[sugarwood]

A friend sent me this recently:

Good one from the Rover community:

https://landroverforums.com/forum/discovery-ii-18/cannibalv8-buyer-beware-78080/

There are a couple of companies that sell manufactured V8s for the Disco II. At least one of them looks like a scam. Maybe they did good work years ago, but if you get through the whole thread it's obvious they no longer do.

"$12,000.00 invested"
"put a piece of tape over the light if it bothered me"

That Cannibal story is really kinda sad. According to some forum regulars they used to do good work. Something happened along the way. Maybe they got in way over their heads, and turned to fraud to get out from under it. A big red flag for me was the fact that they started trying to sell "upgraded" more powerful versions of the engine. They claimed they bored it out to 5.0 liters with custom cams. That's kinda ridiculous. You'd need to be an absolute expert in machining with a shop like a clean room to pull that off, because the factory block was already bored out to within an inch of its life -- Land Rover went from 3.5 to 3.9 to 4.0 to 4.6 liters over its 37-year lifespan in a quest to make more power.

My guess is the shop was started by one guy who knew Rover engines and could rebuild them, then thought he could "add value" and charge more by hot-rodding them, then something happened and he couldn't do all the work himself. Thread mentioned he had health issues. He had to hire some flunky jackass (in Oklahoma. Who da fuq is a Rover tech in OK?) to do the work, and that built crap. By that point the damage was done, and **** like this happens:

When I got the truck back I could not get the check engine light to go off. Upon inspection the first thing that was found was that one of the O2 sensors were missing, in it's place was BMW lug nut and wheel stud screwed into the O2 sensor bung! When this was fixed the CEL still remained on - then we found that the engine wiring harness was put on backwards - O2 sensors on the right were hooked to the left connectors and visa versa - this completely freaked out the engine ECU and it also damaged the ECU, which had to be replaced.

That's called "staring at the floorboards." He wanted to get caught just to end the whole charade. On the Rover, the O2 sensors are literally the easiest thing to change on the truck, and you can see them just by opening the hood. You look right down at the exhaust pipe and the sensor is on top of it. No way to miss that the sensor isn't there.

AFAIK they are out of business now.