Best replacement for the door woofers are the JBL Stage 600CE and they comes as a pair with decent replacement tweeters too. I've replaced all 4 of mine with them. Speakers for the sub are also 6.5 inch (if you have the sub with two speakers) and any half decent sub speaker of the correct size will work fine.
No, I'm much further south than that I'm afraid, my route will be Peterborough, Wellingborough, Northampton, Oxford, all cross country. There's not even a convenient meet up point as we are in completely different directions. I don't do a stop-over unless the journey is more than a 24 hour drive.....
The DSP amp is deep inside behind the sound deadening felt. It may be that if you have a Discovery amp in there the head unit doesn't detect it as a DSP amp so the option doesn't appear.
Had a look at mine this morning and the problem was obvious. Due to the curvature of the rear screen, as the wiper moves across the screen it has to hinge at the base of the wiper arm and mine was seized solid. A squirt of Plus Gas followed by some lube got it working perfectly again. Spoke to Nigel about something else and told him. He checked his and found the exact same problem so we can both now use the rear wiper.
For anyone else suffering the same problem, get it to move by giving it a helping hand and hit the boot release button while it is visible then try to lift the wiper away from the rear screen and you'll almost certainly find you can't. Lube the hinge with whatever you have handy and work it back and forth a few times and it will work as it should again.
Not been in there before but mine has started doing exactly the same thing. It has been working perfectly ever since I've owned the car but then I switch it on a couple of days ago to clear the rain off the rear screen and it only moved a couple of inches. Got out and gave it a helping hand and it parked OK. Now it will only give a part wipe before stopping so that is now one of my Easter holiday jobs. I'll let you know how I get on.....
If you poke the tone button on the stereo and DSP comes up as one of the options, you have the DSP amp. If it has died in the past someone may have fitted one from a Discovery which results in no rear speakers.
I always thought the Unlock EAS button allowed you to control it if it was in hard fault. However, I always go, Read Faults, Unlock EAS, Faults and then read again, that clears everything.
There's a button on the EASUnlock software that doesn't look like a button, it looks like a box, marked 'FAULTS'. Click on that and it clears all the faults, then you can click on Read Faults again to see remains.
My Ascot needs new front top and bottom ball joints so if nobody else wants it, I'll take the front axle assembly and just swap the whole lot.
I've got all next week from Tuesday onwards free so can come over any of those days. How does that fit in with others so there will be more than just Marty and me to shift big stuff?
It runs all the time so the system is kept exercised and the flow of fuel through the fuel rail stops the injectors from overheating. So it simply flows through the fuel rail to the pressure regulator and then back to the tank. To stop it from leaking between noticing the problem and doing something about it, I pulled the petrol pump relay and forced the car to start on LPG. On the very first LPG car I owned (a Saab 900) I completely forgot about that and let the petrol tank run right down, that burnt out the pump as it was running with nothing flowing through it and then ran out of LPG. AA man towed me to the nearest filling station with LPG so I could fill up on that and run on LPG alone until I could put a new pump in.
I'm busy odd days next week but free the whole week after Easter if that helps.
We could do a split. Pete wants the diff and there's one car I work on with a weird ABS fault that I suspect is down to a damaged reluctor ring on one corner, so I could take the half shafts and hubs. I've got a little 4x3 trailer so could bring that with me for taking bits away.
To be quite honest, I'd rather simply neglected rather than spending far longer sorting out someone else's mess.
But, I've been working on my car today. A couple of years ago my fuel gauge started playing up. Running on LPG all the time and keeping about 1/4 tank of petrol in it as a backup, I'd worn out the sender track at that point. I bought a replacement fuel pump assembly ages ago but hadn't got around to fitting it but at the weekend I got out of the car and could smell petrol. It was dripping off the tank.....
On another car I'd had to replace the steel pipes that run above the tank from the pump to the filter (GEMS has an inline filter, Thor doesn't) as they had rusted through so figured mine had done the same. With the rear of the car on ramps to give me plenty of space underneath, dropping the tank is fairly straightforward except the Jubilee clips on the filler neck and breather hose were seized solid so had to be mangled off. With the tank out there was no way the unions at the pump were going to undo but the pipes coming from the pump were so corroded they just snapped off. Expecting the ring that holds the pump into place I was all ready for it to put up a fight but it came undone by hand. Old pump assembly out and new one in.
Rather than using the union nuts and olives, I used good quality hose (that I also bought ages ago) on the pump, with proper fuel pipe clamps and replaced the rotted steel pipes with 8mm copper microbore central heating tube. Short section of hose, copper tube that can easily be bent to match the run of the original steel pipes and lift the tank back into place. The hardest part was getting enough movement on the tank to reconnect the filler hose, but a bit of rubber grease on it allowed it to slip on easily once it lined up. That left me with the tank back in place and a pair of copper tubes coming from it. Cut the hose to the filter and connected that to the copper and cut the return pipe at a point where it hadn't rusted and used another short length of hose and more clips to join the two together. Result, no more petrol leaks and a fuel gauge that should hopefully read properly.
All is not perfect though. The pump I bought was an Allmakes branded one and it is noisy. It can't be heard inside the car but standing outside the car with the engine running, a clearly audible whine can be heard coming from it. Maybe it will quieten down with use, maybe it will be quieter if I put more petrol in the tank, maybe not, but I've kept the one I took out (original I assume) and may even drop the tank again and do a mix and match job on the pump and fuel gauge sender if it annoys me enough.
Not mine but one a friend bought a couple of weeks ago. It was advertised as a 2000, was registered in March 1999 but is actually a very late 98 model, GEMS (WA VIN number) Vogue SE, or at least that is what the tailgate badge says. Although the registration document shows it has had 9 previous owners, it has only done 79,600 . The MoT history shows that it has been used rarely, some years it had done less than 200 miles between tests. The bodywork and underside are near immaculate, the EAS works perfectly, it drives superbly and the only thing letting it down are multiple marks on the back bumper where someone has been a little inaccurate when hitching up a trailer.
However, the downsides were the book showing on the HEVAC and the centre console not appearing to fit properly to the point where opening the centre glovebox was a two handed job as the window switch panel was sitting higher and further back than it should. It was dropped off with me to see if I could sort it out and what I found was it appeared that one of the previous owners was what could best be described as a bodging gorilla.
To start with, the instrument surround was cracked in half where one of the upper screws go in, so that was taken inside and plastic welded on the inside. The more I started taking apart, the more bodges I found. The panel that has the pushbuttons in should have 5 screws holding it in, there was 1 and that was loose. Checking with the Nanocom and with the instruments out, the distribution blend motor was doing nothing and it also reported a fault on the LH blend motor. While in there I noticed that the heater core temperature sensor was on the lower pipe, and not the upper one that it should be but the pipes didn't look right. Dropped the knee panel on mine to check and realised that someone had done the heater core O rings and got the pipes crossed! Not only that but there were signs that they were leaking slightly too. Fortunately I had a pair of O rings, so started on that. However, there wasn't the tell tale hole cut in the side panel that is the usual shortcut. Instead it appeared that whoever had done it had forced the panel apart to get in there resulting in this....
I didn't take the screw out on the right side, it wasn't there in the first place!
Cut the shortcut hole in the side panel, changed the O rings for the correct ones and not the oversized ones that were in there and swapped the pipes over so they lined up properly (probably the reason why it was leaking slightly anyway). Then got back to the blend motor problem.
Having used silicone oil on the distribution linkage, it moved nice and smoothly but the blend motor still didn't do anything. Blend motor was checked (only 3 screws holding it together and not 4 as it should have) and, after unplugging it from the HEVAC, it all tested fine but the crimped connectors in the cable showed it had previously been replaced. Cut the crimps out and soldered and heat shrinked the joints but still no movement from the distribution motor. After much head scratching I dug out a spare HEVAC I had, plugged that in and it worked perfectly, no book, no faults and everything did as it should. Turns out the previous bodger had obviously tested the blend motor by putting power to it without unplugging it from the HEVAC and burnt out the driver chip in the HEVAC. As I have done the same in the past on the HEVAC for the Ascot, I had bought some replacement L272M chips so could change it later. So, at that point It had my spare black fronted HEVAC and not the pretty wood fronted one it should have but I confirmed everything worked although there didn't seem to be a lot of air from the blowers. A look at the pollen filters explained that......
That is the drivers filter but the passenger one wasn't much better, so changed them and started putting everything back together. Plastic welded the broken bits, put everything in with the correct number of screws and remade the top mountings for the window switchpack and everything fitted perfectly. Even the switchpack had 4 of the little Torx headed screws missing from the back as these had been used to secure the HEVAC (about the only thing that was secured with the correct number of screws)! I had to find around 10-15 screws to refit everything as it should be.
The same bodger had also been inside the HEVAC and tried to remove the distribution driver chip, with a hammer and chisel by the look of it, so I cannibalised my spare HEVAC by taking the circuit board out of that and fitting it in the original one (and replaced one of the missing illumination lights too).
The owner collected the car last night and phoned me just before I started writing this to say that it looked good by torchlight but in daylight it looks perfect. Everything fits and looks as it should, there's no creaks or rattles coming from behind the dash and everything just works. Another satisfied owner but I wonder what the result would have been had it been bought by someone that just ignored the faults and not taken the time to get me to take care of it and get it back to how it should be.
Glad to help. The virtually identical two plug latch is also used on the MG TF. I say virtually identical as the MG latch has an extra wire and pin in the smaller plug that isn't needed on the P38 so can be ignored and it will work perfectly. My Ascot has an MG latch in it after the original died and it was cheaper to get the MG latch than the P38 one.
Pierre3 wrote:
Just out of interest, if I am soldering in the door how easy is it for the car to go on fire ????!!! Only joking.
Depends if you use a soldering iron or blowlamp.....
No, you can't take the pins out of the plugs as they are a different type of plug with different pins. No need to use bullet connectors to connect to the door loom, just swap the plugs over so you convert an early latch to a later one. Yes, the very early cars had a socket on the latch itself, then they went to the flying lead with two plugs before the later one that you have from 2000MY onwards with a single 8 way plug with only 7 pins used. In all cases the latches themselves were exactly the same.
That's an earlier latch for 94-99, your one was fitted from 2000 model year onwards. However, all is not lost. If you look, the wire colours on the latch are the same and they are connected inside the same, so you can chop the plug off yours and the plugs off the replacement and solder and heat shrink the wires. LHD passenger latch won't work as it won't have the keyswitch microswitch inside, only door ajar and CDL.
Pete12345 wrote:
Aren't the diffs the same front & rear on P38 ?
Although they are interchangeable and look the same, if you put them side by side, you'll see that the helix on the crown wheel is cut the opposite way. It hasn't stopped people fitting a rear 4 pin diff on the front, but will be noisier.