I've been thru a few MAF's, they're impossible to buy new, and copy ones are junk. I was tempted to try and datalog airflow against voltage, and figure out an adaptor to run a modern Bosch MAF on it.

I can easily acquire the voltage/airflow curves for a Bosch MAF, but the Sagem/GEMS MAF seems impossible to find, and ofcourse datalogging a broken one gives you useless data, so i've never bothered going any further. Someone who can tune the GEMS should be able to pull the airflow table out of the stock ECU, but i've never managed to find anyone willing to actually do it.

However the one i'm using now seems alright.

i suspect this job is going to snowball 😂

okay so as one might have expected in hindsight, the brake override doesnt actually stay enabled once you start driving. Its spring loaded in such a way that it pops out again.

I did notice very visible pitching of the trailer on the motorway, the nose of the trailer bouncing up and down with a very close correlation to the jiggling the car is experiencing.

So i guess we're back to the original question, is it simply too much play in the hitch/coupling allowing the trailer to bounce around at a high frequency. A new hitch is £320 which feels like a lot of money if it doesnt fix it, although to be fair, it probably needs it regardless. Its more that it might be better to sell this trailer and buy something better instead of spending the money on this one.

I wonder this about mine. Its really flat at low RPM's and only really wakes up above 3k or so. Given its a big torquey V8 that doesnt particularly like to rev it seems a bit "upside down".

I want to change the headgaskets soon as i suspect ones a bit leaky, perhaps thats a good time to check the cam, however is there any easy way to check for wear, or am i going to have to remove it and carefully measure everything?

Yeah the roads certainly play a part, theres a stretch of newish road right after the queensferry crossing which was REALLY bad, and the amplitude massively reduced as soon as i was off that new section and back onto the original tar. However its also doing it, albeit to a lesser extent on all roads. I suspect its perhaps a few factors working together, play in some components and vibrations from the road surface setting up a bit of resonance or oscillation, and perhaps the rear shocks are getting a little tired and are struggling to damp the faster movements.

I've loaded a car at the weekend that i'll be taking to the scrappy at some point this week, so i'm going to try the return leg with the brake override enabled and see what happens.

Is there any gotchas swapping out an electric interior for a manual one?

Dont particularly care about the electrics and may have found one in a preferred color which is manual

From dealing with Bosch Motronic ME7.5 its maybe worth pointing out that the cruise control routine has gear ratio inputs. Each gear is programmed as an allowable ratio between engine and road speed. If the engine speed and road speed dont match up, cruise wont engage. I presume this is so wheelspin or clutch slip or whatever causes the cruise to get disengaged.

I ran into this issue when i swapped a Audi TT ECU into my Audi A4. Different gearbox, different set of ratios, and cruise wouldnt work in certain gears, but would in others. Most annoyingly, it wouldnt work in 5th. I eventually fixed it by altering the actual map in the ECU to correct the allowed ratio values. It took bloody ages to sort out as well, as i didnt have the map location in the definition file, and ended up finding snips of information, had to decompile the rom, find a matching code snippet to get the address pointer to the correct table and then do some data logging in each gear to figure out what the correct values should be.

I presume this is a Bosch ECU from a similar era, so i would assume it has similar routines. You could try fiddling the road speed input into the ECU and see if you can get it into a speed range that the ECU is happy with?

Can these clips be added easily? I noticed on mine, the mats themselves had holes, which look like the middle part in the pic above, but theres nothing in the carpet for them to clip to, nor any locking piece.

I've suspected the rear diff for a while, when i got it, it was noisey on overrun at motorway speeds. That noise has either gone away or i've stopped noticing. I also changed the oil at one point and it was properly black and burnt looking, whereas the oil in the front diff looked nice and clean.

Still, investigation required. In particular the propshafts as if those fail it could get messy!

brake pads i thought about at the time, gently touching the brakes didnt seem to alter the noise though, and braking harder it would go away.

I'll need to get underneath and check the propshafts i guess!

Had the p38 out for a long drive today. At one point in roadworks doing about 40mph I noticed a pretty worrying noise.

Sounded like a rubbing or scraping sound from the rear axle or something around there. Most noticeable when holding the throttle at cruise. Full over run or acceleration seemed to make it go away or at least become much less noticeable. At higher speeds I couldn't really hear it any more.

I also have a clonk noise when changing drive direction, eg shifting from reverse to drive, most noticeable at low speeds, which might be related?

Any ideas where I should be looking?

Not sure if theres an override actually, i'll have a look.

Its fairly standard cable operated drum brakes.

had a look over it this evening, and certainly to the eye, i cant see anything wrong with the wheels.

Bearings all feel fine, no play, no roughness or odd noises. Spun the wheels by hand and theres no obvious flat spots or egg shaped running.

They are dated 2014 though. I bought new wheels and tyres as a package back then, as the original wheels were needing refurbed and it was cheaper to just replace the whole lot.

Thanks, i think they are 13". Hopefully at some point this week i'll get it jacked up and check the tyres and bearings.

Is it worth trying to have the wheels balanced?

Mines on Michelin Pilot Sport 4's and doesn't exhibit any weirdness despite it being a very modern tyre design.

I guess it depends if you actually need an all terrain tyre. Mine spends basically 99% of its life on tarmac, and I'm not up for ruining that handling in exchange for some off-road grip I use once in a blue moon!

I've done some very light offroading with the Michelin's and it was fine, I doubt they'd deal with mud ofcourse.

Thanks for the pointers. The tyres arent ancient, i replaced them all when i bought the trailer, but yeah they could have deformed or something. I'll check the date codes.

The trailer itself doesnt have any branding on it, it appears to have been built probably 25-30 years ago. It all looks fairly DIY, but done properly with solid steel sections, proper 5 stud trailer wheels with load rated tyres and a nice bradley hitch. The original wheel rims were dated 1989. The hitch is dated 1997. I've replaced a few of the steel crossmembers over the years, mostly because it was C channel and had been torn by the previous owner ratchet strapping things to the leading edges.

I wouldnt even say its a progressive change. It was fine, then it wasnt, and its been equally bad the last few times i've had it out. Like i say, its never been nice to tow empty, but this vertical jiggling motion is very much new and moves it from a bit "uncomfortable" to basically being unusuable for anything more than a short local trip.

I guess i'll start with the wheels/tyres and check all the bearings etc. Costs nothing.

Tyre pressures are something that hasnt changed much, they're at about 60psi, sidewall recommends 90 for the full 3 tonnes, but Most inflators wont go that high though. I think i had them around 75 at one point but they've slowly crept downwards over the years and are now around 60, which feels like "enough" for a typical saloon car on the back.

I'm just a bit loathed to spend £300 on a new Bradley HU12 to find its still just as bad afterwards!

One of the P38's useful traits that helps justify me keeping it around is its towing capacity. I have a 3T twin axle car transporter that i use infrequently, which goes nicely behind the P38.

The last few times i've had it out however, towing it has been bloody awful. When unloaded, the trailer seems to transmit some sort of vibration or oscillation into the car, which causes a vertical "jiggling" at a frequency which feels like someones shaking my internal organs to bits. Did 100miles in it on satruday, 80 of those unloaded and i was feeling verging on ill by the time i stopped after 40miles. I was having to sit forwards off the seat back to minimise the vibration. Road surface certainly played a role, with one section of road being incredibly bad, but the vibrations were there the whole time.

Now, i know the trailer hitch itself has some wear in it. The draw tube wiggles up and down inside its bore. I've been meaning to buy a new hitch for a while, but its expensive and hard to justify for something used so infrequently. The part i'm trying to figure out though is why its changed. The draw tube has always had this play in it for as long as i've had the trailer, but its never been that bad to tow with.

In the past, the hitch slack seemed to causes the trailer to sort of "kick" the back of the car when the trailer hit a bump or similar. Uncomfortable, loud and annoying, but not continuous. It would also get unsettled over uneven road and the hitch would kinda rattle and bang around, but again, it would only happen over the bit of rough road, not continuously for 40miles!

With the trailer loaded with a car it gets MUCH better, though its still not the most pleasant thing to tow, and it seems to like "snaking", not violently, but enough to mean that your sat there on red alert the whole time.

Anyway, enough waffling, i'm trying to figure out if ALL of this issue is with the trailer itself, or if the vehicle could be playing a part? Perhaps tired shocks or wear in bushes or something? Anyone experienced anything similar?

I've thought about this a bit with mine.

Getting a motor isnt too hard, though there are some questions around what you'd do with the transmission. Most EV's end up with a single speed reduction of somewhere around 9:1. You could use a manual trans and lock it in 2nd/3rd to get the right reduction, but thats a lot of weight.

I've seen a conversion using a Tesla drive unit mounted sideways where the transfer case would go, with a new set of gears made to replace the built in reduction (because your driving the stock axles). However when i did the sums the resulting gear ratio still wasnt right for a P38, seemed better suited to a 90 with bigger tyres etc. Tesla bits are also mega bucks. A LEAF motor is a grand, Tesla one is 10.

The most appealing setup I've come across recently was using the hybrid gearbox from an GS450h... With some simple mods it can be run as a standalone motor, is pretty powerful, and costs about a grand. Theres also a 4wd version with a transfer case on the back, though those are significantly rarer!

The big sticking point for me is batteries. My LEAF has 30kwh pack, about 25kwh usable and that gets me 75miles or so on a decent day (faster motorway driving etc) i suspect 25kwh in a P38 is going to get 50miles, or maybe even less, just with the relative inefficacy. Thus for it to be a useful vehicle i recon it'd want 60-70kwh minimum.

a 30kwh LEAF battery costs around 3 grand. a 60kwh LEAF pack is more like 10. 75kwh Tesla packs are 13+ which feels like a lot of money to be pouring into an old landrover.

Maybe in a few years battery prices will come down a bit and it'll look more sensible!

Thanks, i'll take a look around there.

Not surprising the recent weather might have caused some water ingress, but i'd quite like to fix it before it turns into a hole in the floor.

I've noticed the car was generally "damp" recently, but it doesnt get used frequently so i had just put it down to usual condensation etc. However i'd noticed it was really steamed up after a drive last week, and it didnt clear even sitting with the windows open all day in the sun.... Happened to reach into the front passenger footwell to grab some gloves when i went to the dump the other day and realised the gloves were soaking, as was the carpet...

So, anyone got a list of the likely culprits? It seemed most wet right on the front left corner near the kickplate.