It should be, it's only ordinary steel. I wouldn't attempt it but my welding is terrible, I can stick two bits of 5mm steel together but on anything thinner I just end up blowing holes in it.....

It shouldn't wobble, it's an expansion joint. While it is off, seal the bottom and fill it with water. If it leaks out, it's split.

Depends what he uses. Stuff like K-Seal, Radweld, etc will clog up the passages, Steel Seal or Sodium Silicate (the active ingredient in Steel Seal, but far cheaper) won't as it needs to come into contact with combustion temperatures when it turns into a solid. It will seal a slight leak around a liner for quite some time. Just buy water glass and follow the instructions for using it on the Steel Seal website. Sloth on here had it in his 4.6 for almost 3 years to cure a pressurisation problem before he swapped the engine for an M57 BMW lump.

I'd agree. The only time I've been able to stall one is when testing after a rebuild and they will normally get up to about 17-18 bar before calling it a day. So letting air out and seeing if it runs normally, for a while anyway, seems like a good plan.

That one comes up on the UK site for a 1996 Range Rover https://www.check-vehicle-recalls.service.gov.uk/recall-type/vehicle/make/LAND%20ROVER/model/RANGE%20ROVER/year/1996/recalls

Looks like it is cracks at the plastic welds.

I tend to use LRDirect, Island 4x4 and British Parts (britishparts.co.uk). Island usually are slightly cheaper, LRDirect can be relied on to almost always deliver next day and British Parts are less than an hour away so while they may be slightly more expensive than the other two, I can nip down there and pick stuff up if I need it quickly. Not had any complaints with any of them.

But to your point. Not sure what you are looking at but you're not seeing the same as I am. The sensors are STC2786 and looking at the LRDirect site (https://www.lrdirect.com/stc2786-sensor-abs-new-rr-front), there's two options and 3 prices. They have Allmakes at £15.42 or Britpart OEM which means they are genuine Wabco ones but supplied through Britpart. With the Britpart ones, if you buy just one, it will cost you £97.64 but if you buy two (or more) the price drops to £94.09 each. I'm quoting the ex-VAT prices as you won't be paying the VAT (although you have have to pay the ROI equivalent), or are you looking at them priced in Euros (€) but writing Pounds (£)?

I suspect the Allmakes ones will last about a week (although they do have a 1 year warranty) but if the others are OEM, they will be Wabco and will last as long as the originals.

A hint, if you have a UK computer keyboard and don't have a Euro symbol, try AltGr and 4, some keyboards have it marked, others don't.

Dunno, these seemed a bit floppy in the wheels. Not a huge amount of slop but not a push fit as I expected.

If coolant is overflowing that would suggest there is some air in there. Air expands far more than coolant and the only time the reservoir will overflow is when there is too much expansion. As you've got LPG on it, do the hoses to the reducer go over a hump so air could get trapped in there? Ideally the reducer needs to be mounted as low as possible so the flow and return hoses are going downhill so any air in the system remains in the cooling system and doesn't get trapped somewhere.

That is what I thought too but having just been out there armed with a wire brush on a power drill to clean out the hole and a rubber mallet to knock them in, they just fell into the hole in the wheel. Probably Britpart engineering tolerances..... So I coated the P38 hub centre with copperslip and fitted them on the hubs instead otherwise they would have fallen out of the wheels when putting them on..

The newly acquired P38 is fitted with a set of 19" L322 wheels and, from the shuddering at speed when I drove it home, I strongly suspected that no spigot rings had been fitted. These are needed to keep the wheels central on the hub as the wheel nuts are not conical and the hub centre on the P38 is slightly smaller than that on an L322. I've bought the required rings but if anyone else has fitted them, do the rings fit on the hub centre or in the wheels?

Yes, if you look at the input values it will show you the feedback from each blend motor (and the blowers). So you look at the figure it shows and then change the temperature to HI on both sides, the numbers should increase. Then set both sides to LO and they should decrease. You can use the manual blower speed control to change the blower speed and you should also see the feedback from them changing. Distribution motor is the only one that is a bit hit and miss as you can use the Prog button to send air to the screen and use the other air distribution buttons to move it. I say it is a bit hit and miss as it doesn't really follow any set pattern like the others, it just wanders around depending on where you want the air. Really, all you are looking for is changes.

Yes, the 15 seconds will be the self test where it drives all of them from one end of the travel to the other to check for feedback. I've been fooled by weird errors at times so look at the inputs, values and see what the distribution motor feedback is showing, then try poking the Prog button and see if it changes.

That would make sense, we all know that the throttle body heater starts to leak after a while. I also thought maybe airbags as the other half's Merc has had a recall for a replacement driver's airbag but the guy I was speaking to at LR checked with a colleague to be told that serious, safety related recalls never expire whereas others do after a certain period. If it is the cooling system one, which seems most likely, then it has probably expired as they realise we'll all have found it by now.....

I wonder how many of the 17,603 affected cars actually had the work done? The 96 and 97 ones both had a recall for airbags but not the 98, so presumably they changed supplier for 98 model year.

Checking the MoT history on our recently acquired P38, at the bottom of the page I noticed it was shown as having an outstanding safety recall. Thinking I would take it down to the LR main dealer once it was on the road, out of interest I checked mine to find the same thing. Both are '98 4.0 litre cars but when I checked the Ascot (a 96, 4.6HSE), it wasn't shown as having one.

Thinking that if this was something serious enough to warrant a recall, I'd better get it done so went to the LR main dealer yesterday. If nothing else it would be amusing to be booking in a 26 year old car into a main dealer for work to be done. Spoke to the service man who looked it up on his system and it showed my car had safety recall D255 outstanding. However, when he clicked on the link, which should have bought up the document showing what needed doing on the car, it said there was no document attached. Gave him the registration number of the new one and that also has D255 recall outstanding. He was that impressed with the idea of a 26 year old car with over half a million miles on it, he left his marble floored showroom full of brand new cars to come outside and have a look at it. He agrees with me that none of the ones currently in the showroom will last that long and said that they currently have 80 broken down new ones, most of which have been towed in, that are waiting for work to be carried out on them!

Back home I realised that I have the full service history from the LR system for the Ascot so checked that to see if there was any mention of it ever having had recall D255 done to it but there wasn't. So the question is, what is it that should have been done to 2 out of 3 of my cars that hasn't?

Aragorn wrote:

Burning hydrogen is even worse for efficency than using it in a fuel cell. You've wasted all that energy getting the hydrogen in the first place, then throw most of the resulting energy out of the tailpipe. It feels very much like a lot of these big companies doing hydrogen work are just setup to absorb government grants.

It is mainly the HGV industry that are using a number of different fuels. As well as those running conventional diesel engines on biofuel, there's some running on Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG, the same as we use) as well as the experimental H2 powered vehicles. There seems to be far more diversification in the HGV world than in passenger vehicles, but all using an ICE on different fuels.

RFD is going to be the same as any other car, flat rate of £180 i think as of next year. So its sorta neither here nor there. Charging VAT on domestic electricity is fraught with issues, doesnt really seem workable to me. Seperating out the car and household uses is not easy, especially when you can just plug your car into a 13A socket and charge it from that if you want.

By RFD I was referring to Road Fuel Duty, the tax that is applied to fuel used for road purposes and not Vehicle Excise Duty, aka road tax. The RFD is currently 52.95 pence per litre for petrol and diesel and 28.88 pence per kilogram (so roughly 32 p per litre) on LPG. So the fuel cost of petrol, diesel and LPG is the cost price, plus the RFD, plus the retailers profit and 20% VAT added on top. It is this duty that an LPG bulk tank owner has to pay to HMRC for any fuel used for a vehicle and is the tax that I feel an EV owner should really be charged for on any domestic electricity used to charge their car.

I'm not knocking anyone that chooses to buy and use an EV, each to their own and if it suits you then fine, I just feel the playing field needs to be levelled.

Aragorn wrote:

Maybe they will become a reality? But the cost differences will remain huge. After all, taking electricity and putting it into a battery then driving the wheels will always be cheaper than taking that electricity, turning it into hydrogen, pumping it into a tank, running it thru a fuel cell, charging a battery and then driving the wheels. A hydrogen car is an EV with more steps, and those steps will ALWAYS cost more, both in manufacturing the car in the first place, and ongoing costs in fuelling.

Putting it that way, it is ridiculously inefficient, but Hydrogen is a flammable gas so you can skip the middle steps and simply run an ICE on it. My partner works for Cummins, who supply engines to a large number of truck companies, and they have developed an ICE engine for trucks that runs on Hydrogen. Mercedes trucks have done the same so there is an application for Hydrogen but not via the fuel cell route. Incidentally, The Netherlands and Germany both have H2 filling stations and are opening more regularly.

I dont live in a city, and have put around ~50k on my EV over the last 3 years. Significantly above the average UK mileage, and really its not an issue at all. The problems are mostly imaginary, come from inexperience, or blown out of proportion for a juicy media story. Of course, home charging is a must currently, public charging is too expensive.

Until you start being charged the RFD and additional VAT ......

There are a few folks on here who seem to regularly do massive mileages, but seem to also forget how unusual what they are doing is? A typical car does less than 10k a year in the UK. Very few people are regularly driving more than 200miles a day. You cant take that niche and say "EV's dont work". They work fine for the vast majority of drivers. Even on a long trip, my car (it has the smaller of the two battery options) has around 180miles range on the motorway. Thats enough for a good 2-3hours of driving, at which point i want to stop, stretch my legs and take a piss anyway. While i do that, the car fills itself back up and its ready to go again for the next leg. Unsurprisingly enough, even driving an ICE car with 300+ miles of range, i'd still stop at the same locations. If i was driving my P38, i'd be scrabbling around every 200miles looking for an LPG station, which are rapidly vanishing!!

Agreed, and at an average of 30-35,000 miles a year, that is me. But when you have to stop to fill up, you aren't getting the benefit of the cheaper costs. I've seen a couple of places now that are advertising the price and it seems to be around the 65p a kWh. I know in France they all seem to be 0.79 Euro per Kwh (or were a few weeks ago) so roughly the same.

I get sent a regular email from Parkers and usually ignore the £xx per month costs on cars (I've just bought another P38 for the same price as two or three months payments on something new) but one thing I've noticed is these deals all come with an annual mileage limit. It used to be 8,000 per annum but it seems that now it is down to 5,000 per year. For anyone doing that sort of mileage, an EV would probably suffice.

the fuel savings very quickly dwarf the initial purchase cost.

For some figures, 1000miles driven in an EV, charged at home at 7.5p, at 3mi/kwh (fairly inefficent) that costs £25.
1000miles driven in a petrol car at 40mpg (i've never achieved this, but lets make it look better for the ICE) costs £170

But that same EV being charged at a public charge point will cost almost 10x that making the EV cost per 1,000 miles the same, if not more expensive, than the ICE car

The main problems currently are folks that cannot charge at home due to a lack of driveway etc, and folks regularly doing longer journeys, there are still some areas with patchy coverage of charging, though its expanded massively over the last couple years and will continue to do so. unfortunately for now, that rapid expansion and little competition means high costs.

One of the last projects I was involved in before retirement was a vehicle replacement project. The lack of home charging option for a number of staff that would be using these vehicles meant that an EV was a non-starter. Even those with a driveway used that for their own car, the company vehicle would sit outside on the road. The requirement was for a small van (to replace a fleet of Renault Kangoos) and the EV version of the Kangoo was only good for around 200 miles on a full charge but that was only when empty. As these would have storage and additional electrical items installed and would permanently be loaded with equipment, even the Renault rep said that we would be lucky to get 130 miles range from them. Considering I used to do 150-200 miles a day and that was common for most staff, it just wouldn't work.

A test I read recently was on the EV version of the BMW X5 on a European trip and one thing that stood out for me was that it only returned the stated mileage when cruised at 65mph, when cruised at 80mph, it was down to less than 2/3rds the range. Is this representative? For me, life is too short to drive along the French Autoroutes and German Autobahns at 65 mph, so I will sit at a steady 80mph. Cruising at that speed I get around 210 miles to a full tank of LPG but it only rises to 230 at a lower speed (or when in the UK...). I agree LPG is getting harder to find in the UK but at least I've got petrol to fall back on if I need to so I don't suffer the range anxiety, real or imaginary, that puts a lot of people off an EV.

My sister bought a first generation Nissan Leaf as she was only driving 20-30 miles at a time so it was adequate. When she changed job involving a longer commute, but not by much, she had to change car as the Leaf wasn't capable of getting her to work and back on a single charge. Now she's moving to a more rural area and is talking about getting a hybrid instead of an EV.

It's the TC light that shows low pressure, the red brake light shows that the handbrake is on (conventional switch under the lever) or low brake fluid level (from the sensor on the reservoir).

ABS Fault will normally be followed by Traction Failure as if the ABS isn't working the traction control won't be either. If ABS Fault comes up as soon as the ignition is turned on and before the engine is started, it is failing the initial self test so it might be nothing more serious than an open circuit wheel sensor. If it comes up only once you start moving then it is detecting one sensor giving a reading different to the other three.

The pressure cap opens at 1.4 bar so I wouldn't expect to see higher than that for any length of time but they do pressurise normally anyway. There's a lot of coolant in there, about 11 litres, so thermal expansion is going to cause it to pressurise anyway. The thermal expansion of water is 1.00021 times per degree C (presumably the coefficient of expansion of a water/antifreeze mix is going to be roughly the same), so an 80 degree increase in temperature means that you've got 11.185 litres filling an 11 litre space. How that relates to the pressure I'll let someone else calculate.....

What I can tell you is that the top hose gets pretty hard when up to temperature. The important thing is that the pressure goes away once the engine has cooled down. If it does, the pressure is down to thermal expansion, if it doesn't, the pressure is coming from somewhere else like combustion gases finding their way into the cooling system or, if running on LPG, an internal leak on the vaporiser allowing Propane at high pressure into the cooling system.

Smoke in cold weather is often water vapour from the combustion process, far more noticeable if on LPG too.

Use the Nanocom to check the O2 sensor outputs. Prins is a slave system so follows the fuelling for the petrol system. Any fault on the petrol system will also show on LPG.

Get a roll of the blue masking tape and run that along the bottom of the existing letters. Warm the existing ones with a hair dryer so they peel off, clean the remaining glue off then you can use the masking tape as a guide for fitting the new ones.