Rusting Away

LAND Rovers are made from aluminium, so they don’t rust.”

- Richard Hall

How many times have I heard that? There is a lot of steel in the structure of any older Land Rover, be it Series, Defender, Discovery or Range Rover, and all of it will rust given just a little encouragement. Some vehicles are worse than others: I have seen 50-year-old Series IIs still on their original unpatched chassis, and Defenders half their age held together with a patchwork quilt of untidy welded plates all the way from front bumper to tow hitch. This is partly down to the quality of steel used, and partly to the environment in which the vehicle has spent most of its life. Salted roads, acidic soils and proximity to the sea all play a part in encouraging your Land Rover’s structural parts to revert to the iron oxide from which they were formed.

There are a few things you can do to slow the rusting process. Probably the most useful is to make sure you regularly remove all the mud that builds up in the recesses of the chassis and body, using a jet wash or high-pressure hose. I have seen a fair few chassis that have rotted from the inside out due to mud and sand accumulating in the main rails: cleaning this area is not easy but worth doing once a year and could save you some large repair bills. Treating the chassis inside and out with rust inhibitor (most commonly wax-based) will help limit the spread of the rot. You will not stop steel from rusting altogether, but you can slow the process down to the point where it no longer presents a threat to your Land Rover’s survival.