Someone posted on one of the Facebook groups the other day a blue P38 still in battenburg markings that was apparently a Blood Transfusion Service vehicle, intended to replace the bikes in bad weather.

Presumably in heavy traffic you don't weave through like on a bike, you just bulldoze it to one side.

Happy New Year! I quite liked 2020 because I got to stay at home with my family - which grew by one about two thirds of the way through.

Now since it's a lovely sunny afternoon and there's a bit of heat in that sun, I'm off to take the wee man to the park :-D

I feel it's worth pointing out that my P38 had a whine like that at the back when I got it, and six years and nearly 100,000 miles later it's just exactly as whiny as before.

Will we break 30k before the site's fifth birthday, on the 29th?

I guess if you use a grub screw you should stick a bit of thread locker or something on, so it definitely can't go all the way through if it rattles loose and get sucked into the engine.

So if I was buying parts to refresh the camshaft, I should probably throw a couple of rocker shafts into the order too? But the rockers are likely to be okay?

Mine are all the "bad" castings where the seats are supposed to sink, but I figure they'd have done that by now if they were going to.

Barnard Castle, eh? Think I drove through there a couple of years ago taking the Pretty Route back from Whitby one year :-)

1Steven wrote:

Will have to be home brew, pub would be a ferry ride away in normal times

Sounds intriguing, where are you off to? Anywhere up my neck of the woods?

Well, that's some pretty bad news. I spoke to him on the phone a couple of times and he seemed like a really friendly and helpful guy :-/

I finally decided to pull the trigger on a cam kit for mine, only to find that the site I was going to buy from is no longer accepting orders - "closed until further notice". Given that they were 200 quid cheaper than the nearest competitor I'm a bit annoyed with myself that I didn't do it sooner.

So, fellow P38 victims^W enthusiasts, where's the best place to get a nice new high torque cam and all the associated bits now? And does anyone know what's happened to v8tuner.co.uk and whether they're likely to be back?

I was running around on a set of Insa Turbo Dakars for most of the year which provided lots of grip offroad and weren't too bad even on very wet tarmac. Normally "mud terrain" tyres aren't great on wet hard surfaces because of the lack of sipes but I can't say I had any complaints.

I switched back to my Cooper Discoverer AT3s and they're a hell of a lot quieter. With the Dakars on it was like driving a three tonne hoover!

I adapted the Clarion in mine to use a little bluetooth module instead of the cassette - I tricked the cassette deck into thinking a tape was loaded but fed the audio from the bluetooth adaptor in. It was a little board I bought for a fiver off eBay. Only trick was I needed to also add a 5V regulator to power it!

Any time I've seen "valve stuck closed" and "cannot lower" it's been a knackered driver pack. Every single driver pack I've taken off a breaker has had at least one intermittent channel.

I really need to get my arse in gear and finish my replacement driver PCB...

It's a damn sight easier with the driver's side wheelarch liner removed.

I'm tempted to jump on and show him the bit of code that runs when the BECM is "fully alarmed" - it'll do fuck all until the timeout passes and then you either need a "magic" Nanocom or a 68HC11 debug cable to wipe it.

rr.net I know about but what happened on LZ?

Jeez, it's almost like being a dick to your users makes them not want to use your site...

That would indeed be me :-) Pulled up to the gas pumps and lo and behold another nice P38 sitting there :-)

I think the two SMD chips are opamps, and that big silvery thing top left is a transistor.

Basically there's a thing like a Wheatstone bridge with a diode and a resistor in the airflow, and a constant-current source to ensure the diode gets hot(tish) so when air blows on it it cools it down decreasing the current flow and causing the output voltage to rise.

I mounted the spare wheel standing upright beside the subwoofer. It's temporarily lashed in with rope but I plan to make a proper bracket for it.

The CD changer was knackered so I fitted a VHF radio with remote head there and a 500W inverter, powered off a 24Ah battery tucked into the spare wheel well beside the gas tank.

What's possibly an interesting avenue to explore is what are the diags telling you when it is locked down? Is it just random garbage, or is there some meaning to the stuff it reads back that we haven't figured out?