A slightly unusual job this month, with a customer wanting me to replace the dead 19J turbodiesel in a One Ten with a petrol engine, and do so on a tight budget. When the One Ten was launched in back in 1983, the 2286cc petrol and diesel engines were carried over from the Series III with a few external changes. These included a new timing cover and water pump: the petrol engines also received a pre-engaged starter motor and a Weber twin-choke carburettor on redesigned manifolds. Power output was pretty much unchanged – the petrol One Tens were a bit slow, the diesels almost unuseable.
The diesel engine was swiftly replaced with a more powerful 2.5-litre version but the two and a quarter petrol lasted a couple more years before it was given a long-throw crankshaft together with new pistons and conrods to take it up to the same 2495cc capacity as the diesel. It also received hardened exhaust valve seats to cope with the newfangled lead-free petrol. The new engine was noticeably more powerful than the old – I ran a 2.5 petrol One Ten for a while and it towed a Ninety on a trailer across the Pennines without holding up the traffic too much.
But the 2.5 was rather rougher at high revs than the engine it replaced, and in any case, by the mid-1980s the market was demanding diesels. The petrol Ninety and One Ten sold in small and steadily diminishing numbers until the arrival of the Defender 200Tdi, after which they were available only to special order. I think the last one left the factory around 1993. Many of the survivors have been converted to diesel power, and it is a while since I had a factory-built petrol Ninety or
