I think you may have less to do than you seem to think. OK, so the heater core let go with the pressure so you may have an iffy cap, or it may have just been a weak pattern part (do Britpart do bits for Audis?) but it isn't the end of the world. If you rebuilt motor had top hat liners and studs rather than stretch bolts, unless it got so hot it started pinking and was starting to lose power, I doubt you've done any damage to the engine. Simplest thing will be to bypass the heater and run it, hopefully, you will be pleasnatly surprised.

I went through the same thing with mine when I first got it. Bought with a head gasket blowing into the Vee and a burst rear air spring. Fitted a new pair of rear Dunlops, pulled the head off and noticed a nick in it right where the fire ring was, skimmed the head and whacked it back together. Took it for an MoT, gave it a bit of a run and within 80 miles of doing the head gasket, it started blowing into the Vee again. Left it for two weeks in disgust before deciding to have another go at it. Just as I was about to take the same head off, did a compression check and found it was the other head gasket that had gone. Found an identical nick in the other head too.so had to do the whole lot again. Then I started using it and found that just about everythng that can go wrong on a P38 did and for the first two years of ownership I kept the Classic that I'd bought it to replace. I had a trip to Holland planned that was to be the first European run in the P38 but ended up using the Classic as I couldn't trust the P38. I did a run to France and, while sitting in a queue for a motorway toll, it got very hot, far too hot. That really did kill it so I arrived with it running on 6 and drinking 5 litres of water every 50 odd miles. I ended up borrowing a Discovery and putting the P38 and a Harley Davidson on the trailer to get it home again. This time it had got so hot that two of the threads in the block pulled out and had to be helicoiled. But, I knew if I got it sorted, I'd never need to buy another car again. That was in 2011 and, once the head gaskets had been done yet again, as everything else had been sorted, I just used it. Until, after another 60k+ miles, it could only manage 45 mph uphill with an E Type Jag on a trailer behind. It was at that point I decided I had to make a choice. Try to sell an ex-police P38 with almost 300k on the clock and a very tired engine, add some extra money to it and end up with someone else's pile of trouble and start all over again, or use the money to get my engine rebuilt and keep the Devil I knew. I chose to do the latter and now, with 378k on the clock, I'm taking it to the south of France again next week and will continue doing so while I'm still capable of doing it. But I do know that the car will do it.

If you took it in to be repaired and they haven't been able to repair it, how the hell can they charge you a grand for doing sod all? Offer them a token amount for their labour charges and leave it at that. Cost of transporting it wouldn't be a lot. I'm hiring a trailer next week to deliver a motorcycle to the south of France and bring a Ford Mustang back. If I was going to be anywhere near to Portsmouth after I've dropped the Mustang off, I'd have offered to pick it up and at least get it to you, but I'm going to be pushed for time to get the trailer back to the hire place as it is. Trailer hire is £50 a day at the place I use, so all you'd need is someone with something capable of towing it.

They are additive once you get to use them and appreciate their little foibles. I've recently sold one of mine so I'm down to just two. But it at least gives me space for another..... I honestly can't see myself ever not owning a P38.

The reason you are getting so much support is because we do all our own work and if something crops up we don't understand, we know who to ask. So when we see someone apparently being taken for a ride (I say apparently, as we don't know exactly what the problem is and how much knowledge the garage doing the work has), we get slightly annoyed. You are in much the same situation as the woman near Paris who's car I look after. She spent over 3 grand on her car and it still wasn't right. I called in on my way by and spotted the remaining problems immediately. It was cheaper for her to pay my expenses to drive over there a couple of weeks later and do it than it would have been to take it back to the same garage as it had been to before..

To be perfectly honest, I'd be inclined to turn up with a trailer and take it away. At least then anyone that does go to sort it out isn't going to be doing it on their premises (and showing up how little they know).

Don't see why not. Prise the motor up out of the housing and unscrew it. That's the only reason I've kept the one I butchered the other evening, I know the controller was still working so while the motor may be shot, that bit is still worth keeping as a spare.

Not fun at all but you must have driven quite a way with no water pump for it to overheat. I had the bearing in the tensioner break up on mine a few years ago which threw the belt off rather than shredding it. Fortunately it was just after I'd filled up with fuel and was pulling off the filling station forecourt so could stop immediately.

If they aren't contacting you at least they aren't doing anything and making it worse. If they were, they'd be calling you and asking for more money.....

He came over on Saturday to demonstrate his handiwork on the valve block and show me the remains of the innards of the compressor. The Classic valve block and compressor are very slightly different to those on the P38 as it lives in a box under the car. So where we have the outlet silencer screwed into the valve block, he has another hole for an 8mm pipe with O rings and collet so the outlet is mounted remotely. Compressor draws it's air in at the top through another port opposite the outlet, in fact, a P38 one could be modified as the casting has the bit where the hole would be, it just isn't drilled and tapped.

We bench tested the valve block and driver pack and it's all working fine, seems to be holding pressure and opening each valve when triggered (as best we could tell with cobbled together Schrader valves, lengths of pipe and a electric tyre pump) but the same can't be said of the compressor. It appears to have been full of water so it completely destroyed inside so he's got another on it's way and a seal kit to rebuild it. Then we checked the electrical side and found that one of the 4 fuses was missing. Put that in, hung my spare compressor on the cables and that fired into life too. The plan now is that once he has the compressor ready, he's going to refit everything to the car. I'm going to make up the cable so we can run the free EASUnlock software and we can then control it from that. Assuming we get air coming out of the right pipes when we trigger the solenoids, we'll remove the coil springs and fit the air springs in their place and hope it all works.......

dave3d wrote:

I am also one of the bodgers. It is a design fault that an inspection hatch was not included (as it was for other L/R models) ... also a level sensor on the coolant expansion tank. I keep meaning to fabricate a proper surround with a bolted down cover. Mine is just taped up and I agree is a bodge at the moment. Dropping the tank is easy if you have it on a car lift.

As I said, if you do it yourself then it's your car and your choice but if you pay someone to do a job and they do something like that without telling you they've done it, that's just not on. I've dropped a tank a couple of times with the car on axle stands and lowered it down with a plank of wood on a trolley jack but I agree it isn't really that much fun.

Mazz, this place was intended as a sort of virtual pub anyway so it is much like a bunch of mates, some more local than others though. Like most cars (and things) there are common problems that crop up every so often so we will all have experienced it before. In 9 years and almost 180,000 miles I've experienced everything that can fail at some point but mine is petrol so I'll have different faults than you with a diesel.

Diesels aren't my forte even though I do maintain one for the the owner, a woman who lives just outside Paris. There's a few fairly common things that will cause your symptoms though. I'm a little concerned when you mention the fuel pump under the back seat as the fuel pump is in the fuel tank. To get to it you drop the tank although some bodgers think it easier to butcher the car and cut a hole in the floor. If you are doing it yourself that's one thing but if you are paying someone to do a job and they bodge it I'd be inclined to ask for my money back.

The battery drain problems are well known but unfortunately many mechanics don't even understand electrics (it doesn't go up and down or round and round and you can't see it) so expecting them to understand RF is like expecting them to understand brain surgery. I'm coming up to retirement after 47 years of working in RF and it is a black art to most people so much of the stuff you read online is rubbish, it's a case of filtering out the rubbish from the facts. For instance, broadband or Wi-fi won't affect a P38, neither will cordless phones, mobile phone masts and most of the other things that get the blame.

By now you should have realised that you should have taken Marty up on his offer, but I can appreciate you not wanting to trust someone you didn't know. Anyone on here will be able to at least tell you what the problem is, if not fix it, as there aren't many things we've not come across before. One question you haven't answered is what engine, petrol or diesel, as that makes the probable cause different.

One thing I discovered last night (or very early this morning to be precise) is that the brush guides on the Valeo motors are a hard plastic. If the brushes aren't making good contact they get hot and that allows the plastic guide to form a ridge so the brushes are no longer touching the commutator. I got the brushes out of a noisy P38 blower motor and found they were no better than the ones in the Merc motor I had in bits. Managed to clean up the guides, sand the original brushes down and it now works perfectly.

However, in James's case, I suspect it is the speed controller that has died rather than the motor.

Check by seeing which one isn't moving before pulling it out. Having just taken one apart to see if I could nick the brushes to go in a very similar Valeo blower in t'other half's Merc, you'll be very lucky getting it apart. It can be done but.......

You are right, I am confused, relay 6 controls the RH blower so if it behaves itself with that out, then it is that one at fault. Blame it on the heat, we aren't used to it being hot two days in a row in the UK.

Normally the outer electrode gets very thin and there's a gap you could drive a bus through. I think you gapped yours down when fitting them, maybe that has made the difference?

But you don't need a huge one and a four stage smart charger will do a much better job than a solar panel. I bought one of the Lidl copy of a Ctek for just over a tenner which I connected up to trickle charge a battery. Worked fine for a while but then decided it was going to run flat out all the time, toasted the battery and got so hot the plastic casing melted. So I'd be very wary of leaving one of them connected permanently.

It depends what you mean by un-amped as there already is an amp in the head unit. In your case, it is rated at 4x45W, so that is the 4 channels each with a 45W amp to drive the speakers. An amp will be rated at an output figure into a specific impedance load, so you will see something like 45W into 4 Ohms, but it could equally be rated at 60W or 80W into 2 Ohms (and some are to make them sound more powerful than they really are) so as soon as you add additional speakers you are reducing the impedance and hence the amount of power it can supply (until you are down to a virtual short circuit and it either burns out or shuts off to protect itself). So yes, there is a point where adding more speakers won't increase the amount of sound as there isn't enough power to share between them but you are very unlikely to reach that point unless you get really silly and install speakers everywhere. Hence the need for huge 10,000W+ amps to drive the large amount of speakers at a concert, you've got to have enough speakers to be able to shift enough air to make the sound audible (at eardrum splitting volume) over a large area.

I've no idea what the output of the DSP amp is, or the door amps for that matter, but I suspect they will also be rated at something like 50W per channel (or in the case of the door amps, per amp). That would allow a manufacturer to say that it has a 250W audio system if you add the sub amp in too. The L405 can be had with a 1500W audio system but you have to bear in mind that once up to around 60% of the rated output, you start to get distortion so to keep the sound quality good you need an amp that is only ticking over at normal volume levels.

Unfortunately, the ICE and Hi-Fi world is full of bullsh*t.

Running on LPG needs a better spark than on petrol and plugs seem to not last as long either. That's why I change mine every 10,000. For me that's £32 a year so no big deal. Yours won't take the BPR6ES plugs as it needs the others with the smaller hex, but as the actual electrodes are the same, I would think the same would apply.

A nice simple one. Plugs are so cheap, my local factors charge £1.99 each for BPR6ES so at £16 a time, there's no reason not to do them regularly.