Case in point on refurb costs.. it's just cost me £2450 to fit new bushes/steering damper, eas bags, HT leads/plugs, air con new condenser, and service, replaced plenum foam.
NB: It still needs two new head gaskets, I'm told..Any idea how much that will cost me? plus any advice pointers on who best to undertake ideally in the North West (UK!). I want the vehicle mechanically mint before deciding to sell or keep it, if a keeper its on to cosmetics then! I like the idea Richard of doubling up for it to be a daily driver ..It's done 59200 Full dealer ship miles, so sack the idea of a refurbed defender, if I can get her up to a showroom standard. Plus there's a chap who works at Kentdale Land Rover who's offered to service and repair it for me (but not the head gaskets) at home. So might be the way forward, which keeps the miles of the Porsche AND keep my sensible other half happier ?
@lez I'd keep it owning a range rover is like a drug habit whe. you got one cost money ti keep on road when you not got one you want one lol
could you not do the head gaskets your self ?
Yes Thanks, agreed Karlos1..I'm getting that way with vehicles now I've all but retired, plus the need to keep myself occupied and the fact that I can't slip the cost of repairs through the company accounts anymore !!
I'm afraid Head gaskets and other major mechanicals previously highlighted are way beyond my skill sets.
I do have an acute attention to detail and practical renovation skills, which will allow me to undertake most of the cabin and exterior tweaks. Richard..FYI, I quickly removed the running boards and headlamp grills as soon as I took ownership !! Less is more !.. I've mounted some chrome caps into where the grill fastenings were for now.
One of the next jobs is to get the hurricane alloys re-finished. Whilst it's on the ramp with the wheels off, I going to steam clean the underside, and then set about treating it with Jenolite ? and then Lanoguard ? to finish. Has anybody had any experience with these treatments? (recommended by the Kentdale Land Rover chap) . Forgive my input and multi questions chaps ..but clearly, you have many years of experience that's invaluable to me..Thanks
Lez wrote:
Case in point on refurb costs.. it's just cost me £2450 to fit new bushes/steering damper, eas bags, HT leads/plugs, air con new condenser, and service, replaced plenum foam.
You are obviously paying someone else to do it for you. There's probably no more than £400-450 in parts there (if ALL the bushes were done) and the only difficult job is pressing the old bushes out and the new ones in as it needs a press but everything is easily doable.
NB: It still needs two new head gaskets, I'm told..Any idea how much that will cost me?
Around 50 quid for a gasket set and £140 for a set of ARB head studs if you don't want to be doing it again in 3 or 4 years time. But my question would be why would a car that has done no more than 5 years average mileage need head gaskets? What syumptoms does it have that has made someone come to that conclusion? If it had done double that mileage then maybe it would need them but if it has never been overheated then they should be fine. Head gaskets are dead easy too, once the inlet manifold is off all you are looking at is a pair of old school 4 cylinder pushrod engines (my step father looked at mine when I had the heads off and commented that it looked much the same as a Ford Kent engine as fitted to the old Escort). The only part of the job that causes grief is getting the well rusted bolts that hold the two halves of the exhaust manifold heat shields on but at only 59k miles, they will probably still be capable of simply being unscrewed.
Plus there's a chap who works at Kentdale Land Rover who's offered to service and repair it for me (but not the head gaskets) at home.
That's what you need if you aren't prepared to or don't feel confident in doing it yourself, someone that will do it at mates rates rather than charging by the hour. They are so easy to work on as you can get to almost all things so are ideal to learn if you haven't done it before.
The car has overheated and broke down when the heater matrix o rings burst and the previous owner failed to spot the temp gauge on red ! . He's a good friend but an impatient clot ...since then (post o ring repair) the engine loses coolant about 1 pint per 30 miles..and steam coming from exhaust in cool climate. No cream in oil, It also back pressures at the expansion tank when you attempt to remove the cap after a few miles..I'm told it might also be slipped liner/s ?. It's had a sniff test and gases show in the coolant.
You won't get cream in the oil as the coolant passages are at each end of the heads and the oil passages are at the centre so they can't mix. It could be a leak between a liner and the block which will allow combustion pressure into the coolant passages. Simple test is to run it up to normal temperature, at which point the top hose will be rock hard due to thermal expansion. Let it cool down overnight and then check again, if the top hose is still hard and there is pressure in the reservoir, combustion gases are getting into the coolant passages. I suspect that is what you will find, particularly if it has failed a sniff test. If you take the spark plugs out and find one appears steam cleaned compared with the others, that is the one with the problem.
If it is leaking around the liner, new head gaskets won't make a blind bit of difference as the fire rings on the gasket are outside the liner/block joint. You could go for the bodgers fix and put water glass (Sodium Silicate, the active ingredient in Steel Seal) in it. That should seal it for a few thousand miles or you can do it properly and have the engine fitted with top hat liners. These are flanged so the gasket fire ring is on the top of the liner and not on the block (see http://www.v8developments.co.uk/tophat.htm) meaning the possibility of a blown head gasket is vastly reduced but that does require the engine to be removed and stripped down to a bare block so your best option would be a replacement short (without heads) engine (http://www.v8developments.co.uk/46short.htm) or a complete long engine (http://www.v8developments.co.uk/46long.htm).
Still cheaper than a refurbed Defender though.....
Thanks Richard, that's all great info..I'll start with the top hose/reservoir test ! and report back. FYI I replaced the plugs and couldn't see any real variation in the condition between them all ?
Back onto the topic of what I have done to my Range Rover. Spent Sunday removing the little 70 litre LPG tank from the red one and fitting the nice big 95 litre full toroidal that I picked up from Romanrob last weekend. Had to extend the fill pipe which was in 8mm copper so replaced it with 8mm Faro polypipe as it is so much easier to work with. Got it all in, bolted into place and the pipework and electrical connections done. Just got to fill it with gas now......
However, after dealing with the petrol leak on the red one I seem to be surrounded by incontinent P38s at the moment. The AC on mine has had a tiny leak for a couple of years but with some stop leak in it and a regas it would last for 5 or 6 months but recently it has got worse and only lasted a couple of months last time it was done. Regassed it again and it lasted a week. Pressure tested it with Nitrogen, put 10 bar into the system but that was down to just under 2 bar by the following day so the leak has definitely got worse. Couldn't find any source of the leak under the bonnet, not even from the 6 year old Britpart condenser, so I started to fear the worst. Got my tame AC man to use his leak tester where a trace gas is put into the system and an electronic sniffer then checks for that. He checked everywhere under the bonnet, including the condenser, and found nothing. As soon as he put the sniffer into one of the dash vents it gave a very high reading so it is the evaporator.
As the evaporator lives right up against the bulkhead in front of the heater box, to change it involves completely removing the dash. Because of that, most breakers don't go that far and leave it in the shell and a new one is over £800! Found one from a breaker in Germany at £150 including postage but then there would almost certainly be duty to pay on import which would increase the price and also delay getting it. However, a call to Mark Skitt, the man in Wales with a field full of P38s and L322s, revealed that he does go that far and is sending me one for £80. It should be here tomorrow or Friday so guess how I will be spending the weekend.
Quite how anyone can drive a P38 without working AC I have no idea. There's so much glass they are like a greenhouse in the sun and, having done a 160 mile round trip on Monday when the HEVAC told me it was 29 degrees outside, was not pleasant.
Gilbertd wrote:
Quite how anyone can drive a P38 without working AC I have no idea. There's so much glass they are like a greenhouse in the sun and, having done a 160 mile round trip on Monday when the HEVAC told me it was 29 degrees outside, was not pleasant.
I 100% agree re A/C as when I have had problems with the left hand A/C drain causing condensation from the evaporator to flood into the passenger compartment I had to switch off the A/C & rely on opening the sunroof & windows to keep the temperature down. I will start another thread to discuss this problem as it's still giving me trouble. I might have to pop over while you have the dash out to take a look at how the drains run because I'm still having difficulties visualising the 3D layout of the evaporator & the drains.
Took it to bits......
Lots of bits to change the AC evaporator. It's a well known fact that a car manufacturer has to start somewhere and it would appear that LR started with the AC evaporator and built the rest of the car around it. This is how my interior looked just after lunchtime today.....
But it's always nice when you start a job and find the cause of the problem you are trying to fix is obvious. I'm not sure how much green dye has been put in the AC system over the years but I found quite a lot of it. When I pulled the evaporator out, the inside of the passenger drain was full of green dye, although the drivers side was clogged solid. Once I split the evaporator housing the source of my AC leak was pretty obvious.
Cleaned out the housing, fitted the replacement evaporator and put it back together. Fitted it in place and connected the pipes under the bonnet and filled the system with 12 bar of Nitrogen to do a leak test before putting everything else back in. Having got this far I've no desire in taking it all out again so jumped into the red one and went to B&Q for some sticky foam draught excluder to use on the inside of the ducts and on the top of the heater box. With a bit of luck, the output of the heater will enter the car and not lose half of it trough multiple gaps in the ducting.
However, then I did something really stupid. In my haste to get back and carry on, rather than wait for the car parked opposite to finish loading their stuff into their car and move the trolley, I turned too sharply out of the parking space and scraped the barrier around the trolley parking area. Anyone know where I can get a passenger front door in Rioja Red as the one I have is now a bit misshaped.....
Got home, admitted to my error and carried on. Heater box back in and bolted up, new heater core O rings fitted (something I always keep a few spares of), drain tubes connected and stuck a couple of layers of sticky foam on the inside mating faces of the ducts and fitted those. So that is the state it is in now. Hopefully it won't rain in the night as the dash is outside next to the car and the rest of the stuff is on the back seat but it everything goes smoothly, I should have it all back together by lunchtime tomorrow.
been a busy boy by the looks of it richard
be glad when it all finished with
Certainly will, it's bad enough driving around with no AC at the moment but got a fortnight in Europe next month.
you got to have the ac working
just had new screen fitted to the sport today bloody stone chip cracked the screen in bottom of passenger side of the screen
That silly little plastic clip on the petrol filler flap broke. TBH I hadn't noticed that there was a silly little plastic clip there in the first place which shows how observant I am considering how many times I must have filled her up in the last 13 years & 100K miles. 95% of the clip was still present but the whole was loose & would not engage with the little retractable pin that secures it.
If only all P38 parts were so widely available. Googling on part number BPX700010 finds it available from all the usual part suppliers plus many others that I had never heard of before. On Amazon alone there must have been thirty different suppliers with prices varying from under £5 to over £30! Mostly priced at around a fiver it's a very pricey little bit of plastic but as the original lasted at least 13 years & probably the 23 years since it left the factory I hopefully won't need another any time soon.
It took longer to remove the gaffer tape that had been temporarily securing the flap than it did to fit the clip.
Put it all back together, or at least I did on Saturday but it was finished off today when the AC was gassed. Everything went back in better than when it came out. I've got leak free heater ducts, leak free AC and a dashboard that is held in with a full set of bolts, not just one bolt in place, one down behind the heater box and two just not there at all! I'm surprised it didn't rattle and bounce around all the time. However, it isn't perfect, the message centre display (and HEVAC) is dim and the rocker on the stalk doesn't adjust the brightness, neither up or down. But that's a job for tomorrow.....
After a lot of head scratching and a call to Rick at Callrova, it seems you can't adjust the brightness of the display unless the lights are on. I was always under the impression that you could have a different setting for day and night but you can't. With the lights off the message centre brightness is fixed at its brightest but can be dimmed down when the lights are on at nightime. So that was a lot of wasted time trying to fix a fault that didn't exist....
However, used the car at night on Friday and the clock, EAS disable switch and front foglight switch didn't light up. They did before so I figured that it must be that the contacts needed cleaning as they had been disturbed. Out came the centre console (again) and checked them, all 3 bulbs blown. Whether they had blown over a period and I hadn't noticed, but I doubt it, or if they had chosen to blow when disturbed I have no idea. On the shelf I had a couple of spare orange switch bulbs, but only a blown green one. I was going to order some but at £12.50 each (whereas the orange ones are half that for some reason) decided I would confirm if they had actually blown first. They had but when I looked in the bag of assorted bulbs I keep in the glovebox for one for the clock, found 2 brand new green switch bulbs still in their unopened packets. So fitted those and now have a full set of dash lights.
Had a look at the blown ones and realised they are only wire ended miniature bulbs available from CPC Farnell at £3.77 for a pack of 5 (order code SC00339)! So, with 3 blown green switch bulbs and one blown orange one, I'll be able to fit new bulbs into those and still have one spare left over.
Took it for MoT. 517,249 miles on the clock and a pass with no advisories. Not a bad result considering I've done 100,000 miles since August 2020.
“Not a bad result”! I’ll say! For a vehicle with 517,000 miles. Great work Richard.
Mot passed a few advisories very happy to be fair, fair old bit of work and money to get her roadworthy.
Well happy, pushed in to daily service as i don't have other car at the moment ha ha oh dear....
