Glencoyne Engineering

26/10/2026

Another batch of selector shaft seal kits on eBay now https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/307249959324

Still have a few sets of engine mounts left plus carburettors and overhaul kits, but the shop will be closed for a fortnight from the end of this week, any orders received after midnight Thursday will sit around unshipped until mid November.

Detent spring plates: I ran into a small issue with these which is that I did all the design and testing on Series IIA and Series III suffix A gearboxes. I came to fit a pair to my own Series III and realised that later Series III boxes have a beefed up casing around the reverse idler, with just enough extra metal to interfere with the fit of the right hand plate. So I need to go through the first batch of plates and grind a chamfer on each right hand plate: I'll change the drawings slightly for the next batch.

I'm also trying to decide whether to have future batches of these and the seal retainers zinc plated to protect against corrosion. It's quite expensive for small batches and will probably add a couple of pounds to the cost, but saves people having to prime and paint them to protect against rust. Would be interested to know what people think.

I'll see if I can get some detent spring plates available for sale before the shutdown but I'm running a bit short of time, still need to write the instructions and I also have a Series IIA gearbox to put together this week.

Coming soon: is the EU about to ban old Land Rovers by accident? Regulation 2026/1738 (End of Life Vehicles Regulation or ELVR) just dropped and on first sight it looks problematic. One of the definitions for "End of Life Vehicle" is a vehicle which leaks fluids... Even worse, our own Government is making worrying noises about aligning our own rules on this subject with those of Brussels. I'm pretty sure we had a referendum on that a while back, but what do I know? I'm just a car mechanic. Anyway, I will have a bit of time spare next week where I can read the entire Regulation in all its gory detail, seeing as no-one else in the UK seems to have got round to doing so. I'll let you all know what I find.

EXCLUSIVE TO GLENCOYNE ENGINEERING LTD. These gearboxes often suffer from oil leaking past the inadequate selector shaft seals, running down the sides of the gearbox and dripping off the bottom.

06/10/2026

Product news:

1. Engine mounts now available again via my eBay shop https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/307217441170

2. Selector shaft seal kits almost sold out but I have just ordered another 25 sets, delivery 7-10 days.

3. The first batch of heavy duty detent spring retainers have also been ordered, hopefully here the same time as the selector kits. I'll need to fit a pair to my long-suffering Series III to check I haven't cocked up the drawings. They have been designed to allow you to compress the rubber sealing rings slightly and are thicker steel than the originals to stop them bending outwards over time. Easy fit with no gearbox dismantling or modifications needed.

For now I'm buried in broken Series gearboxes and also have a 300TDi engine and R380 gearbox in for overhaul, just for a change. One of the Series boxes has had a pretty spectacular internal failure at some point. I was in two minds about whether to junk the casing and dig up a better one from my spares hoard but this was probably done about 30 years ago, it is part of the history of the vehicle and looks to be a good strong repair. Also I don't like throwing away bits that are no longer available new if I can avoid it.

I also have a 2.5 n/a engine in bits which I'll probably build up as a Series replacement (chain cam, vertical injection pump) mainly because I have loads of old diesel bits to use up. I've done a couple of these and they give usefully more poke than a 2.25 while keeping the original appearance and not needing to hack the chassis around or relocate the battery and air cleaner. It's an ex Sherpa engine, so if anyone is looking for a Sherpa / FX4 timing case or inlet manifold with built-in air cleaner, drop me a message.

Finally the rebuilt Defender transfer box is still kicking around. 22D suffix E, 1.410, £750 outright, no exchange unit needed. I'm sure someone will want it eventually. Please.

25/09/2026

Another Series III gearbox stripped and overhauled. This is the more desirable Suffix D version and will be going into my own vehicle at some point along with an Ashcroft high ratio transfer box. It was a bit of a mess internally but I got lucky with some good second hand components. Needless to say it has one of my selector shaft seal kits on it. It will also get the upgraded detent spring plates if I ever hear back from the manufacturer I was talking to. They seem to have stopped answering emails, may need to give them a ring.

These gearboxes are getting steadily harder to rebuild as the supply of decent parts dries up. I'm hearing there are quite a few companies that used to rebuild them but won't touch them now. Same goes for the LT95 4-speed box. Since I only do small volumes I am happy to take on these gearboxes: I have a selection of gears, shafts etc although certain parts are getting tricky to source. I use OEM rebuild kits with mostly Japanese bearings, decent quality synchro rings and Corteco seals.

The hardest thing is deciding whether a particular component is fit to reuse. Mainshaft gears are the worst: a lot of them have worn dog teeth where they have been run for a long time with knackered synchromesh, and if new ones are unavailable you have to make a judgement as to whether the wear you can see will cause issues jumping out of gear. Dog teeth worn to a taper on the sides are always bin fodder, as are chipped teeth and 1st/2nd synchro hubs with chunks broken out of them where the synchro rings sit.

If anyone is looking to clear out a pile of second hand (or new old stock) Series gearbox parts then please feel free to message me. It is always handy to have a few spares on the shelf.

P.S. More engine mounts ordered, should be here imminently.

22/09/2026

Defender transfer box is now back together and looking for a new home. Type 22D suffix E, 1.410 ratio (standard Defender spec), all OEM bearings and seals, rebuilt centre differential, cross-drilled input gear. Will fit any LT77, LT85 or R380 gearbox, also the ZF autobox on the Disco 1. 1.410 ratio works really nicely on a Disco 200/300 automatic if you use it for towing. Outright sale, no exchange needed £750.

18/09/2026

Selector shaft kits update

Having sold the first 20 kits in hours I ordered another 50 which are now here. I held off from listing them on eBay as one of my testbed vehicles had a very minor oil weep from the selector shaft area after a motorway trip and I needed to find out why.

It turns out that the bolt holes for the retainer plates are not blind holes but intersect the holes for the front top cover bolts. Sometimes oil can migrate along the threads and this is what was happening here. Only on one retainer bolt out of the four but just enough to start seeping oil when the gearbox was hot. It didn't help that the new retainer plates are thicker than the originals, hence a bit less bolt thread into the casing. Early gearboxes use studs rather than bolts for the top cover which will help reduce oil seepage provided the studs are fully tight in the casing.

The cure here is very simple: remove the bolts, discard the spring washers, clean up the threads, coat with Loctite and refit. I've just done a very fast road test on the affected vehicle, thrashed it mercilessly for 25 miles and got the gearbox nice and hot. As you can see, no oil leaks. Before sealing the bolts it would start seeping oil after about five miles, and sealing the bolts is the only thing I have done to it. So I'm happy that I've got to the bottom of the issue and have amended the fitting instructions accordingly:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PrXfgv8-78XJfhNHzfIMx0K4LZlf0fXM/view?usp=sharing

Fairly typical old Land Rover stuff, you fix one fault and then find that it has been masking another one. Also worth noting that if the top cover bolts have been previously overtightened it can distort the cover slightly so you get oil leaking though the joint between the top cover and main casing in between the selector shafts. I've just looked at a set of bare castings for a Series III box and if you put a straight edge across the front of the top cover you can see a tiny amount of daylight. Nothing a bit of sealant won't sort, but don't assume the mating faces between the top cover and main casing are flat just because they look flat.

Next 50 seal kits now up on eBay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/307185783847 and I have another batch of engine mounts expected early next week. The vehicle in the photo is also running hand-made prototypes for my improved detent spring seal kit and look how dry it is around there as well. That one is waiting for a metalworking firm to confirm that they can bend the retainers to the required degree of accuracy: hopefully I can get that all buttoned up and ordered in a week or so.

14/09/2026

Don't be scammed!

I was idly browsing FB at the weekend and spotted something interesting: a Land Rover specialist advertising their latest product, a fuel injection system for Series Land Rovers. It got my attention because I briefly looked at doing something similar a few years ago using the monopoint throttle body from a 1.6 Astra. I didn't pursue it due to lack of time and investment capital. This conversion looked neat and much along the lines I had been thinking. Price was £1,695, not cheap but not outrageous for something like this, so I thought "who are these guys"?

Their FB page was impressive, some really nice leather retrims of Series vehicles, freshly rebuilt show finish Series One and 200TDi engines, a dozen galvanised chassis being delivered to their workshop... it felt a bit "off" somehow. From their FB posts they were probably the biggest Land Rover restorer in the UK yet somehow I'd never heard of "Genuine Rover Parts".

Contact details were a mobile number, a Gmail address and a physical address in North London. Gmail isn't a red flag in itself but most companies of any size have their own website and domain name. I do and I'm tiny. So I looked up the North London address on Google Streetview and it's a first floor housing association flat in Arnos Grove. See photo. LOL.

A Google search didn't turn up any results for "Genuine Rover Parts" outside their own FB and Instagram pages and there is no way that you can run a restoration business on this scale and have absolutely zero footprint on Google.

Useful tip: if you are looking at a business page on Facebook click on the business name, then on "Transparency and Privacy Policy". This will show you whether the page has had any name changes and where the people who run the page are based. "Genuine Rover Parts" started out as a Suzuki Jimny specialist, then became a "pets for sale" page before turning into "Genuine Rover Parts". The pet selling bit is probably where they picked up their 16k followers. The page admins live in Cameroon.

So it's a scam, because of course it is. What impresses me here is the sheer scale of it. They have pulled in photos of high quality Land Rover restoration work from all over the world and then written posts claiming it as their own work. They have to be using AI to be able to do something like this, it's much too slick for a bunch of low IQ scam merchants to put together by themselves.

If scammers are now using AI we are going to see a lot more of this stuff and it will only get more sophisticated and believable. DO NOT SEND MONEY TO ANY BUSINESS ADVERTISING ONLINE WITHOUT DOING DUE DILIGENCE. At the very least do a Google search on the business name. Scammers can't (yet) fake that bit. If it looks like a real company ring them, ideally using the number on their own website, not the one you saw in their FB post.

There has been a steady stream of sad stories from people who saw a Defender advertised on line at a price about £3k below normal and sent the seller a £500 deposit by bank transfer to stop anyone else getting hold of the "bargain". This always ends the same way. That kind of scam is just the beginning: things are going to get very much worse.

10/09/2026

That didn't take long. First twenty seal kits sold in no time so I have ordered parts for another fifty. Hopefully here by the end of next week. A lot of leaky Series Land Rovers out there.

10/09/2026

Does anyone recognise this rather neat little bobtail Rangie? The current owner has put quite a lot of work in and is now trying to register it in an EU country. Inevitably the authorities there want to know the identity of the giant global corporation that built it, as the bureaucratic mind cannot comprehend the idea of someone doing this kind of work in a shed. Any help at all would be welcome, especially if the conversion used commercially available bits.

10/09/2026

Bear with me on the seal kits. Ebay didn't like me including a link to the instructions and blocked the listing. FFS. I have submitted a revised listing and hopefully their AI bots will be happy with that.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to run a micro-business anywhere in the Western world. Combination of big government and big corporations. I have read that FB are going to start charging to post links to products but I haven't seen how much money we are talking about. £5 a month I could live with. £50? LOL. Meanwhile across the channel some little French guy selling a few parts for old French cars can't ship to any other EU country without paying more to register as a "packaging producer" than he is ever going to make from selling new old stock window winders for Renault 16s.

We can't go on like this.

10/09/2026

Selector shaft seal kits are here! 20 sets now available on Ebay, more on order so don't worry if you miss out initially. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/307171731741

Fitting instructions can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pLqeQlhS9ass0FyuxEAH0h6xFweiW-lK/view?usp=sharing