Old Land Rovers leak

That might be the first thing I heard about Land Rovers when I started searching for one. If it’s not leaking, your fluids are low” is the oft-told joke. Rover Sage Charlie Pendleton advised, “If the leak is the size of a half-dollar, I don’t worry about it. If it’s the size of a grapefruit or larger, I track it down and fix it.” A few weeks back my truck developed a grapefruit size leak. This week George Tergin tracked it own and (fingers crossed) fixed it.

My rebuilt engine originally had a turbocharger. I had them take it off before installing my engine because it would have necessitated some work on the transmission I didn’t want to do (have done). And I was confident I didn’t need to achieve highway speeds. Anyway…

The turbocharger gets its oil from a hole in the engine block. That had to be capped off. In my case, the cap was a little too long and didn’t thread all the way down on the… plug gizmo? Looks like they might have put some goop in the cap to improve the seal and it held for six months before starting to leak.

George got a new cap and then did some surgery on it to properly cap the gusher. Still have some half-dollar leaks but George is determined to track ’em down.

Update 4/12/19: The Big Leak is no more.

2 thoughts on “Old Land Rovers leak

  1. Good question. I don’t know the answer but I’ll ask George. The more time I spend looking over his shoulder, the more amazed I am at the engineering that went into these old trucks. From conception to design to manufacture.

    George explains: Finding the correct “cap” was easier than finding that metric thread in a bolt.

  2. One might ask: why the plug gizmo at all? Why not just remove it and put in an actual threaded plug?

Comments are closed.