Land Rover Repair: Land Rover Transfer Case Cracked!, semi trucks, ebay

Question
Hello- we have a 94 Disco I that we just purchased on ebay about 10 mos ago. It has 100k on it and is in pretty good shape. We had it for a couple of months and then we were told the entire case cracked and would cost $4-5k to repair with labor and a used case. We found an almost brand new case on ebay for $500 but it is for a '96 Disco, but we were told it would fit but some newer parts that were added since the '94 model would have to be removed. This sounds pretty complicated and I'm pretty good with engines. We were thinking of doing this repair/exchange ourselves but we've been warned of the horrendous task this would be for us! The dealer said it would be about $700 at $95/hr to repair. Some people are telling us to make sure we have no less than $1400 saved for the labor. Now can you tell us if infact this part IS compatable with our '94 without having to remove parts or is it Vital that we remove some of the newer added parts since the '94 model- if so- can you tell us which components have to be removed? We felt like they were telling us we'd have to remove things from the '96 case to make it sound impossible to do this exchange ourselves. But if we did this work ourselves we would have saved $4500 at the $700 quote the local dealer gave us! (They really sound like they don't want to do the job!) Is there any light you can shed on this for us? The LR looks great, nice tires only about 102k now, really nice green color etc.  The PS pump died though and we bought that on ebay too. One last thing, we're not too familiar with LRs, but we do have a new love for them, but when it is in normal 'D' and we come upon snow, does the transfer case kick in by itself to 4WD? We felt this may have cracked the case b/c as soon as it started to snow - it stopped rolling pretty much and felt like we were pulling 3 semi trucks. But there is a stick for the other gears though. My wife, scared of the neighborhood she was in when it died, kept driving it home about 4 miles like this b/c she thought something was only wrong with the tires- could her driving it when it was pulling so hard caused it to totally crack instead of just damaging it? I know it's a lot of questions- we've been trying to save the $ for 8 months now to get this fixed and we want to be sure we're doing the right thing before we waste anymore $!  There's a lot of folks out there that care as much about the LRs as we do-we hope you can help us anyway you can.  We sincerely appreciate anything you could tell us.
Thank you so much!
Paul

Answer
The case you are referring to is the transfer case, right?

You can install a transfer case from a 96 Disco into a 94 without much problem at all.  YOu can take yours out and set them side by side and you'll see what has to be swapped.

As to engaging in snow - Land Rovers are in 4wd all the time.  The lever by the shifter can be moved to the left to lock the center differential giving equal drive to front and rear and shifted forward to select low range for off road driving.


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