Yep. Opened inlet and both rears. Valve block clicked for each command but nowt. I even left it sitting for 30 seconds with the compressor running and the valves open just to see if it would lift but it didn't seem to do anything.

Usually when started it will begin rising within a minute or so. Ive seen to go from bump stops to normal height before I turn out the end of the cauldesac...

Is there a way of splicing a shrader valve into the tank line? That way I can use a guage to see pressure and also fill the tank with the airline if needed.?

Hmm didnt seem to work.

The compressor ran, valves clicked, but the car didnt actually lift.

Annoying theres no pressure sensor as i've no idea if the tank was actually filling etc.

Morat wrote:

Have you got a fully charged battery? :)

It was fully charged last week, but i've got a 15A bench supply i'll stick on it while running the compressor. Wont fully cover the compressor load, but will take the worst of it, and it'll just let it refill the battery after.

thanks will have a look in a bit. Trying to sort a drop link and having it sat on the bump stops isnt helping access!

The EAS tank is empty (it leaks out if its been parked) and the car decided to empty its airbags as i shut all the doors with it jacked right up.

The engine wont run as its waiting on a new MAF...

Is there any way i can get EAS to fill the tank and lift itself to normal height without starting the engine? I have nanocom, not sure if i can start the compressor and open the appropriate valves with that?

Britpart has awful quality control. Some bits fit and work fine. Some bits wont even fit at all. Other bits fit and work, but for about 43 seconds, before failing. And ofcourse its luck of the draw where you land on that spectrum.

Wether or not i use a britpart component depends on my perceived likelihood of failure, and difficulty of replacing it if it does fail...

yeh fair play if its plastic more care is needed. More stupidity from landrover when designing this car i guess! The older defender/disco arms just used steel cased metalastic bushes.

Continuing the reassembly i spent some hours on it yesterday and today.

Yesterday I stripped the passenger driveshaft and CV right down to component parts, cleaned everything up and reassembled. The boot on that side had been replaced before, and i wasnt convinced whoever had replaced it had cleaned the joint properly. I have a rule to always just replace the whole CV, instead of just refiting a new boot, for numerous reasons... Cleaning up old CV's is horrid, they're almost always worn anyway, and complete CV's arent usually that much more expensive... Ofcourse i ignored my own rule this time for some reason, and regretted it, as there were some pretty heavy signs of wear in the joint. But Oh well. It went back together with its new boot, though i did end up with absolute rage at the fixing bands supplied.

Most of the time, CV boots are supplied with Oetiker style band clamps like this, and as a result i have a set of the proper pliers required to set them:

And thats exactly what was supplied for the small end, as per the pic. However for the large end, they supplied this junk:

Not a clue what its supposed to be and completely useless. Luckily i had a couple spare "universal" types. Unfortunately they were intended to be used with rubber boots, and didnt like applying the clamping force usually needed for the plastic boots, first one i fitted i folded the tangs right back over on themselves with the clamping force... but i fitted them as best i could and hopefully they will stay on.

So with that done i got the new axle oil seals fitted, balljoints torqued and got the shaft and hub reassembled into the knuckle, brakes back on and ABS sensor refitted. So the passenger side is now all complete bar installing the wheel, and tightening the steering balljoints.

So this morning i started the same process on the drivers side... and ofcourse being a P38 it likes to throw curve balls! Removed the shaft from the hub and noticed the hub felt rough. Bearing seems to be completely shafted. Super notchy (feels like a stepper motor, snapping between poles!) and very rough sounding. Oddly enough never heard a peep from it when driving, but clearly i cant refit it like that.

Anyway i've dismantled the shaft and CV from that side, stripped and cleaned the CV and reassembled with fresh grease and a new boot. I guess its sorta stuck now until i get the hub bearing sorted. However after lunch i will go back out and finish tightening the steering balljoints, maybe refit the passenger wheel and see about sorting the nearside ARB droplink.

Its just a normal steel cased metalastic bush isnt it? Usually they're no bother in a decent press with the right assortment of pushers etc.

To get them out i usually holesaw out the rubber, and hacksaw thru the bush casings. Then its just an appropriate piece of metal to push them back in.

From my experience with wheel bearings and bushes on the Audi, even if it starts a bit squint, so long as the mandrels all fit decently, the press soon squares it up.

Yeh i guess you've had the same idea, refurbish a spare set and then its just a nice easy swap over job rather than having to dismantle and then rebuild with the car stuck off the road.

Work has a big 20tonne press so hopefully pushing the bushes in and out wont be a problem.

I was quite impressed by how delicate looking the steering knuckles are when you compare it to the massive hunk of casting that you get on a Defender or similar!

the front radius bushes onto the axle look ok, at least not all torn/ripped etc i guess they could have gone soggy though. I've not checked the chassis end.

They are pretty cheap so maybe i should just do them... Anyone got a spare pair of radius arms i could borrow?

mine didnt wobble, and the MOT man didnt mention any play. But it did wander all over the place and its like an old american movie trying to keep it in a streight line down a back road.

In the last year its had a new steering damper, a new steering column to steering box UJ shaft, both panhard rod bushes and all four steering balljoints replaced. (annoyingly i clipped the boot on one of them with the grinder trying to remove the stupid lower balljoint, so thats going to need done again at some point :()

I really hope these balljoints sort the wandering because its really unpleasant and theres not a great deal left!

I was thinking about just connecting the bosch maf and sagem in series and then driving the car with datalogging on both outputs.

Analysing the data afterwards will give you the voltage for some given airflow for both sensors and you know if bosch says X sagem says Y. Smooth all the points and you end up with a curve.

Even better would be to do the same thing on a test bed/flow bench type arrangement, as doing it on engine makes it more difficult to read every data point

However for that to work you need a known perfect Sagem MAF, and those clearly dont exist else we wouldnt be having this conversation. Hence me thinking that pulling that data from the ECU was the way to go.

Anyway, its all getting away from the point, as currently i need an MOT, and that means i need a working MAF, not a 6 month electronics project :P

Does anyone have a known good Sagem knocking around?

the clones are universally reported to be shite, but i dont have a problem spending £80 on a genuine Bosch unit. If the Sagem MAF was similar money, i'd just buy one and then i know its right. But they're somehow £800... Insane. For £800 i could rip the whole lot out and fit something like Emerald!

The MAF sends a voltage to the ECU. The ECU has a lookup table which converts that voltage to an airflow figure. The airflow is then used to compute the fuelling required.

Having spent some time messing with tuning VAG group ECU's i know for instance that the bosch MAF's have a curve like this (the scale is voltage against air mass in kg/hr. with a 200kg/hr offset as the sensor can read negative airflow). This table can simply be lifted directly from the ECU programming:

Theres obviously many MAFs and they all have different curves, the chart above shows a few different VAG models, but the data is fairly readily available, and using that data we can immediately lookup a MAF voltage and know the airflow that voltage represents.

A similar table will exist for the Sagem 20AM but finding it is proving elusive.

If you knew the table for the Sagem, you could get a simple arduino or similar, to sample the input from a chosen Bosch maf, lookup what the sagem would be outputting at the same airflow, and then output that voltage to the ECU.

We could then purchase a cheap £80 Genuine Bosch MAF and bin off the knackered used 20AM's. Unfortunately such tuning information doesnt seem to be available for GEMS. I presume a few people have figured out tuning GEMS, but typically info like that is kept supersecret.

The boots were all split on them and the insides were rusty. They would creak when you turned the steering. So defo gubbered! Hope it makes an improvement with how it drives because it was certainly a bit wandery before

Still not fixed this yet, been working on the balljoints in the other thread, but very peculiar yesterday morning...

Its not moved in 3 weeks since it failed the MOT. Jumped in and fired it up to move it out of its parking area and onto the driveway. Now usually, it fires up very slightly lumpy, and needs a wee rev to clear its throat. However yesterday it fired up running on about 5 cylinders, coughing spluttering popping and farting and generally really unhappy. revving it didnt clear it, and it filled the street with smoke (blue to begin with, then black) I ended up moving it by holding the throttle open, and using the brake to control the speed.

I did find a minute to check the fault codes. It said "amfr correction at its maximum negative value"

Another bad MAF?

MAF was dead when i bought the car, and it ran ok cold, but stopped once hot. Unfortunately genuine ones are about 5 million quid, so the only option was to buy a used one, which appears to have now also died.

I was trying to find someone who could provide the MAF translation table from the ECU. If we know the voltage vs airflow curve, it would be very possible to engineer a replacement using a common modern MAF sensor. Unfortunately i found nothing.

Cheers for the help guys. Back at it this morning and got them out. Tightened the thing even more and smashed at it with a big ball pein and it finally let go. The passenger side let go with a bang too!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dy6sfw41lrosje0/IMG-20180408-WA0006.jpg?dl=0

The tools definately bent now though, refitting the bushes was fun with the bent tool:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/duv3dkxm1j58fhn/IMG-20180408-WA0003.jpg?dl=0

Didnt start out like that, but the end walked across the cup due to the bend and it all ended up cocked over. However all four went in without issue.

I then realised i ordered 4 big nuts for the balljoints, rather than two big and two small, so i now need to get those before i can finish installing the knuckle.

Also need to get axle oil seals, new bolts to attach the hubs (existing ones were missmatching and ended up pretty smashed up), new CV boots, a new ABS sensor (one ended up getting smashed out!) and i appear to have lost a caliper bolt, so i might just replace the four of those as well.

Not finished, but the backs broken, and once the bits arrive its probably only an hour in the evening to finish it off. Slightly annoying the cars now stuck in the middle of the driveway though! I should have parked it further forwards!

The bottom adaptor is too big, however the balljoint sticks thru by about 3mm so pretty sure the adaptor is pushing against the balljoint, not the knuckle. I was hoping to at least get it started moving, then swap it out for a socket or something to pull it the rest of the way thru.

Unfortunately my press kit doesnt have as many adaptors as the one pictured.

Given up for the night.

This is where we are on both sides:

Tightened it as much as we dared, the C clamp is actually deforming in the pic its so tight.

Bashed lumps out of it with the ball pein and its not moved at all...

Bleh!

Yeh i figured out the jacking the body earlier, wound the C clamp up as much as i dared with a 3ft breaker bar, but its not shifting. Not tried shocking it yet though.