Just goes to show that you ALWAYS need to check before you buy. That Ninety looked nice in the photos and the description gave no indication of the tinworm and other issues. If someone had bought this off eBay ( for example), without seeing it first, they'd be pretty disappointed!

Yeah they're coming up all the time. For a bargain I think it would need to be a private sale rather than a dealer, and to get a good one would really need to move fast as soon as it came on the market.

My main worry was buying something that appeared good but went bang within a week or something. Makes it easier to reject something if you can literally pull pieces of metal of the chassis with your fingers though ;-)

There was a quite nice condition 1989 defender 2.5TD, completely unmodified. Chassis was excellent but would need immediate rust proofing. Was a bit above my budget though at 4k, when I saw that one though I'd had enough of lying in muddy puddles and the wife was in the car with our 3 month old daughter and getting quite impatient so had to leave

Usually a better option to buy privately than from a dealer at the cheaper end of Defenders being sold, it's going to be an expensive couple of years for anyone trying to buy a Defender, too many dealers jumping on the bandwagon right now and offering rusty tat at top prices.

I bought a bargain one with a bad chassis on ebay then paid for a chassis swap. Overall it cost more than £3.5k, and 8 months of waiting, but now I know that rust and a few other things will not be an issue for the foreseeable future.

I would definitely have paid that for one with a solid chassis. Almost anything can be fixed relatively cheaply except a badly rotten chassis. If I had the space I would buy a cheapo one like you and a brand new galvanised chassis, and basically rebuild it to last decades.