Not entirely my project, by any means, but an interesting one to help with.
What we have is an old(ish) Land Rover Defender 90, 1996 vintage.
Originally came with a pretty solid 4 cylinder diesel engine (300Tdi) and a dual range manual gearbox. It’s now being rebuilt though, with a 6 cylinder diesel engine and automatic gearbox from a BMW X5.
Why? Well it turns out it’s a fairly common thing to do, and there are a few suppliers around dedicated to providing parts, adapters, links and the like. It seems that the engines are pretty well available at reasonable price, fron cars being broken mainly, and they do find their way into all sorts of vehicles as well as Land Rovers.
To add to the fun though, ours is getting an interior revamp to, pulling in a dashboard and electrics from a more modern Defender (Puma), which introduces a few nice complications, as it moves away slightly from the simple point to point wiring and intoduces concepts such as CanBus as OBD, for which some digging is required.