Dunno about MacGyver but Dina did comment that if she had been with anyone else she would have been panicking about getting back on time to go to work on Monday but wasn't in the slightest bit concerned.

But, the name says it all, I'm surprised they dare put their name on it. Two years old and this is the state of it.

I've replaced it with a Euro Car Parts special, a Klarius, which at £36 using one of their discount codes seemed like a good deal. Especially as my local branch had one in stock. Seems to be a lot better made than the Britpart and lined up with the other pipes perfectly.

Not really electrikery or even oily so I thought I'd post it in here even thought it isn't an introduction. But I thought you could all do with a laugh at my expense.

As I’ve mentioned my car has 5,000 miles or thereabouts to do in the next 3 weeks, but it hasn’t started too well. Checked all my documents on Tuesday evening to realise the MoT runs out on the 23rd. Managed to book it in for Wednesday afternoon but it failed. When Marty and I changed the front axle back around Christmas time, the one we fitted had split boots on both ends of the link rod that joins the two wheels together. I’d meant to change them but never got round to it, figured I’d leave it until they were worn and starting to slop. Not too much of a problem as I would be back from my first 2,000 mile round trip on the 22nd, so ordered the complete set so it would be at home waiting for me to bung it on as soon as I was home and could drop it in for retest.

Set off on Thursday morning towing a car transporter trailer loaded with a 1974, Series 3, V12 E Type Jag which needed to be delivered to my mates workshop in Antibes in the South of France and 120 kilos of cast iron fireplace that needed taking down too. When I’d called to book the hire trailer I’d said I needed the biggest they’d got and big means heavy. I was towing a good 3 tonnes. All was going well until somewhere near riddlemethis’s place at about 3am on Friday, the AC stopped working and it was getting a bit warm. Checked it with the Naonocom and it said it was working but I’d only got just over 9V arriving at the compressor clutch, not enough to pull it in. I could dab a wire from the battery onto it and the clutch would engage and stay in on the 9V but as soon as it released, it wouldn’t pull in again. Figured that at the next LPG and coffee stop, I’d upgrade it to the later system where the HEVAC pulls in a relay which would switch power directly from the battery. With a few lengths of wire, my crimp tool and a spare relay, that was done in about 10 minutes fitted and tried. Clutch clicked in and then immediately dropped out again. Nanocom showed that the HEVAC was getting offended. It had detected that the clutch wasn’t drawing as much current as it should so had logged a fault and stopped trying to engage it. Bugger, some things are just too clever for their own good. Looks like it was going to be a warm journey for the rest of the way so we carried on with the windows open..

Near Aix the car seemed to fill with orange dust. Couldn’t work out what it was to start with until I looked in the mirror. I’ve got the new material for the headlining but that is scheduled for next week when I’m back home. The turbulence of driving with the windows open had released the headlining at the back and the rotted remains of the foam was coming out and flying around inside the car. Stuck it back up when we next stopped but by then everything inside the car, including us, had turned orange.

Arrived at the workshop Friday morning and we unloaded the trailer. Loaded the return load, a 1967 Triumph Bonneville motorcycle, and set off to my mate’s house. As I was slowing for the last toll point (St Isidore), about 10 miles from his house, it went Beep, Alternator Fault comes up on the dash with a red picture of a battery. Pulled up and opened the bonnet. All looked fine, alternator looked like an alternator, hadn’t burst into flames or melted and the serpentine belt was attached and turning nicely. Figured I should be able to make it to his house with the battery not being charged. The last part of the run to his house is 3km up a mountain track which rises almost 500m. It’s very narrow and bumpy with two hairpin bends and I’ve got to get up it in a car that may run out of electric at any time so the engine will stop while towing a trailer. Daren’t let the revs drop so went up there at about twice the speed I would do normally with the trailer dragging in the undergrowth on either side. Part way up the engine note seemed to change but I ignored that as it was still running and the dash hadn’t lit up with any more warnings. Got to the top, parked and opened the bonnet. Put my meter on the battery and it was showing 11.8V with the engine running. Definitely an alternator fault.

Found a pair of gloves so I didn’t have to wait for it to cool down. It was pretty warm having done just short of 1,000 miles in an ambient temperature of 31 degrees (almost as warm as the occupants of the car with no AC in 31 degrees!) but it was soon off. I had the vain hope that it was something simple like a stuck brush that could be sorted with a quick poke. No such luck. It seems that 316,600 miles is the finite life of a Marelli P38 alternator. The brushes were pretty worn but not as worn as the slip rings. That’s the black plastic under the ring that the brush is bearing against, not just a bit of blackened brass……

Just down the road from my mates place, well about 450m in the vertical plane and probably no more than 1km in the horizontal, but a 4 km drive away, is a place called Cassauto 06. A car breakers although I’ve driven past it no end of times and assumed it was no longer in business as where you used to see a pile of dead Renaults, now you could see nothing more than the sign. He assured me they were still there and phoned them. Alternator for a V8 petrol P38 Range Rover, no problem mate, got loads of them, he was told. I found that slightly hard to believe but clutching one very dead, and still very warm, alternator, we went down there. I was convinced we would get there to find a pile of assorted alternators, none of which would fit a P38. Seems that everything is hidden out of sight these days and there were at least 3 P38s and a Discovery in there amongst other stuff that used to be common but isn’t these days. When was the last time you saw a Renault 16 or a Peugeot 304 cabriolet? There’s at least one of each in this place, pretty much rust free too! The guy goes off and comes back with a very familiar looking alternator. Put it next to mine to make sure it was the same then went out the back. Came back a few minutes later with a pristine looking, fully tested, guaranteed for 30 days, 100A alternator with a Land Rover label showing it to be an AMR3021 (standard fit on an earlier P38 but then superseded to a different number). Cost me 150 Euros but probably a lot cheaper than if I’d used my ADAC European breakdown membership who would have got one for me but it would have been from a main dealer at main dealer price and probably not until Monday at the earliest.

Fitted it and was quite surprised to find that 11.8V was still enough to start the engine without any of the usual gearbox fault, etc that usually pop up if a battery is a bit iffy. Meter on the battery showed it was charging nicely but the engine note still sounded odd. A quick look underneath showed why.

Bouncing over the bumpy track at a stupid speed had caused the outlet pipe on the centre silencer box break off. It looked well rotted anyway and I’m surprised the MoT tested hadn’t at least commented on it. Interestingly, it’s only a couple of years old. The centre box started to leak at the seam so I ordered a new one which arrived with a Britpart sticker on it, but it was cheap. The one I took off had Land Rover on it and I’m fairly sure it, along with the downpipes and back end, are the original ones. The silencer itself is fine, it’s the rear pipe that had let go. Sounded quite throaty and figured that as long as the front pipe into the silencer wasn’t in the same state, it would get me home. Concerned that the front pipe would be taking the weight of the whole silencer, I used a bit of steel garden plant wire to at least take a bit of the weight and hoped it would last.

It did last and got me home although I must admit that after about 700 miles I remembered a post from someone on the other forum who had a blowing exhaust burn through an EAS pipe. With the exhaust gases coming out in front of the rear axle I then started imagining the axle oil solidifying from the heat and the diff seizing, the brake fluid boiling in the pipe running over the axle (even though there isn’t one) leaving me with no brakes or the rear air spring catching fire and dropping me onto the bumpstops. But none of the above happened and we got home.

We even had air con. I noticed that the feed from the HEVAC goes to the connector in the RH kick panel. I’d checked the one in the LH side but don’t think I’ve ever been inside the other one. It looked OK but I snipped the wires into the plug and bypassed it anyway. AC started to work but it didn’t last, so on a fuel stop I checked and found 11.2V at the compressor so ran a wire from the compressor to inside the car. As there were enough volts to hold it I once engaged, all that was needed was enough volts to pull it in in the first place. Every time it started to get a bit warm in the car, Dina would poke the bit of wire into the fag lighter socket, the clutch would engage and we’d get cold air. As soon as it started to get warm, she’d just give it full battery volts and it would all go cold again. No problem.

Just got to get it all sorted out before the weekend when we set of on a 3,000 mile round trip……

Many years ago I ran big Citroen DS's (I've never been into simple cars) and would always use Champion plugs. After an ID 19 Safari and a couple of DS 21's, I got my first fuel injected one, as DS 23EFi. After running around town I would get out on a bit of open road, give it some throttle and it would cough and splutter down the road for the first quarter mile or so and then clear itself until next time it was run at low speed. I mentioned it to the service manager in my local Citroen dealer (who I was on first name terms with) and was immediately asked what plugs I was using as if I was using the same Champions as in the carb versions, that would be the problem. Stick to NGK or, if you can't get them, Bosch. A set of NGKs went in and no more misfiring. Around the same time I was racing motocross and it was a standing joke that if you wanted to enter the four stroke championship but only had a two stroke bike, fit a Champion plug and it would only fire 50% of the time it was supposed to at best.

Ever since then my preference for plugs has been NGK, Bosch, Denso, Supermarket own brand, cheap Chinese knock offs and finally, if you can't get any of those, Champions......

On a GEMS you need NGK BPR6ES or if you want Iridium BPR6EiX, but different plugs are listed for the Thor engine for some reason NGK PFR6N-11 (according to www.sparkplugs.co.uk) or BKR6EiX-11 for Iridium. I found that on LPG a set of the standard plugs are well worn after 12-15,000 miles so I change them every 10,000 but Iridium will last about 4 times as long. Whether it's worth the extra cost is debatable but it definitely isn't worth getting the 'special' NGK LPG plugs as from the spec they appear to be the same as the standard Iridium but cost about 4 times the price..

The Kenwood can be controlled by steering wheel buttons but it wasn't something of real importance to me as my steering wheel doesn't have any buttons on it. I'd consider changing it for one that did have buttons as long as it only had buttons for the stereo and not for the cruise control as well as I don't have cruise control.......

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......