Well,
You seem to be getting a lot of banter about how bad Disco’s are, and all you asked was how rare a 5-speed Discovery is. Rare is obviously a matter of opinion. I don’t know what your opinion of rare is, but I’m pretty sure there are fewer 5-speed Discoveries in the US ten there are Defender 90’s. I searched a long time before finding a white SD in good condition back in 2000. It was a ’96 with about 40K miles on it. That being said, they are out there, but I have to imagine they are even harder to find nice examples of a 5-speed Discovery, eleven years after the last ones where imported (’97 was the last year for manual Discoverys). I wish I could find one as nice as Scott bought and built (let me know if it goes on the market Scott), but I think they are pretty rare finds these days.
All that being said, there were a lot of issues with the Discovery, as many have pointed out. And it seams that the build quality runs the gambit from POS to sterling. I’ve talked to as many Disco owners with 150-200K miles on theirs that think they are the greatest trucks, and that have had virtually no issues with them, as I have with people with 50K trucks that think they are the biggest POS ever built. So if you are concerned about dropping a lot of money into one after you buy it, join the club. Unfortunately I think it is much a crap shoot as anything, as to whether you will get a good one or not.
My 2 cents. The biggest issues to worry about are if the engine is experiencing a valve issue (’96-’99, earlier years the issue did not surface), and the main shaft spline wear issue. The only way to properly diagnose this is to pull the PTO cover of the t-case and pull the input gear to check the condition of the splines. If it doesn’t have a cross drilled gear, replace it with one, and keep the t-case a tad bit overfilled.
