History

Being the environmentally friendly guy that I am, I bought a Land Rover Discovery back in January with the intention to travel Europe in comfort. I also enjoy the idea of being able to dominate the road with this tank of a vehicle. However, since owning the thing it has brought me nothing but despair...I guess this is karma slapping me in the face.

Two days after I bought it I lost the one key that I had. That was the beginning of the money pit. It cost over $200 to get a new key and key fob. I drove it for about a week and noticed that it started blowing out a lot of black smoke on acceleration, and it would start to stall at times. The stalling became more frequent and I found myself pushing the thing more than I was driving it. So I began troubleshooting. I gave it a full tune up, replaced the fuel pump and checked a bunch of sensors...another $300 later and still nothing. Being a man, I absolutely refuse to take the thing into a shop and have some other guy put their hands on her. Just to make sure the engine was alright, I decided to do a compression check and found out one of the cylinders wasn't getting any compression...hmm. After some research, it has been determined that it likely has a bad valve.

Do I really want to deal with this? Well yesterday I figured its been sitting outside my house for the past four months, it probably wouldn't hurt to work on it myself.

Now, for those that know me or have heard about what happened to my house, I will remind you that I am not a professional. I'm going into this thing sort of blind. I have to manage to not only take my engine apart, but also put it back together again...correctly.

If an experienced person was doing this, it should take about 10 hours. I plan to do it in 7 (yeah right). So if you like, follow along and enjoy my pain as I go through this experience. I'm armed with my Macbook with electronic version of the Discovery mechanics manual, a Haynes manual and whatever tools I can find at the hobby shop. May God help us all...