What Lies Beneath
First appeared in Total Off-Road, May 2017
Precious few of the Land Rover 90s that date from the first few years of production are still in anything resembling their original state. In some cases, that’s a bad thing. But every so often a Landy turns up that looks unremarkable – until you start digging beneath the surface…
There’s absolutely no limit to the variety of 90s you come across. But every so often, something crops up that gets you wondering.
We said something pretty much like that last month about a blingy red 90 we’d turned up at Salter and Selby, a car dealership based on a farm in the village of Plungar, amid the idyllic rolling countryside on the Leicestershire-Nottinghamshire border. It was the sort of truck you only ever see a dealer taking on if they’re Landy enthusiasts at heart; sure enough Tom Salter is just that, and the red pose-truck we featured last month was only one of the intriguing Landies the company had for sale at the time.
The one in these pictures is another. An unremarkable looking ex-military wagon from 1985 was parked in the corner of the company’s barn when we turned up. Unremarkable, that is – until we started poking around and began to see just what it was made of.
On the face of it, this is a windowed hard-top with a naturally aspirated 2.5 diesel and 115,000 miles on the clock. That’s only about 4000 a year, so heaven knows how many it’s really done… actually, heaven knows full stop, but one thing you can be sure of is that different bits of it have different histories.
The chassis, for example. Well, it might not even have that much of a history. Its age is unknown, but it looks pretty new – though it would. And it says a lot about that of the vehicle itself – because it’s galvanised. Someone has built this Landy from parts, that’s clear – but the parts they built it from suggest first that it’s an honest one, and second that they set out to create a 90 that would be a cut above your average bitsa.
Look underneath that gleaming silver chassis, for starters, and you’ll see that the back axle has disc brakes on it. Not something Land Rover got into the swing of putting on the Defender for more than half a decade after this one was built. Tom says he hasn’t gone digging around for serial numbers, or drawn the halfshafts to count the splines, but he reckons the 90 was built using Discovery axles – which would certainly explain the brakes, of course.
They’re turned by a naturally aspirated 2.5 diesel engine which, given the vehicle’s age, may be original to it. The transmission appears standard, though the gearbox has a PTO shaft which would originally have powered a mechanical winch. The plot thickens…
Inside, the cabin is tidy if not pristine. The 90 has proper seats, as opposed to the Series-style padding you see on some ex-military Landies of this age, and the steering wheel is a later ‘soft-touch’ unit from the Defender era. Not as wide in the beam as the contemporary wheel, which of course was chosen to turn the front wheels without the benefit of power assistance, but the smaller-diameter job on this truck does okay once it’s got moving.
Sadly, we’ve not been able to make contact with whoever built this 90, which ended up at Salter and Selby after being traded in to a Land Rover main dealer. So we can only speculate on the thinking behind the build, which doesn’t appear to have been a case of throwing bits together at random.
Certainly, the galvanised chassis points towards a serious project, and the use of later, disc-braked axles suggests the builder wanted a Landy with the major grief points engineered out. We’d venture a guess that they were after a 90 with a bit more refinement than an old ex-service hack, too. Maybe a farmer wanting a simple, low-maintenance workhorse that would see him out?
There’s nothing to suggest that this was meant to be turned into a world-beating comp truck or anything like that, at any rate, and the classic hallmarks of an abandoned project are nowhere to be seen. Who knows what’s inside those axles, that gearbox… who knows even whether the engine is as standard as it looks?
Like so many old Landies, it’s a fascinating bundle of mysteries. Unlike many of them, they appear to tell a tale not of neglect, but of the loving care every old 90 surely deserves.
