90 Front End

After just a month of owning the 90, some prat has put a dent in it.  It looks like a shopping trolley handle has bashed the front wing and put a dent across the joint between the front and side panels, just above the line of the headlight trim panel.  It’s going to cost about £200 to be dealt with.  Great.  We had considered, when buying the 90, having the slatted light guards, but decided against it.  Of course, had we fitted them, this damage would probably not have happened, so we are now going to fit them after all.  Closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, and all that…  Still it should prevent a recurrence after the repair is done.

Some work needed doing before the light guards are added, though.  Seemingly every new Defender has droopy wings and headlight trims – the trims are always dropping down at the outboard ends, and adding the slatted guards only exacerbates the fault.  The brand new guard equipped models I have seen in show rooms have very uneven alignments.   Being me, that just wasn’t going to do, so I stripped the grille panel out to have a go at squaring everything up.  Firstly, I measured the gap between the inner edges of the wing front panels at the top and bottom and found a 7.5mm difference – the bonnet slam panel is 7-8mm longer than the gap between the outside faces of the wing mounting brackets on the chassis.  Unbelievable!  That was rectified with a handful of 2mm washers between the bracket and wing, bringing the winds square, but the headlight trims still drooped.  A close look showed that in each case, the holes and slots for the indicator and sidelight are too high relative to the two inboard screw holes.  Since slotting the screw holes would require ugly washers to hide the ends of the holes, I decided that lengthening the lighting apertures to allow the outboard end of the trims to be raised a little would be better – the alterations would be concealed behind the two small lights on each side.  So, after about 2-3mm of deepening the apertures on their lower edges, the panels now fit squarely on the wings and it all looks much tidier and will not be shown up with the guards.  You can see the difference in the before and after photos of the complete front end.

While the grille panel was out, I also tackled the common problem of the rotting mesh grille at the bottom.  Land Rover don’t seem to learn or care about corrosion.  True to form, they take a bare stamped aluminium mesh and pop rivet it into a GRP panel, then paint it.  Unsurprisingly, at least to us, the aluminium is only painted on the visible front face, and so those parts hidden behind the GRP and its back face very quickly corrode, shedding its paint and exposing even more aluminium, accelerating the corrosion.  Astonishingly, a new panel and mesh (they are unavailable separately) costs £180, +VAT (and I think that might be at the discounted price Marshalls give me, too).  So, I drilled out the 14 5mm rivets, wire brushed and Jenolited the mesh, sprayed it up in Galvafroid, stone chip paint, Santorini black and laquer before refitting.  The rivet heads were brush painted after the panel had been polished in order to remove the staining in the original paintwork around each rivet.  It looks like new now, and might last more than a year before it needs another repaint.

Fitting the panels back together showed a curious thing.  The left side head light trim top edge had always been behind the GRP grill panel’s edge, as witnessed by a rub mark in the paint, but there had been a gap on the right hand side which no longer existed – this side now matched the other, but the GRP panel didn’t want to push back easily on that side for the retaining screws to line up with their holes.  It only needed light pressure to sort out, but when a friend came around the other day and we talked about the whole drooping issue, we saw his had the same overlap on the left and gap on the right, and it appears this is normally the case.

Anyway, if you also dislike the wing droop, then it’s a simple fix that only takes a couple of hours:

1) Remove the grille panel (on aircon models, this means four small screws along the top and one large self tapper on the side – not sure about the others);

2) Remove the bolt securing the front corner of the wing to the chassis and loosen the next bolt back significantly (it won’t come out of the wing);

3) Fit 4mm of large diameter washers between the wing and bracket and loosely refit the nut and bolt;

4) Cut slots in washers to pack the rear bolt between wing and bracket, then tighten them all up;

5) Refit the grille panel and remove the headlight trims;

6) File about 2mm initially out of the lower edges of the circles and slots for the lights and their fixings and test fit to the wing, looking for an even 65mm gap from the top of the plastic trim to the centre of the joint between wing front and top, filing more plastic if necessary;

7) Refit the trims, lights and screws and wonder why you needed to do this on a £35,000 car.

So, once the dents have been fixed, the light guards will be fitted.  The snorkel can go on then, too (it can’t yet because the whole panel will be painted on the dent repair), but a friend mentioned that his insurers were very excited, not in a good way, about him having a snorkel, even though they didn’t seem concerned about his roll cage, winch or suspension lift, so we’ll check what effects the snorkel will have on insurance before we fit it.  Given that it’s being fitted for aesthetics and the car won’t be used off road, I hope we can persuade them not to play silly buggers.

In other fun, I also had to remove the interior side trims to find the source of a Sherardised nut that fell out of the trim under the right hand side window the other day.  To do this, you need to unclip and remove the rear window trims, remove the front seat belt shoulder points and side grab handles, and then prise out the four plastic clips holding the trim to the side of the car (one is hidden inside the rubber buffer for the folding seat) without damaging the trim or clips.  Then the trim can be teased out.  The nut turned out to have come off the bottom of the bolt securing the mid-length bracket that fixes the heard top to the tub capping.  This was refitted with a drop of thread lock, all the bolts and nuts along the tub and roof line, especially the seat belt anchor points, checked, the trim refitted and the other side removed for similar inspection.  Guess what… the corresponding nut on the other side was also loose, though hadn’t come off yet.  Another drop of thread lock and it all went back together.   OK, not a difficult or very lengthy job, and it only cost the price of the thread lock if you don’t have any already, but really?  Is it so dear that Land Rover can’t put a drop on themselves?