After a lot of thought and some positive advises from here and some friends, I decided to buy a Defender 90. To fit to my budget, I finally went for a year 99, with almost 200k on the counter (km). Inside and outside almost perfect, I did look for rust and corrosion, but did not see any. Motor sounds good, but I am far from expert on diesels, unfortunately.
As I did not want to drive a car that is completely unknown to me in the crazy traffic of Rio de Janeiro and the highway leading to Petropolis, the car dealer was willing to deliver at our place.
simply great. First impressions: the steering is quite light, considering, but the clutch and break pedals are harder then expected, something to get used to anyway. The main gearshaft, being quite long, has a long travel, but I had no problems finding the right gears. I did not use the short L/H gear yet, although I think I have to shortly, our road is steep uphill. As this is not synchronized, some sort of double-clutching seems to be in order, according to the manual.
In the dark of the night, I was very pleased with the extra set of headlamps (Hellas, I presume) that are mounted. Brazilian roads can be really bad visible.
Coming home, the 90 solved one problem, it DID fit in the garage (as to the height), although there is only 5 cm headspace (with the mounted rack).
One question: Being a cold night (for Brazilian standards) the window got clogged. Normally, you would turn on the ventilator and heating to unclog at least the front window. But the lever of the ventilator did not give any result, and the lever of the warm airflow (left, on LHD) seems to be stuck. Is it normal, this car is fitted with an airco and I can't make out from the manual if the standard hot air vent is disengaged in that case..
Apart from that, I never saw an owners manual that size with lots of info... (translated into Portuguese, but I have an English pdf)
For the interested: The chassis number revealed that this car is made in the Karman Ghia plant (subsidiary of Ford) in Sao Paulo, the body is imported, but the motor is a 300 Tdi made by Maxxiom/International motors inc.