by pk
Off road driving in a Discovery is great fun. It is adventurous, challenging and a stark change away from the daily responsibilities of work and family that most of us face. A day out on the trail is like hitting the brain's reset button. I believe a bad day wheeling is better than the best day fishing, or golfing, or whatever else people do to escape and refresh. In pursuit of this adventure, most rush to enhance their rigs with all kinds of aftermarket parts. Lockers, sliders, springs, shocks and big tires are just a few that come to mind. There is no doubt that these modifications improve on the Disco's, already formidable, off road performance. But experience has taught me that most of these "upgrades" merely allow us to get further and further away from civilization before we get stuck so much worse than ever before.
Once, while backing out of a running stream, where I never should have gone in the first place, my tail pipe tip stabbed into the soft riverbank. As I backed up hill, the Disco's exhaust folded up around the rear axel. Do you know if a Disco's V8 engine will run with the exhaust pipe twisted up and pinched off? Well it won't, not at all. What would you do? How would you get home? I had to get under there and grab that hot resonator with gloves on and bend it back to where I could get to it. Then I cut the whole mess off with a hacksaw and drove home without the benefit of the resonator. But I got home.
Another day my Disco refused to start when I got way out in the boonies of a dry creek canyon. I could hear that the fuel pump wasn't running when the key was switched on. No fuel pressure? Again, the V8 was slacking on the job. What would you do? How would you get home? After my panic subsided, I got a voltmeter out and traced the power to the fuel pump. Power left the engine compartment on the correct wire but did not make it to the fuel pump connector in the rear. Unable to find the break in the circuit there in the rocky creek bed, I plugged in the trailer light harness and spliced the running lights directly to the fuel pump hot lead. As long as I kept the head lights on, the fuel pump was whirring and I was rolling towards home.
Yet another time I came up a soft, muddy trail in the forest and the Disco's driver side wheels just sank in. It was snowy and deserted; I was alone and getting cold as the late afternoon stretched into dusk. What would you do? How would you get home? It seemed like recovery would be easy but the winch was buried and I had to shovel snow and icy mud just to see it. There was a giant tree root blocking the front tire down in the hole I sank into. To make matters worse, the only reasonable tree to winch to was at a bad angle. That reduced the performance of the winch so the snatch block had to be rigged for more pull. The little tree started to give way so I had to strap it to another smaller one for extra support. Fortunately I had the equipment to make it all work and I got recovered and hit the road for home. Let's focus only on the items necessary to GET HOME. I am a big fan of getting home. I think it may be the one thing I like more than wheeling in my Disco. The getting home list is, in my opinion, pretty short. A longer list would be better but it hurts my head to think about carrying too much more stuff than this. A shorter list, well maybe, but this is what I need to tote along in order to feel I have a reasonable chance of getting home at all.
Here is my ‘Get Home’ list:
I try to do as much maintenance work and repair on my Disco as possible. It's
not so much to save money, but to learn the systems of my Disco. I have found
that the more I understand about how it is built, the better chance I have at
getting it working well enough to ramble home. When you understand how it works
you can understand how to patch it up enough to move. Sometimes it's not pretty
and sometimes it does some costly damage, but that is a small price to pay for
the comfort of home.