Would the bigger one fit a Thor engine then?
Also, it was the seller of the one in your link that messaged me! Haha.
I've listed a spare torque converter on eBay. It came off the back of a 4.6 Thor engine I bought from the local breakers yard. Being from a 4.6 Thor I assumed it was a "medium" unit and listed it as such
Someone's messaged saying it's actually a large one, which ofcourse doesn't make a lot of sense, but I guess these are old cars and things get swapped about.
Can anyone take a look at the pic and tell which size it is? Is there a measurement I can take to confirm? I didn't see any part number on it.
I bought an alloy sump with the same plan, but havent yet got around to it, and i'm not sure i will at this point.
My understanding was that there were some small differences but nothing insurmountable.
As it happens, the Dacia is port injected. The Nissan HR engine is availalbe in both port and DI variants, with the DI versions used in the higher spec models. The factory LPG Dacias use the port injected version.
I suspect mostly for cost reasons, many small capacity cheap engines are still port injected, but these arent often the types of cars that attract LPG installs, as they're already pretty cheap to run.
You really dont see any newer range rovers etc on LPG these days, whereas it was super common in the P38's years.
I think the high output diesels over the past 10-15 years has really dampened the demand for LPG in large SUV's. In the P38's day and even into early L322 era, the petrol engines had a significant power advantage, making it worthwhile buying the V8 and dealing with the LPG setup... But once you got the likes of the TDV8's producing 300+hp the whole scene starts to shift. Most folk buying the petrol V8 at that point over the diesel probably arent particuarly bothered about fuel consumption, especially with the £735 a year in tax!
And you can see that looking at the numbers on ebay, most of the LPG equipped cars are before 2009, with only tiny numbers between 2009 and 2020, with a bit of an uptick after that which are almost all Dacias.
One positive is that working LPG means i can probably squeak thru an MOT with my worn out catalytic converters. Though i'm not entirely sure thats a good thing 😂
yeah i suspect if your doing plenty miles then it all helps. I only did 2000miles last year in it and we're half way thru this year and its only done about 200miles since its MOT.
I imagine LPG volumes are low at most of these filling stations, so they're increasing the price to help cover their costs. We're no doubt reaching the point where most cars on the road are Direct Injection and cant use it. So its only holdouts like us with 20-30 year old motors that are actually buying any, and those old cars will slowly whittle away.
The only places near me (within perhaps 25-30miles) with LPG at all are a couple morrisons and an asda.
My car has LPG, and it all works, however i'm beginning to question its continued worth, especially as its probably wanting some TLC.
The car doesnt run as well on the LPG as it does on petrol, feels a bit flat. Ofcourse thats typically offset by a huge cost saving that makes it worthwhile. Theres also a few drivability issues at high throttle demand.
However as LPG becomes harder to find, (the last few times i've gone to the local place they've been out of stock), i've also noticed the cost saving deminishing to the point of questionability...
My local place is now charging £1 a litre for LPG, vs £1.45 for petrol. However the car uses more fuel on LPG, which cuts into the saving. I recon it uses at least 25% more LPG than petrol. Plus its a bit of a detour to the next town over to buy it, and its the only place around that has it any more.
I've always reconned a tank of LPG at around 85L gets me 200-220miles or so. That works out around 12mpg and at £1 costs about 37p a mile
if we assume 15mpg on petrol at £1.45 thats 43p a mile
It used to be that LPG was half the price of petrol and meant the running costs were down in the 20p range, but 37 vs 43 seems barely worth it?
How are others finding it?
I don't want to jump the gun, but steel seal certainly did something
Flushed the system 3 times with water to get rid of the old coolant, then filled with clean water and two bottles of steel seal.
On initial startup it did gain some pressure, but I've just driven 60miles of motorways, a roads and back roads and the pressure settled in around 1 bar, dropping to about 0.85 bar at idle. Still rises with engine rpms but don't think I saw it over 1.2bar, certainly not the 1.4+ that I saw the other day.
I'll let I cool right down, top off all the levels etc with it cold and have another run tomorrow, see where we are at.
you can, but i suspect in such an extreme enviroment with huge temperature cycling etc it will fail.
The weld will also be susceptible to rusting.
I've modified stainless exhaust systems a few times with mig and mild steel wire, and it doesnt last long, the welds rot out quickly.
yeah the tubes are stainless, probably a low grade likwe 409 hence they can be a little "rusty" looking. Plain mild steel would have rotted away years ago!
Ideally find someone to TIG weld it. Its stainless steel.
yeah i ordered some steel seal, i was going to order the bare sodium silicate, but steel seal claim to offer a warranty, and will refund if it doesnt work... Granted they may well try to weasel out of it, but i figured that would be worth a shot.
I'll need to flush it a few times first though, as its not compatible with the Red/OAT coolant i currently have in it, so will flush thru a few times with fresh water and then run the steel seal with plain water and see what happens.
From memory, Sloth had very similar symptoms to me when we talked about this a while back.
Really its a sticking plaster either way. The engine is knackered, the bores are ruined and the camshaft is past it. But if the steel seal gets another year or two out of it then great.
I think longer term, i want to find myself a tidier shell. Ideally one without a sunroof. Then perhaps build that up with a nice BMW engine swap or something. If anyone has a non-runner with a tidy body and no sunroof let me know :D
I've used the cheapest ebay ABS sensors on mine. I figure they're cheap and easy to swap, and dont usually cause a failure that means you'll be stuck at the side of the road, unlike say a crank sensor. Can even keep a spare in the boot if your particularly worried.
So far so good. I've had them in the front for many years without any issues.
I've also fitted similarly cheap ones on my A4 and i think had to replace one over 10years.
Oddly enough, i went thru about 4 cheap crank sensors on the P38 until i managed to find a new old stock genuine part.
The LPG reducer is essentially replacing the throttle heater loop. Line leaves the manifold, goes to the reducer and then back to the expansion bottle. Its all 10mm hose and theres loads of flow, i very much doubt any air is stuck there. I've also left the LPG system off while testing as there was a suggestion the reducer could be leaking LPG into the cooling system.
I did wonder, if the "air" was actually just the leaking combustion gas, but the cars parked on a slight slope with the engine downhill and it was simply getting stuck somewhere and not making it back to the reservoir while testing. As a result it overflows. When driving normally it would find its way to the reservoir and burp out the PRV when the pressure got too high.
The fact that there was 0.35bar left in the system after two short drives means something new is getting in after the cap is closed, right? A "normal" air bubble wouldnt do that, it would return to 0bar as the air would return to its previous size.
I think i'm going to throw some of the "headgasket in a bottle" stuff in as a last ditch effort and see what happens.
took the thought right out of my head...
Unfortunately it doesnt really clear anything up as i've just ran it for 5+ minutes with one of the sniff testers attached and the reaction agent remained blue...
I stopped as the coolant overflowed the tank into the tester.
On the residual pressure point... At the weekend, i went out to it, stone cold, 0.18bar of pressure on the guage. I did not open the tank. Ran it for maybe 10minutes, drove to the lockup, picked up some bits and drove home, couple of miles tops. This morning, stone cold, 0.35bar on the guage. Opened the cap and the guage immediately dropped to 0.01bar.
So something is leaking into the system, but presumably at a very very slow rate which is not enough to trigger the RELD fluid?
Harv wrote:
The t-stat controls temperature, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t care what the pressure is. Also, IIRC, some OEM reservoir caps relieve at 20 psi, so if the system is showing 20psi when the ambient temperature is really hot and the engine under high load, this might be normal.
My cap is rated 140kpa, so yeah, 1.4bar. I suspect your right, the cap is probably venting off extra pressure and it ends up just sitting around the 1.4bar point once up to temp.
mad-as wrote:
those pressures are a bit worrying as the thermostat is suppose to control the temp, at 1.4 bar that's max pressure for the system, the system should be around .8ish bar or so around 9psi is a good pressure to have. do you have temp readings or just pressure as the temps for that pressure would be around 118+ degrees. there is something wrong with the system, you are running around 20psi which is way over the top for the system
Temperatures are totally normal, it'll sit around 90c when driving on the motorway for instance.
I do generally agree though i think the pressure is too high and i imagine its a cracked block.
If i get some time over the next few weeks i'm going to flush the system out with clean water and run some of that water glass stuff thru it, cant make it any worse at this point!
i bought some alloy ones, they fit snugly in the wheel, but sometimes remain stuck to the hub...
I've had in the past where tyre fitters have removed wheels and put them back on a different place, and ended up with two rings ramrodded onto the one wheelhub and another wheel ending up with no rings at all.
Could it be the airbags? Theres a massive industry wide recall for 90s/00s cars with Takata airbags. The "explosive" inside changes with heat/age and instead of releasing gas they literally explode and send shrapnel flying. A few folk have been killed from the shrapnel.
Audi replaced the airbag in my 2000 model year A4 last year for the same reason. Theres apparently 100s of millions of these airbags out there.
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.
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. Albeit at a much slower rate ofcourse. I suspect some sort of mileage/road based scheme might end up being implemented? Either direct tolling or some sort of annual charge.
Yeah, public charging costs are a problem, but its not really because EV's are a failure, its sorta the opposite. Companies are investing millions into the infrastructure to get these charging points installed and want to recoup that. I would hope longer term that as the market fills out, we'll see more competitive pricing. But indeed, public charging will never be as cheap as home.
On a typical "long journey" for me, the car starts off filled with cheap household electricity. If i drive say 400miles, then lets round off and say half comes from home at 7.5p and the other half comes from a public unit at 65p. For that journey, the average is ~36p/kwh or say 12p a mile. About the same as a fairly efficient ICE doing around 55mpg. I suspect these charging companies know that, and have very deliberately priced it so that its "similar to an ICE car".
The vast majority of my mileage is done at the cheap rate however. One trip at 36p, or even 70p, isnt really a problem.
I dont know if you'd lose 1/3rd of your range doing 80 rather than 65 sounds fairly extreme, i drive most places at 70-75, like you I cant be arsed with crawling along at 65 dodging trucks. i get on average about 3mi/kwh. Summer when its warm it can be 3.2-3.5ish, worst winter days it might be as low as 2.5ish. The spread is perhaps wider than an ICE might be, because you get free heating in an ICE. ICE engines tend to get more efficient as you increase their output, which is why they're horrible around town, but also perhaps why they're less sensitive to changes in speed, as while driving faster uses more energy, the ICE becomes a little more efficient helping offset it.
Before the Skoda, we had a LEAF which i used for commuting, it had maybe 70-80miles of range, and that was such that most weekend family trips we ended up using the range rover. But with the Skoda having the ~200miles, the range rover never gets used any more. We acutally bought an older LEAF to use as a town runabout for the wife as the audi was getting ruined being used all year round.
The thing that really pisses me off is the constant negative press that is essentially just lies. I imagine its being pedalled by the fossil industry to further their agenda. Papers like the daily mail will spin every article about cars to be Anti EV in some way or another, and much of what they're claiming is wrong, outdated, or due to wilful ignorance.
There are some valid concerns, edge cases etc ofcourse but it needs balance, and that balance isnt there. As an EV driver, we regularly see the same old points regurgitated over and over. I've had colleagues try to tell me my own car doesnt work for a variety of reasons, despite the fact i'm driving it every day and they've never even sat in one. it gets tiring after a while.
I'll check the residual pressure later today, it usually does have some pressure left in it though.