The other day I had a weird failure where one of the coil packs melted down. I was able to drive home on six cylinders, and fitted a spare one (thanks to David Hallworth for that!). Now the problem is that while it runs just fine on gas, it does not run on petrol at all. There's fuel at the rail, there are no faults logged, it just cuts out dead when switching to petrol. Plugging in the diags, everything reads perfectly. I can't think of anything that would take out just the injectors without showing other signs of distress.

Anyone ever run across this before?

... but does anyone know what they are? The wiring to the sensors on mine seems a bit crusty and has broken right at the plug on both sides. I've bodged them back together but I'm considering just making new cables up and taking them straight back to the ECU. But first, I need to know what kind of plug I'm buying!

I know a few folk have a third lambda sensor fitted, so I'm looking for a suggestions on the best way to do it.

I've got a 0V/1V sensor and suitable sensor boss. My cunning plan is to disconnect the engine ECU, gearbox ECU and temperature senders (the one to the BECM), clean up the front of the passenger downpipe where I can get to it easily just above the existing lambda, drill a big hole, and weld the boss in with the MIG, without taking the Y-pipe off the vehicle.

What hideous consequence have I failed to foresee?

What with all this GDPR regulations, lots of people are making noise about personal data on websites.

This website, https://rangerovers.pub, does not store any personal data that you haven't put on here yourself (like in your user profile). At a minimum, it stores your (probably pseudonymous) username, your email address and an irreversibly encrypted version of your password. This data is not disclosed to any third party, and is handled as securely as is reasonably practicable.

The site uses cookies to identify your browser, which is a pretty standard way of ensuring that things like logging in works. There's a very stupid law written by non-techie people that requires you to be told this. Ideally there should be a popup warning you that this site uses cookies and giving you the option to reject or accept them. If you do not want a browser-identifying cookie, use your browser settings to block cookies from https://rangerovers.pub. This will break logging in, and you won't be able to post.

Under new GDPR rules you have the right to request that all data about you are removed from the site. If you choose to leave the rrpub community and would like a Stalinist purge airbrushing from history, please send an email to gordonjcp@gmail.com and I will arrange it. This probably won't remove cached copies from Google, you're on your own with that. Oceania is at war with Eastasia; Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

So far there have been no requests from shadowy government agencies for copies of the website database.

I was pretty surprised recently to find that I had almost no brakes at all, coming up to a busy roundabout at the bottom of a steep hill. A quick scan of the panel revealed the two brake warning lights on (mine's non-ETC).

The pump isn't running, but if I jumper pins 2 and 5 on the plug for the pressure switch it runs just fine. As an emergency measure I cracked open the relay and poked it with my finger to run the pump, and here's the weird bit - when it gets to a certain point, the relay pulls in by itself and then cuts off when the accumulator reaches pressure!

Is this a sign that the pressure switch has failed?

I've noticed that the gear lever on my thirstymatic V8 gets stiffer and stiffer to move as things warm up. It's kind of always done it but it's recently got worse. I gave the exposed bit of teleflex cable underneath a bit of a a clean, but it hasn't really helped.

Is it just a worn cable, or grease drying up somewhere, or a sign of annoying, difficult and expensive repairs in the box itself?

I spotted a P38 in a scrappy today with a calibrated speedo, which got me wondering what its history was. My first thought was ex-cop car but it doesn't have a "Special Vehicles" plate on it (that I can see). It's obviously had the interior fiddled with because the seat bases and carpets are black but the seats are cream leather, same as mine.

It's got a highline BECM but there's a lowline BECM lying in the boot! I got the VIN if that helps anyone. It's on a private plate but it's probably a fairly early one. The tailgate is badged "4.0 SE".

Would anyone who has pics up on Photobucket (with the attendant "linking disabled, gimme my moneyz" image taking the place of sensible stuff) like them transferred over to rrpub, as part of the ongoing updates?

So I stuck new lambda sensors in my Rangie and sure enough they made sod all difference. It would appear that the lambda sensor heaters aren't being grounded by the ECU to turn them on.

Are there any funny situations where the ECU wouldn't just enable the sensor heaters?

So while the new mixer and vapouriser on my 4.0 have seriously improved things, it would appear that both my lambda sensors are knackered! Neither of them are switching although judging by the performance things like the MPG on the trip computer dropping from 18mpg to 14mpg, the one that drives the gas system was probably okay the other night.

With the laptop plugged into the gas system I can see it's pegged fully lean with the stepper trying to open as far as it can go. Normally at all speeds (even at idle) it hovers right around the 90 mark with the odd excursion up or down under acceleration and lifting off. Would it be reasonably safe to just set the stepper values to lock it to 90 until I get some lambda sensors delivered? I figure that would make it work pretty much the same as a fixed power valve.

So after doing the head gasket my 4.0 GEMS idles beautifully and actually performs not too badly - up to about 2500rpm, at which point it start spluttering and generally won't rev beyond that. It's the same on petrol or gas. There's a fault code stored for the camshaft sensor according to my cheapy ELM327, but when I look at the appropriate pin with the sillyscope I can see the correct two short two long squarewave pulses, looking just like the picture in the manual.

One of the lambda sensors seems a bit lazy, but it was like that before I started working on the engine.

What have I missed here?

My GEMS 4.0 has started blowing to atmosphere from one of the driver's side cylinders. It's not quite as loud as Miah's was (yet!) but it's definitely doing it. Clearly I'm going to have to do the head gaskets, but since I actually need the car to run around in I need to get it done as quickly as possible. I've not really done one of these before (although I've changed heads before), so here's the list of daft questions:

Do I need to get the heads skimmed? Up until now it's been going pretty well without losing more than the expected amount of oil or water. I can probably find someone to check them for flatness nearby but they'll take a while to skim them.

When Miah and I leakdown tested it a few months back it was about 20% evenly across all eight cylinders. Is it worth dropping the sump off and doing the piston rings too? That starts to get into doing bigend and main bearings as well, I guess?

If I do pull the pistons out and stick new rings in, what do I need to do about the bores? I've read various things about using those three-legged grinding stones and bogbrush type hones to break the glaze, presumably that's pretty important if I disturb that part?

That's right, I first kicked this site off as rrpub.gjcp.net on the 29th of December 2015. As has been discussed to death in the past, it kind of sprung from a discussion Gilbertd and I had in the pub when he was up in Glasgow working, and a certain amount of "How Hard Can It Be...?" thinking. Since then we've got about 80 very active users posting in over 700 topics and nearly 13,000 posts in total. I was going to plot some nice graphs for you all to look at but they look like a slightly wobbly line going up - it's surprising how steady it's all been.

But it's you lot who come here who make it what it is, so I'd like to thank you all for your contributions to the site and all the help, advice and bouncing about of ideas that make it such a fun and friendly place :-)

Happy New Year, everyone!

My 4.0 V8 has always accelerated pretty poorly. Even on a slight hill it'll drop down to 2nd to accelerate from 30 to 40mph. Even at about 50mph it won't really accelerate on a hill. Now here's the thing, everyone says the cams wear really quickly but every description I have found of a worn cam is that it'll accelerate just fine at low speed but run out of puff as it gets up the rev range, and that makes sense.

Mine goes like a bloody rocket above about 3000rpm. Give it a hefty bootful and once it's moving it just pulls and pulls, especially on LPG. It does sound a bit rattly at about 4500-5000rpm in "Sports" mode but it's as quiet and smooth as you like below that - except there's an irregular "slappy" rattling from somewhere down below. I thought it was to the back of the engine but I'm coming round to the idea it's at the front.

Could it be that the cam is actually okay, and that the chain itself is excessively worn and stretched? I don't really know the engine's history, since it was bought second-hand as a replacement, but it seems clean enough. I put a set of second-hand rocker shafts on because the originals were badly worn which makes me wonder about the cam, but when we had it apart to fit it, everything looked pretty much okay. Eyeballing the rockers as the engine turns over they all seem to move about the same amount. A leakdown test showed about 20% evenly across all eight cylinders, which isn't great but isn't particularly horrible either - certainly not enough to make me want to pull cylinder heads off!

I'm about to do some front end surgery on mine, and while I'm in there I'm going to replace the front brake pads. Looking on Island 4x4, they appear to have a wide variety of pads for a fairly narrow range of prices, going from 13 quid for Britpart (probably not, thanks) up to £36.50 for EBC Green Stuff. Somewhere in the middle are the 17 quid Delphi pads I've always used (and can't really complain about), 21 quid EBC Ultimax ones and 30 quid Jurid ones (OEM for BMW according to my BMW-owning mate).

Anyone used any of them, particularly the EBC ones? Am I going to feel I got my 20 quid's worth fitting Green Stuff rather than Delphi?

I've got coolant dripping down somewhere on the passenger side near the front. I can't quite see where it's coming from, but it seems to be near a small bolt with a flanged head into the side of the block just above the sump. Is this a block drain or something? It seems too far down.

Any thoughts on where it might be coming from?

My old beast has a bit of a misfire and is down on power. The plugs are getting a bit old but I recently checked and set the gaps down to 0.7mm and I stuck on some new Intermotor plug leads (the Magnecores it had were falling apart).

Is there any way to check if the coil itself is failing, or do you just test by substitution? Also, is there anything that actually fails over time in spark plugs apart from the gap opening up?

I think all is not well with my R90E - the engine cut out as I turned into the end of the farm track this evening, and wouldn't restart on gas. Eventually it restarted on petrol, after a bit of farting and coughing.

Driving the gas solenoid on "by hand" resulted in a loud hiss that emptied the line almost immediately (only hissed for about a second). I'm pretty sure it shouldn't do that. I opened up the vapouriser but couldn't find any signs of split diaphragms or anything, but I strongly suspect the vapouriser has had it. It was leaking quite a bit of coolant, too.

I had a quick look on Tinley Tech's website but they seem to be out of stock of R90Es. They've got some others ranging from about 50 quid to a couple of hundred quid - is there much difference in performance in a closed-loop system? My local LPG fitter probably has multipoint vapourisers, which I guess are no good for my singlepoint install.

Stick some photos of your P38s (or indeed any other vehicles you drive) in interesting places here. I'll start :-)