Living in a village,mine never goes less than 20 miles if I'm going anywhere but I've found that it gets better the further it goes on a long run. It settles to a happy cruising speed of 70-75 on a run to Dover but once off the ferry, for what seems like the same throttle opening and its at 75-80. Although that might be due to the lack of traffic and the billiard table smooth roads on the other side of the Channel.....

That's where the mattress went, strapped to the roof with the straps going in through the windows. Then put an old door on top of it and another strap from front to back attached to the towing eye on the front and towbar at the back. The idea was that this should stop it from lifting if the wind got under it. It did until a double decker bus went past in the opposite direction at about 60mph. I was following and though the car was going to take off!

Clive603 wrote:

Plan A is to run mine until I get too old to drive. As I'm 71 now that should take me past 2035.

I hit 70 earlier this year, so I can look forward to renewing my driving licence at least another 5 times.....

being able to load in a an 8 x 4 sheet of ply would be nice but thats about it.

But it can, I've done it when we were refurbishing a house a couple of years ago. If you drop the rear seats and open the top and bottom tailgates, it will slide in on the diagonal until it sits on top of the front headrests. Then you can push it in and the edges will sit on the bits either side of the boot and at the front it will be level with the sun visors. Rear view mirror is completely useless but if you have the electric seats you can raise the headrests up so it isn't resting on the top of your head. If you don't, in my case Dina drove that one as she isn't as tall as me and I drove mine with all the smaller bits and tools in it.

You can fit an Ikea sofa in one too as long as it is in bits but I failed with a king size double mattress......

More like he's wondering how many of us will put up with the little quirks and foibles of a P38 for another 10 years. I know I certainly will. At my current rate of usage, in 10 years time I'll still be about 200k short of the million mile mark and it isn't going to be retired until I reach that at least.

Not too fussed about the French increasing parking charges as although I go to France quite a lot, the only place I park is at my mates house or in the underground multi-storey car parks and they charge a fortune anyway.

Lpgc wrote:

Who plans on still running a P38 in 2035?

My daughter reckons they will probably bury me in mine when the time comes.....

and then there's those that have two usernames of course......

Swapping the leads wouldn't be a bad idea to see if it moves.

For the MAF, if you are using a Nanocom, it reads in kg/hr so 26 is a bit high but not by a huge amount. Spec says it should be 20 +- 3kg/hr.

The noise suggests it is running on 7, which you already knew, and it is the mechanical bits moving but not as a result of combustion. I've heard it before and it does sound nasty but will go away when all cylinders are firing.

It could be a failing coil pack. Although each coil fires 2 plugs, I've known one car that was misfiring on only 1 of the two. Coil packs are easy to change on a GEMS but a bit of a pain on a Thor, you need small hands and a 1/4" drive socket unless you fancy taking the upper manifold off to get to them.

EAS pump can't be too tight and if slack will be even noisier but it must have the correct dished washers. Bottom ones concave side down, top ones, concave side up

But the V8, if running properly, is as smooth as you can get. Anything else will be somewhere in the drivetrain.

Quite possibly. It's a 24 year old car so it is very likely to have slack in the top and bottom axle ball joints (not detected on an MoT unless done by someone that knows how to check them), Panhard rod bushes and radius arm bushes. Any of which can cause the steering to pull one way or the other. £1,000 is about right for top and bottom ball joints as even experienced LR mechanics don't like doing them as they can be a real pig to get the old ones out.

A noisy diff is also a sign that it is getting worn and will need to be replaced sooner or later. You may well have damaged it when the front propshaft let go.

Only EAS goes through the one behind the LHS kick panel so that won't affect any of the other systems. The ABS relay is a strange dual contact one that can handle the high current but IIRC the has a different in layout so can't be swapped with a standard relay.

No, even the description in RAVE isn't strictly correct. If you look at the diagram, the single pressure switch connects the HEVAC to the engine ECU which then sends a signal to the fusebox to bring in relay 18, the AC control relay, which turns on the condenser fans at slow speed.

From the Nanocom HEVAC document:
Air conditioning grant: When the A/C button is pressed an active low signal is output to the engine management ECU (The Request). This then looks at factors like engine temperature, load, current acceleration etc. and according to when these conditions allow, grant Air conditioning. This involves it engaging the clutch to drive the Air Conditioning pump, altering its internal fuelling to compensate for the load imposed by the pump, managing along with the Hevac, the Condenser fans, and also telling the Hevac that Air Conditioning has been granted. (even though the AC is on all the time EXCEPT when the button is pressed.....

Looking at that, you are seeing the AC Grant signal but from where? HEVAC or GEMS ECU? It appears that the HEVAC needs to send a request to the ECU which then sends the AC Grant signal as long as the ECU is happy for that to happen which then causes the HEVAC to send 12V out on the compressor clutch from pin 7. That means it won't try to engage the clutch if the engine isn't running or if it is running very hot and adding extra load wouldn't be a good idea. It isn't clear which is which but pins 28 and 29 on the GEMS ECU are the two that deal with the AC, so one will be looking for a ground from the HEVAC (the request), while the other puts out the Grant. The two connections at the HEVAC that go to these two pins are on the Black/Grey wire from pin 13, C246B and a Yellow/Black from pin 8 of C244 (which has the single pressure switch in line with it). However, even that isn't clear as the diagram shows the pressure switch to be open at less than 13 bar and closed at above 17 bar so at static pressure (without the compressor running) the pressure would be down at around 8 bar????

The trinary switch contains two separate switches, hence it having 5 wires to it. One is a single on/off switch which is the one that causes relays 13 and 14 to engage and put the fans on high speed if the pressure gets up to 21 bar. The other switch within it is the 3 way switch which is open circuit if pressure is below 2.4 bar or above 30 bar. So it won't allow the clutch to engage if the refrigerant is low or if it is over-pressuring.

The evaporator going down to 1C is too low and it will almost certainly ice up, that will cause the pressure to increase pretty dramatically which is why the clutch is dropping out. I suspect ice will be forming on the outside of the Low side (thick) pipe and the high side (thinner) pipe will be too hot to touch. When running normally, the evaporator temperature should go down no lower than 4C, at which point the compressor clutch will drop out until the temperature gets up to around 6-7C when it will kick in again.

I'm not even sure why I looked at the temperature gauge as it never moves no matter how long it is idling. I seem to have a habit of driving on bits of road that are about to be closed in front of me. I sat in one queue for almost 2 hours a few weeks ago and wondered if the temperature gauge was working as it hadn't moved so pulled the Nano out and checked it. 93C is the highest I've ever seen, with normal running at 87-89C.

Check fuse 27 as that provides power to the ABS ECU, whie Maxi fuse 3 (the middle one) supplies the ABS pump.

You need a replacement HEVAC. The fans should run at low speed when the compressor clutch is in and only go to high speed when the pressure in the AC system gets too high. The power to the relay from the Black/Yellow wire on pin 7 should only be there when AC Grant is showing Yes. That is what controls the clutch to stop the system being over-pressurised. With it having a permanent 12V on it, that feature has been removed.

That link is useful. My heater pipe sensor died, or it would read correct when cold or hot, but while heating up it would go to -40C. I found they are NLA but from a post on rr.net, that said it needed a 22k thermistor, I did the same as described in that link. Only to find that it read very low. Added a 10k resistor in parallel and it reads something like sensible so the heater works as it should but not correct. That link shows a 10k thermistor being used so it looks like I'll be changing mine.

It was embarrassed about being seen with lesser cars at Lidl. If it isn't working mechanically, I'd suggest replacing the door latch asap.

Original engine but rebuilt with top hat liners at 287,500. Heads are still the originals. Gearbox was replaced at 454,185 as it lost all drive but that actually turned out to be the torque converter. Both diffs replaced at some point, all wheel bearings are original. Brake discs have been replaced about 4 times though......

Isn't it +11 hours time difference? If you posted at 8am on the 7th Dec, the site shows it as 20:56 on the 6th. So 23:06 on the 29th December here would be 10:06 on the 30th for you as you are ahead of us.