Air springs are complicated. I have an inch and a half thick textbook somewhere that barely scratches the surface.
Anyway mine is on standard Dunlop airbags about 20,000 miles old so they should still be behaving fine. What I don't understand is why it has started behaving as if the springing is too soft. Looking back it started misbehaving about 1,000 - 1,500 miles ago and has steadily got worse. Putting the stiffer Bilstein dampers on has done pretty much what I'd expect from trying to control over soft suspension on a steel sprung car by uprating dampers instead of springs.
No leaks. It stays up for over a week when parked and pretty much never takes more than a few seconds to sort itself out ready to drive off regardless of load. Unless I park in just the wrong place with the left hand front wheel in an annoying dip perfectly matched to the tyre radius.
Clive
Got the full set of yellow Bilsteins from Paddock. Including the steering damper. With a couple or three hundred miles on the clock preliminary assessment is that they are stiffer than what came off and more progressive. Damping increase with larger suspension movements is noticeably more aggressive than standard.
Which may annoy the living daylights out of me when I finally get things sorted.
Its still not right. Stiffer damping seems to be covering up the underlying problem.
If it were conventional car with metal springs I'd say the symptoms point to worn out way too soft springs. But I don't think that's possible on a P38 as spring rate is effectively set by the pressure in the air bags which in turn is defined by the ride height. Way I see it so long as the car can hit and maintain the right ride height there must be enough pressure in the bags. Certainly my three amigos are behaving just fine and waving the tape measure around between arch and wheel centres suggest its about right. A little high perhaps on standard, maybe 1/4 - 3/8", but I'll sort that next time I can get on Mikes nice level barn floor. Best part of my drive puts a canter wise tilt of about 1" across the car so I guess thats close enough for the spacers to work just fine. But its so much easier to play with spacers with a chassis lift instead of futzing with a jack doing one at a time.
Steering isn't happy either. Seems to have picked up a bit of play in the system and car doesn't wan't to run dead true. Time to get my steering box rebuilt so I know I have a decent one fitted instead of that second hand one of unknown history. Local(ish) land Rover guy can get it done for £350. Lot more than the E-Bay exchange mob but it will be the full monty not a wash'n seal jobbie. If I'm going that far hafta wonder if it makes sense to dump a fat £100 into an OEM steering shaft too. I know I tend to dump more money into new parts than most folk but at least then I'm pretty sure it will be right.
Clive
I'm surprised that folk are only getting 3 or so years useful life from a battery. Mine is over 6 years old and still working fine despite lots of standing around and charge ups "when I think about it". Dunno what brand it is. Just whatever the local independent tyre & exhaust place was selling back then as a decent mid range choice.
Don't think I've ever put two batteries on a car but as I've had the P38 since 2011 it may be the first.
Clive
Are we sure these are for vehicle applications?
Various makes show ---31MF as a leisure battery (whatever that means) where --- is the makers letter code. Lucas version is LX31MF. Quite a few of the usual mail order suspects list it.
Link here https://advancedbatterysupplies.co.uk/news/2012/04/what-is-the-difference-between-a-car-battery-and-a-leisure-battery/ purports to explain the difference but the electrochemistry sounds suspect to me.
Clive
Gilbertd wrote:
I've got a Garmin sat nav that comes with free lifetime map and speed camera updates and also has the capability of connecting a wireless reversing camera. You have to use the genuine Garmin camera kit which costs as much again as the sat nav but works perfectly. If powered from the reversing light feed, as soon as you select reverse the display shows what the camera can see.
Garmin have an online one day "30 th birthday" 30% off sale today, 18 th September 2019, ending just shy of midnight. The BTC30 back up camera kit is down from £135 to £94.50. So if anyone intends to get one might be an idea to go online and get it today.
Not much there, mostly smart watches and fitness stuff but there are couple of car sat navs and the motorcycle (Zumo) ones listed too. I've just got a Zumo for the bikes which comes with a car mount kit so might get a camera too and I use it in the car as my old one is running out of map space.
Clive
Glad its all sorted.
Clive
Spoke to Paul Johnson, near Crawley, Sussex. He has a 4.6 GEMs already out of the car. 118,000 miles with full service history. Says it ran nicely. No alternator but everything else is there. About £600.
Clive
He's knocked $8,000 off.
Down to $47,000 now. Still outrageous. Despite the E-Bay notification excitement over such a big drop.
Clive
Mine has been rock steady Eddie in the middle of the gauge when sat in the mid afternoon 8 mile queue for the Dartford crossing for an hour / hour and a half at a time this summer. The gas had gotten low in the air con system last Monday causing it to down tools about 15 minutes in so no help from the electric fans for about an hour of crawling but the gauge still stayed steady.
Recent Airtex water pump but still same radiator as when I bought the car. Factory type but if original or a replacement I know not.
Clive
Glad to hear that the Monroes are good.
However after (too much!) mimbling I've decided to go for a set of Bilstiens from Paddock. Twice the price of Monroes but half the price of genuine Land Rover parts. With any luck I shall be able to report back on how they do in a week or so.
Clive
no10chris wrote:
romanrob wrote:
you can get Dave on catch-up. End of Day 1, beep beep beep, engine immobilised - hilarious
Gotta love these idiots that think every car you can just unplug things and it will still run, lol
Rule one of reality show, use people who don't know what the" beep" they are doing. And, preferably, too thick to learn.
Clive
Darned if I can find anything fundamentally wrong so, working on the premise that if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck it is a duck I guess my set of OEM Boge shocks have clapped out in 15,000 road miles. Not good. Especially as they came with Land Rover part numbers.
So what to change them for. Paying the Green Oval tax for factory replacements come out at around £500 a set delivered! OEM Boge like I had before is around £110 a set once front & rear pairs have been tracked down. In retrospect far too close to Britpart prices for confidence in quality. OEM or not I'm beginning to think these are just plain old basic oil units so two tons of P38 is overworking them more than a bit.
Monroe and Woodhead gas shocks claim to be OEM too and are around £200 to £250 a set.
Paddock have Bilstein B6 Yellow monotube gas shocks at around £300 a set which is pretty attractive as being about half list. But its not completely clear if these are road or off road shocks as the same part number appears in both sections. Checking on the Bilstien site the true off road versions carry different numbers so those probably are road optimised.
My steering damper is clearly getting old and must be changed soon and Paddock also have the Bilstein steering damper for £70 odd delivered, which is about the same as Genuine, I'm tempted to add a splash of yellow underneath. OK so called OEM Armstrong steering dampers are about half the price but, right now, I'm not that confident that the OEM tag really means proper quality.
What does the team think.
Clive
Her ladyship has decided that a Mercedes E350 estate will be her next car and keeps bombarding me with look-at-this bargain on CarGurus E-mails.
As a sanity check I looked at P38 prices. Not many but two seriously optimistic standouts were:-
1998 4.6 Limited Edition (which?) with 54,000 miles on the clock for £12,000 and a fiver change
2002 4.6 Vogue with 24,500 miles on the clock for £20,000 and a fiver change.
!! ???
Makes the up to £10,000 ish Japanese imports seem almost sensible.
Clive
Waterless coolant is pretty much snake oil when it comes to pressurised cooling systems. Its a less efficient coolant and requires much greater temperature changes to extract any given amount of heat.
With a pressurised water based cooling system you can arrange things so that most of the heat energy being taken out of the engine goes into trying to boil the water against the pressure head. As the energy needed to change the state of water from liquid to vapour is large a lot of heat can be absorbed without much change in coolant temperature. Which makes it much easier to keep the whole engine temperature stable. Theoretical ideal is for the hot coolant entering the radiator to have not quite enough energy to boil against the pressure head and the coolant leaving the radiator to be just a fraction below boiling point at that pressure. In a real system you make sure you have some margin but the temperature can be much more stable than with waterless coolant where any heat extracted from the engine goes directly into changing the coolant temperature.
The raison d'etre of waterless coolant is its much higher boiling point than unpressurised water. So it works pretty well in a crude, unpressurised or low pressure motor with a big cooling system and lots of metal in the block. A big metal block makes an effective heat sink smoothing out temperature variations between cold and hot ends. Lots of coolant rushing round allows the heat to be taken up without too much difference between hot and cold ends. But its still hard to arrange a nice smooth temperature gradient from the bottom of the block, where the coolant enters, up to the head where it leaves. With conventional coolant passage layout having water inlet and outlet at the same end of the motor with longitudinal galleries in block and head joined by vertical passages its very easy to have a short circuited system where the back end of the engine runs dangerously hotter than the front.
For all sorts of reasons our alloy V8 engines don't do well with internal temperature variations so are intrinsically unsuited to waterless coolants. It's a big cooling system so you can get away with it if you don't push too hard or in racing where high power, and high heat, normally goes with high speed so plenty of airflow over the radiator and in the engine compartment to help keep stuff cool. A modern motor designed for waterless coolant will have a rather different coolant passage layout.
Finally, unpleasant though boiling is with steam flying everywhere, it is very effective at pulling a lot of heat out of the motor very quickly. Just need to ensure coolant flow is continuous and all the passages are full to keep drawing the heat out. Much easier said than done. Which is why steam cooling where the coolant turns to vapour inside the motor has never been made to work reliably despite being much more efficient and needing far less coolant than a conventional system.
As usual there are darn good reasons for the conventional fuddy duddy engineering approach. You have to work hard to come up with something that is all round better.
Clive
Do you park on a slope nose down?
I do and mine used to play the same coolant settles at 1/4" or so down trick.
Until it decided that the best way to mark its territory was to leak at the joint where the hose from the water pump joins the thermostat during cool-down.
Clive
Price is low end of aftermarket range but not silly so should be OK.
Holes not lining up seems to be standard these days. I paid a lot more for allegedly OEM a couple or three years back and the holes didn't line up.
Clive
Gilbertd wrote:
Clive603 wrote:
Running General Grabber HTS tyres at their recommended 35 psi all round.
Recommeded by who? Pressures should be 28 psi in the front and 38 psi in the rear, although I tend to run a couple of psi higher all round, particularly when doing a long distance towing job.
35 psi was off the General Grabber list for HTS tyres. Some of the other Grabbers were closer to the standard. Queried that with the type shop at the time. They said try it on both and see. Certainly seemed happier at the General Grabber settings than book. Wear pattern is good and its been generally well behaved until very recently unless there was something needing fixing.
Morat
Thanks for the heads up on the viscous coupling. Certainly sounds a possibility. Time to read up in RAVE. Hopefully if it is the coupling I have plenty of warning before "bang" as gotta drive off to Southend airport in a few minutes to collect brother off the Aberdeen flight. Usual hour (ish) wait on the M25 to get to the Dartford Crossing coming up.
Raised the front at the weekend for another look. With only one wheel up the lifted one turned smoothly by hand with noticeable stiffness. So I guess the VC at least somewhat functional and not locked up.
Clive
Running General Grabber HTS tyres at their recommended 35 psi all round. Which worked fine when first fitted perhaps 15,000 - 20,000 miles ago. Still have reasonable tread but there will probably be new Vredesteins going on next year.
On reflection this wallowy & roll issue has been hanging around in the background pretty much all the time I've had the car. Its what has shown up whenever other suspension / steering things have got to the worn / end of life stage. I'd just put it down to being thats what P38s do when bits underneath get too worn. Everything I've changed has either been well worn or clearly getting old so its not as if anything wasn't pretty much due. Even if I'd gone the just do the knackerd bit route I reckon everything would have, of necessity, been done within the next 10,000 miles anyway.
Clive
Four new height sensors fitted on Saturday in friend Mikes "barn" workshop. Nice level floor and lift with headroom to get car right up to make life easy. One of the new rear ones ones was way different calibration compared to the others. Actually had to swop sides as its was right not the lower limit when fitted to the drivers side. See what its like after week or so but looks like I'll have to get that one changed under warranty.
After all the fiddling around I think the original "iffy sensor, or two" issue might actually have been poor connections not align sensors. But nice new ones now.
Car seems a touch more stable but its still very wallowy and doesn't seem to be running quite true. Clearly the problem is still evolving. On further reflection the issue seems more roll related than damper travel as I managed to find some straight across the road bumps and hollows to play on and it seems much better behaved when both sides hit at the same time. Single side bumps, hollows et al feel awful and roll is certainly excessive. But its had new factory anti-roll bar bushes and links fairly recently so that ought to be OK. Front Panhard rod bushes are still good but I shall be sourcing used panhard rod to fit new bushes in for a change-over.
Frankly I'm out of ideas.
Clive
Bumper comes off so easily that the main issue is finding somewhere to put the thing whilst you are busy. I have pulled it of solo but its a ot easier to remove with an assistant.
Be careful with the union nuts as they are verye asily distorted.
Clive