The original 300,000 mile rear diff had quite a bit of slop in it but was quiet so I swapped it with the one from the 130,000 mile SE. That stopped the clunk whenever I went from forward to reverse and I expected it to last for at least another 150,000. That is why I was convinced the noise was coming from the front. It's easy enough to tell if one has been changed before because the bead of silicon around the outside is a nice uniform size where it was put on by machine when the diff was assembled compared with it being all irregular where it has been put on by a man with a tube of RTV. So I'm 99% sure the one I took off the SE and fitted had never been changed beforel. Despite filling it with Millers synthetic gear oil, I suspect something isn't right in there.

The whine started off as a standard sounding diff whine but as the speed got up it turned into a howl and peaked at 70mph. I thought it was only audible inside the car until I went through a tunnel with the window open and realised that it sounded like a jet engine from outside! Avenger 4x4 supplied me with a warranted replacement for the grand sum of £60 and as I've got a slack day for work (and it isn't raining), I'll be out there changing it later today.

Wouldn't it be easier to swap the plates on a Monday?

A couple of months ago my car developed what sounded like a whining diff. As I had replaced the rear not that many months previously it couldn't be that so I assumed it was from the front. There was a bit of up and down slop on the input and oil that did resemble metalflake paint so I figured that had to be it. Marty fitted new top and bottom ball joints to a spare front axle he had, I went to his workshop and we fitted that. On the way home it did seem to be much better and the front end felt much more precise so the ball joints had done the job. Over the last few weeks though, the whine still seemed to be there. I wasn't sure if it was me being hyper sensitive to it and do remember my missus once saying that it sounded like a bus and had almost come to the conclusion that it had always been there. The noise always seemed to be coming from the centre of the car. I'd changed the transfer case anyway and that hadn't made any difference so I was starting to suspect something in the gearbox. But dropping it into neutral didn't cause the noise to change and running it through the gears with the transfer box in neutral and it wasn't there.

Yesterday I decided to convince myself once and for all so crawled underneath and dropped the rear propshaft off. Took it for a run down the road and realised that it is most definitely the rear diff. What a difference with no drive through it, near silent just as I remember it! No noticale slop in it at all but something definitely isn't right inside. However, I did come very close to a major disaster. I got home, went to refit the propshaft and found the parking brake drum had almost fallen off. The countersunk screw that holds it in was on the last turn of it's thread and another half mile or so and the drum would have fallen off and shot out from under the car doing who knows what damage on it's way out to freedom. So if you are going to try running with no rear propshaft, make sure you put at least one of the nuts onto a stud to hold it in place.

A visit to Avenger 4x4 to pick up a replacement rear diff would seem to be my first call tomorrow. Unlike the front, the rear is a piece of piss to change......

I have to drive a tin can Renault Kangoo van for work, although tin can is perhaps the wrong description as it seems to have a fair amount of plastic in it too, but getting out of that after another 200 mile round trip in a day and getting into the P38 makes it all seem worth while. OK, so mine has the basic plod spec cloth interior and is devoid of things like cruise control but she fires up first time every time, rises up if she's been left more than 5 days (as it takes that long before it even drops a millimetre) and just does what she should. I've currently got a 2014 Bentley Continental GT Speed to play with but after a 50 mile round trip in the luxurious leather interior and testing the quoted 0-100 mph in 9 seconds a couple of times, it started to feel quite ordinary in comparison. There is just something about a P38 that cannot be described.

Yes, RAVE doesn't even mention it. I assume that a main dealer, who RAVE is aimed at after all, would just fit a new steering box. If you have an assistant to rock the steering wheel from side to side to show any play, then you will be able to see if it is in the box or the joints on the lower column.

There isn't anywhere brake fluid can go other than fall out onto the floor. As far as I know it can't leak inside the modulator and, unlike a conventional servo system, you don't have a vacuum hose to the inlet for it to be sucked in there. There's a couple of short metal pipes on either side at the rear, one on each side, that are tucked away and do rust. Mine has also had the main pipe from front to rear replaced with copper/nickel at some point so that could be leaking somewhere along it's length.

The level is going to drop slightly as the pads wear and the caliper pistons move out but that would only move the level from max to min even going from a complete set of brand new pads to almost worn out. It shouldn't need to be constantly topped up.

No doubt Bolt will be able to explain exactly why but I suspect the battery suffers in the heat (just like we do). Actually, it makes sense. When it's really hot we feel like we have no energy so why should the battery be any different?

Yes, done mine as it had a bit of play at the straight ahead point. You need to be very gentle with it, I put a blob of white paint on the edge of the adjuster so I could see how much I'd moved it by. 1/8th of a turn at a time and if you tighten it too much, it gives an 'interesting' feel to the steering. When tightening the locknut, use a ring spanner so you can hold the adjuster in one place.

I actually asked one of the girls in the hotel I stayed at (after I greeted her with a Bonjour and she then replied in something resembling French that I couldn't understand) and she explained that French had arrived in Canada with settlers from France. Over the last 400 or so years the language has evolved just the same as French spoken in France has evolved. 400 years ago it was the same language but they've just evolved in different ways. Made sense to me.

Bolt wrote:

Now, there is a very angry ex pat Brit in Wa state who does seem a wee bit peeved at all of the Z Plate registration folks out there........

Who would that be? You're not going to let on that RRTH is an ex-pat surely? He must have had the full frontal lobotomy at US immigration......

We get it to a certain degree over here with Londoners. It may be because it can take them 2 hours to drive from one side of London to the other or anywhere you can't get to on the London Underground is a foreign country but they think the world stops outside of London. For 3 years I drove into London every day, 84 miles each way, all motorway, and it I could do it in under an hour and a half. Yet Londoners would look at a map, see how far away somewhere was and wouldn't even consider travelling that sort of distance. Many years ago I used to run a car owners club and we had a meeting every couple of months somewhere in the country. As we couldn't find anywhere suitable in London we arranged one in Windsor. Now it's only 20 or so miles outside of London yet no London based members turned up. A week later I got a phone call from a London member who asked when the next London meeting would be and I told him he'd just missed it. Oh no, that was in Windsor, when's the next one in London? He couldn't comprehend that for me to get there I'd driven to London, gone around the outside and then out to Windsor. Surely, you'd need a couple of overnight stops for a journey like that?

Anyway Tom, we'll accept you as an honorary Brit. You're travelling around the British colonies in a British built boat after all.......

I have nothing against Canadians at all, I spent an extremely enjoyable week in Montreal a couple of years ago. Amazing place and people although I must admit it did seem a little strange at first. It looked like I was in the US but everyone spoke French. Now I go to France about 8 times a year and have a reasonable grasp of the language but listening to someone speaking what is obviously French but being unable to understand a word of it seemed very odd. The thing that amused me most was that in France a stop sign says STOP, in Montreal a stop sign says ARRET.

Driving there was interesting too. I've never come across such a polite bunch of drivers anywhere in the world. The way everyone stops at a crossroads and takes it in turns to move, anywhere else in the world they'd all try to go at once and end up in a big, mangled heap in the middle.

I also heard that the biggest insult you can give to a Canadian is to call them American........

He's moved from Dubai so I suspect it was to keep all the cool air from the AC inside rather than keep filing the car with stupidly hot air from outside. Most of us need to do it the opposite way, to keep the hot air inside.

Very true. Problem I have at the moment is that it switches off at 8:30 because I would normally go to work at around 9:00 but I'm working from home today.....

Doesn't work when I've got two cars outside that have things I want to do on them, it's down to about 3 degrees and the front of my house faces North so doesn't even get any sun on it. Doing fiddly things in woolly gloves is a bit difficult.

Good job you're not in England then, it's bloody freezing over here at the moment.....

Although Gordon would probably call me a southern softie because it's probably a lot colder where he is.

At the risk of sounding like someone else, the procedure is all in RAVE. If you haven't downloaded it yet, do it now!

But yes, it is a fill to the hole. It's done with the engine and gearbox cold. Start engine, go through all gears slowly a couple of times, leave in neutral, then leap underneath and fill to the level hole. The reason why there's no dipstick on the later cars is the gap where it comes up on an earlier GEMS isn't there any more as it's filled with that big bunch of ally bananas on top of your engine.

gordonjcp wrote:

It's been pointed out that the member list looks pretty damn weird,

Too right it does, I'm not a member any more. Have I been banned from another Range Rover forum already?

But you're our resident diesel expert, you're supposed to answer questions not ask them! Have you tried starting it without the drive belt on to rule out alternator, AC compressor, idler pullys, etc?

I think that goes for all of us, it's just that we've probably all dealt with just about everything that can go wrong with a P38 at some time or another......

Yes but you have to host them on photobucket or similar and then when you click the image button it asks for the URL for then and drags them off the net.

Hmm, just had a thought. Should a question about EAS be in the electrickery section? It runs on 'lectric but it leaks so maybe it should be in the oily bits section......

I'm sure there's an admin on another forum who would make the decision and move it.