I had two 200Tdi-engined Land Rovers come into the workshop in quick succession. One was booked in for a routine timing belt change, and the other limped in running on three cylinders and making some most peculiar noises, having been written off by two other garages as ‘not worth repairing’. I had been told over the phone that the vehicle was a 1986 Ninety with a turbodiesel engine so I was expecting a life-expired 19J engine: on lifting the bonnet I was surprised to find a 200Tdi. And not just any old 200Tdi, but a proper Defender 11L unit with the high-mounted turbocharger.
My plan for this vehicle (as agreed with the owner) had been to pull out the old engine and drop in one of the various ex-military 2.5 non-turbo lumps that I have lying around. The good old 12J is very slow but simple and robust with excellent spares availability, and would have been plenty good enough for pottering around the country lanes of East Anglia. However, finding a 200Tdi under the bonnet resulted in a change of plan. 200Tdi engines are famously robust and quite hard to kill, so I decided to do a bit of digging around in this engine’s internals to see whether it could be salvaged without spending a fortune.
The engine was very rough and smoky, clearly off a cylinder and with a strange intermittent loud banging noise which I had not heard before. This sounded as though it was coming from the air intake,had about half an inch clearance on the rocker arm instead of the usual ten thou.
