My UK 2004 100 Series 'Amazon' 1HD-FTE - Our unloved truck

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Hi Folks,

I joined this great community last year not long before buying our 100 series, and have been posting the odd 'help' thread and lots of updates via 'What did you do on your 100 series this week?' stickied post, but thought it's own thread would be good as an ongoing record of its repairs/maintenance, and for you all to see extent to which a guy from the UK will keep his (not so rotten) example of a 100 series going.

We bought this to support a move out a city and back into the rural countryside, and have got tired of the quality/longevity that newer cars offer & car payments every month.

Long story short
In the UK, the biggest issue that faces cars of this age is rust due to the rain & salt on our roads. Before viewing this, I spent several 4-5 hour train journeys going all over the country in search of a good example. One of the cars I viewed was so rotten in person that I just got back in the taxi I had taken from the train station and headed straight back. As a result, you'll pay good money for one which isn't rotten! My main focus was buying one that wasn't rotten, as everything else can be sorted.

In September 2024, I came across a 2004 100 series w/234K miles on the clock about 4 hours away. I spoke with the guy, he sent loads of pictures, made all the right noises etc so I went to view it. Even though I'm somewhat experienced with vehicle maintenance and repairs (in a previous life I was qualified as a mechanic, but never did anything with it), I didn't have as much experience with 100 series' at the time, so to my untrained eye and viewing later in the day, I 100% underestimated the reality of the work that it needed, and having never driven one I didn't know what to expect, so assumed they were all supposed to drive like boats

I paid around £9,500/$13,000USD after taking off some money for some bits which they hadn't mentioned and went on my way - it became clear very quickly that it had some issues:

• Pretty much every single suspension/ARB/diff bush/UCA/LCA joint on it needed replacing
• The steering rack was very very worn and needed replacing
• The coolant system was on it's last legs (radiator was very very aged)
• Front discs & wheel bearings were absolutely cooked
• Windscreen leaking badly due to a botched previous install, missing rivets, enlarged rivet holes, missing mouldings etc
• 3rd brake light/boot seal leaking
• Rear diff pinion seal leaking & Rear diff breather rusted solid and blocked
• Front & Rear shocks/bushes/mountings all needing replacing
• Speedo reading way out, and not consistently, sometimes by 5MPH, sometimes by 25MPH regardless of speed

In hindsight, it was quite obvious that the truck hadn't had any major maintenance for a long long time, and it's yearly annual inspection (MOT) was certainly dodgy - it had no failures of advisories of any kind noted which was a MAJOR red flag considering the above.

But with anything, the deeper you go, the more issues you find... (surely no more issues, right!?)

I had and still have plans to do more involved work on it myself, but until we move house (this coming week) we are and have been living in the centre of a big city without a garage or any space to undertake bigger jobs - one of the first big jobs will be to build a garage.

Heres a picture of the old girl 2 months after buying it, more updates to follow!

 

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Well, after coming to terms with the (initial) long list of issues, I put into order a priority list of stuff that needed sorting and started getting stuff ordered, but I made myself a promise that I'd only be using OEM parts where possible - after all, these bits had lasted 21 years so I didn't want to be doing it all again any time soon.

First things first - I needed to get this thing watertight!

I ordered all new windscreen mouldings, the various other dams, rubber sealing strips, rivets etc. When I ordered/order stuff for this car, it's always from either Partsouq or Dave Stedman @ Japan4x4, but more often than not the latter as I've had increasing issues with Partsouq not including items they have pictured etc.

Anyway - I ordered a windscreen replacement from a guy who told me he could fit it and rivet on the new mouldings etc. Fast forward to the day, he fitted the screen badly, decided he couldn't fit the mouldings or rivets and left after installing the screen.

A much more experienced fitter who is familiar with these then came to salvage the job a few weeks later, but sadly the windscreen had been installed too far out by the previous guy and after a week of the new mouldings being installed, the screen cracked where a rivet hole was.

The good news was that the car was now water tight, and the foot wells were no longer wet, but had a small crack - I decided to leave it as is for the moment and focus on the rest before blowing another £350-400 on a new screen.

Whilst bits were removed, the rubber seal and clips along the bottom of the windscreen cowling, and the wiper blades were all replaced (OEM).

The surrounding area wasn't bad at all, and got treated while it was out - something I'll probably want to revisit again down the line.

Following this, I turned my attention to the rear - the boot carpet under a protective mat was very wet and very stained.
I ordered more new seals - one for the upper tailgate and one for the whole boot opening and fitted those! I then saw various posts around the 3rd tail light and it's poor 'foam' seal along the top, and sure enough mine had a big gap and was perished!

I removed the 3rd brake light, and then added some butyl clay/paste stuff that people on here recommended and reinstalled. Annoyingly, the stud on one side snapped when tightening it up (the clay thickness wasn't an issue), but by this point it was already well seated, secure and the butyl stuff was quite happy, so I added a small amount of clear waterproof sealant around the 3rd brake light as a back up. Another job to revisit down the line but it was then fully water tight.

I removed the carpet and wet-vac'ed it, and cleaned up the various rust spots and painted the brakcets - again, I didn't realise at the time you could buy new brackets instead so I'll definitely replace those at some point next year.

Sorry for the bad quality late night picture, but you can see it was all much better!

Thanks for reading so far!

 

[SMLE]

After getting it water tight, I turned my attention to the big stuff.

My wife was very supportive of it as she loves the car, so we went all in and ordered a shed load of stuff from Dave @ Japan4x4 in Japan consisting of:

- New Steering Rack & hoses
- Front & Rear UCA/LCA whole units & Panhard bar
- New radiator and all hoses
- Front & Rear droplinks/bushes etc
- All new bolts/nuts for these
- Cambelt/Waterpump/Tensioner/Cam seal etc

The parts arrived, and I booked in some time with our LC guy to get this stuff sorted.

Before sending it down, I also ordered new front bearings, discs, pads etc and much more.

A few pics:

 

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So the truck went off to my LC guy, and the first port of call was the engine bay work:

- Check valve clearances
- Replace injector seals
- Clean out intake manifold etc
- Replace waterpump/cambelt/tensioner etc
- Replace radiator, coolant hoses, T pieces, other hardware etc
- Change brakefluid
- Replace steering rack & fluid

The clearances were all good, bar one valve so that was good news! Injector nozzles are worn so those will be replaced in the next few months, but other injector seals were replaced in the meantime. The manifold was surprisingly clean too!

The brakefluid was very very bad, likely hadn't been changed in 10 years!

 

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Next came the rest of the front:

- UCA/LCA entire assemblies
- Bearings, discs, pads, steering knuckle bushing, dust covers etc
- Anti Roll Bar (ARB) bushes
- Front diff bushes (I opted for entire assembles except the front diff bush which only comes with as part of the casing)
- Replace CV axles (this wasn't clear until I had been inspecting the front diff doughnut bush and happened to see the joints moving when stationary and shifting between gears as per 2001LC's video, so again opted to replace these).

Then the rear:

- UCA/LCA/Panhard Rod entire assembles
- ARB bushes/rod etc
- Small amount of welding to rear crossmember
- Rear height sensor linkage replacement

And then moved onto the rear shock bushes, but working on something equivalent to a 'rust belt' car means the rear floor access holes needed cutting to allow access to remove the rear shocks.

On closer inspection, it became clear that the outer casing of the rear shocks was just rust, so to avoid issues with the annual inspection (MOT) and to address this, I opted again to replace them both - with OEM, along with all new bushes and hardware.

 

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I had the truck back for a few weeks to use whilst I waited for some more parts to come - what a difference!

The dreaded 'thud' was gone 99% of the time, and the car for the first time in my ownership felt tight in the steering and generally an pleasure to drive.
The car got full alignment by a tyre place and it was lovely! Aircon also got regassed and was ice cold.

It then went back for the front shock bushings as these weren't in a good way, and the annual inspection (MOT) was imminent. One of the front shocks was the original one, and the other was an aftermarket one fitted just prior to my ownership, but on attempting to remove the top nut on the original shock (after trying various things) it snapped and a new shock was needed.

Again, I opted for OEM and paired with all new bushes. The aftermarket shock on the other side also had it's bushes replaced, as the garage/owner before me had reused all the old and worn out bushes when fitting a new shock...

Another thing to address was the rear diff - the rear diff pinion seal was leaking every time it was replaced. The casing which it sealed against was pitted from rust, it was clear that the diff oil had not been replaced for some time and was heavily contaminated by water (likely from the blocked breather pipe before it got replaced), so the diff oil and pinion seal got replaced again.

Sadly, disaster struck!

Driving on the motorway, listening to music, enjoying the new drive and I could suddenly here a noise that was getting louder and louder - it was coming from the rear.

The rear locker actuator was not functional but for whatever reason had engaged the diff and broken the fork inside, the diff was very unhappy. It was also likely the pinion bearing was shot, so I got it recovered home.

I had to make some more tough decisions:

- Buy a used diff for around £500 with no history, warranty or confidence in what I was buying
- Buy a new 3rd member casing and get the old diff rebuilt for around £1000
- Buy a new entire diff and actuator for around £1200 shipped from Dave @ Japan4x4

Even though the costs were incredibly difficult to swallow after all the other work, I opted for the final option and ordered a whole new diff and actuator from Japan4x4.

Old:

New:

The diff got fitted, but despite everything being cross-referenced, the connectors were different on the harness vs locking actuator, so we had no way of unlocking the rear diff.

Some quick thinking from Dave @ Japan4x4 meant that we could essentially use a 12v feed to activate/deactivate the locker, meaning the car was once again driveable. The intention is to get this connector sorted out properly in the coming month or so once I've moved house, so I can use the rear locker properly for the first time in my ownership!

 

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This week, the vehicle went in for it's annual inspection, but just prior to this had it's windscreen replaced again to address the crack which previously formed (as explained in the earlier post).

It was doing great until they were testing the brakes individually and a brake line straight from the master cylinder burst! They MOT garage also noted that the NS rear handbrake shoe needed adjustment.

The cars MOT ran out the following day, so I couldn't take it to another garage easily, so I did what I had to do and moved the car without brakes about 50 metres down the road in the industrial estate to another garage, they replaced the brake line, bled the brakes and then adjusted the NS rear hand brake.

It passed it's MOT, and then I got the car back - however my LC guy suggested I check they've not overtensioned the hand brake shoes as it's quite common and will cook the rear bearings. Well, they garage had done exactly that and the car was noticeably reserved and the rear wheel and drum got very hot, very quickly.

My guy drove 2 hours to help us out of this bind, and it materialised this s***show of a garage who had adjusted the shoes had reassembled and adjusted it all wrong. The rear drum/disc took well over an hour to remove, even with the help of bolts in the face of the drum to help push it out and alot of prying. It became clear very quickly that the shoes had got incredibly hot, cracked, and expanded even tighter against the inside of the drum.

You can't see in these pictures, but the metal work inside had heat-treated itself, I was very lucky it hadn't caused an accident really

Rule #1 - don't trust random garages who don't have a clue about these to do stuff properly.

All new rear handbrake hardware being ordered, but in the mean time I'll get by with OSR handbrake shoes working nicely and with the car in P.

These pics show it after 50 miles!

 

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So what's next?

- Moving house this week, so she'll be loaded up to support the cause
- New rear handbrake hardware being ordered
- Need to investigate an intermittent front end knock when turning at slow speeds or turning stationary (wasn't present before all new front end steering/suspension etc).
- Need to get a new connection sorted for the rear diff actuator so I can start using that
- Injectors will be pulled and refurbished in the coming several months
- Turbo will be pulled and refurbished in the coming several months too
- Plan to start to replace window seals/hardware
- Need to check AHC pressures/heights properly and adjust accordingly
- Next year I will get the underside completely stripped of heavy rust and protected + rear NS arch has an area of rust 'scabbing' which will need addressing too
- Also planning some refreshing of the interior to make it feel a bit more loved