Hello there! I’ve had such good luck finding helpful info on this forum for my projects, I decided to join and contribute. My husband has a 2001 Disco II which I’ve adopted. What’s his is mine, right?? The license plate lights looked tired, dingy, and orange. Water was getting into the cover due to a rotted gasket around the back. I picked up a new one on the Rovers North website for about $45. To replace, remove the interior rear door panel. You’ll have to remove the speaker cover and speakers in order to remove the panel. Near the upper right corner of the plastic covering over the “guts” of the door, cut an opening which allows access to the nuts/bolts for the latch cover. You’ll see 4 nuts but you only need to remove the outer 2. Good luck with the one on the right. Land Rover tucked that little guy way up in the corner. Thank goodness for small hands. Remove the license plate light covers and bulbs, and gently pull the wires off the covers. Pop out the green Land Rover emblem from the latch cover with a flathead screwdriver or similar tool. If you look inside the cover and upward, you’ll see a bolt head. Remove that bolt. You can then take the latch cover off the door. From there, I took everything apart (removed rotted pieces of original gasket, pulled wires out of the cover, etc). I washed it and put Mothers back-to-black on it. I washed the rust dust off the license plate light covers and the rear door under where the cover had been. Once done with all the cleanup, gently feed the wires through the appropriate hole in the new gasket. Route the wires through the cover and push the new gasket onto the back of the cover. Replace the bolt behind the Land Rover emblem and the nuts inside the rear door area. Put the license plate bulbs and cover back in. Then put everything inside the rear door back together. (Side note: inexpensive LED bulbs were put in and they look fantastic!)





While I had everything removed, I also removed the latch handle itself, lubricated it (only had bike chain lube handy but it works well), and washed/inspected it’s gasket. The whole job took about an hour but I’m a beginner.

I’m sorry if the pictures are a bit out of order. Moving them around from my phone wasn’t easy.



Dry rotted gasket


Parts diagram

 

Thanks for posting this! I could not find this in (the RAVE) manual (which of course could be poor searching on my part)

 

@MellBelle .. dude you rock! I've been wanting to change out the rubber gasket at the back of the handle instead of adding black sealant.
Cheers!

 

Nice write up.

 

My gasket was really tatty and was obviously allowing some rain into the door cavity. No actual rust, thankfully.
What began as a one to one and half banana project kinda got ugly. About half of the blind door card fasteners broke, no matter how delicate I was with my popper tools. And that outboard nut was a bridge too far without pulling the latch mechanism. Problem was that the three T25 screws that hold it to the door were totally frozen. Had to slot them and give them many whacks with an impact screwdriver. Damn that sucked.
And, of course, the bulb holder/lenses on the license plate illuminators have given up the ghost. Ordered some of the cheap Ebay LEDs suggested in this thread:
https://landroverforums.com/forum/di...d-pods-101609/

Now I await the panel fasteners and lights to close this project out.
The part # for the gasket is CXE100400

Thanks to the OP for a very good writeup!

 

I have some 3D LED holders for these lights on thingiverse:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3401700