Can you use a piece of wire to bridge the terminals in the plug for the tailgate?
That would complete the circuit without the motor. If the fuse still blows you know it's not the motor.
Best I've ever had out of my 4.6 Thor on LPG is around 200 miles. That was almost entirely motorway miles and was the first tank of LPG after having it fitted.
Every tank after that has been fewer miles. I usually get around 160-180. I think the worst I've had was around 120 miles. I've never towed anything.
I have a wheel well tank which takes somewhere around 65 litres.
I don't know if there is increased interest but my local supplier recently put their price up. It's now 65p (or 67p, I can't remember) and I've stopped using them. There's a Shell station on my commute that has LPG on their price board but it never has a price. I think they've stopped selling it but haven't replaced their board. I read somewhere recently that BP have stopped selling it too. The BP I saw that had it was very expensive though - IIRC it was something like 79p.
Makes me think there's not enough interest to make it worthwhile for them to stock to it.
I fill up at Morrisons in Coventry as it's 55p there. It's inconvenient though as it's over 20 miles from home. I have to plan and schedule quite well for fill ups. Sometimes I don't plan well or have an unexpected journey that throws the plans out and I have to fill up at the expensive local place. Another inconvenience is my local place also doesn't open every day of the week and is only open during business hours in the week. They also closed for just over a week around Christmas leaving me running on petrol (I was off work and not in Coventry for closer to three weeks).
It's made the car cheaper to run but it does come with its own drawbacks - availability, convenience, having to plan my life around my more frequent fill ups and my partner won't go near it or fill it up. If she's driving it and it needs filling up it ends up running on petrol.
Not working on it until Friday.
Only leaks I know of at the moment are somewhere around the steering box, a heater pipe where the LPG system is spliced in and a rear axle oil seal. All of which are also getting looked at tomorrow.
Lpgc wrote:
I know them as clocksprings too. Got to be careful fitting them as apparently once you've unleashed it to unwind there's no winding it back, which is why there's little point getting one from a scrapyard. A bit along the lines of fixing a petrol lawnmower's self returning pull start cable setup except there's no access.
You can make them usable again after they fully unwind. You need to fully wind it tight, count how many turns it takes to fully unwind it then wind it tight again. From there you can unwind it to it's halfway point as you know how many turns it is between fully wound and unwound. You need to make sure the clockspring winding is centralised so you can be sure it has enough slack in both directions when turning the steering wheel.
If you install it with it wound too tight you end up overtightening it and snapping the wires when turning the steering wheel.
Had to do this when I was fitting cruise control to my old ST170 as the additional steering wheel buttons needed a different clockspring.
Yeah, the misfire was back yesterday.
I think it must have been loose and leaking and when I've pulled on it to check it I think it came off completely. I figured you must have used longer sections of pipe when fitting the system - it was a PITA trying to get them back on as they are now :P
In the end I found some wooden dowel that fits in the pipes to act as an extension.
I wonder if this will also cure my occasional high idle issue. Every so often I find that my idle speed will jump up to around 2500rpm and stay there until I either switch the car off or put the car in drive and hold the brake. As the engine warms up it goes away. It only seems to happen on really cold days. I've been guessing that there's air getting into the intake somewhere but couldn't find/see/hear a leak on any of the visible bits up top.
The value for the lambda probe has been static since last October. I've checked it with the Nanocom periodically and have never seen a proper value for it, even after resetting the adaptive values. As soon as I put the new sensor in I got a value, even with the leaky LPG pipe. I was also getting a stored error code saying that the sensor was missing. That went away with the new sensor fitted.
I'm fairly happy that there was an issue with the sensor.
Looks like they were based in Yorkshire and went out business in 2007:
https://companycheck.co.uk/company/03966103/MCT-MITCHELL-COTTS-LIMITED/companies-house-data
This is how the engine number appears on my 4.6 Thor:
It had the compression ratio listed above and starts with 60D as Richard said.
Looks like yours has been ground away and a new one marked.
Lpgc wrote:
With the engine running on petrol pull each pipe off each injector in turn and make sure there's vacuum on them (replace pipe each time before checking the next one)... this is to check a pipe hasn't come off a manifold spud. Then with the engine off try blowing through each pipe, if any are much harder to blow through than others the pipe might be kinked. It would take a much worse kink to cause a misfire at idle (when only a small amount of gas has to flow through the pipe) than at higher engine loads.
One of the pipes has come detached from the engine end. It's the only one that I can blow through very, very easily. When blowing through it I can hear a rush of air. It also has no vacuum with the engine running.
The other three I can blow through but there's resistance.
I guess the upper manifold is coming off on Friday :)
It's a good opportunity to ensure that each one is connected to the right injector and cylinder.
New sensor now fitted, checked in Nano that I have a fluctuating value for the bank and I do, reset the adaptive values, cleared the stored error codes and went for a test drive.
Still fine in petrol, no misfire on LPG but still down on power/sluggish on LPG. No error codes at the end of the test drive though. The fluctuating idle on LPG seems to have cleared up.
I'll drive it for a while on petrol to let the ECU learn some values for the adaptive and try LPG again.
The sensor arrived today while I was out. Came in a nice blue Bosch box and the security to check it's genuine checks out. All looks good then!
Hoping to get out and fit it this evening.
Not all cars can run on that though. New cars from 2011 onwards are supposed to be compatible but older than that there's no guarantee. Cars older than 2002 are advised not to use it at all:
https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/emissions/what-is-e10-fuel-and-how-could-it-affect-you/
I'm not sure how accurate the RAC info is but I follow a few YouTubers that modify cars and run ethanol based fuel and have to modify their cars to suit. They install flex fuel sensors and have to tune the ECU run correctly on it. The ECU's have different tunes for the different fuel and the flex fuel sensor allows the ECU to determine which tune to use. I'm not sure about things like modifying rubber and plastic seals to accommodate it though - they tend to run more modern cars than our P38's.
Morat wrote:
Then we need Simon to crack the issue of starting a cold multipoint system on LPG!
Countries that have properly cold winters (Canada etc) have block heaters that warm up the engine before you start it. They have a mains power cord hanging out of the grill/bonnet and they just plug it in. I imagine we could rig up something like that but it would have to be plugged in to the mains to work or else it would likely drain the battery.
Not much help if you don't have a driveway and/or garage and have to park in the street, sometimes several houses away from your own house - but then this is the same issue people will have if they want us all to drive plug in electric cars!
I've tried LPG again a few times and the issue is still there.
I've ordered the sensor so I'll see how that goes.
It did look like the right thing to me but thought it best to check in case I was missing something silly!
Cheap usually comes with strings attached.
Looking at Lambda sensors now I'm home (at work).
Can anyone see a reason to not buy this?
I searched by part number (MHK100940, found on the LRCat website) and it says it's a Bosch sensor to fit a 4.6 P38 before the cat.
My hesitation is based on the price. It's £24 cheaper than at LR Direct. I also have in my head that GEMS cars had a different sensor to that fitted to a Thor. The eBay listing says it fits 1994-2002.
I do have a slight roughness at idle that I've now realised is only there on LPG. The idle speed wobbles up and down. Acceleration and general driving has been OK since October though.
I didn't send the PM as it started to look like it was a general car issue (lambda sensor) and not an issue with the LPG system :)
Useful things to know and check though, thanks! When I'm home I'll give it all a check.
When I had it stripped down I did number the LPG pipes going through the manifold but when I came to reassemble it all two of the numbers had rubbed off. I worried that I ended up with the connected wrong but since the car ran I figured they were ok. I assume if I had connected an LPG injector to the wrong cylinder I'd have all sorts of issues.
Lpgc wrote:
but for what other reason might I possibly want a Faraday cage?
You can sit in it when you think your enemies have found a way to penetrate the protection ofyour tin foil hat :P
Yeah, that's why I didn't immediately jump to the conclusion that it was the lambda sensor.
I did have quick Google last night and found a thread on Landyzone with a guy reporting similar symptoms and he said it was a worn camshaft. Fitting a new camshaft cured the issues for him.
He didn't mention a difference on petrol Vs LPG.
https://www.landyzone.co.uk/land-rover/p38-v8-vibration-when-accelerating.308979/
I can't remember what the lambda reading was off the topmost my head but I know it was completely static. The other one was bouncing up and down.
I considered blocked cat when it didn't want to accelerate but as you said it would be the same on petrol.
Yeah, I'm confident the coils are wired properly as I've been driving it since October :P. The issue only occurred after about an hour of driving today. I think the diagrams are in RAVE, I'm sure I used them when doing the head gasket job.
When I did the head gaskets I had a bad missfire that set fire to the cat. The missfire codes were for cylinders 1, 3, 5 and 7 IIRC.
I assumed it was a loose connection because I didn't change anything and the issue went away. I assumed that my checks to the wiring connectors had secured a loose one. I think that's where I got the idea that those cylinders were fed by the same coil.
I've also assumed that the heat from the cat has damaged the lambda sensor or the wiring on that side.
Another thing I've not had time to look in to properly is the stored voltage value for the TPS. It seems to fluctuate between 14.something and 15.something which I'm lead to believe is wrong.
I did take the sensor off and measure the resistance through the range but I don't have the figures to hand. I did notice that the Nanocom never sees a throttle open position above something like 70% even with the pedal pressed to the floor.