The Car "Edmund"
As everyone has been asking here is the story of our car Edmund. He's a bit fat at the moment and get's very close to three and a half tons, hopefully as time goes by we can lighten the load.
We got Edmund in about October 2006, and he sat idle in the garage for nearly an entire year, only being taken out once a month for a brief drive. This led to the lack of use syndrome, which then led to a small group of mechanics being left clueless not knowing what was wrong with it for the better part of two months. Eventually it turned out to be a dud ECU. This was only replaced once practically every other sensor on the vehicle was swapped which ended with an exorbitantly high repair bill. And at the same time they found a small hole in the head near the entry of one of the injectors. We also had a new roof tent put on, some extra safes under the backseats and the location of the old roof tent turned into an extra large storage draw for lightweight gear.
The suspension was also completely redone as it leaned like hell around even the slightest corners. After having test driven another overweight 130 that had dual shocks all round I thought it would be best to do the same. Oops I misunderstood the mechanic and it cost 3 times as much as I thought. Oh well shit happens.
Back to the small hole in the head. The mechanics were nice enough to give me a photo of the questionable hole, I went about finding out more info on what could be done to fix it. So I posted the picture on a landrover forum, within minutes someone responded with replace the head ASAP. He had a friend with the same thing and it destroyed the entire motor. I went on getting more and more info and eventually got the same sort of answer from pretty much everyone, Including Turner engineering in the UK. I finally decided to replace the head after I spoke to a French mechanic and he put it in plain “French”; if it was his car this is what he would do. If he was driving around Europe, he would pay the extra 150 franc a year insurance that will tow your car back to your garage of choice if it doesn’t work anymore. But if he was going to Africa he would replace the head immediately, it’s hard to get a TD5 head out there and if you get one it’s going to cost an arm and a leg. So that was that I was on the phone to turner to find out the cost of a new head. 1000 pounds just for the head then you need, this part and that part etc etc... Chris and Dani agreed to replace it for me while I was in NZ so that we wouldn’t have to delay the trip, I originally wanted to do it myself to save on the labour costs but based upon the amount of time we had before we wanted to leave with everything else to do it just wouldn’t have been possible.
Beyond that Edmund is one of the most unusual looking landrovers you will see, the back is brilliantly designed. He will have plenty of opportunities to prove himself over the next year.
Here is some of the main kit fitted to Edmund.
We also have all the other usual accessories like a GPS, Laptop, Cameras, tow straps, compressor, ropes, hi lift jack, tent, cooking gear the list is very long. We may create a full list but at this point enough people have created one that you don’t need another one from us and as we have more space than others we have taken too much stuff. So we will more likely create a “what not to take” list.