Looking on one of the other Disco forums,came across a thread where a '99 owner had his radiator fan fly apart and do major damage underhood-I have hear a couple other cases of this happening with Discos,my '03 has the Borg Warner fan with blades molded onto the outer rim of the clutch:looked mine over real good and found nothing suspect and it looked like a good strong design.The two earlier fan designs,the BMW looking one and the design with the ring around the blades could be suspect ?

 

 

Hard to say exactly what happened there, the fan was shredded but he also indicated a wobble. So Fan, belt water pump are all suspect all we have is the end result. But in my experience it is pretty rare for a fan to lose every fan blade unless it was significantly flawed or damaged prior to install or during operation.

 

 

Best4x4 according to the owner the fan was new from AB.

 

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Here is what I experienced, on my 2004 Discovery @ 80,000 original miles: After what seemed like the fan blowing apart, with other considerable damage around the radiator, following my repair and assessment of what happened to cause all this, I determined that the water pump bearing gave out, fell apart actually, causing the water pump impeller to turn off center and jam against the aluminum housing that the pump impeller rides in. That, in turn, of course, caused the belt to be forced off of the pulley, breaking apart the belt guard on top front of engine. With the loose belt flying around front of engine, it broke off all of the plastic fan blades. Just a few days earlier, too, I had inspected the water pump, by seeing if it had any looseness in the bearing, and it seemed tight, not worn. So, I think the water pump was OEM, about 80,000 miles, thus it is hard to determine how long they will last. I installed the highest quality water pump I could find, one with a brass or bronze impeller.

 

when I bought my disco with ~114,000 on it,the water pump was shot-leaking and bearings wasted-I replaced it with a Spanish made,steel impeller pump from Autozone(cost ~200) only have about 2000 miles on that pump.Regarding the fan blowup on the other forum,he mentioned his fan wobbled some but axial runout of ~1/8"is quite normal because the single row ball bearing in the clutch has some natural play even if the blades turn perfectly true.I think the clutch must have failed and locked during that incident to get enough RPM to do the damage it did...If anything goes wrong with the fan on my disco,i have a nice fan from a ~95 chevy S-10 4.3 I could trim down and use-almost same design as Rover fan,strong glass-filled nylon.

 

Dorman 620-112 Fan Blade is 25.00