VISITORS to my workshop over the last year cannot fail to have noticed a very sorry-looking and incomplete Range Rover taking up far too much of my scarce and precious workshop space. The story behind this is a sad one. The owner bought the vehicle (a very late soft-dash Classic with the 3.9-litre V8 engine) at a classic car auction and brought it to me for a service and a few minor repairs to door locks, lights and so on.
I drove the vehicle into the workshop, put it on axle stands, and two minutes later I was pulling out big chunks of structurally important bodywork with my bare hands. The inner wings (front and rear), front footwells and boot floor were as rotten as anything I have ever seen. The entire underside of the vehicle had been sprayed with thick black underseal on top of mud, and wherever I scraped off this filthy stuff I found more holes. The bits that had not rusted right through were heavily wasted and encrusted with thick rust scale.
Despite its low mileage and tidy appearance, my assessment at this point was that the vehicle was beyond economic repair. It needed a boot floor and rear arches, a complete front end, footwells both sides, and although the sills had been replaced at some point the ends had been left
