Thanks for that
@Hippo, I had it in my brain that the front and rear diffs were different ratios resulting in consant drag being felt by the VCU, which put load on the VCU and thus heated the fluid. As I understood it the fluid failed because it slowly got cooked and became overly viscous transmitting most if not all of the torque from the two diffs at different rotational speeds into each other. And as such, long drives like dual carriageway / motorway exacerbated things on an iffy VCU because the difference in the ratios front and rear,it was a constant load on the VCU heating it up making it even stickier allowing the front band back diffs to have an arm wrestling match.
Its interesting that they don't need too much time to unwind, but if they can unwind, that plays nicely with my thinking that short journeys will be better for them than longer ones, and having done half its mileage running around locally, that had probably helped mine at least even a little.
I'd been looking at D3/D4's... having read various comments off here I'm quietly going off the notion, as since I discovered the fate of our old disco I've been feeling an empty pang in my soul yearning for another discovery. To let you understand, we used to have 300tdi discovery, to which which I had done a new boot floor, both sills, partial floor pan, 4x new calipers discs and pads, retrofitted heated sats to it, fully lined the interior with sound deadening, new front bumper and rubber bull bar, snorkel, parking sensors, brand new sony bluetooth head unit and brand new speakers, including wiring in the tailgate boom box to a preamp out from the headunit,two sets of wheels with one having chunky tyres t'other having A/T's on them, we loved the vehicle and thats why rather than patch a bit here and there I had replaced whole sections of the vehicle.
I regrettably sold it to a guy that was a friend at the time, he duly ran it into the ground, taking off the alloys with chunky tyres and selling them on gumtree for £80, took off the rubber bull bar and was going to skip it complete with the brand new headlights, I saved it before he managed to take it to the dump, he put on a 2" lift partial kit, as in +2" heavy duty shocks and +2" heavy duty springs, in his own words the shocks would have been as well being straight bars of steel, it didnt have the extended brake lines or caster adjustment arms or cranked rear arms, so the geometry was now to hell in a wheel barrow. He then ripped out the sound deadening etc.... His mistreatment of the motor was one of many dickish traits that came to the surface withi him, hence he used to be a friend. There were many other things outside landrovers that he did that soured our relationship, but the final straw for me was when I recently discovered that when it needed a bit of chassis welding for its MOT, he had sold it on gumtree for "Spares or Repair" for £300.
You know as well as I do someone's going to buy that as spares, flog engine & Gearbox, the 24 spline axles, weight in the shell and chassis and call it a nice easy £500 proffit. So he killed my old disco, and I've since been greiving it, yearning for another disco, but equally aware that if I bought another D1 I'd most likely be starting at square one and need to stock up on welding supplies again. D3/D4 I thought hmmm....
