Full restoration, partial restoration, full on modification? What direction to take a car project can be a difficult decision. This D90 is mostly stock but there are a few things that are not original that can not be put back to the factory spec. For instance, the car has been resprayed AA Yellow which is the correct OEM color of this car but it is clearly not original. It has inward facing rear seats which is very Defender….but this configuration was not available with NAS Defenders. So these were clearly added on at some point. This car either came with no rear seats or it had a bench at one point but it has since been lost. This is fixable but with considerable effort and cost due to the lack of seat belt mounting points. That brings us to the biggest non-original element of the car and that is the rear roll cage bar.
NAS Defenders had their roll cage encased in a foam/rubber padding. This padding is not removable and is actually molded onto the roll cage. Only NAS versions had this done to the roll cage and since there are not that many NASes created (since they only were manufactured from 94-97) no one is offering replacement parts. Safety Devices who is the worlds largest roll cage manufacturer for Defenders offers all configurations except the padded NAS version. That means if you are missing any parts or need a replacement roll cage for a NAS you only have two options: 1) you find a NAS junker and pull the parts from that car but this is rare and often the parts are of poor quality or 2) you switch to a non-NAS roll cage.
My truck has the original NAS roll cage on all bars except one bar, the rear hoop. I don’t know what happened as there is no record or evidence of an accident. My best guess is that there was some damage to the rear hoop or the padding started to rip (which is common) and the prior owner decided to replace the hoop with a non-NAS. Another possibility is that this NAS truck only had a front section roll cage and no rear seating (fastback style) but at some point the prior owner wanted rear seating, put in the inward facing seats, and found some NAS and some non-NAS roll cage parts to create a mismatched full cage. Either way, me finding a NAS cage in good shape that I can buy to put my cage back to full original is going to be hard if not impossible.
Because of that non-NAS rear hoop, putting an original rear bench will be expensive, but I am going to do it anyway. The inward facing seats I have now are cool but impractical and not stock. I have found an original NAS bench that needs to be refurbished. I will get new foam inserts and an upholstery kit as well as strip and paint the metal frame of the bench. This will get me a period correct stock rear seat that I can mount. As for the seat belt mounts I will either need to weld on mounting tabs to the rear hoop (which is actually possible since my rear hoop doesn’t have the NAS padding….hello silver lining) or I will mount a four point harness to the floor of the truck.
The last non stock thing on the truck is the bumper. Right now it has a period correct ARB safari bumper versus the original bumper. Mounted to the ARB bumper are some Hella Rallye 2000 off-road lights. This is a great bumper but not the look I am going for. This bumper was designed to accommodate a traditional steel cable winch and as you can see the bumper has a lot of protection….but changes the look of the truck. I have decided to change this bumper out with a Terrafirma Pro Taper bumper which is a more streamlined steel bumper that more easily accepts modern winches. This means we will no longer have grille lights but it also means the boxy Defender front of the car will be more prominent.
Everything else is stock and can easily be maintained or refurbished as needed. But all of this is a long way of saying I don’t think this is a full restoration candidate to be locked away in the garage and babied. I think keeping the spirit of the original truck is key, keeping most of it stock is desirable, but doing some modifications should be considered. Those modifications should be bolt-on whenever possible, tastefully done, and done with a purpose of increasing safety or increasing fun. So with that in mind I move on to building out the project list.