DAB+ gives extra features like scrolling information and additional frequency coverage which the Kenwood can do anyway. I originally bought a Pioneer as I wanted something with green illumination to match the HEVAC and everything else and it had programmable colours but it was very bright and bloody annoying out the corner of your eye at night. The DAB reception wasn't brilliant and it looked a bit too flashy in the dash. When the Kenwood came out, it seemed a lot better, not too out of place and again has programmable display colours. I think the Pure, which is going to be very good, only has white illumination. I suppose it all depends on how original you want it to look.

This is mine with a couple of blanks either side of it to fill in the gaps

It's got both, line out and FM rebroadcast. The FM rebroadcast automatically changes channel if it detects another signal on the same frequency but it defaults to 87.6 which is clear most of the time. The aerial is only about a foot long and very whippy so no problem with car park barriers either. I did a click and collect when I got mine and got £8 discount too. Not sure if that was a limited offer or not.

Because the Grom plugs in in place of the CD multichanger. The Pure unit outputs either to a line in socket or uses it's own built in FM transmitter so you just tune your existing FM radio into it. I've got a Kenwood KCD-BT73DAB fitted in my car as there is no way I could keep it original (original was a hole in the dash and base level speakers). I've uprated to the mid line speaker setup but still a sub short of a full set. The Kenwood gives me DAB, FM, CD (MP3 compatible), USB in (x2, one on the front panel and another on a flying lead from the rear), line in, Bluetooth with external mic and full control of the phone from the radio as well as playing music over Bluetooth.

My company van had the worlds crappiest radio, it was so deaf that AM didn't exist and FM only if you can actually see the transmitter, so I bought one of these to use in it http://www.halfords.com/technology/car-audio/dab-car-stereos/sonichi-s100-digital-radio-adaptor. No Bluetooth but it gives me DAB and a line in socket should I need it. If you do go for DAB, don't bother trying to use a stick on the windscreen aerial. They never work that well at the best of times but are even worse with the heated screen elements. When I first fitted mine in the P38, I tried one on the nearside rear window and it wasn't bad but still left me with big holes in the coverage so I fitted one of these http://www.halfords.com/technology/car-audio/dab-car-stereos/sonichi-magnetic-roof-mount-dab-antenna at the back of the roof and ran the cable above the headlining. Works perfectly so got the same for the works van. Going to have to buy another though. As I'm off work for a few weeks I took it out of the van and bunged it in the other half's car and I suspect I'm not going to get it back......

Ahh yes, the French Bank Holiday in the middle of the week, so everybody gets a day off and can't be bothered to go into work for the rest of the week.

Leave the lights and recalibrate your EAS?

Martyuk wrote:

Richard, I wonder if your grille has been swapped at some point... maybe if the plod had lights cut into there, they replaced it when they sold it? As far as I know all of the grilles were colour matched at the bottom to vehicle paintwork, the same as under the headlamps...

Errm, yup, grille has most definitely been replaced.......

Marty, get a dishwasher with a big cutlery tray. Leanne will be well chuffed and you'll get loads of bits of door latches in there (but don't try putting the motors in, I suspect they wouldn't take kindly to it).

I also discovered something to clean the black strips along the tops of the doors. The ones that go grey and grotty. Before doing anything I took the car to my local Polish car wash as it hadn't been cleaned since Summer Camp and still had Marty's mud on it. The pressure washer started to lift the reflective strips on the A pillars, a relic from it's previous life. I decided they were beginning to look a little tatty so could come off. But that left the glue so, having found that brake cleaner wouldn't shift it, had a ferret around in the garage and found a bottle of meths (there are times when we all need a drink after all). That took the glue off but also cleaned up the black so I had a go at the strips on the top of the doors. It works, a bit of meths on a cloth and they are black again. In the past I've tried WD40, looks good for a day or so, back to black lasts slightly longer but this looks like it should last.

Yes, I considered doing the bumper too but couldn't be arsed to mask off the rest of the car and take the number plate off. Not sure if there's enough left in the aerosol can to do the whole bumper though and it would look pretty stupid with only half of it done. If I do it though, I'll do the bumper and the spoiler extension at the bottom but leave the bit in the middle. Also noticed that Nick (Sloth) has the bottom of the grille in body colour which looks good to me. Might be worth getting the painter to paint the bottom strip when he does the rest of the car.

Checked the cables and plug. Cables are fine but the plug wasn't. Tweaked the contacts and now bank 1 is staying closed loop and switching nicely. The same can't be said for bank 2 though as that is now going OPEN (but not Open Fault?). Looks like I'm going to be grovelling under it again.

In anticipation of 5,000 miles in the next 3 weeks and the respray (which isn't going to happen until after the 5,000 miles now), I've been doing the odd little job on the car this weekend. As well as the obvious service things, I've been doing something I normally never do, cosmetics. I've painted the front grille so it's no longer a milky grey from the UV exposure. In fact, I've painted it twice as the first time I bought dark grey bumper paint but it looked more like a shitty brown to me so I've done it black. Did the strips under the headlights too and I must admit it looks damn good.

As those that were at the summer camp will have noticed, one of my front foglights was doing a passable impersonation of a goldfish bowl. So I took it out. Now one piece of advice. If you have a front foglight full of water, do not open the back of it while laying under the car. It makes your Tee shirt very wet and your head hurts from hitting it on the front anti roll bar as you try to leap out of the way. Found out why it was filling with water as it had a big crack on the top so any water thrown up from the front wheel would lay on top of it and drip into the lamp. Anyway, after emptying the water out, I had a bit of a problem. There were multiple tide marks showing the different levels the water had got to at various times on the inside of the lens. It appears that they install the bulb holder and reflector before fitting the glass and that is bonded in place so didn't look like it was going to come off. Or not in one piece anyway.

Dina had gone shopping and a quick check in the kitchen revealed that the dishwasher was half full. So the foglight went in there positioned so the jets of water and cleaning stuff would go into the opening on the back. Switched it on and went back outside to continue my tinkering. Dina came home from shopping and thanked me for putting the dishwasher on even though it wasn't full.

After about an hour a voice from the from door was heard to say, "Richard, what was this doing in the dish washer?" The dishwasher had beeped to say it had finished so she'd opened it to empty it...... I told her that Orangebean, Mark, the guy in the dodgy shorts with no seats in his car at the Summer Camp, had suggested a dishwasher was ideal for washing engine parts and I figured it should be pretty good for foglights too. It was, it did a damn good job too. Sealed the crack with a dollop of silicon and the jobs a good un as they say.

Bugger, I can edit a post but not the typo in the title, Doh!

My drains have only clogged up once (or only once since I've owned it) but the LR rubber mats over the carpets have a ridge around the outside. All you get then is a puddle on the mat. Quite a big puddle it was at the time too.....

The hoses may be 19mm ID but by the time they get down to the O rings and heater matrix, they are down to 15mm or thereabouts anyway so it doesn't make any difference to the flow (or doesn't seem to on mine). Mine was in parallel when I first got it and in the middle of winter while idling waiting to get into a car park (Christmas shopping), the heater went very lukewarm as most of the coolant was going through the reducer. On a Classic I owned previously, that was also in parallel and, being a single point so would run on gas from stone cold, the reducer would ice up within 400m of setting off as it was all going through the heater. Series plumbing on both cured both problems.

I've got the original 19mm hose going to a 19-15mm pipe connector to feed the reducer and then the same in the return hose to go to the heater matrix.

Not quite as easy as it could be as your reducer has both coolant connections on the same side rather, than as most, one on each side. If I was doing it, I'd run a straight hose from the inlet manifold (no 21 below) to the reducer and then the outlet from the reducer to the heater matrix.

As for the lambda sensors, I'd leave them connected if you have the software and cable to look at what the system is doing. If you don't, there's no point as the only reason for connecting them is so they display on the screen. Without them connected you need an OBD reader (or a Nanocom of course) to see what they are doing when running on gas.

You've got A/C at home? Flash bugger.......

Oi, where did my post go? Brilliant job Tony, much better than a lot of professional installs I've seen. One thing that I maybe should have mentioned before is the coolant plumbing. On something like a P38 where the heater is full flow, it's better to plumb the reducer in series rather than parallel. On mine I've gone from the heater feed to the reducer first and then on to the heater. Only one pipe to cut into so less chance of leaks and there's full flow through both. With them in parallel the coolant will take the path of least resistance so you can get a reducer that is slow to heat up or a heater that never gets above lukewarm.

I'm fairly certain the most testing they do with used parts is clean them. I've used Emmots a few times and only had one bad experience. I thought my starter motor was dying, or the solenoid at the very least, as every so often all I would get was a clunk from the solenoid but no rotation of the motor. Emmots had one listed on eBay so I bought it. When it arrived it was a Marelli not a Bosch as I had but the fittings were the same so I just assumed LR had fitted either. Before fitting it, I tested it and found it didn't work. Solenoid didn't go clunk but the motor would spin with volts applied to it. As it was different to the one I had, I couldn't strip them and make one good one out of two so got on to Emmots and explained the problem. They immediately sent me a replacement, a Bosch this time, and told me they didn't want the Marelli back as if it was faulty it was no good to them. So they couldn't have tested it before sending it out.

Turned out there was nothing wrong with the starter though. The connection at the battery terminal had worked itself loose so I had a very poor connection between the battery and the starter and alternator. I found that out when the battery went flat while driving......

Not that impressed with Adrian Flux these days. I used them many years ago when they were just a small broker working out of a tiny office in the backstreets of Kings Lynn specialising in oddball stuff rather than a general broker working from a huge converted mansion that they have now. They used to be very good but not these days it appears. My daughter used them when she had a Mk1 MR2. 4 years ago she got her renewal and the premium had almost doubled so she phoned them. She pointed out that she had now reached the age of 25 so should no longer be loaded for being a young driver and had another years no claims so had expected it to go down. She was told that as the weather had been very bad that winter, lots of people had made claims so premiums had to go up to cover them. She asked if she'd made a claim and they confirmed she hadn't so she wanted to know why she was having to pay extra to cover the dickheads that couldn't drive in a bit of snow and ice. She went elsewhere.

More recently, last week in fact, I realised that if the paintsprayer gets his finger out and calls me to tell me when he can fit my P38 in for it's long overdue new coat, I'd find myself with no wheels. So, I dragged one of my other toys out from under it's cover. It's a 1991 Maserati Biturbo Spider that has been sitting under cover for the last 4 years but has been fired up every so often to make sure it still worked. Put a new battery on it and she fired up first time. Pulled all 4 brake calipers off and made sure they were moving freely and took it for an MoT. It passed with only a couple of slightly rusty rear brake pipes on advice. Figured insurance would be a good idea (my trade policy covers performance cars for trade purposes only) so did an online quote with Footman James for a 3,000 mile Classic Car policy with Dina as a named driver. £166 a year from them. Decided to give Adrian Flux a go but their website says that 75% of customers get a better deal by phoning rather than online so I phoned them. Gave them all the same details and they came back at £631!! The explanation was that although Dina has 24 years of accident, claim and conviction free driving and now has a UK driving licence too, she has only lived in the UK for 3 years. Without her as a named driver, just me on the policy, they still came out at £191. So I've got it covered for both of us, with exactly the same details and level of cover, with Footman James.

Quite right. You've paid for a pair of heads that are advertised as ready to fit which that one clearly isn't. If you were a garage there's a big difference in labour involved in bolting a ready to go head on and either drilling out and tapping or, more likely, as modern 'mechanics' are no more than parts fitters, sending it out to somewhere else to do the job (and charging it all to the customer).

That's the very same set I bought to put mine back together. You'll end up with a bag of assorted copper washers and O rings as, other than the head gaskets, it's the same set for older motors. So don't worry about having bits left over......

I don't know of any engine with an alloy head and a composite gasket that needs the head torquing down to any more than 65-70 ft/lbs, that's the norm for just about everything. That's what I did mine to when I put the rebuilt heads back on the rebuilt block and that was 30,000 miles ago. Just make sure you use Elring gaskets and you won't have a problem.