With the Deposit for a frame paid, I now needed a donor vehicle from which to harvest parts. As discussed in the previous entry, the ideal donor car for the job was a 3.9 litre (or 4.0 litre) manual Land Rover Discovery. So I set about looking for the prefect car, one which was mechanically sound, cheap but had tatty body work or even an MOT failure which required structural welding. I wanted to spend less than £1000 all in.

I looked through all the usual channels; Auto-Trader, Pistonheads, Land Rover magazines etc etc. The number of cars I found in the spec. that I wanted at the price I wanted totalled 5. Sadly before I got to look at some a few disappeared, which cut me down to just 2. There was a £795 3.9l in Newcastle which looked a little beaten up, had no MOT or tax, and a £1400 4.0l in Peterborough.

Seeing as Newcastle was a 3+ hour trip, Dad and I went to Peterborough instead. When we arrived, we were greeted by a small but crowded lock up, with our Discovery right at the back behind 2 rows of cars. It had obviously been neglected as the tyres were all flat and the battery had burst which was spewing pale blue crystals from one of the terminals. As a result the engine wouldn’t even turn over, so we quickly walked away.

It looked as though we were going to have to go to Newcastle, except there was nothing to go for as car had disappeared from Auto-trader and we couldn’t raise the dealer (it later re-appeared on Gumtree sporting a fresh MOT and pumped up price tag, even though it was missing a front head-light cluster and indicator). All my options had gone. I had the choice of wait until a new car came up or go and look at some diesels (yeuch!).

In my hour of need, the Black Country again came up with the goods. Not more than 10 miles away from where I bought the chassis, a gleaming red 3.9l Discovery popped up, for the princely sum of £1290. Dad and I hitched up the trailer and went, promptly, with cash in hand. We took the trailer for two reasons, a) we didn’t want to make the trip again, and b) if it looks like you mean business, you can drive a harder bargain.

We arrived on the chap’s doorstep; he then explained that the car was not at his “showroom” (I think he thought we were joking when we said we’d come and look at it), it was at a Land Rover specialist (Read: drug dealers auto-repair workshop). We then followed him on a convoluted trip into what turned out to be the centre of Birmingham… with the trailer. Not the most amount of fun I’ve ever had, but we made it. When we arrived, we found the car in this state (see above picture).

There was a mechanic (who smelt like a ferret crossed with a pole-cat) trying to fit a new distributor. He was using the wrong cylinder bank to set the timing, and as a result the car did not run. But it turned over, had the right colour coolant, oil etc. The rest of the car was tidy enough, just the odd oil leak here and there, but everything (CV joints, drive shafts and the like) was deemed as it should be. Cutting a long story short, I bought it for just over £1000. I figured if nothing else it’s £1000 worth of spare parts.

So here is what I bought:

It is a 1998 Land Rover Discovery V8i series 1. It has 103,000 miles on the clock, which is actually surprisingly low for the age. It is fitted with an LPG system, which I am told is worth more than the car (meh, scrapyard or use one of the tanks to hold compressed air for when I get some pneumatic diff locks).

It has a cloth interior, which doesn’t hide its age well. No Air-con, nor any airbags, which makes things easier when it comes down to the electrics. It has a 5 speed gearbox and a 2 speed transfer box complete with locking differential.

I have been told quite a few times that it is too nice to strip for parts (again, meh).

It came with 16 inch wheels, all with completely ruined tyres on them, I was planning to get some 18 inch wheels from a Range Rover anyway. These will make ideal tyres for storage for the time being, then I can put some massive 37inch off-road tyres on these wheels when it’s complete. So win-win.

There you have it. For now I have a non running 3.9l V8 Discovery, but now the fun can begin!

Having decided that I’m going to build a Tomcat, initially I need to know three things to get the process under way:

1 – What is the intended usage? (Mainly road – some off-road, mostly off-road – some road, or purely off-road.)

2 – Which Land Rover will I use as the donor car? (There are many to choose from.)

3 – Budget.

Knowing the first partially informs the second choice, which in turn provides the information for a lot of the rest of the build.

For instance, if I wanted a car purely for off-road trials*, I would use the shortest wheelbase Tomcat chassis as it is the most manoeuvrable. I would also want an automatic gearbox as it provides (almost) constant drive, which up long steep hills is more useful than having to change gear, and a very torquey engine. Therefore the ideal donor car would probably be (if it existed?) an automatic 300Tdi Defender (as it has the shortest chassis from the factory, which means it requires the least amount of modification).

*Trials involve lots of very tight turns with very steep hills which have torturous approach and exit angles on a variety of surfaces.

So with all the above said and done, the choices I made were:

1 – I was meant to be finding a replacement for my poor arthritic BMW, so it will be mainly used on the road with some off-road usage (and possibly a track day or two for the laughs) thrown in. This means contrary to popular belief, I will need to have an Individual Vehicle Assessment (IVA, or SVA not really sure which) and an associated Q number plate before I can use it on the road. This also gives me some freedom as I am not required to use parts from the same donor car, nor am I required to use the same suspension mounting points as the standard car.

2 – I wanted the off-road ability of the P38 Range Rover, minus the air suspension, lack of power, weight, terrible brakes and automatic gearbox, so I decided a manual 3.9l/4.0l V8i Discovery as my donor vehicle would be perfect. The Discovery is essentially identical to the Range Rover underneath, except it has coil springs instead of air-bags and 4-piston brake calipers on the front and 2-piston calipers on the rear as opposed to 2-piston calipers all round a la the Range Rover. The lack of power/ weight will be sorted by using fibre glass body panels and a smaller overall body size.

3 – Low! With this in mind I chose to have a 100inch Tomcat as it requires the least amount of fabrication work and modification to produce, as the Range Rover/Discovery both have 100inch wheelbases from the factory, so is therefore the cheapest.

Anyway, after trawling the internet, I found a likely looking chassis at a company called Leavesley International in Alrewas (near Lichfield). I went down to have a look and bought the chassis there and then. A week later Dad and I went down with the Range Rover and trailer to pick it up. Here are a couple of pictures of it being loaded on to the trailer.

Whilst we were there I spotted the largest piston-conrod assembly I have ever seen. It was definitely worthy of a picture, bear in mind, I am around 6ft 1 tall (we later concluded it was from a tug boat).

We dropped the chassis in with Paul at Tomcat as the workshop was on the way home, he delivered his judgement on the chassis: thumbs up, which was good news. We had a chat about what would go on the chassis, in the end I chose to have a pick-up style body with under load-bed suspension at the rear and turreted front suspension. I decided to go for some budget space-filler dampers with a view to upgrading them at some point to Fox’s remote reservoir dampers (because this will be an evolutionary process). We then agreed a price, I paid him a deposit and went home excited at the prospect of what’s to come.

For the past few months I have been looking for a new car to replace my ageing BMW 320i. I have been through every combination of comparator in order to select a car. I even went as far as to write a spread-sheet to calculate the most suitable car for me, the results of which suggested I should buy a Renault Clio 182 or a Ford Fiesta ST. After trying both I found them to be thoroughly uninspiring. Back to Square one.

Upon further consideration I had a moment of clarity: It is now no longer possible to have fun on the road with a car, not without putting someone’s life or my licence at risk. There is simply too much traffic around, even in the back waters where I live. It then became obvious, why not have fun off-road, where there is no traffic. This and the fact that winter was looming sparked the idea of a 4×4 (and it can’t be a bad thing to have another tow car around the place can it?).

I initially looked at some crew-cabs such as the Nissan Navara, but after research found them (and all non-permanent 4 wheel drives) to be frail. So a permanent 4 wheel drive it had to be and to find such a vehicle I looked no further than my parents Range Rover. It has everything you need to go off-road and in some comfort as my Dad and I found out last winter when we drove it through some 3-4ft deep snow drifts.

At this stage, whilst milling around on the internet looking at various forums and sites selling upgrades for Land Rover/ Range Rovers, I came across the Tomcat Motorsport website. Tomcat Motorsport produce a kit for turning a Land Rover, or Range Rover into a Tomcat. In brief, the process involves stripping the donor car back to the bare chassis and then welding a new space frame to the Land Rover ladder chassis and rebuilding the car from there with new body panels.

As it happens Tomcat Motorsport are based only-a-very-short-trip-across-the-countryside away. So I made the trip to the workshop and talked to Paul (the Tomcat Motorsport owner) about the Tomcat and what’s involved etc. His sales pitch was very thorough… he sat me in the car pictured above, and I was sold immediately. I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.

So, I left the workshop with a new mission: to build a Tomcat 100.  I have some spare cash. Check. I have the know-how (ish). Check. And most importantly I have the time and space. Check and check. Time to execute a (not) thoroughly planned and researched idea. I mean, how hard can it be?