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The only place for a coil spring is up Zebedee's arse
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Good luck with it Richard and take solace that here, it would have been 6-7 Grand and one reason I've never bought a parts car!

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As long as you have somewhere to keep it, wouldn't it be worthwhile buying one here and shipping it over? We get charged around £900 for a car in a container from US to UK so I would have thought it would be much the same. Or would you have to pay some extortionate amount in import duty?

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Gilbertd wrote:

I couldn't find any mention of an Ascot edition either. I was going to buy the P38 bible but Amazon want £60 for it! Paint is Altai Silver (code 567) but it has a blueish tinge to it and it looks more blue under a blue sky but much less so on a cloudy day. V5 says colour silver too.

Looks like Ascot is a Land River badged push bike these days!

Prices for "Range Rover, The Second Generation" by Taylor are through the roof and into orbit these days. One optimist wants £165. Mine was £3.50 off E-Bay, free postage too, a couple of years back. 3 or four to choose from.

Clive

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That's the killer.
1) You have to get permission to import and a vehicle 22-17 years old won't get it (without huge brown envelope)
2) You have to have proof of ownership for 12 months before applying for the above (or a huge brown envelope)
3) It must be a left hooker and no HBE can get around that.
4) They calculate import duty on the price when new, not current value. So 100% of 1995 price in my case.
5) There is 100% tax on the value and duty for having an engine over 1600cc

Starts to mount up doesn't it?

Oh, and 6) A guy at the port may just take a fancy to it. So you'll never see it anyway 😊

A Filipino working overseas can avoid a little of this shit but still unlikely to get around the age or mysterious disappearance issue.

THAT'S why I haven't bothered! 😊

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Ouch, now that is steep and I thought that the way we are charged VAT on stuff from the US was taking the piss. We pay import duty at 10% of the purchase price (or at least the price that is shown on the bill of sale, wink, wink), shipping costs, insurance and then VAT on the total of these so we are paying VAT on the import duty, a tax on a tax. If the car originated in Europe it isn't considered as being imported, it is being repatriated so there's no import duty at all if over 30 years old and a nominal £50 if under that.

You could get round 6 by getting whoever ships it for you to fit a fuse in position 11 so the transfer case is in neutral and post the keys to you separately and allow the infamous P38 security to do the rest.

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If it's just a "parts car" why not saw it in half and ship it as "machine tools" or "failed part for analysis"?

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Having spent some time out on it this evening, it gets better by the minute, seriously. It appears that the MoT place it was taken to could see a nice little earner. The one thing I wasn't looking forward to having to deal with was split boots on the bottom ball joints but having been under there, there is absolutely nothing wrong with them. In fact, it looks like the ball joints were replaced in the past so everything there is good too. Rutland Rover called round while I was out there to pick up a spare rear axle oil seal I had. While idly looking under the bonnet, I noticed an awful lot of slack on the tube to the washers. So much that when the bonnet was shut it was being trapped under the bonnet. Re-routed the pipe and the washers now work perfectly too. Just in the process of removing the rotary coupler to test it and if that sorts the SRS fault, then it's ready for an MoT.

Got pictures of the dodgy seat too, just got to find a decent alternative to Photobucket. Tried uploading to Google Drive but for some reason I can't link directly to them.

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Gilbertd wrote:

Got pictures of the dodgy seat too, just got to find a decent alternative to Photobucket. Tried uploading to Google Drive but for some reason I can't link directly to them.

Imgur seems to work nicely.

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Got the rotary coupler half out and then decided to check RAVE. Found that the cables don't plug into it but are part of it. Checked continuity between the plug on the SRS cable under the dash and the connector for the airbag itself. All OK so reconnected with a squirt of contact cleaner in both plugs. Turned on the ignition and the dash said Airbag Fault, checked the fault with the Nano, cleared it, Airbag Fault on the dash disappeared and the SRS light went out. Success! The only thing on the MoT failure sheet that I haven't checked (because I'd forgotten about it) is the rusty ferrules on the brake hoses but I have a sneaking suspicion they will be as rusty as the ball joint boots are split.

Now I'm on to the more cosmetic side of things. So, the seat has definitely seen better days

enter image description here

enter image description here

I've sorted one or two minor things that were annoying me and then thought I would turn my attention to the sunroof. Along with the other error messages I was getting was one that every so often would pop up and tell me that the sunroof wasn't set. Poking the button did nothing so, having watched Marty do it on Smiler's car at Summer Camp, armed with my big screwdriver, I pulled out the interior light ready to start twiddling the manual adjuster. My theory was, judging by the mildew around it, that it hadn't been used for some time and the motor had just got stuck. First thing I noticed when I pulled the light out was a dangling socket so I figured it had been disconnected for some reason so had a look for something to plug it into. I think I have found the reason why the sunroof doesn't work......

enter image description here

The motor appears to have gone the same way as the viscous coupling and fan.

So it doesn't keep nagging me to set the sunroof I've gone into the BeCM settings and told it there isn't one, that should shut it up for the time being.

Edited to add that imgur does indeed work. Time to download all my pictures from Photobucket and close my account.

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This will sort your tired looking seats. :-)

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They are so disgusting I'm tempted to use my mod status and delete the post.

But then I would have to change my name to RRToadhall.......

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I knew I should have gone with the Zebra ones!

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You could look for a passenger seat on this side of the Channel.

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Seat bases can be swapped if you remove the actual cushion from the rest of the metalwork. I recently fitted a passenger side cushion to the drivers seat on my white one as the original was in a similar state. It means taking the seat out and stripping it down but simple enough to do, I even managed to find out why my heated seats weren't working while it was in bits and now they do.

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Is this http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Range-Rover-P38-sunroof-motor-entstoert-/172734392420 all I need or is there anything else missing?

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Furness (ia_dora) has the same for same price. Maybe closer to you?
Furness

Edit No they are not, it's past Liverpool...

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Yes, saw that, it's free postage so cheaper and Furness have a good reputation but their's doesn't include the rubber mounts or bolts which I need.

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Tends to be the only problem with Furness, who I use/ recommend on a regular basis. If its not in the pic you can't persuade them to chuck fittings etc in. Bought a rear wiper motor assembly off them a while back. Needed to make sure that all the rubbers etc were with it.
They told me that if it's not pictured they just bin stuff like that.
They're still great at same day dispatch for next day delivery and clean reliable parts though

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Continued last night. Fitted the new (Britpart) tailgate straps that the postman delivered (and I'm sorry Sloth, but they lined up perfectly and the bearings moved smoothly too), refitted the offside rear door trim (the little plastic pegs were in the door but not attached to the door card), got the passenger side door mirror working and the glass attached by it's clips and not held approximately in place with a bit of duct tape and decided to have a look at the LPG system. That has also been the subject of untold bodgery.

For those not familiar with a single point, a little explanation. You have a mixer, a venturi with lots of holes around the inside edge, attached to the throttle body. That is fed with gas at just below atmospheric pressure from the vaporiser via a stepper motor controlled valve to fine tune the mixture. The stepper is driven by a controller which takes a signal from one of the lambda sensors and causes the stepper to open if the mixture is too lean and close if it is too rich. The airflow through the venturi in the mixer draws the gas in so the more air being sucked in by the engine the more gas gets sucked in with it so the stepper is just there to fine tune.

All this lot was buried beneath the air intake trunking so not exactly easy to get to or see and a lot of the cabling had been bundled up and taped looking like it had been done fairly recently and the vaporiser is all new and shiny too (an OMVL R90E, rated for engines up to 6 litres or 380bhp, identical to the one fitted to my car). Pulled the trunking off to look for the stepper only to find there wasn't one there, it had been replaced with a manual valve that would normally be used on an open loop system on a carbed engine. The cable that should have gone to the stepper was in the recently taped bundle of wires. The software for these systems will show the lambda sensor output so you can see if it is rich, lean or happily flipping between the two as it should and it also shows how far open the stepper is so you can see if it is nicely in the middle of it's travel or at either end. Started to tune the vaporiser output pressure and got it so it was idling on gas with the manual valve in the mid position. Swapped the valve for a stepper and started to twiddle. Got it idling on gas with the lambda switching and the stepper moving nicely around the mid point. However, the adjusters on the vaporiser seemed wrong. There's two, one that deals with the actual output pressure and a second idle bleed screw that dribbles a constant supply through. This latter one is normally screwed fully home as it is only needed on a very low revving engine that doesn't generate enough suck to draw any gas through at idle and the adjustment on it is very fine, 1/4 of a turn makes a hell of a difference. That was partly open but the output screw was almost all the way out meaning maximum pressure. As soon as I opened the throttle, the lambda showed fully lean, the stepper went fully open and it still showed so lean it didn't really want to rev. At that point I gave up and decided it was time for food and a bit of head scratching.

Thought about it more and this morning went out to check my theory. My theory was that if the venturi was clogged, then the gas wasn't being sucked in, it was having to be forced in. So, off with the intake trunking again and looked and immediately could see the problem. The bloody venturi is missing from the mixer! Instead of a smaller opening with holes around the inside edge, there's just a hole with a pipe for the gas to come in. No wonder it won't rev, there's no way the airflow can suck any gas in through this......

enter image description here

Look like I need to get a new mixer too......

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Looks like the car was cheap cause it has half the bits missing then. Lol