After a lot of head scratching and a call to Rick at Callrova, it seems you can't adjust the brightness of the display unless the lights are on. I was always under the impression that you could have a different setting for day and night but you can't. With the lights off the message centre brightness is fixed at its brightest but can be dimmed down when the lights are on at nightime. So that was a lot of wasted time trying to fix a fault that didn't exist....

However, used the car at night on Friday and the clock, EAS disable switch and front foglight switch didn't light up. They did before so I figured that it must be that the contacts needed cleaning as they had been disturbed. Out came the centre console (again) and checked them, all 3 bulbs blown. Whether they had blown over a period and I hadn't noticed, but I doubt it, or if they had chosen to blow when disturbed I have no idea. On the shelf I had a couple of spare orange switch bulbs, but only a blown green one. I was going to order some but at £12.50 each (whereas the orange ones are half that for some reason) decided I would confirm if they had actually blown first. They had but when I looked in the bag of assorted bulbs I keep in the glovebox for one for the clock, found 2 brand new green switch bulbs still in their unopened packets. So fitted those and now have a full set of dash lights.

Had a look at the blown ones and realised they are only wire ended miniature bulbs available from CPC Farnell at £3.77 for a pack of 5 (order code SC00339)! So, with 3 blown green switch bulbs and one blown orange one, I'll be able to fit new bulbs into those and still have one spare left over.

The only bodywork areas that can rust (or corrode in the case of the alloy panels), are the bottom of the lower tailgate (alloy) which will probably benefit from something squirting inside it, the front lip on the bonnet and the rear wheelarches behind the rear doors. To treat the rear arches you'd need to take the wheelarch liner out to get at it from the inside. Theoretically the bottom of the doors could corrode if moisture got trapped in them but they do have drain holes so that shouldn't happen and they have a rubbing strip trim along the bottom anyway so it wouldn't be visible.

A friend who restored a Classic had that treated with Lanoguard but a Classic needs something as they do rot away nicely. The P38 doesn't really suffer from rust, the only ones I have seen that have been rusty are ones that have lived by the sea and almost certainly been used for launching a boat into sea water. When launching my boat I reverse down a slipway until I hear the exhausts are under water and know I've gone far enough for it to float off easily. That is in fresh water though so not a problem.

Put it all back together, or at least I did on Saturday but it was finished off today when the AC was gassed. Everything went back in better than when it came out. I've got leak free heater ducts, leak free AC and a dashboard that is held in with a full set of bolts, not just one bolt in place, one down behind the heater box and two just not there at all! I'm surprised it didn't rattle and bounce around all the time. However, it isn't perfect, the message centre display (and HEVAC) is dim and the rocker on the stalk doesn't adjust the brightness, neither up or down. But that's a job for tomorrow.....

Certainly will, it's bad enough driving around with no AC at the moment but got a fortnight in Europe next month.

Took it to bits......

Lots of bits to change the AC evaporator. It's a well known fact that a car manufacturer has to start somewhere and it would appear that LR started with the AC evaporator and built the rest of the car around it. This is how my interior looked just after lunchtime today.....

But it's always nice when you start a job and find the cause of the problem you are trying to fix is obvious. I'm not sure how much green dye has been put in the AC system over the years but I found quite a lot of it. When I pulled the evaporator out, the inside of the passenger drain was full of green dye, although the drivers side was clogged solid. Once I split the evaporator housing the source of my AC leak was pretty obvious.

Cleaned out the housing, fitted the replacement evaporator and put it back together. Fitted it in place and connected the pipes under the bonnet and filled the system with 12 bar of Nitrogen to do a leak test before putting everything else back in. Having got this far I've no desire in taking it all out again so jumped into the red one and went to B&Q for some sticky foam draught excluder to use on the inside of the ducts and on the top of the heater box. With a bit of luck, the output of the heater will enter the car and not lose half of it trough multiple gaps in the ducting.

However, then I did something really stupid. In my haste to get back and carry on, rather than wait for the car parked opposite to finish loading their stuff into their car and move the trolley, I turned too sharply out of the parking space and scraped the barrier around the trolley parking area. Anyone know where I can get a passenger front door in Rioja Red as the one I have is now a bit misshaped.....

Got home, admitted to my error and carried on. Heater box back in and bolted up, new heater core O rings fitted (something I always keep a few spares of), drain tubes connected and stuck a couple of layers of sticky foam on the inside mating faces of the ducts and fitted those. So that is the state it is in now. Hopefully it won't rain in the night as the dash is outside next to the car and the rest of the stuff is on the back seat but it everything goes smoothly, I should have it all back together by lunchtime tomorrow.

If you are talking about the fat ones either side of the HEVAC, they feed heater output to the vents under the front seats. The AC evaporator drains are much closer to the bulkhead and are about 1/2" diameter.

But to Nigel's problem. The evaporator sits in a plastic box with a gutter along the bottom and the two stubs that go onto the drain tubes.

This is the two tubes sticking up from through the floor

Now the gutter is going to sit horizontally so why is it always the passenger (driver's side for those with the steering wheel on the wrong side) that dribbles into the footwell? In my case it was because the drivers side drain tube was blocked solid so all of the condensation would have to go out the other side. On a humid day, there's a lot of condensation to drain and I suspect the one tube simply isn't big enough. If it can't drain away it fills the gutter until it overflows into the duct from the blower. If you look at this picture you can just see a tidemark where the water level has got up to.

It looks like water has even got up to the join in the casing at some point. As the foam in the joints of the ducts rotted away years ago, they don't seal so what water can't get out of the drain will run into the duct and dribble out of the joint onto your passengers feet. Icy cold water dripping on their tootsies isn't going to go down well (as Nigel has found out).

Now we know the cause, how can it be sorted without going to the lengths I've had to go to today? First step would be to clean out the drivers side drain tube as I suspect it will be as clogged as mine was. I suppose it would be possible to put a small hose up through the driver's side drain and dribble some water slowly (enough to flush the gutter but not to fill the duct) through to flush any debris that may be blocking it out through the passenger side drain. The duct from the blower on the driver's side is higher up so that one won't fill up with water.

I'll be replacing my AC evaporator this weekend so the dash will be coming out. That will give me a chance to see the anatomy of what is in there and hopefully work out where the leak comes from. When I took the red one in for MoT, water was dripping at a pretty good rate out of the drains yet when we used it last weekend, there was still water dripping onto the passenger carpet inside as well, so I think that one must be partially blocked.

Back onto the topic of what I have done to my Range Rover. Spent Sunday removing the little 70 litre LPG tank from the red one and fitting the nice big 95 litre full toroidal that I picked up from Romanrob last weekend. Had to extend the fill pipe which was in 8mm copper so replaced it with 8mm Faro polypipe as it is so much easier to work with. Got it all in, bolted into place and the pipework and electrical connections done. Just got to fill it with gas now......

However, after dealing with the petrol leak on the red one I seem to be surrounded by incontinent P38s at the moment. The AC on mine has had a tiny leak for a couple of years but with some stop leak in it and a regas it would last for 5 or 6 months but recently it has got worse and only lasted a couple of months last time it was done. Regassed it again and it lasted a week. Pressure tested it with Nitrogen, put 10 bar into the system but that was down to just under 2 bar by the following day so the leak has definitely got worse. Couldn't find any source of the leak under the bonnet, not even from the 6 year old Britpart condenser, so I started to fear the worst. Got my tame AC man to use his leak tester where a trace gas is put into the system and an electronic sniffer then checks for that. He checked everywhere under the bonnet, including the condenser, and found nothing. As soon as he put the sniffer into one of the dash vents it gave a very high reading so it is the evaporator.

As the evaporator lives right up against the bulkhead in front of the heater box, to change it involves completely removing the dash. Because of that, most breakers don't go that far and leave it in the shell and a new one is over £800! Found one from a breaker in Germany at £150 including postage but then there would almost certainly be duty to pay on import which would increase the price and also delay getting it. However, a call to Mark Skitt, the man in Wales with a field full of P38s and L322s, revealed that he does go that far and is sending me one for £80. It should be here tomorrow or Friday so guess how I will be spending the weekend.

Quite how anyone can drive a P38 without working AC I have no idea. There's so much glass they are like a greenhouse in the sun and, having done a 160 mile round trip on Monday when the HEVAC told me it was 29 degrees outside, was not pleasant.

No idea, a UK car wouldn't bring on the service light for a misfire (or for most other things either) whereas US spec cars seem to bring it on for the slightest reason. Maybe you are just lucky (or a previous owner has fitted a UK spec ECU).

Somebody probably dropped it when fitting it and closed the gap up. A too small gap will cause a misfire too, the gap on the NGKs is 1.1mm (hence the 11 on the end of the type number). For a piston to hit a spark plug you'd need ridiculously high compression pistons and heads that have been skimmed far too much.

You won't get cream in the oil as the coolant passages are at each end of the heads and the oil passages are at the centre so they can't mix. It could be a leak between a liner and the block which will allow combustion pressure into the coolant passages. Simple test is to run it up to normal temperature, at which point the top hose will be rock hard due to thermal expansion. Let it cool down overnight and then check again, if the top hose is still hard and there is pressure in the reservoir, combustion gases are getting into the coolant passages. I suspect that is what you will find, particularly if it has failed a sniff test. If you take the spark plugs out and find one appears steam cleaned compared with the others, that is the one with the problem.

If it is leaking around the liner, new head gaskets won't make a blind bit of difference as the fire rings on the gasket are outside the liner/block joint. You could go for the bodgers fix and put water glass (Sodium Silicate, the active ingredient in Steel Seal) in it. That should seal it for a few thousand miles or you can do it properly and have the engine fitted with top hat liners. These are flanged so the gasket fire ring is on the top of the liner and not on the block (see http://www.v8developments.co.uk/tophat.htm) meaning the possibility of a blown head gasket is vastly reduced but that does require the engine to be removed and stripped down to a bare block so your best option would be a replacement short (without heads) engine (http://www.v8developments.co.uk/46short.htm) or a complete long engine (http://www.v8developments.co.uk/46long.htm).

Still cheaper than a refurbed Defender though.....

Those plugs look to be copper core (fat centre electrode) whereas the recommended NGK equivalent, the PFR6N-11, have a Platinum centre electrode. The first thing I would do would be fit a set of those and see what difference that makes.

Lez wrote:

Case in point on refurb costs.. it's just cost me £2450 to fit new bushes/steering damper, eas bags, HT leads/plugs, air con new condenser, and service, replaced plenum foam.

You are obviously paying someone else to do it for you. There's probably no more than £400-450 in parts there (if ALL the bushes were done) and the only difficult job is pressing the old bushes out and the new ones in as it needs a press but everything is easily doable.

NB: It still needs two new head gaskets, I'm told..Any idea how much that will cost me?

Around 50 quid for a gasket set and £140 for a set of ARB head studs if you don't want to be doing it again in 3 or 4 years time. But my question would be why would a car that has done no more than 5 years average mileage need head gaskets? What syumptoms does it have that has made someone come to that conclusion? If it had done double that mileage then maybe it would need them but if it has never been overheated then they should be fine. Head gaskets are dead easy too, once the inlet manifold is off all you are looking at is a pair of old school 4 cylinder pushrod engines (my step father looked at mine when I had the heads off and commented that it looked much the same as a Ford Kent engine as fitted to the old Escort). The only part of the job that causes grief is getting the well rusted bolts that hold the two halves of the exhaust manifold heat shields on but at only 59k miles, they will probably still be capable of simply being unscrewed.

Plus there's a chap who works at Kentdale Land Rover who's offered to service and repair it for me (but not the head gaskets) at home.

That's what you need if you aren't prepared to or don't feel confident in doing it yourself, someone that will do it at mates rates rather than charging by the hour. They are so easy to work on as you can get to almost all things so are ideal to learn if you haven't done it before.

I wouldn't call £25k good value for something you can't use every day.

However, you don't need one. Back in the late nineties, we had some Discovery's at work fitted with a gutter height mounted 10m pneumatic mast which raised the centre of gravity and made them heavier on one side. One of our guys was going up to a hilltop radio site and managed to tip one over. H&S manager got involved and, as a result, all of us that used one of them got sent to Solihull to do the Land Rover off road driving course. I did mine in 2000 or 2001 when the P38 was current. I arrived there to see a rutted mud hill and thought the only way you'd get up that was in a Defender on huge knobbly tyres. Half an hour later I was driving up it in a TD5 Discovery on standard road tyres. The instructor said, the driver will bottle out long before you reach the limit of what the car can do, it's down to knowing how to drive it. At the end of the day I asked what model was the best off road, fully expecting to be told the Defender. Without hesitation, his reply was "the Range Rover on air suspension".

It is a 'proper' 4x4 but doubles as a luxury car as well. I've got a set of Kleber all season tyres on mine (the 2nd set now), 3 peaks marked so legal in Europe in winter and it dealt admirably with 42cm of snow in Latvia in December. It was so good, I had to floor it off a filling station to confirm that the traction control was working as it hadn't kicked in when being driven normally.

Nearly 20 years ago with a couple of friends in France, I was importing old 1950's and 1960's cars from the States and then taking them down to the South of France so needed something to tow a trailer with a couple of tonnes of Yank Tank on the back. At the time I was running a Saab 900 (on LPG) with a towbar but there was no way it was up to towing them. Rather than having to tax, insure and MoT an everyday car and a tow car, I decided to get something that could do both jobs. I bought a Ford Explorer and rapidly discovered it was possibly the worst tow car ever built so, working on the principle that if a Range Rover was good enough for the Queen, it was good enough for me. I bought a '93 Classic LSE from a mate of a mate. If I washed it, I could use it for going out and it could tow up to 3.5 tonnes. It was already on LPG (that didn't work properly but I soon sorted that out) so was cheap to run too. It towed pretty well, despite having been converted to coil springs, but the main problem was that more of it would dissolve every time it rained. The outer door skins may be alloy but the inners are steel and you could open the rear doors and inspect the electric window regulators without taking the door panels off. The coil springs that had been fitted were for a standard Classic but the LSE is 9 inches longer at the rear so they were too soft. OK when driving it normally but with a trailer on the back, the headlights would point skywards. I needed EAS. Had I known what I know now, I would have put the original system back on but I didn't so fitted stiffer rear springs. That improved it when towing but it was damn near rigid when not. I needed a P38.

Mine, the ex-police one I still have now, came up on eBay. Already on LPG but with a burst rear air spring and running on 7 due to a head gasket blowing into the Vee. £600 later, I trailered it home behind the LSE. A pair of rear air springs and a head gasket later, it was on the road. Then all the other problems we all know about now started. I actually owned the P38 and the LSE for 3 years as I didn't trust the P38 as far as I could throw it so needed something I could rely on even if the rust holes were getting larger by the day. Since then, I have used the P38 as my everyday car, it does the weekly shop, it gets loaded up with almost half a tonne of kit when I go to install air conditioning systems (as I have done today), it regularly goes to SW France and at least once a year goes to visit my partners parents in Latvia (1520 miles each way). It got washed and polished and took my daughter's bridesmaids to her wedding but it also climbs the odd mountain in the Alps and does a bit of green laning too, because it can. In the near 15 years I have owned it, it has been bought home by the AA 3 times. Once when the bearing on the serpentine belt tensioner collapsed and threw the belt off, once when the water pump bearing exploded and the most recent time when the gearbox died at 454,185 miles (I did think abut writing to LR and complaining that the parts they were using were obviously of inferior quality). i don't consider that bad considering that is in the 312,000 miles I've done since buying it.

People have sometimes asked if it is for sale and I've told them not at any price, my daughter reckons they will bury me in it when the time comes.

Lez wrote:

I did travel once from Manchester to Barcelona in my brand spanking L322 company car in 1999,

Must have been travelling quickly to go back in time, The L322 didn't come out until 2002......

I think the only cars you can say that aren't designed for long distance cruising are the little 1 litre, or less, shopping trolleys that all look so similar if you took the badges off you wouldn't have a clue what it was.

The JBL speakers come as a pair of 6.5 inch ones and a pair of tweeters. I replaced the front tweeters with the JBL ones but with my old ears I couldn't hear any difference. What you will have now, assuming they haven't been messed around with, is a pair of 6.5 inch woofers and a pair of smaller midrange speakers in the door panels along with the tweeters in the triangular panel. The rear doors will be the same but without the tweeters. I didn't touch the midrange, they are still the originals. The tweeters and midrange speakers are in parallel and fed with the higher frequencies, while the woofers come from the DSP amp on a lower frequency output. That is how you would wire them if using crossovers.

The original woofers are attached to a plastic support with bits of bent tin, the JBL speakers need screws but not a problem to just drill 4 holes in the plastic support and use self tappers.

Yup, they're the ones.

If the DSP amp has been removed, then the wiring should have been linked where the DSP amp originally lived (see https://rangerovers.pub/topic/8-info-p38-alpine-dsp-amp-connections-and-wiring?page=1#pid30814) unless someone has run new cabling in from the head unit to the speakers. What you have now will dictate what you need to do and what is the least work. Most, if not all, modern head units have built in DSP anyway so an external DSP amp (if you can even find one) isn't worth it.

Your original speakers are now 24 years old and speaker technology has improved a lot since then, they are also likely on their last legs anyway. I've replaced all of mine with JBL units (JBL Stage 600CE), far better and a straight swap. If you want to add a sub, then up to you, I've got a small underseat one sitting just behind the BeCM under the drivers seat and that works well too.