I haven’t done anything to my L320 today, not even opened a door. However, a few weeks ago I decided to rewire the backseat map lights and add some lights in the tailgate. Back in December 2021 when I bought the car I immediately wired up the backseat map lights to work with the doors (they don’t come on normally). It wasn’t my finest work and I wanted to redo it, but hadn’t yet. So I started acquiring parts, new diodes, factory style connectors, crimps, factory colored wire, lights, the works. Finally got it all together and took a day to get it done. From outside it just looks like it should. Behind the scenes it’s got a fresh new wiring job with a pigtail that can be removed to return it to stock. Diodes have been incorporated into the light housings with a third pin added for the door open circuit to turn them on. The new lights in the tailgate point down when the tailgate is open and light the cargo area very well, especially compared to how it came originally. Overall I’m really happy with the results.

Likewise, I haven't done a thing to either of my P38's. Green one is waiting for a wash & me to have a go with T-Cut on the hedge scratch down one side. The blue one is waiting on a battery via my son's mate using GSF staff discount !!

I drove it back from Hull, having previously driven it to Hull and then from Rotterdam to Antwerp, then to Mechelen and back to Rotterdam.
What a pleasant way to spend a few hours!

Nice one, how long did it take you to get round the Antwerp ring road? It usually takes at least an hour longer than Google maps says it will. Otherwise, Belgium has a lot going for it despite what people say, good beer, good chocolate and cheap LPG.....

It wasn't too bad this time! Probably because the meeting finished at about 3pm so I was nicely away before rush hour. I have less than fond memories of the Antwerp Ring and Kennedy Tunnel from when I used to drive back from Onsabruck at the weekend...

Today, I overtook someone on the way to the Physio and the exhaust decided that louder was faster :/ I dropped straight round to the local tyre and exhaust place (no, they're really good) and she should be sorted tomorrow.

I serviced the car a couple of days ago which included new pollen filters. The deal that I got on eBay was for two pollen filters plus the foam for the scuttle. I had never put new foam in before but it's pretty straightforward to get at. I know that some people have made a permanent job with perforated aluminium sheet which I night try in the future but as I had the foam I thought that I may as well use it.

I was able to reuse all the existing screws but would have preferred to replace them all with stainless screws if anyone has a link. I have some stainless self tappers but the screw heads are too small for the holes.

The car originally had a heated windscreen but sometime before my ownership it was replaced with a screen that didn't have heating elements but all the wiring is in place. I am not sure how many there should be of those weird little clips that secure the lower windscreen trim but I found ten in varying condition. It seems that they are NLA & even command a decent price used. I'm surprised that no enterprising bod with a 3D printer hasn't run off copies.

What Have You done To Your Range Rover Today? Well it wasn't yesterday but last Thursday & I took my car to see @Gilbertd again as I have had an increasingly loud rumble at the front of the car. It's been coming on for a few thousand miles. At first I wasn't sure that it was present at all but over time it has got much louder & I have become increasingly more conscious of it. Richard concurred with my diagnosis of a driver's side front wheel bearing that needed replacement. As it happened in his garage he had a whole half-shaft with bearing & hub that he had nabbed when Marty cleared his UK workshop a while ago. There was no provenance on the state of the used wheel bearing but as Richard pointed wheel bearing failure on the P38 is uncommon & that as far as he knows the wheel bearings are original in his ex-police P38 with over 500K miles on the clock so not risky.

Changing the whole half-shaft including the hub & bearing assembly is the easiest way of replacing a wheel bearing. For those without access to a suitable press i.e. most of us, the simplest option is to buy a hub with a new bearing fitted but for a decent bearing (non-Britpart) that's pretty expensive compared to the cost of a used part (£0 in this case😀. Changing the whole half-shaft also means that you don't need to get undone the big nut that holds the hub on the end of the half-shaft.

The work all went smoothly & while some of the bolts were stiff to undo there were no great problems. Just a long breaker bar & a lump hammer was all it took so no heat was required & no nuts or bolts got rounded off. The only specialist workshop tool was an old brake disc that was bolted on prior to being struck with a sledgehammer to get the old half-shaft with hub assemble out of the front diff. A new ABS sensor purchased in anticipation of destroying the old one while removing it from the hub proved unnecessary as it pulled out easily.

Once it was all back together again I took it for a spin up & down the road to confirm that the rumble had gone but now I have it back home I've been getting a bit OCD about noises related to road speed. I came up to a roundabout yesterday & convinced myself that I could hear the wheel bearing again but then realised it was the thump-thump-thump burbling of a 4.6L V8 at low revs.

I am once again immensely grateful to @Gilbertd for help with work on the car as my contribution this time apart from chat was not much more than holding the half-shaft vertical while he rolled on a new rubber gaiter & cleaning up bolts that had traces of red Loctite.

Today I haven't done anything to my Rangie because I've been coping with things being down because of AWS shitting its leg off.

None of the rrpub services were affected, because they're all hosted by Bitfolk in London Docklands, and while the database backups are AWS they are a) not essential to the site actually running, and b) hosted in AWS eu-central-1 which wasn't affected.

So, rangerovers.pub continues to clatter and rattle its way along the Information Superhighway at its own pace, leaving its little oily drops occasionally, but still working as well as it ever did.

Thanks Gordon!

I will add my thanks to the work done by gordonjcp post 1628. I have no idea of what he was talking about, and being computer stuff I prefer to not know. Hopefully rrpub will keep rolling along for some years as it has been a great source of information for me.

Like nigelbb my next comment is not, what I have done today, but what I have done over the past week and a half.
Living in Australia I couldn’t drop round to get Gilbertd’s opinion about the same noise in the front end of Bimbo, my red P38. However my long suffering wife told me to replace the either one or both front wheel bearings.
My previous green P38 is now a parts donor, and I knew that its previous owner had recently renewed both front hubs and as I found out an added bonus of two near new brake discs. They came off just by removing the holding screw so obviously not been on the car for long. I was able to remove axles and hubs with no dramas.
So to removing the units from Bimbo, to be short in description, it was all seized and took me a bloody long time.
Two new axle seals, a set of brake pads and all the good parts installed …… no noise, thanks given to wife for correct diagnosis.

I laughed at nigelbb’s comment on the roundabout, I too suffered the same thoughts …… the dual exhaust does sound nice!!

My work continued on to remove the official LR air con fix harness that I found was on the green car, and install it on the red car. Green car also supplied a near new air con compressor. My auto electrician is yet to install new receiver drier and 2 pin switch and recharge the system and he is confident I will have an operating air con system. Just as well as the day time temperatures are up to low 30’s C already so looks like a hot summer is on the way.

Tomorrow I start on removing foot well multi pin plug/sockets with soldered joints.

Andrew

Nigel's car is a 2000 or 2001 and I don't think the front end had been apart since it left Lode Lane. Brake Calliper came off easily enough but the bolts holding the calliper carrier on needed the club hammer and even when they started moving, still needed a breaker bar to move them until the last couple of turns. Brake disc needed the soft faced mallet from behind which meant jacking the other front wheel off the ground so it could be rotated. Disc backplate didn't have rusted bolt heads and all 3 of the bolts came out easily as did the ABS sensor but the 4 bolts holding the hub in place again needed the breaker bar until the last couple of turns. Then it was down to bolting an old brake disc on back to front and belting it with a sledge hammer to get the hub to move. But with everything cleaned up, it all went back together in next to no time.

Finally scared out some time to put the repaired exhaust front pipes back on the. About 4 or 5 hours on my own with maybe an hours waste dealing with "old car" silly stuff. Doesn't seem to matter how carefully you do prep work, anything short of full restoration mode and it finds away to bite you!

Slow, but 71 is not the new 21, and when you re working on your own with the car on drive up ramps there is a lot of slide in and out and walking from side to side time wasted. At least my ramps are rather higher and much stronger than the usual variety.

After fitting the new studs into the manifold I connected the pipe to centre box very loosely with nuts right on the end of the (longer) bolts and cribbed the pipe up step by step using blocks of wood. Making sure to keep the nearside Lambda sensor wires clear of the prop shaft. Very vulnerable they are. Last inch or so lift by hand and one nut on each side to keep it in place whilst I dealt with the gearbox support cross member. Proper clean off and greasing when I took it off to remove the pipe meant it not only went back in OK after I'd removed the pipe it also came out again and went back easily enough with pipe in place. Pipe does restrict access to some of the bolts so usual futzing around sorting socket extensions to get the torque wrench on. Easy if standing under a car right up on a lift. Trickier on your back with about 6" nose to chassis clearance! But we got there.

Finish bolting the pipes went pretty much just like that as did connecting the drivers side Lambda sensor. Considerable frustration, aeration and creative language trying to fit the nearside Lambda plug. Eventually I realised that jacking the nearside front wheel up, so the ramp could be pulled out and an axle stand put under the chassis letting wheel hang free once the jack was pulled out made just enough room to get my hand past the prop shaft and onto the plug so all could be connected. Getting into the right position to do the job with standard elbow articulation was a bit fraught tho'.

Lost best part of two weeks in prep work including finding a repair kit. Which latter was much harder than I expected. Mrs Google wasn't co=operating.

Eventually discovered AutoDoc could supply a 60 mm repair kit :- Bosal 263-17 : for £25 delivered. Had to wait over a week which gave me time to de-rust and paint to the pipes. Decent quality with repair sections for both pipe and slinger end. Not needing the silencer end part, my back system is stainless, I cut a it down to a stub of pipe and sliced a 1/2" wide strip out lengthways and massaged it to a smaller diameter making a nice tight inner strengthener for a properly permanent job once all welded.

Also needed a new loose flange.

Found a stainless one on E-Bay. £15 from Profusion Exhausts. Chinese laser cut done in rat gnawing mode so a fair bit of cleaning up needed before it was safe to handle. As delivered there was no taper on the inner hole just a sharp square, rough cut, edge. Popped it in the lathe to give it a nice smooth 45° (ish) taper which I figured would work much better at holding things together in a gas tight joint. Bolt slots in the flange were 13 mm, for 12 mm bolts, but the ones on my exhaust loose flange are 9 mm, for 8 mm bolts, So more futzing around making properly deep and strong top hat washers to sleeve the oversize holes down to match the bolts. I've got the workshop facilities to handle that sort of thing. If you only have ordinary garage kit maybe there is a supplier of one that just fits.

PS The Laser Impact Stud remover recommended earlier works great. Wrecks the studs but they came out. Albeit with more rattling from the big Makita battery impact gun than I expected. Heating the flange before trying was probably prudent.

Clive

Clive603 wrote:

Easy if standing under a car right up on a lift. Trickier on your back with about 6" nose to chassis clearance! But we got there.

I'm the opposite, I prefer to work laying under the car. Normally I do all the work under the car simply by putting the EAS on High and leaving a door or the tailgate open. I've got ramps but the only time I've used them was when changing my gearbox (with the front wheels on the ramps and the rear on axle stands). When I was taking my transfer case off to replace the chain, bearings and seals, I managed to blag the use of a 4 post lift but found that it was either too high so I was on tiptoes or too low so I was having to stoop. In fact, when we were putting it back on after the rebuild we lowered the lift right down so the car was just a little higher than it would have been with the suspension on high.

What caused an issue with the lambda sensor plug? Not sure is your car is a GEMS or Thor but on a GEMS the plug is clipped to a bracket on the side of the sump so you only need one hand to connect it. Maybe with your higher ramps it was too high (or not high enough) to make it awkward.

On the Thor the nearside sensor connector bracket is tucked high up on side of the gearbox at the front. Less room that side anyway and the prop shaft runs almost directly below it so you have to work your arm round the shaft. The pipe from the gearbox to oil cooler also runs across a potential access route. With the wheel hanging free the prop shaft drops so there is room to get an arm over it. With the car up on lift I imagine there is room to go straight up beside the prop shaft but I couldn't find a suitable position to get the necessary arm angle from underneath.

You trust the EAS system a lot more than I do!

If I'm under a car it's on something solid. Having the tali end of a Bristol slip off a bottle jack 30 years ago just whilst I was preparing to quickly slip under to block it up properly was a graphic lesson. Remaking the Watt linkage was a pain but vastly preferable to having the back half of two tons of gentleman's sporting carriage on my chest.

Woke up this morning and realised that if I'd gotten the repair kit first I could have fixed things without dropping the exhaust. Live and learn.

Cliv

Yeah, I don't like bottle jacks for that reason. I've got a big 12 ton one that is intended for trucks but the contact point isn't very big and it isn't that wide so can easily tip over. I tend to only use it for supporting things while I'm bolting them on rather than lifting. It's a bit like the one that LR supply for changing a wheel. We used to have a Disco 2 at work and got a flat rear tyre one day while out in it. Only to find that the supplied bottle jack, even when fully retracted is too tall to fit under the axle when there's no air in the tyre. Had to drive it on the flat until we could get the flat tyre up onto a kerb meaning the jack was in the gutter and would fit under the axle. Then once it was jacked up high enough to fit a tyre that did have air in it, it was wobbling quite nicely.....

My EAS has only ever dropped when I had a duff height sensor and I was driving it at the time. With the car not running and a door open, it isn't going to try to self level so would only drop if it had a leak. I can put it on High and leave it for as long as I ever leave the car and it doesn't drop at all so I know there's no leaks.