Where from? I just Googled Lucas MF31 and came up with nobody wanting to sell me one.

and they say that the EAS is ridiculously complex, needs expensive diagnostics and it's much easier to spend £400 on a coil spring kit than try to fix it.... As you've now found out, with the cable and software you can do your own diagnostics and all you need to do is watch for anything that doesn't seem quite right. If you think about it, if they sold a brand new car that sank to it's knees overnight and took at least a couple of minutes to rise back up again, people would complain. It didn't when it was new so, as long as you are aware of what to look for, it won't now.

But with your sat nav, you'd never be able to get the punters to their destination......

On the topic of alternative fuels, Hydrogen could be used to run a standard ICE. You'd be able to run quite a bit of compression too as it has an Octane rating of 130 RON. With a stoichiometric ratio of 34:1 (34 parts air to 1 part Hydrogen by weight), then you shouldn't need a huge tank either.

Then there is salt water. Shell are selling the toy cars using a fuel cell that is activated by salt water, so why couldn't this be scaled up to a full sized car? Being an island we aren't short of salt water either. Or is this something that Shell hold the patent on and wouldn't allow it to be scaled up or it would reduce the amount of their petrol we'd have to buy?

Personally my view is that the renewable energy business is mostly bullshit. There's even a TV advert running for some company (it may even be Shell thinking about it) that supplies homes with renewable electricity. Now there's a good trick if you can do it. The electricity isn't renewable, you use it, you convert electrical energy into heat, light or movement. It isn't being renewed, it's being converted into another form of energy.

My prediction for the future (although I very much doubt I'll still be around to see it) is that the fission reactor will be perfected and there will be a shoe box sized one in every home and car providing an unlimited source of free energy. That is unless the likes of Shell, BP, Texaco, etc buy up the patents and research and put a stop to it......

What gets me about the London ULEZ is that if you are prepared to pay the fee, you can drive what you like. The Congestion Charge was supposed to discourange people from taking their cars into the zone but when you look, it isn't Aunt Mable driving in to have a look at St Pauls, it's trade vehicles. The ones that don't have a choice. The ULEZ charge is just an extension of that to raise even more money.

It has nothing to do with congestion or air quality, unlike the system introduced in France. To drive into Paris, Lyon and Grenoble you need to display a numbered sticker. They go from 0, for EVs, to 5 for Euro 4 diesels. A GEMS petrol P38 is Euro 3 so should be class 3, but, as I declared mine as running on LPG, I got issued with a class 1, the same as a Hybrid. When the pollution levels are high, the higher numbered classes are banned from the zones. I drove through Lyon and round Paris on 22nd July, when they had the heatwave we got a couple of days later. Due to the high temperatures and no wind, pollution levels were high so vehicles in classes 3, 4 and 5 were prohibilted. So had I been running on petrol, I would have had to take the outer ring roads instead of my usual route. However, class 3 isn't just Euro 3 petrol it is also Euro 6 diesel, so no matter how new it was, if you were driving a diesel, you were prohibited. Interestingly, a similar system will never work here as the sticker only costs €4.10 so they'd never make enough money from it. Despite Sadiq Khan offering grants to London taxi drivers to convert to LPG, there's no concessions for the rest of us.

Incidentally, the best day I ever had driving in Central London was the day they predicted would be the worst, the day the bus drivers were on strike!

Unlikely to be the IAT as that only does anything when the ambient temperature in the engine bay gets too high. It has no affect at all at normal temperatures and is only there to retard the ignition timing if the intake air tempoerature gets over 55 degrees C. Unplug it and stick a 1k Ohm resistor in it's place and see if that makes any difference but I doubt it will.

davew wrote:

However there is a BIg Push for EVs over here... and I can't even drive my P38 in London already due to ULEV....
https://www.greencarguide.co.uk/features/ultra-low-emission-vehicles-ulev-and-low-emission-cars/

Errm, yes you can, it just costs you £12.50 on top of the Congestion charge of £10.50 (if you have an autopay account set up, more if you don't). The UK, or at least the TFL nod towards reducing pollution is to charge anyone that wants to drive into the Zone if they don't have a car that meets their criteria. Nobody is banned, you just have to pay the tax.

As they seem to think I have a bit more knowledge of the subject than some, at work I've been put in charge of selecting the replacement vehicles for our current fleet of Renault Kangoo vans. Not an easy task. Most of the fleet are 2015 so are Euro 4 diesels meaning my employers have to pay the £23 every time I have to venture into the Zone. We've got a couple of later ones which are Euro 6 so there's no ULEZ charge on those, just the Congestion Charge. With other cities also talking about introducing ULEZ zones, what do we go for? Electric? With most of us doing between 100 and 200 miles in a day, range means they are a non-starter (and the Tesla Model X is just a tad expensive). Hybrid? Only two commercial variants currently available, the Mitsubishi Outlander (too expensive) and the Transit Custom (too big) so how about a Hybrid estate car? Most are Plug-in Hybrids meaning the driver will have to plug it in at home overnight so how do we reimburse the employees for paying to fuel their company vehicles? Although in talking to the guy at our lease company, some clients have gone for the Outlader to get the £8,000 Government grant and at the end of the lease period they had come back with the charging cable still in it's polythene bag never having been used, they'd been driven solely on petrol for the entire lease period. So then it's down to self charging hybrids and how many of them are there? The answer is not many (and they are also bloody expensive). So the bottom line is it's looking more and more likely that the next vehicles will be petrol.......

What plugs are you using and how old are the leads? I reckon on NGK BPR6ES and change every 10,000 miles and generic 8mm HT leads (Island specials) and change every couple of years. On the old school Crypton tuner that had a proper CRT scope, that would show a higher voltage on cylinders that weren't running as efficiently as others. Might be worth a try if your scope can handle the voltage.

Well, it's showing that those 4 pots are running differently to the others and they do share coil packs so I would think it has some sort of bearing on things.

From watching what it does when driving and the affect a TPS that hasn't been calibrated has, I think the IACV adjusts to maintain the idle speed but also acts to raise the revs at very small throttle openings. So it will sit around the 15-30 steps figure at idle but if you give a very small amount of throttle, rather than relying on a tiny movement of the butterfly, the operation of the TPS causes the IACV to open up to raise the revs and give a clean transition from idle to above idle but not by much (a bit like the progression jets in a carb). I had an iffy TPS which meant I could not hold the revs at around 1,000rpm, it would idle fine and it would run at 1,300 rpm but no way could I hold the revs anywhere in between. The TPS wasn't reacting to the small throttle movement so the IACV wasn't opening at small throttle openings and there wasn't enough additional air getting past the butterfly to raise the revs until it opened a bit more. Once you are running normally, it closes back down to the idle opening ready for when you come off the throttle.

However, that isn't going to give incomplete combustion and a high HC figure but a weak spark would.

Posted my last while you were posting pictures of the plugs. 2 and 3 share a coil as do 4 and 7 so I suspect a replacement set of coils might be a good idea.

When you say the cats are rattly, do you mean you can hear something rattling inside or does it just sound like a rattle? Gutted cats without adding a tube inside do make a rattly sort of noise as the empty boxes act like some sort of reasonator box.

That's a very good question. If it was bought already converted to LPG it is quite possible the cats have been gutted and will still sail through the LPG emissions test but fail if tested on petrol.

There was someone in the discussion on the other side (who I think is now also on here) that went for the Klebers and rated them very highly. I also considered them but went with the Vredestein Duatrac 5 in the end which are superb if you want an all season road tyre.

You've got them the wrong way round, CO limit on petrol is 0.2% while it is HC that is 200ppm. High HC is showing unburnt hydrocarbons in the exhaust so you have incomplete combustion caused by either a weak spark on one or more cylinders or too much fuel going in on one or more. Which two plugs had slight sooting on them? Were they two that share one coil which would suggest one coil pack is weak. It would also explain the slightly uneven idle. Otherwise you could be looking at leaking injectors that don't shut off fully so are dribbling extra fuel in. As a percentage of how much is supposed to go in, it would be far greater at idle when the injectors are only open for a short duration while when the revs are higher they will normally be open for longer allowing more fuel in and less time for additional fuel to be dribbling in. You ,might have an injector or two that needs a clean. I used this method https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUUgR94drxg to clean injectors but used a 12V supply and a 3.3 Ohm resistor in series with it. If you don't have a spare Schrader valve, you can indulge in a bit of bodgery as in this method https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rk0tKtiVic

On a GEMS, the Nanocom (under Inputs, Air and Idle) shows idle air valve as a number between 0 and 200 (showing the number of steps), correct being between 15 and 30 at idle when hot. However, if you have a weak coil it will be opening more than it should to keep the idle revs correct. If you find that you can't adjust it down to zero, then it is trying to compensate for something else. .

It's a hell of a lot easier to just put the tyre sizes into the calculator I linked to. If you use the tyre comparison tab, you can enter two tyre sizes and it calculates Diameter, Width, Sidewall height, Circumference and Revs per Mile. It also shows pictures of the two tyres side by side as well as speedo error.

There was a discussion on the other side a few months ago and someone found that anything larger than original won't fit. See https://tiresize.com/calculator/, diameter of the 255/65x16 is 29.1" while the 70 series is 30.1".

dave3d wrote:

BFG nearest seem to be 255/70 R16

They definitely won't fit in the spare wheel well. But the AT3 in OE size doesn't look that expensive to me, see https://www.oponeo.co.uk/tyre-details/general-grabber-at3-255-65-r16-109-h-bsw#261367880. Can't fault Oponeo either with delivery far quicker than mytyres.co.uk and blackcircles and often a lot cheaper too..

We all know that the ultimate battery for the p38 is the ginormous Hankook MF31-1000 (the one that just fits in the hole) but the last time anyone checked, they were being shown as no longer available. Well thankfully, now the weather is about to get colder and batteries are going to start to show their age, they are back. https://www.batterymegastore.co.uk/hankook-mf31-1000.html

Harv is spot on, it shouldn't drop at all. My Ascot hasn't been run in at least 4 weeks now and is still sitting at high where I left it. If you pull the timer relay from under the passenger seat when you are going to be leaving it for a couple of days and it doesn't drop, it is self levelling. If it does, you've got a leak.

If you listen to some people (RPi for instance) they all drop liners, some say Thor is better, others say GEMS is better, some say that the 4.6 is more prone than the 4.0 litre. In reality, the GEMS and Thor use the same block, only the ancilliary bits are different, more 4.6's have suffered slipped liners than 4.0 litre ones but only because they sold more 4.6 versions than 4.0 litre ones. If it is going to slip a liner, it's almost certainly because you've overheated it and whether it is a GEMS, a Thor, a 4.0 litre or a 4.6 is going to make sod all difference.