Discovery 3 self recovery with air jack

In september 2006, several weeks after the birth of my son Anders, I really couldn’t resist driving offroad any longer. My offroad buddy couldn’t join me so I decided to go alone. Just me, myself and my Discovery 3…

All very well, a great day, great weather, nice slopes, some sand… and then I tried to take a ditch. I couldn’t take it at a right angle, because my Disco 3 would touch the ground with its belly. So I decided to take the ditch dialogonally. Unfortunately the car pulled itself straight again, I think because I didn’t have enough momentum, so it got stuck with its belly on the ground.

Initially I started to shovel the ground away, but it was too hot for that to be pleasant, and I decided to use my air jack (for the first time in an offroad situation). I had bought it several weeks before at www.air-jack.com. An air jack is a large strong bag that can be inflated by simply connecting it to the exhaust pipe of an engine running idle. Because the bag is quite big, it doesn’t need a high pressure to be able to raise a serious weight. The one I bought is type ELH04, and it can actually lift 4000kg.

A Discovery 3 has two exhaust pipes that are interconnected, which means you connect the hose of the air jack to one, while you need to block the other exhaust as well. So I purchased a blocking cone as well. When using the airjack by yourself, this means you have to stretch your arms to reach out for the two exhausts… not very practical…

I’m going to try to solve that using a tool I got from a friend. It’s called ‘packer coupling’, or just ‘packer’, and it is used in concrete injection processes to fix cracks and water leaks in concrete. This is a metal tube with a piece of rubber, that can be tightened with a bolt. By tightening the bolt, the rubber is pushed together, which results in it becoming wider, thus blocking one of the two exhausts. At least, that’s the theory, I still need to try it out…

This is a picture of such a ‘packer’: