration.

 

I'm finally at this Zen moment in the rover world where I have realized that everything is fixable, and not as bad as I thought...

Good luck.

 

With a body on frame Rover, everything is fixable. At some point all it takes is more money. Ha! There are replacement parts available for everything. Of course you might eventually wind up spending the cost of a new vehicle, but . . .

There are new, galvanized chassis available if you need to go that far.

That said, I've told people I am the terminal owner of my Land Rover. I plan to keep fixing it.