small upgrades and repairs

now, in a Disco, that can mean anything.

During the summer I noticed that my license plate light cover was leaking water, as it rained almost every day this summer, I did not think much of it ( we were almost 3 feet above normal for rain in 2018) but once the cold weather hit, I happened to notice it had also cracked over time I noticed it was getting worse. I also knew my plate lights were inop, so I assumed that there was a correlation. It was time to do some repairs and upgrades!

First up: The old cover was looking pretty, well, old. Knackered if you will.

Off it had to come. Unfortunately this required disassembling most of the rear door. The door panel, subwoofer, storage bin, interior handle, and even the latch had to come off just to access two of the three nuts that held it on.

The third bolt was hidden behind the Rover emblem on the cover itself, once you popped it out, you could slide a socket on an extension in there.

Off the truck, the cover was actually looking worse. Not only was it badly cracked, but a small piece on the corner popped off and disappeared and both plate lights were completely rotted. There was not enough metal left to even enable a repair. It was time to upgrade! Any and all wetness you see was from the cup full of water that was trapped between the cover and the door. It's a good thing that Rover makes the outer skins of the disco out of aluminum.

As I buy epoxy by the gallon (literally!) it was just a matter of washing it all down, sanding, mixing up some epoxy and adding some thickeners to it so as to fill in the hole and cracks. I also filled the two rectangular holes for the plate lights for later use.

Add some more sanding (a lot more!) and some textured paint and here we have it:

Now for the upgrade I was telling you about: As the plate lights were not only inop, but actually rotted to the point of unusability and that Disco2 parts are made of gold compared to LR3 and 4 parts, I bought a single "rock light" from Rigid industries. Supposedly it is their low powered one at 400 lumens, which I am certain is more than the stock pair of lights ever dreamed of putting out. It looks well made and should probably outlast many parts of my Rover.

I have yet to see it at night, but it was a simple matter to tie it into the original wiring of my Disco.

And here we have it, all nice and clean and gracing the door once more.

As this was a nice week compared to last and probably next, I did also manage to replace my failing Starter, rewired the mains and grounds to get rid of some suspect corrosion, and added this fun little piece to the door panel. A net insert from a BMW Z3. I have two of them in the disco already, in front of the rear seats as a handy grab area to keep things safe but still easily accessable.

nice fix and look cool.

That turned out quite well!

Impressive.

Make sure to ground the ABS pump and double up all the chassis grounds when you have time. 

I miss my disco.  

That came out nicely.  Sometimes, fixing the little things gives you the sense of big time accomplishments. 

Can’t wait to see a nighttime picture 

hopefully soon. It was too nice today not to drive the Abarth

tonight I am going to try to get the plate lights on camera, but for now something to cure my lack of rear reflectors

One of the things I dislike about the looks of the Disco are the taillights on the Face lifted Disco2. The Amber turnsignal is far too large compared to the parking/brake light. It also does not work with the lens protectors I put on. The amber sticks down beneath the plastic and looks huge. I thought about tinting them, but I like people to know I am turning, so I went out and bought some reflective conspicuity tape. Thanks to amazon, I was able to get it in 5" width for not too much money in a red that does a decent enough job emulating the factory red on the tail lights. While it lacks depth, it's nearly impossible to see a difference from 10 feet.

See how large the amber turn signals look compared to the rest of the tail lamp?

This is after applying the tape:

While they look a lot better than before, the reflective capabilities of this tape are not too be believed. The stock Rover Reflectors were part of the rear Fog lights and were not very good at being anything but red. They certainly had little reflectivity and I am not even sure how LR got them through DOT testing.

have to excuse how blown out these look. I was not using my good camera, so the auto adjust did it's best to make nighttime look like daylight. The Rocklight is a little too bright for my tastes, but I doubt anybody will care. If they do, I will drop some gel over the led to knock it's intensity down some.

With the flash on is more how it really looks