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The new Land Rover Defender is far more luxurious than the old one, but in Britain it still works for a living. This one is a rural ambulance, used on bad roads and farm tracks. At 67,480 miles (108,600 km) it came into a well-known UK workshop for a new timing chain.
It is one of the first cars of this generation, with the 2.0-litre four-cylinder Ingenium diesel and mild-hybrid technology. Land Rover later moved to 3.0-litre six-cylinder diesels. The mechanic has rebuilt about 100 earlier Ingenium engines and hoped this revised version would be easier to work on.
What he ran into
- Oil leaks before he even started. Of the roughly 100 Ingenium engines he has repaired, only two or three did not leak.
- One improvement: the intercooler no longer covers the crankshaft pulley.
- Layer upon layer of components. To remove one part, you first remove several that sit partly on top of it.
- The gearbox has to come out to reach the chain, which sits at the back of the engine. The car went up and down on the lift several times because the timing cover could not come off until another part was removed from above, under the windscreen.
- A worn front subframe bushing, placed right next to the oil drain plug, so oil spilt at every oil change destroys the rubber.
- Wiring harnesses routed close to the exhaust.
The chain itself was badly stretched, although the oil had clearly been changed at decent intervals. “Nothing has been changed here,” the mechanic said of the timing design. The new chain was fitted with every guide, tensioner and cover bolt torqued correctly. Then a coolant leak showed up from the EGR valve, which was replaced with the owner’s approval. Shiny particles in the oil filter were not magnetic: aluminium from the timing cover, worn by the slack chain.
You can see the whole job in the video below. Automatically translated subtitles can be turned on in the player settings.
Planning the job
In North America the new Defender was sold with petrol engines (the 2.0 P300 and the 3.0 six-cylinder mild hybrid), not this diesel, but the Ingenium family shares its rear-mounted timing drive and the same access problems. With a job this long, the order of operations matters. The factory repair manual for your Defender lists every step and special tool, the timing setup, torque values and the wiring for the harnesses you have to move.
Our manuals are the manufacturer’s own service information for your VIN, delivered as a PDF with working hyperlinks: click a step in the index, or a connector in a wiring diagram, and you go straight to it. No scanned pages, no guessing.