When off-roading is a passion but a decision to emigrate to the other side of the world looms, the only thing to do is pack your beloved Land Rover Defender and take it with you. Psimpson7 has owned his 2001 TD5 Defender 90 for 14 years, and during that time tweaked it to be ideal for the off-road trails.
His choice to fit an L77 V8 with cylinder deactivation and the automatic 6L80e transmission from a written off Holden Commodore with 37,000 km is one that we at PH can get behind. The spec list is long, which hopefully the OP will explain fully at some point, but the main points are that he is fitting are an underdrive pulley, cage, locking diffs and a galvanised chassis.
With off-the-shelf adapters available in America allowing the transfer box to be fitted on to the gearbox without needing to push the drivetrain back, the focus has been on converting the output housing to 4WD and dry tail housing. The air conditioning compressor has been removed for the full rugged feel. The alternator needs has been relocated and a power steering pump was fitted. The PHer has designed some mounts on Solidworks and had them CNCed.
To keep the car road legal in Australia, Psimpson7 needed to run the full emissions set up for the engine including cats and multiple sensors; then problems arose when he wanted to run a Lokar gear knob as it only has one plane, versus the Commodore's standard two-plane for manual and auto modes.
Plenty more modifications had to be done including sump, manifolds and new gauges as well as basically stripping the engine back to bare bones before refitting the rest of the front end and getting into more technical bits of a rebuild. If you are looking for a heavily technical build thread this is definitely for you. Congratulations Psimpson7, your L77 engined Land Rover Defender is our Reader's Car Of The Week.
Read the full build thread here.