Private Investigations.

♫ It's a mystery to me - the game commences.... I go checking out the reports - digging up the dirt...♫

I had that Dire Straits tune in my head several times...

So, the main reasons why I bought this Defender - the galvanised chassis and Ashcroft gearbox - may not be what TPO claimed them to be. I found this very difficult to believe. While my intuition ain't perfect I normally get a feeling when things aren't right, and I didn't get that feeling when we had our long chats on the phone and on-line. He seemed perfectly OK and "in tune" with me. This is very disappointing, but there's probably a simple explanation. Surely Ashcroft have got it wrong. Richards too...

It's worth saying at this point that Ashcroft and Richards are reputed to be the Gold Standard in Defender gearbox rebuilds and chassis replacements. I did a lot of research before setting out on the search for Daphne's successor and these 2 items were on the Must Have list. Most things that're bolted to a Defender come into the "accessory" category - winches, fancy seats, tents, racks but not the chassis and the transmission, these "are" the vehicle. The only thing that should be added to that list is the 300Tdi engine. So, I was buying exactly what we needed as a basis for a top notch expedition vehicle. Or so I'd been led to believe.

At this point the DVLA sent me a cheque for the unexpired period of the Road Tax. TPO had taxed it for a year, right? All agreed in writing and done on the day of sale. My mistake was not standing over him when he did it. The refund was for the balance of SIX month's tax, not twelve. If I hadn't taken the truck off the road I wouldn't have found this out until too late. I'm impressed again, and like before not in a good way.
Our subsequent on-line conversation was a little terse. With "apologies" he would send me the balance owing for the tax and yes, the receipts for the chassis and gearbox would be "around somewhere" and would be sent to me. As already promised, in fact. Similarly he'd send the service checklists showing what had been done and when.

With alarm bells now ringing, I did some checking. It didn't take long, with the Internet's long memory and perfect records, to discover TPO's on-line persona. On a well-known UK Landrover forum he'd described the rebuild of "our" Defender but it had apparently been done 2 years earlier than he'd told me. He'd made a big noise about how much it'd all cost and that the gearbox and chassis were the best available - Ashcroft and Richards, "of course". I was now beginning to think that whoever had done the rebuild had conned him, and I really wanted this to be sorted out. I scrubbed the casing and sent a photo of the gearbox serial number to Ashcroft, hoping they could trace it in their records.

This isn't the number stamped by Ashcroft, it's the original Landrover number. It's from a Disco, and Ashcroft had no record of it. Whatever it was, it wasn't the original Defender box and had never been through their workshop. Bugger. Photos sent to Richards were less conclusive but the method of manufacture - welded edges, not folded, suggested that it was an early product and may not have been laser cut with the RC logo. The jury's out on that one for the moment, then.

A few weeks went by and then completely out of the blue and with no explanations or apologies, I got this:

I'm sure that AW Transmissions are a perfectly sound company, but I paid for someone else's product.

Now, I might be getting old but I'm not yet senile so if I'd paid a lot of money for a recon gearbox I think I'd remember where I'd bought it and not "remember it was an Ashcroft (gearbox) because it began with an "A"". No kidding, that was TPO's excuse, and from a bloke who's paid a lot of money to have- and use -his brain. He went on to say that he "now fully admit(s)" that it isn't an Ashcroft box BUT I should think myself lucky - the box I'd been sold was "more expensive" and if I wasn't happy with it I could refund him the difference. Or keep the vehicle and he'd "buy it back off me " at some time in the future. No, there are no typos here, that's exactly what he suggested. I was somewhat surprised at all this and that's putting it mildly. Does he think, perhaps, that I arrived from outer space yesterday? So he hadn't been conned, he was actually an idiot. And given his on-line bragging as far back 2010 regarding the gearbox's origins and his claim of everything being "desert and mountain proven", maybe a bit of a Walter Mitty as well.


Photos of the service history pages had been sent quite early in the argument to quieten my fears that the date of the major work was in doubt -2010 or 2012?. Paperwork with various dates appeared but the important ones - the date of the chassis and cambelt change clearly showing - or claiming - the work had been done in 2012 by a garage in Sussex. The garage stamp and the proprietor's signature on one page gave it some legal status in my view - they were saying the work had been done. Of course, someone could've added these notes at some later time to try to give credence to a statement, but no-one would do something like that. Would they? Especially if there was on-line evidence that it probably wasn't true. That would be just stupid. Eh? Did somebody say something?

The note in the box reads"chassis swap Dec 12, cam belt 12"

I believe the garage is entirely innocent here, so I've done a bit of "alteration" myself.

 As the legal wrangle intensified TPO sent me, via his solicitor, the original service paperwork so long overdue. You might notice the difference between the picture below and the one above:




The one on the top is the one sent to me to "prove" the date of the cambelt change and chassis swap. The lower one  bears an uncanny resemblance to the other. In fact, it's the original document from which the one above was copied but now with a clumsy attempt to disguise information previously presented as original and genuine. I don't know what the legal position is here, but I can make a pretty good guess. Basically there wasn't a lot of accuracy in the original advert on eBay or in subsequent discussions and I think there's a definition of this.... Some people think this is up to the buyer to spot. It's not. If a seller tells a buyer something that he knows to be incorrect, untrue or misleading it's up to the seller to put it right. We debated the point for a number of weeks, getting

increasingly annoyed with each other. In the end I did some research on my legal position and threatened to sue him. He responded with threats of how a court would see I had no case, that his wife is a barrister and I "would lose and it would cost thousands".

 So, what to do? Should I just write it off to experience? Buyer Beware, and all that? I considered my position, as they say, and decided that it wasn't TPO who'd been conned, it was me. Did he know the truth or had he somehow convinced himself that he'd actually bought an Ashcroft box when he researched, ordered and paid for a product from a different supplier? Given his obvious intelligence I doubted the latter so assumed the former. I sent the forms to Money Claim Online and waited for the screams of indignation. After 6 months of argument and the predictable threats from his solicitor (not wife), he agreed to pay for the AW box to be removed and an Ashcroft unit substituted at his expense. Result. A pity, though. I really liked this guy initially and if he'd ben a bit more sensible/unstupid he'd have saved himself a lot of money.









So I eventually got what I thought I'd bought in the first place. But...it was never going to be easy, was it? To swap the main gearbox the transfer box has to be moved. When the guys at the garage took the bolts out, one of them was a bit of a bitch to undo. This is why:

Whoever had reassembled the transmission when the chassis was rebuilt didn't know that not all transfer gearbox retaining bolts are equal. One is longer than the rest and there's a reason for that. So, if you don't put it in the correct hole it's too long and protrudes into the casing.

The hole is now 15% bigger after being reamed out by the bent bolt

  It then jams the gears and the transfer box and the propshafts won't turn. Or rather, it  is very difficult to turn these things unless considerable force is applied.This would set alarm bells ringing if it were me, but clearly the muppets who did this job had no such concerns. Just get a length of scaffolding and use that as a lever - that'll sort it. And it did. The bolt got bent and chewed up and the nasty metal scabs then got spread around the box like shot from a 12-bore. When I got the Good News at work I went round to have a look and spent 15 minutes scraping bits out of the transfer case before we came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth putting it back in that condition and would probably cost several hundred quid to sort it locally.

Reminds me of Bob Marley on a Bad Hair Day

Back to Ashcrofts - " Thanks for the R380, now can you send me a 230 box and get it here tomorrow?"
 

 After a week we got it all back together and ready for a road test. The speedo was now playing up - jittering about then failing completely after 15 minutes or so. I bought a new drive gear, thinking the old one might not like the new transfer box. As I crawled underneath to fit it I found what you see here - a lot of oil spread across the chassis, coming from the transmission brake. This suggested a faulty oil seal. Ashcrofts suggested I took it to a Landrover specialist in Inverness to look at, at their expense.
The problem turned out to be a nut that wasn't torqued up enough so quite easy to fix.

This didn't solve the chirping speedo though, so I asked them to road test the whole thing to see if we could diagnose the problem. During the test...bang...clang....clatter....










Sigh..*#. Anybody wanna guess what this is?

It's the mounting flange for the drive pulley that sticks out of the front of the water pump. It's sheared off across the shaft. A one-in-a-million fault, apparently so no surprise that it happened to me. I'm beginning to regret ever setting eyes on this truck and its previous owner even more.
I did, of course, have a spare water pump. In the spares box. 45 miles away. So another fistful of dollars to replace the pump that I needed to get me back home, where the other one was....I'll refrain from mentioning how much this little escapade has cost - that's something I wouldn't want to shout about, unlike The Previous Owner.


Now I have a Defender with two Rolls-Royce standard gearboxes. Peace of Mind costs, and a lot more than I bargained for but hey, I know exactly what's under my feet now and this is worth all the hassle. I think...

Wouldn't want to do it again, though.

Anybody want a brand new water pump?