Looks like the Overpriced P38 Spotters Club is having a really good week.
£10,000 for this admittedly smart 30 th anniversary edition https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Range-Rover-P38-30th-Anniversary-Ltd-edition/232656731892 with 120,000 miles up. Theoretically you could say the interior looks good but the combination of dark green leather with cream piping and cream plastic has rather too much resemblance to the aftermath of an unfortunate late night post pub curry choice for any normally non colour blind person to appreciate.
Clive
Possibly the "legend" of better servicing and more careful looking after associated with "prestige" Japanese re-imports might affect folks perceptions. If you want a P38 you want a P38 so its all down to condition-condition-condition and does SWIMBO like the colour. Mind you at that money I'd want more than a paltry 3 months warranty.
However looked at vaguely dispassionately some sort of case could be made on a pure economics "likely miles per pound" invested basis.
That P38 has 45,000 (ish) miles on it so should be good for 70,000 odd more with normal servicing plus (say) two extra fixes. Normal servicing including a replacement set of air bags, refurb compressor / valve block, suspension bushes and are of the other known gets old parts along the way. P38 is cheaper to fix / service than the Disco by good margin too. Suppose for fair fuel consumption comparison we should add in £1,000 for LPG.
Throw another £5,000 into the pot and you have a 300,000 mile motor. But you know that.
Disco has 75,000 miles on it. Probably only another 40,000 to 50,000 on normal servicing before it starts throwing incidents. I know Disco 3's can do serious miles with no issues but its still bit of a gamble. Not first series L322 "how many shirts would you like to loose territory" but still not wonderful. Lots more complex than the P38 and far more expensive to fix. Maybe £5,000 on extras by the time it gets to 200,000 and odds are you're more or less done. Too much un-rebuildable stuff. Far as I'm concerned teacher was off sick the week that the guy who stayed the Disco 3 managed to attend classes. Can't see ever being desperate enough to drive round in something that ugly!
Still a nonsense price when you can find nearly as nice for half or less with 60 - 70,000 on the clock tho'. But fact is for grumpy old so-n-so like me on 5,000 miles a year over-paying for something unlikely to have real issues for the decade or more could be attractive. I've pretty much settled on doing the mid-life improvements thing to mine and, factoring in the original £4,000 purchase price costs will be getting up there by the time its done.
Clive
Morat has it.
Really its down to how many miles you are going to do and what a just-use-it car is worth to you. Way I see it pushing around £6,000 - £7,000 into a sound vehicle will get you a pretty much "bullet proof for the next 100,000 miles" with just ordinary servicing P38 on LPG. Or rather less if you decide not to top hat the motor. Which given the relatively inexpensive servicing of a P38 really isn't a bad deal. Assuming you have LPG in reasonable range or on a regular run. Which I don't. Rats!
So that green one would make a lot of sense as a starter vehicle.
Different if you, like moi, don't do vast miles when its actual spend not spend per mile thats important. I've been taking Car Mechanic magazine for the past few years gathering evidence for my possible next purchase, ought to be due around 2024. Troubles and costs of modern, even so called relatively economy stuff, are bloody terrifying. So mayhap doing a bullet proof P38 to last until I'm 80 odd might make sense. Say 70,000 miles worth over next 15 years. Could probably get £6,000 for the Bristol so funds are no issue.
Might be into doing one anyway. The "unofficial kid sister" is due her annual 2 or 3 week between contracts visit come April. If she doesn't stop whinging about how much her L322 TD6 is costing to run and service (£5,000 on servicing last year, Yikes!) I'll be seriously tempted to toss her the keys to the Big Red Beast to se if he can convert her to the one true faith. (Hour long "there, there, there - pat, pat, pat - it'll be OK - tears don't stain shoulders, How Much!" response phone calls are getting old.)
Clive
20 nm is more than little greater than finger tight. About 14 1/2 ft lb in proper money. Roughly the standard tightening torque for a half decent 8 mm bolt according to this : http://www.wtools.com.tw/STANDARD-BOLT-TIGHTENING-TORQUE.shtml. Interesting links but I defy anyone to make sense of the introductory blurb to the relation formulae between bolt and torque at the bottom.
I prefer the spring loaded handle with direct reading dial type like this https://www.cromwell.co.uk/shop/hand-tools/torque-wrenches/sw25-dial-indicating-torque-wrench/p/KEN5551250K for that sort of low torque work. Its very easy to feel whats going on. Important when pretensioning a stretch bolt. Theoretically not as positive as a click type but it takes only a modicum of care to hold better accuracy than the inherent scatter of a normal size click type. Folk tend not to know what they are so often found very cheap or even, like mine, free.
Clive.
Sheesh. Brings back unpleasant memories of doing near enough same "stuck in the footwell" thing in a GT6 more years ago than I'm gonna admit to. Fortunately GT6 seat is thinner relative to the steering wheel so could still breath (shallowly) whilst I figured things out. On my ownsome so self extraction essential.
Ever since I've always pulled the seat out before I slip into a footwell. I put the original error down to bad habits picked up in 6 months of Reliant trike ownership!
Clive
The DIY DAB antenna in your third link should work very well indeed.
Did some Googling to try and find some intelligent commentary. My grasp of antenna theory was pretty weak back in night school days 40 years ago and it certainly hasn't improved. This quote sounds right
"Apparently performance is mainly down to the coil at the bottom which acts as a choke impedance matching device. What you have is an end fed balanced 5/8 wave. Dunno who came up with the design but the use of the coil, the 75 ohm coax and the fold back is very very clever indeed !"
Dunno what effect running it close to a scree pillar will have. I'd test it hanging in the middle of the screen first.
Clive
Yup the electronics are smart enough to stop you locking the car if it thinks the key is still in it. Key detection microswitch actuator on mine is a bit sticky and if it doesn't go over when the key is removed the car won't lock. Usually hear it if it doesn't go. Pushing the key back in and pulling out sharply fixes it. Much louder clunk when fixing.
Clive
L322 lights are wider than the P38 ones so I imagine the "Bubba with a monster trade pack deal on Isopon" converters leave the aircon condenser off, junk the viscous fan and move the radiator back a bit to make room for the lights. Allegedly getting the L322 bumper mounted properly is, ahem, "less than easy" too. Not that any of the Bubbas and Bubba wannabees I've ever met have properly in their vocabulary anyway. In certain quarters taking an angle grinder to the welds for service access appears to be considered acceptable!
Folk claim to have done the job properly retaining the air-conditioning and viscous fan but imply its very hard work needing significant bodywork expertise to achieve a could've come from the factory result. Unfortunately the Photobucket issue seems to have deep sixed all the relevant pictures so its hard to verify that the words match reality.
Clive
Looks like SpeedyHen will do these Brooklands books at near as dammitt £38 for the Workshop Manual and £36 for the Parts Book which is decent value considering how many pages there are.
But the look inside view on Amazon suggests that the meat is printed at two pages to a landscape format sheet. So pretty much half scale which won't help legibility and, probably, makes a hollyhock of the page organisation.
Got a couple or three Brooklands books myself and print quality is pretty crap at best. And don't mention the pictures. Clearly direct photoset pages from "camera on post" film. Heck most of the photos in my Norton Rotaries Limited Edition Extra couldn't have been worse if they'd done the James Bond thing with a Minox and desk light! For nigh on £40 a pop I'd want the manual and parts book done right and nothing I've ever seen from Brooklands gives me that nice warm fuzzy "its gonna be good" feeling.
I like the look of what Sloth has done. Maybe better with more, smaller comb bindings than just 3 big ones. Some sort of volume ID on the comb would help too. Will those Brother/Dymo et al hand held thermal marker tapes stay put? Nice thing about the ring binders I found is full width and length clear pockets on front and back to take proper contents details. Hadta use that stiff almost card paper tho' cos ordinary paper wouldn't slide all the way down the spine.
Clive
Yup the binding & putting together bit at home is a real double ball ache. Home printing is just a single ball ache, unless you have a high volume printer with duplex capability. Started out doing the few pages as I needed them too then said "Stuff it. Do it right." and did the lot.
Single pages in clear wallets do pretty much double the space needed but its so nice in that things really do lay flat and its safe to plonk something on open pages to stop the wind blowing things around when working outside. Frankly if I'm gonna have a ball ache job I'll get my moneys worth out of the suffering and do it proper like. Done the chase a page round the garden bit a time or two. Both when a paperback bound manual disintegrated and when a loose leaf one lost a page or three.
Tempting link but at 70 drinking vouchers! An hour every night will get a DIY effort done, eventually. Hafta prioritise as works pension doesn't go all that far. Car lift is this years ambition methinks.
Clive
Now he offers!
Last years "wear the LaserJet 4MP+ out" project was to print out all of the P38 Workshop and Electrical Trouble Shooting manuals. I filled 8 four ring binders mostly 1 1/2" nominal but one bigger 2" one 'cos that was what I had. Three binders for each volume of the workshop manual, two for the electrical troubleshooting. Realistically a touch crowded, would have been better if I'd had enough of the wider ones to do them all.
I don't care for direct hole punching of the paper for this sort of thing so each double sided sheet is in its own glass clear pouch. Oily fingermarks just wipe off. I found EuroOffice 5 star pouches to be of adequate quality and not silly expensive in boxes of 100. Vertical alignment of the holes is a touch variable but name brands are 5 or more times the price and little better. Pouches mean that the odd mis-feed, miscount or inadvertently doing only one side is easily corrected for by slipping another sheet in. Takes ages on your own. Doing more than about 40 pages at time is asking for trouble. Its very easy to end up with inconsistent first and last page placement. I cocked up about 100 pages in one set. Put them in anyway figuring I could live with it the a couple of weeks later ripped the lot out for a do-over.
Whilst I was at it I filled two more binders. One with all the Nanocom instructions and one with useful things gleaned from t'net. Mostly BECM and EAS related. That will grow.
About 2 ft of shelf space.
This years project is to pull all the parts book stuff off Lrcat. Already done Axles and Suspension section as I needed to sort out full set of bushes. Currently a Word file but it will all go to PDF eventually.
Clive
Guess it was made on a cheap CNC 2D bender. Manually setting the twist and distance where the bend plane changes gives lots of room to get it wrong.
Never got the economics of this smallish production aftermarket stuff. I've thought that the speed and accuracy of a proper 3D bender would squeeze 2D tech right out of the market despite the higher cost of the machine.
Clive.
Got Grabber HTS on mine which seem pretty decent in light to moderate snow, quiet enough that I can't really hear road noise over wind and lasting well so far. C wet grip rating which is fine the way I drive.
Wouldn't touch an AT of any sort with a barge, let alone the pole. Wet grip rating of most sizes is F which is risky on a 2 ton car. Local tyre place put a set of AT somethings on her ladyships L322. Serious credit card damage followed by endless complaints of insufficient grip. Not poxy surprised now I've actually checked the ratings. Absolutely not madame lead foot compatible. Last time I'll trust their judgement. On Vredstein Quatrac now which she likes.
Clive
Orangebean flagged this one up on the 2002 Vogue Restro thread :-
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2002-Land-Rover-Range-Rover-P38-Vogue-SE-Very-Low-Mileage-59k-FSH/352222677323? but is it blue or green
If I weren't so far down the mid-life improvements route on mine that blue beast would be seriously tempting as it ticks all the boxes including LPG. Theoretically bit spendy but loads of miles left at normal servicing schedules so good on a £ per anticipated mile basis. Not stupidly far away too.
I see E-Bay has several low mileage late P38 up at the moment like
and
Seems to make something of an economic nonsense of doing serious mid life work on a car at 2 or 3 times the mileage.
Clive
gordonjcp wrote:
What I thought about was getting a set of small inline NRVs and turning them down on a lathe to fit inside the valve block where the "normal" NRVs go, with a groove to hold an O-ring at each end to seal the gap and hold it in place.
Something like these babies perhaps :- https://www.cambridgereactordesign.com/miniaturecheckvalves/#close . No great issue to make a carrier the right size for one of the small tubular ones. As they are complete units we don't have to worry about seat condition. May be a bit spendy.
The common, economically priced, off the shelf check valves for pneumatics and fluidics control applications are made to take push in nylon tube like our air suspension so tend to be too big. Smallest ones are for 4 mm tube and, typically, are 9 or 10 mm Ø overall. Too much to turn down methinks. Ordinary miniature ones start at 1/8 BSP thread so way too big.
Need to watch the crack pressure. Many of the process control variety have very high, 'hundreds of PSI, crack pressure which really won't do. I think around 7 or 8 psi is normal for pneumatic / fluidics control type valves which should be OK.
Need to verify flow rates too. Should have looked more closely at the valve block when I had mine apart but I presume standard is a simple O ring on a flat seat style lifting into a sufficiently big pipe so as not seriously restrict airflow.
Clive
Three pieces looks to be the way its done. Point, wire and rectangular end piece.
$64,000 question is does a mullered point mean a mullered seat underneath which also needs re-working. If so we need some way to re-finish the seat. May not be possible if the design relies on the anodising to provide a sufficiently hard face.
Looking at Morats self dis-assembled version I suspect the pointy bit is simply held on to the keep-it-together wire with loctite or similar engineering adhesive. If it is loctite then a bit of heat will shift it just fine. Looks as if the top end of the wire just goes through the hole in the flat part and is bonked flattish to stop it coming back out.
Brass should do for the pointy end. Only potentially tricky bit is if there is a recessed seat for the spring on the backside of the point. Hopefully not as those little back facer type tools are a tricky grind and easy to break.
Realistically might as well make 50 as make one or two. Time to see if that capstan attachment in the too good to bin cupboard actually fits my Smart & Brown 1024 VSL. Maybe I should have grabbed that Britan! (http://www.lathes.co.uk if you want to know what the old fool is blathering on about!).
Clive
.
Is this a hint that its about time Clive got round to tooling up and making a batch of new pointy bits to recondition the valve insert doobies?
Theoretically I have some uncommitted time next year.
Clive
No 2 on running the M reg one if its basically acceptable and sorting Micheal properly. Taken 40 odd years for the penny to drop but now firmly convinced that do it properly, do it once is always the cheap way overall. And my short cuts (bodges) were generally considered three classes above most folks.
Last time I had owt to do with that sort of swop the new second hand motor decided to get iffy about 2 months down the road and mate in question had to find yet another engine. OK only an Escort van so changing the engine was just a matter of unbolting, balancing on a trolley jack to slide it out then passing a doubled rope underneath and hopping up onto the wings to lift it out between us. Ended up re-building engine no 3 to ensure GF and her two Newfoundlands were happy. Time and cost spent faffing about with a car to car swop and shifting the carcass would more than have covered a refresh level rebuild anyway.
Clive
Had a quick gander at the website.
You think that's bad.
How about £5 change out of £ 33,000 for 4.6 Classic LSE. Not even a soft dash! Makes that fake Royal special edition look almost reasonable. Can just see a poor angle view of the cheap engraved /printed label on the dashboard in one shot. Amazing what you can do with double sided sticky foam! Would you drive a car with something like that screaming at the passenger "Dealer took him for a ride!". Um, nope.
Skimming through the years and pictures throws up some very odd juxtapositions with GEMs engines shown for far too modern vehicles.
Realistically £6,000 to 7,000 for 30,000 miles or so vehicles further down is expensive but makes some kind of cack handed sense if you want put 50,000 miles or so on it. Around £3,000 might buy you a good 100,000 mile ish UK one but you will spend the difference on the mid-life improvements program over 50,000 miles so its pretty much a wash.
Mind you if what my mate Paul "I trained as a toolmaker" told me about the Porsche collector / fancier market is true nothing P38 related even makes it onto the cheap end of that scale.
Clive
Orangebean wrote:
the joy of owning and driving a P38 diesel for only £195 :)
"Joy" and "P38 diesel" do not belong in the same sentence. Unless my dictionaries are sadly in error.
Caravan dealer. Hmmn.
Man bought it cheap to do collections'n deliveries. Ran it with no servicing until it dropped. Then abandoned it in the local boozer. No way is it just heater plugs. It will fire up on three good plugs if its much above freezing. Realistically its a £1,500 car even if running perfectly. Back in the day he'd be buying rusty Transits.
My view is that a P38 is gonna eat £4,000 - £5,000 and fair bit of quality garage time over and above normal servicing if you do any half decent miles unless you select and time the purchase very carefully. Are you feeling lucky! So its just a matter of doing enough miles to justify the spend. Still seem to be 100,000 mile (ish) examples in decent nick popping up regularly in the £2,000 - £3,000 range. Which is where I'd be looking.
In round numbers my W plate 4.0 HSE was £3,000 in 2012 with 70,000 miles, about £2,000 in non normal service bits and extra thingies. £2,500 in service and normal running stuff including tax & insurance. Coming up to 90,000 miles now. Probably still get £3,000 back. Call it a grand a year plus fuel to run it. Not too shabby.
Clive