Ive always wanted a Discovery and finally bought a "mint" used 98 V8 (on lpg) about 6 months ago.
I live in rural Australia, and actually need a 4WD, I do around 1000K's a week and many places I go to have goat track type roads that will rip the exhausts off a normal sedan.
My first impressions were how much better it rides both on and off road compared to a Nissan Patrol and Toyota Landcruiser, it also used less LPG than both those vehicles which I also had on gas.
I decided to do a routine tuneup, and purchased from an ebay landrover dealer dist cap, rotor, leads, coolant bottle and cap.
Installed them all, it ran like a bag of shit, finally found out the non-genuine rotor button was tracking, replaced it with a genuine and all was well again for about another week until it started misfiring again...this time it turned out the crappy leads were at fault, I replaced these with a custom set a specialist here makes for LPG disco's and that problem solved.
Next problem...it started to loose coolant, the ebay cap wasnt sealing and after purchasing a genuine cap I found the ebay unit was simply not moulded correctly and had no chance of sealing the expansion tank under pressure, I was still loosing coolant but nothing external so whipped the heads off which showed some blow-by and replaced the head gaskets.
Still using coolant!!.....took the heads off again and sent them away to have crack tested (should of done that first)...unfortunately came back ok, with heads off blocked off all coolant gallerys, pressurised system and found coolant making its way into the first front left pot...I think this is the "slipped liner" problem Ive read about on this group?
The local Rover dealer wanted around $6000 for a short motor (I think thats about 4000 british pounds?) but then told me they had supply problems and could not get me one for some time.
I must of made around 100 phone calls to wreckers, plenty of V8's around but they all wanted around $3000 for units with 250,000K's + on them, I figured this was getting near rebuild time so too expensive.
Finally I lucked onto a 99 Disco that had done almost no miles at all and had been in a minor rear end collision and the insurance company had written the car off so got that for the same price as a tired old unit.
Just got it back together, service the trans, diffs, transfer case, new wheel bearings, rotors, idle solenoid, assorted electrical connectors were replaced, new radiator, hoses, rebuilt aircon etc etc etc.
Ive just got back from a Melb-Queensland trip (about 4500K's return) and it was a joy to drive, reasonably economical (gas is around 40-50 cents a litre) and hopefully I'll get a few trouble free years out of it.
Cheers