Great! I'd best get that sorted sooner rather then later then!

The list of jobs on P38's around here seems to be getting longer rather then shorter!

David.

I figured as I'm going to have to take it all apart again and that Island 4x4 are listing the pipe I'm having problems with for £29.99 I might as well just fit a brand new one.

Hopefully that'll be here pretty quickly and I can attempt to get it fitted over the break. I've also ordered heater matrix o-rings too.

I'm also hoping to have a look at removing the last few bits from my breaker over the holidays and get rid of that as well. Going to be a busy few days!

David.

I've looked at these exhausts on eBay several times, if they're not that bad to fit then I might take the plunge. Our 97 needs an exhaust as it's blowing just behind the drivers side rear wheel.

Both of the VSE's are ok at the moment thankfully but at that price, it's not worth fitting a mild steel one.

David.

There's definitely 2 washers there, one goes straight onto the banjo, then the banjo goes through the eye of the pipe, then there's another washer and then that goes into the box.

I've tried 2 different banjo's but it's still leaking unfortunately.

David.

Also, whilst I remember... GSF have got a 57% Discount Code running this weekend. If you use the coupon code "XMAS57" at checkout, you get a 57% discount.

I just bought 25 litres of Dexron III and 4.5 litres of EP 75w-90 for £99 which includes free delivery to the door.

The oil is CarLube so it's not the best stuff out there but at that price, I'll change it more frequently :)

David.

Well we had another couple of hours on the VSE yesterday. The coolant pipe was replaced and the return pipe from the radiator was "borrowed" from the Oslo Blue VSE so that we could get it running and bled through.

Gordon popped down yesterday and gave the car a once over, we noticed that the microswitch in the drivers door latch doesn't recognise when the door is opened so I'm going to hassle Marty for a latch when he returns.

The dilemma of the power steering fluid leak is still on going though. Gordon had a look yesterday and we were fairly convinced it had stopped. We filled it with fluid and took it for a run. We had to top it up when we checked it half way and put it down to bleeding out. We got home and checked it again and it was still ok level wise so we thought it was done.

I went out a couple of hours later and started it and noticed a funny grumble. I checked the fluid and sure enough it was empty again. I cleaned the top of the steering box this morning using a cleaning spray and a rag and started the car and there is still fluid coming out from under the 16mm banjo.

I think I'm going to order a brand new pipe rather then trying to get the one from my breaker to seal again incase there's something there causing problems, if that doesn't sort it then it's going to have to be a new steering box by the looks of it. I'm just getting really frustrated by this as I've never had problems getting something to seal like this before.

The car needs the heater matrix o-rings replacing as there's a damp feeling to the carpet inside and it tastes sweet.

I can confirm though that this things drives brilliantly and is a pleasure to be behind the wheel of. It's incredibly quiet and runs perfectly.

Fingers crossed I can get this pipe before everywhere starts shutting down for Christmas, that way I can hopefully get it sorted and driving ASAP.

David.

This red VSE is really testing my patience just now...

The replacement for the coolant pipe that broke the other day arrived yesterday so I went to fit it last night. The old one was indeed a right mess and was breaking as soon as you touched it so it definitely needed replacing. I wasn't convinced that the throttle body end of the new pipe was right so I thought I'd run it in and see how it looked.

I routed it behind the battery box and up to the coolant bottle, that bit was fine, I routed it through the clips onto the engine, that was fine, however it wouldn't go behind the air con compressor due to clearances and me not wanting to break the new pipe. I looked at the compressor and thought "It's 4 bolts, I'll take it off and route the pipe". That would of been well and good if the 4th bolt hadn't sheered in the bracket that holds it.

I tried to finish routing the pipe and sure enough, the end that goes onto the throttle body is the wrong one. It's about 4" to short. I rang the dealer I bought it from back this morning and they have advised that LR have superseded the part for GEMS and THOR to the same pipe and that's the only one available.

I've found a breaker locally who has a 99 4.6 in for breaking so he's gone to check the bracket is still there whilst I type this. Fingers crossed anyway! I think I'm also going to buy a roll of rubber pipe and replace the plastic pipes with rubber as it solves the problem of length and means they won't go brittle again.

David.

Well, I looked out of the window this morning whilst having a cup of coffee and noticed that the rear end of the VSE was in the air and the front was on the bump stops.

Hopefully there should be a delivery tomorrow or Friday with some nice shiny bits from Island 4x4 and we can get this thing properly on the road by the weekend :)

David.

Well, this afternoon we had better results. I popped to the local hydraulics company and bought some new 16mm dowty washers to go on the banjo. I removed the banjo and the old washers and decided to try the other banjo that I had. I believe the one I had fitted was from the breaker I've got so the other was put in in it's place.

I topped the reservoir up and bled it through as per RAVE and I'm pleased to say there was no fluid hissing out under pressure this time. I've cleaned the top of the steering box so that I can keep an eye on it but daylight had run out when I'd finished so I left it alone for today.

The compressor that I made from the two seems to be doing it's job perfectly as the car came up off it's bump stops nice and quickly. I've left it on full height and disconnected the EAS ECU so there's no self levelling going on so I'll hopefully get an idea if there's any bad airbags on it.

I bled the cooling system through and made sure I had a nice steady return coming into the coolant bottle. Once I was convinced there was no air in the system I put the cap back on and left it running for 20 mins. The thermostat opened and everything felt nice and evenly warm. I checked a few things with an IR thermometer and everything appeared to be at the same temperature. I've left it over night to cool so I'll top the coolant off tomorrow when it's cold and we'll go from there.

Fingers crossed yesterday was just a spot of bad luck!

David.

I've only had the 16mm banjo undone so no chance of screwing that one up thankfully.

I'm just petrified of over tightening it. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to sort it out. Fingers crossed anyway!

David.

Well today got off to a good start...

I did a bit of dismantling on the refurb'd valve block I'd been given and the o rings were nice and soft and still looked round so I fitted that and the new compressor I'd made from the two.

I then moved onto the steering pipe. I was going to remove the radiator so I drained the cooling system and then realised I could do it with the radiator in situ just with removing the fan, fan cowling and moving the top hose to one side.

The new pipe went in easily enough but caught the plastic coolant pipe that carries the return from the throttle body which was nicely brittle and snapped. I've ordered a new one of them that should be here in a day or two so as a temporary measure I sleeved the old one so I could get the car mobile.

Anyway, I fitted the pipe, fitted two new dowty washers that I had in the workshop to the banjo, filled the power steering reservoir and filled the cooling system. I started the car and the power steering pipe was doing a bit of grumbling however a few slight turns of the steering wheel shut that up.

I heard a hissing noise and looked under the bonnet and found fluid pishing out of the union that I'd just refitted. I nipped them up a bit more before reading RAVE and realising that they should have been torqued to 50nm. I think as it was dark by now I've only torqued them to 40nm. The leak has slowed down but not stopped.

I'll fit 2 new washers again tomorrow and retorque it to 50nm in the hope that it'll cure it.

Has anyone else had any problems resealing the steering pipes to the steering box?

David.

We fitted the blue polybushes to our P38 about 6 years ago, just after we'd got it. They weren't cheap ones either, they were made by Polybush.

At the time, it tightened the car up and improved the ride significantly but after about 12 months the car started to feel like something was wrong. It started wandering on the road and didn't fill you with confidence when on narrow roads. I put it back in the air on the ramp and went over everything with a bar but wouldn't really find anything that looked that bad so we kept using it.

A few months later it started to develop a horrendous vibration if you hit a pot hole or an uneven road surface. It almost felt like the car was about to shake itself to pieces. The only thing you could do to stop it was to lift off and let is slow a few mph and then normal service would be resumed.

I put the car back on the ramp and got the long pry bar out and found movement in the front radius arms.

Water had gotten in between the polybush and the hole in the radius arm and corrosion had occurred so the bush didn't fit properly in the hole any longer. When trying to take the bolt out to remove the radius arm the metal insert in the middle of the polybush had corroded to the bolt as well. No amount of battering the bolt would make it shift and because the bush was there I couldn't get the oxy acetylene in to heat it. It took hours to clean the radius arms up to a point where they were fit to take the LR bushes.

In the end I had to use a very thin angle grinder cutting disc to cut the bolt out inside the mounting points on the axle to remove the bloody radius arm and replace all the bolts on both radius arms.

At this point I bought genuine Land Rover bushes (all of them) and my Dad made a tool on the lathe to fit them as the genuine bushes need compressing as you press them into the arm. When they come out of the tool they expand slightly so they're a very tight fit into the radius arm.

5.5 years later the genuine bushes are still tight, there's no wander or vibration from anything in the car and it drives spot on. The only bushes you couldn't get from LR at the time was the rear radius arm bushes so I had to fit aftermarket ones to them.

Personally, I'd never fit polybushes to anything ever again, the longevity of them I found awful and they're no cheaper then genuine. The only benefit is as mentioned above, they are very easy to fit as they come in two halves with a metal tube that pushes into the middle of the bush.

I'm sure others have probably had better results but these are my findings on my car using bushes I bought :)

Ahh! I looked through the Suspension and then Rear section and couldn't find them. I then looked at an old invoice for another P38 and grabbed the part number ending in the G suffix and couldn't see them!

Going to give it a proper once over today in day light and see if there's anything else worth ordering whilst I'm at it.

David.

Cheers, will have a look at them shortly.

Strange that Island 4x4 only list the fronts these days. I've had full sets from them in the past.

David.

Thanks Gilbert. Just looking at Island 4x4, they only seem to list Boge for the fronts at £25 each, any idea who stock the rears?

David.

Well today turned out to be a bit interesting.

The car was very slow to rise according to the seller so I decided I'd fit the refurbished compressor and valve block I'd been given by the seller so that I could get it up into the air and get a proper look at the bags. I swapped the valve block and fitted the new compressor that had gold paint on the bolts acting as tamper proof markings.

With everything fitted and secured I started the car to find the compressor not running at all. I noticed there was a scorch mark on top of relay 20 so I grabbed this from the other VSE I've got to test it, this made no difference. I then made a jumper wire with 2 crimp spades on it to test the compressor and it started straight away.

I spoke to Gordon on the phone and he suggested using Testbook to try turning the compressor on and off manually, this also worked. It was at this point I decided to try the existing compressor that came with the car. This one started working again.

I then took both compressors into the house as it was -6 outside and stripped them both down. I found the thermal cut out on the "refurbished" compressor was knackered and the commutator on the previous compressor had big wear marks in it. The seal on the old compressor was totally knackered too.

Thankfully I managed to make one good one from the two ready to refit in the morning when daylight resumes. The seller sent me a message tonight and told me he'd bought the valve block and compressor from someone on eBay selling them as refurbished. It's really annoying the shit that some people will sell.

Hopefully tomorrow will see the EAS sorted and then I can sort the power steering fluid leak. I believe it's the pipe from the reservoir to the steering box as it's a constant low pressure drip regardless if the car is running or not and it appears to be leaking from under the radiator on the metal section of a pipe. I'll get a look at the pipe on my breaker tomorrow as I believe they're both the same and as long as it's good I'll swap it. Failing that I'll cut the rotten section out and replace it with some rubber pipe and a couple of jubilee clips for now until I can get a new pipe.

The sat nav on the car seems to think I'm about 30 miles away from where I actually am and the RF key fob doesn't work. It lights up but doesn't do anything on the car. I'm also going to remove the trim panels in the rear tomorrow so I can see if something has been disconnected in there. Hopefully that'll be an easy fix.

I'm going to replace all 4 air bags on the car so they're all new and fresh, I was also thinking about replacing all the shock absorbers as well. On our old 97 we replaced them with BOGE ones, they made a noticeable difference to the car at the time. Are there any particular ones people would recommend?

Thanks

David.

no10chris wrote:

I’m sure I’ve seen that one before, the reg gives it away,, must of been on ebay

I don’t think it was. The guy I got it from has had it 8 years and wasn’t planning on selling it until I got in touch with him.

Could be wrong though.

Marty, PM sent.

David.

That'd be handy except it's both door speakers, both door tweeters and the centre fill speaker on the dash :(

Won't know till I've done some more digging. Progress shall be made over the next few days anyway.

David.

I've ordered a ribbon kit off eBay for the Red and Blue VSE's anyway :)

I ran a sensor check on the sat nav and found a Reception Interf. message beside GPS status. I'll check the cabling behind the panel tomorrow.

I'm hoping that I've got the bits to repair the steering fluid leak tomorrow too. The suspension takes a while to come up, there's a recon compressor and valve block with the car so they're getting fitted too. Other then that, it's going straight into service on Tuesday as I've got a couple of jobs I need the trailer for.

I've got a horrid feeling the DSP amp isn't working properly as there's not much volume coming from the front speakers, when messing with the fader, there is sound but not an awful lot of it.

More updates to follow :)

David.

Just been looking through the paperwork for this one.

I've got the full owners handbook pack included in which is the radio code and EKA code. It's got pretty much a full service history, including a few big bills. It's also got the LPG conversion certificate, including the original conversion receipt dated 2005 when the car was 3 years old. Total cost of the conversion was £2150. The factory build sheet is also included in the wallet!

It was registered on 30/05/02. My Oslo Blue VSE was registered on 26/04/02 so there's not a lot between them.

David.