Comforting to hear that nothing will break imminently, thanks. Incredibly, I have managed to get the seals and a new timing belt sent to Dushanbe, the next city we're going to. They don't have any couriers or a postal system to speak of, but the owner of the hostel we are staying knows somebody...

Update on this from rural Uzbekistan: I rebuilt the car around a new galvanised chassis in the end! Not the sensible thing to do (it would have been much cheaper to sell and buy another) but I learnt a crapload about the car by doing it. That will hopefully help me when stuck in the middle of a...

Long story short, I’m in Uzbekistan in my 300tdi Defender 90, and I have a pretty bad oil leak from the timing case. I temporarily put in a wading plug to gauge how much it is leaking, and something like 10-20ml dribbled out after 5 minutes of driving (so 50-100ml an hour). I’m guessing it’s a...

I got a Defender a couple of months ago with the intention of driving it to Central Asia with my girlfriend. We just went on a test trip up to Scotland to iron out any problems and, well, we certainly found the problems. On the way back, the front propshaft disintegrated spectacularly at 50mph...