Morat
Use the clamps both sides of the cut when using a chop saw. Usual chop saw blade and speeds are rather too aggressive for Delrin so it can get bit lively during the process. Doesn't help that the stuff is smooth and slippery making it hard to hold with one hand. If you have some excess material best to have a couple of practice goes to get the right rate of cut. Pushing the saw through too slow or too fast will both give poor results.

Although you can cut it with woodworking tools it certainly doesn't cut like wood. As with all plastics it cuts like, well, plastic. Worst thing when using ordinary tools is getting a neat end and shifting the fluffy bits round the edge. Miles better than high density polythene tho' which is a total bear.

Clive

Have you checked that the joints in the coupling to the suspension move freely.

My fronts were playing up a bit but when sorting the radius arm bushes I found the pivot pins on the radius arms were well corroded with serious flaking. Made some new stainless ones and fitted with red rubber grease in the connectors. Sorted. Not convinced my back pivots are as good as it could be but thats a job for another day.

Delrin or nylon is a pain to handsaw accurately. Parting off on a lathe works best for a neat, accurate, job. Looks like best value on t'bay at the moment is 2500 mm of 30 mm Ø delrin for near as dammitt £41 delivered. Which will do two sets. I need to do a set for myself so if Morat wants to go halves I'll knock out two sets and send one up. Left over 400 mm will always come in handy. Can easily do more sets whilst I'm set up if folk want.

Clive

My cover is exactly the same as Brians'. I bought the screen holder too. Its an FLY branded universal holder modified by replacing the multi adjustable cradle with a replica of the metal clip over cover. So it sits in quite securely with the screen fully visible. Cant see any great issues in engineering something equivalent although probably need thumb screw location rather than the spiffy clip on cover modification.

Clive

Think the protective metal cover came with later versions. Got one with mine.

Trick to getting it off and back on is to make sure its dead central over the screen. Its sensibly loose then and comes off easily. Side plates stick up a smidgin above the main case to stop the cover sliding off. But you can get the cover on or off when its overlapping the sides if you push or pull really hard. Would have been better if the sides were a touch higher so the cover has to go centrally between them rather than it being possible to get it on with an overlap. No issues when you know. Took me about 4 tries before the penny dropped.

Found a Sat Nav case in Halfords just big enough to hold Nano and leads. Mine lives in the top drawer of my Snap On midsection.

Clive

Agreed on the general wonderfulness of heated screens but the bottom (reading) end of my varifocal glasses focuses nicely on the elements which can be irritating. I see about 6" to 9" deep worth of elements when not absolutely focusing well up the road. Really only notice when looking around at junctions et al but ...

Don't like to drive with fixed focus distance glasses as speedo and everything in the car is fuzzy.

Clive

My W plate 4.0 SE has the pinstripe and HLR on the side. But not on the rear. Just 4.0 SE.

Clive

I got a Hella one from Euro Car Parts. Allegedly OEM so I figured the holes would line up. Didn't fancy store brand or E-Bay cheap having heard about fixing and fan hole issues on other vehicles with cheap and who-they brands.

Fan fixings were in the right place but two of the fixing holes didn't quite line up. Close but no cigar. A bit of minor filing on the car sorted things.

When you are tooling up to produce these things properly how hard can it be to get the holes right! Too hard obviously.

Clive

Doesn't sound right. Stamped on mine once at around 40 mph and it was downright scary. Nice dry road, antilock banging away like crazy and we pulled up in about half the distance I expected. Major room for Mr Magoo to pull out in front of me. Good job there was no one behind or the tow hook would have collected a front bumper!

Brakes are bit heavier weighted than the modern norm. Most of which I think are too darn light anyway. But thats by design. Underneath all the leather and nice toys is a supremely capable off roader so decently weighted brakes (an long travel throttle) are essential for smooth control when rocking'n rolling across country.

Suits me just fine but then I pretty much live in lace up boots, either walking style or hard toes. Don't think I've worn what would be called normal shoes this year! Or last.

Clive

Assuming the inner pipe is the one that has to be blanked off probably the easiest way to tackle that job is to make two or even three part unit. Basically a union of whatever size is convenient screwed or otherwise fixed onto the outer pipe with an internal thread enabling a solid blanking rod to be screwed up against the inner pipe O ring sealing the pipe off. Loctite should hold and seal the threads. Do what you will with the outer pipe union. Either capped off too or drilled for flow elsewhere with a matching non standard thingy to make the joint Come out sideways if you have to. Who cares about ugly under t'car if it works!

Done something similar to this before when a concentric pipe systems needed to be sealed and measuring up to make properly dimensioned projection was just too much like work.

Clive

Confession time!

I power washed the engine compartment on mine with no ill effects. Done it on several other cars too. But my power washer is an industrial Karcher (ex hire company gone broke) with adjustable pressure and a maximum volume adjustment on the trigger. Turned right down it has little more oomph than a hosepipe but the actual wetting position is very controllable although swinging a 4 ft (ish) double lance with separate suds & water feeds can get cumbersome. But for £15 back in 1985 or there-abouts I wasn't complaining.

Didn't one of the detailing masters on here reckon a hand held steam cleaner worked well?

One day I shall make me a Haralson pressure multiplying hose end just to see how well they do.

Clive

PS Dyson. Over-rated, overhyped, badly engineered and, frankly, not very effective. Had one. Got fed-up with fixing it every couple of years and scored a cheap Kirby out of the local free ad paper. Also seriously overhyped and (way, way) overpriced but effective and built like a battleship. Fixing Dyson "Its just stopped" cleaners was easy money for a while but when one comes back for the fourth time 'cos James D can't design a cable clamp it got bit too old. James D is in the same category as Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar all mouth, no trousers and a convincing line of patter to cover up incompetence. Ball-barrow was the only good idea James ever had. Even then he couldn't get the centre of gravity right managing to produce a wheelbarrow that is almost impossible to tip for emptying. Which is pretty hard to do!

While you are waiting for the shocks spend some quality time getting some good doses of Plus Gas, or whatever your preferred magic releaser in a tin is (not WD40, please), round the threads. I did and was pleasantly surprised by how relatively easily things came off. Post removal inspection suggested trying to shift things dry would have been a fairly major battle.

Definitely impact wrench on the top bolts. For my first try I used a breaker bar with the socket drive extensions needed to reach in past the wheel properly supported on axle stands. Those air pipes are far to vulnerable if the socket cams off the bolt head to risk working freehand. It clearly wasn't going to move with any sane force on the breaker bar. So I bought a cheap electric impact gun. Spun out so easy that I thought the socket had cammed off the head.

Clive

If you have the measurements and a mate with a lathe its not too difficult to make a tube with a suitable taper inside to compress the bush.

Did one for my front radius arm bushes. Will do one for my rear ones but that's on next years schedule! If someone knows the sizes I can easily make one for you.

Clive

Be nice to know why LR changed the connectors.

As they are both two pin connectors its possible that the 2001 airbag trigger outputs are incompatible with the '98 - '99 airbags so the connector sizes were changed to prevent mis-matched connections.

Clive

L322. Engineered by BMW, built by Ford. Nuff said!

Stupidly over complicated in all the wrong places. Lots of fundamentally bad engineering bodged round enough to work. What gronoff thought an electric handbrake was good idea on a vehicle with off road pretensions. Or any vehicle for that matter.

If the official unofficial kid sisters' TD6 is typical, needs a small fortune spent on looking after it. Like £1,200 in 8 months to sort a front suspension knock. About a grand of that I won't see again! Her habit of looking for cheaper servicing, in this case via an Indy who I don't think is really up to such complex vehicles doesn't help. Thought she'd learned her lesson some years back after smithereening my VFR750 Honda at about 120 mph. Late for work and cheap oil filter collapsed! According to her speed limits don't apply to blondes on motorcycles. No great loss. Piece of crap in my opinion even if Johnny Harris (who looked after Joey Dunlops bikes) said it was good one.

When she got worried about her Discovery 300TDi after a "well regarded Indy" forgot to properly tighten the sump plug so it dumped all its oil in mid flight I told her to find a decent late P38 and I'd do a Gilbertd on it. Top hatted engine, lpg and everything sorted properly for the next 150,000 miles. Nope "I don't like the P38, the L322 is much prettier.". There are mistakes and there are expensive mistakes. That one being a really expensive mistake in my view. Yet she loves it to bits. Wimmin!

Concerning engines nobody has ever satisfactorily explained to me why the Rover V8 couldn't have been given modern 4 valve cylinder heads and appropriate camshafts to get sensible economy out of the beast. How difficult could that be on basic push rod motor. BMW V8 may be acceptable for a while but Vanos system and other daftness is just a grenade waiting to blow once the miles get serious. Design is such that it can't be sensibly rebuilt which is not something I approve of.

Clive

Last pre-engaged starter motor problem I got involved with turned out to be issues with the contacts inside the engagement solenoid which actually switch power to the starter motor. A fair few years back but contacts were well burnt as I recall it. We surmised that the engagement solenoid wasn't managing full travel so the connection was iffy and the contacts suffered. As with yours hitting it fixed it for a bit. No obvious causes so the motor was scrapped.

Horribly messy job cleaning out all the carbon dust. Don't do it bare handed or it will be a week before SWMBO lets you eat at the table again! First time through it will take lots longer than it ought if you intend to make a proper job with a full clean out and re-lubrication.

Clive.

Agree on track, and bulb holder if its in one, tarnish being a likely cause. Over various vehicles I reckon cleaning up was needed about half the time to get a new bulb going. You'd have thought that if the old one made good contact for ages until it blew a new one would just slot in and go. But Mr Gremlin says "No.".

These days I clean things every time however good they look.

Clive

UV kit is your friend then. I got a Ring one off E-Bay, about £12 - £13 with the torch. Bottles of nostrum are about half that if you have a UV torch.

Instructions say to put it in and run engine for 20 minutes then look for evidence. Not so sure about that. I just got loads of little splatters all over the engine bay. Nice big easily seen path when the failing pump seal did let a tablespoon or two size puddle's worth out. Next time I shall start looking after about 5 minutes.

I drained out the radiator, mixed the dye in with the coolant and re-filled via a filter to collect all the entrained bits so it was properly mixed to start with rather than relying on it working its way down from the header tank. Syringing out the header might well have been enough tho'.

Clive

Primary purpose of core plugs is to fill up the holes left in the casting so you can extract the sand, or whatever, core used to define the inside parts of the casting. Mostly waterways. Drive in plug is just the easiest way of doing the job. Make it the right shape and it has enough clearance to slip in easily yet a swift blow in the middle will cause it to expand evenly to grip all round for a nice seal. Popping out for pressure relief on freezing or very serious overheating is an incidental and very unreliable benefit.

Hate to say it but your droplets look very similar to the ones I had when spending 4 years, but only 12,000 miles, chasing a small water loss. In my experience unless the leak is pretty big, as in stop at regular intervals to top up size, visible droplets and tracks have more to do with under bonnet airflow and where the fan blows stuff than the actual location of the real leak. I fixed several small leaks that ought to have been about right for the coolant lost to little effect.

Even a good scrub down and a UV kit didn't really solve things although I got very suspicious of the water-pump. But I "knew" that was good cos it got a good inspection when I changed the (bodged) waiter pump gasket during a crankshaft seal change. Eventually it dumped enough overnight to be really sure that it was the pump seal. With 20/20 hindsight it was clear that the pump seal had been failing for a long time. Those things are pressure loaded so it would hold up once the car was up to temperature and the system properly pressurised but would leak during warm-up. So a larger, but still not huge, short term leak looked like a small all the time one.

Clive

Hard change is probably just the ECU re-learning things and generally getting its act together with the other electronics. If possible it might be worth checking that all the gearbox ECU inputs are sensibly central within the normal operating ranges. If its seeing an input right up to one end of the tolerance there may not be enough adaptive adjustment to get a smooth change with a newly re-built gearbox having nice tight clutches. On a well worn box the general sloppiness could be enough to absorb the harshness.

I'd be wanting to cast a beady eye on the engine torque reduction and road speed - output shaft speed dialogs. Maybe see what it does in Sport mode as the more aggressive operating set up puts more demands on the torque reduction and speed related control system.

A real internal mechanical clunk is, of course, seriously bad news.

Clive

no10chris wrote:

They do water pump spanner and holders on eBay cheap enough, although must admit I’ve never needed the holder, a good wallop normally shocks it enough, especially as yours has been off I think your have no problems.

Depends how its been put on. Mine had clearly been hammered on good and tight. So much so that I had serious doubts as to getting it off even with the right tools. Started by carefully selecting the best pair of flats. Was one mighty heave away from some serious engineering to produce a clamp on, guaranteed never to slip, spanner device to teach it manners. Looking at the nut I was fairly lucky that the best pair of flats, which weren't that wonderful, held up against the force applied.

Over the years I've taken a certain morbid interest in seeing how far into my car Mr Unprofessional Professional mechanic has been. Regrettably many P38s have been through the "serviced too much on the cheap" process so you have to look carefully and be wary.

Clive