That's probably the part where I'd pop him in the face and say something like, "Yeah, well you're a $h!+head so it shouldn't matter."

As for me: I drove out to Salida and picked up a nice, used CVT Mt. St. Helens roof top tent from a guy off ExPo. Stoked. No dawdling outside for pics though, it's about 5 degrees out there. I should celebrate with a trip to Moab. It's much warmer and I've got a place to stay now!

 

Finally got around to replacing my rotoflex on the rear driveshaft. Had a pretty good vibration that showed up around 70mph. Took it up to about 90 mph (as a test) and felt good so success.

 

Excellent restraint not spitting in his face!

 

It wasn't easy. All these "international" students my campus is getting are so difficult to deal with. Not to offend anyone but..... I've never been to Saudi Arabia but my gosh the ones on campus here are so rude and arrogant.

I honestly at first wasn't even gonna do anything about it since it just made a few cracks and didn't break anything off. All he needed to do was apologize and act like he somewhat cared, because I know accidents happen. It was him trying to run off and then insulting me and my vehicle that really put me over the edge. I am however a bit ashamed his Lexus didn't get a scratch and my "off-road vehicle" has 3 different cracks in the front from a bump. The cops did chuckle a bit at that.

 

Cool!
I have to wait until early spring to finally buy my rooftop tent. I've been trying to decide on hard shell pop up style or more traditional canvas fold up.

I got my roof rack floor on yesterday, no pics yet as I'm waiting to snip the zip ties after I get a little more compression and the floor to fit the form of the rack more closely. I'll take some tomorrow.



I also finally finished the install of the Terrafirma rock sliders. That was a not a fun experience.


I finally switched over to the Mann/Purolator Oil filter W 650/4 and 15/40 Rotella T.

And then because it was too cold to do the ARB bumper install tonight, I finished off setting up my reverse camera and integrating it with the Pioneer Nex8000 head unit that I installed a couple of weeks ago.



Oh and my brakes, new ladder and some gauges I ordered showed up. It's like Christmas!

 

Bump...

 

I had the same debate. Frankly, I'm not sure I've decided 100%. I like the smaller footprint of the folding RTT. I also like the overhang it provides and the possibility of zipping on an annex. And let's face it, they have a great treehouse/safari ascetic when they're deployed.

But this one is a hard shell and it's black, which is nice because it matches the color of my truck. The tipping point was that I got it for $900, which is a steal for the hard shell style. So I'll give it a whirl on a couple trips and when a good deal on a fold-out style comes along maybe I'll give that a try too. Then I'll keep the one I like most.

The guy I bought it from said he had a FlipPac for a while and it sounded like you were sleeping under the flags at a car dealership when it got windy.

 

Robert, I love all of these recent posts. I have a 2003 D2 that I'm thinking about selling. Didn't cost me much and I've put a lot of work into it. But now it needs a new head gasket (I think--it's spitting coolant from the overflow tube and overheating, and giving me misfires on a cylinder (don't recall which)). So I'm about to wash my hands of it.

And then I see all of your posts, and think to myself, "with a bit more work, I could have a lot of fun with this vehicle."

*Sigh* #FirstWorldProblems

In short: thanks for the encouragement!

 

You should go back through some of my historical posts, you'll find that I totally had many of these problems in my first year of D2 ownership. In fact I broke down twice on the way home from buying my truck and driving it back to Seattle from L.A. I've had oil cooler quick disconnect hoses blow off, batteries fail. sunroofs fail, door actuators fail, i've been superlocked out of the truck, the "lift" that the truck came with was a junkyard special. I could go on....

In fact I have a post where I was pretty much at my wits end and asking the community whether I should fold or keep going.

One way to look at it, is that any 10 year old former luxury truck is going to have severe deficiencies in its service history unless it was enthusiast owned. What you and I bought, was a solid platform on which to build a great truck. Blown Headgaskets, overheating etc are all opportunities for you to get that work done , replace the engine , hotter cam etc, that will provide you with a baseline for reliability for the duration of your ownership. I still don't fully trust my truck, but my plan is to get a performance V8 built for me in the next 6 months.

One final way to look at your truck, If you'd bought a Defender, you'd be at least 40-50K into a NAS truck. If you bought gray market, starting point is around 15K for a rusted pile of aluminium. As long as you're ok with money spent on your truck as going towards your hobby, you could easily spend 20K in making your Discovery perfect for you and end up with a very reliable vehicle that has all of the accessories, enhancements that you wanted , and still be able to drive the whole family plus a couple extra to the beach and back!

Totaling up my parts expenditure in the last 2 years, my total spend on my truck is getting up there, but it's the truck that fits perfectly between my childhood dream to own a Land Rover and the practical necessities of being able to transport my wife and kids around as well. If my truck had a TD5 in it, I could hand on heart say i'd keep it forever, as it is, i'll hang onto "Alfred" for as many years as I can.

Finally, I have a sneaking suspicion that Disco's will eventually start to increase in value as the number of trashed examples disappear from our roads. I think at the very least, the Discovery 1 should become a future classic.

 

A first time owner of a DII, I have been working for the past weekend and this weekend on replacing the oil pump gears. Came home over a week ago, last 50 ft got an oil pressure light and heard some hard ticking from the top end of the engine.

Got it all pulled apart not but about 10 minutes ago...Gears are fine...Now I'm lost on what is next for me and why I heard that ticking and had the oil light.

I've only had the 2002 DII for about 4 weeks now, started out with a power steering hose leak; replaced that. Now this. I'm about 2 weeks away from snow and need it to run, I'm going to clean up and re lube the gears and re-install everything. Change the oil over from the Rotella 15w40 to a different oil setup and see if that helps me any.

However, if anybody has any suggestions while I'm under this beast on what might've caused my original issues, i'm game to listen.