The ten thousandth post was this one by Orangebean. I should have thought of some sort of prize :-) The very first one was my post here after I'd deleted the "dummy" first post from setting the forum up, right back at the end of 2015.

Thanks to everyone for all the support!

Does anyone know what the differences between pre-'97 and post-'97 GEMS fuseboxes are?

I can search through the posts and find all of them that have images hosted on Photobucket.

If you'd like me to host them locally I can probably just copy them over by hand, at least until I get the image uploader finished. If you'd like me to do this, either reply on this thread or drop me a PM.

... for the phrase "The only place for a coil spring is up Zebedee's arse".

... how important are they? I've got a set of manifolds with burst flexis (driver's side way worse than passenger side) and I was thinking about just cutting them out, bolting the manifolds to a scrap head, and welding in a straight bit of tube.

How much do they actually need to flex? If I use hex bolts to hold them on it's a damn sight easier to get to the one behind the steering column shaft.

I'm thinking about fitting a third lambda sensor just for the gas ECU to mine. A few folk seem to have zirconia sensors in an extra sensor bung welded to the Y-pipe.

Any particular recommendations, or just whatever cheap generic single-wire lambda sensor I can pick up? Would it be better with a heated sensor?

As the title says, I changed out the rocker shafts and rockers for some second-hand but good ones (although all the rockers have die numbers that suggest they should have been replaced, the hardened pushrod seats haven't sunk). Everything's back together, and on startup it revs to about 1800rpm when cold and idles at about 900-1000rpm when warm.

The fact that it does eventually screw down the idle suggests that the idle stepper is working. It does the same on gas and petrol, with a little hunting on gas as it screws the mixture up and down (it's always done this). The throttle is returning to its stop, and there don't appear to be any manifold leaks.

Could it just be that the engine isn't auto-adapting to having its driver's side bank of cylinders having working valves? There's only about a quarter tank of fuel in, and I know that Martyuk has said that they disable auto-adaption below a certain level.

Mine doesn't appear to have rockers with the die codes mentioned in the TSB, but it does have a distinct clack and a bit of a miss.

The rockers are I think quite badly worn - when you try to turn them on the shaft there's a distinct "notch" as they go over the part they'd normally sit on. I reckon it's time for new rockers and shafts - any recommendations?

I gave some folk access to the mod stick. You should now be able to nuke posts and spammers. Be careful with it, and remember backups get run at 3am :-)

I have a certain amount of drama unfold (popcorn in hand) on a couple of forums regarding advertising commercial services. There appears to be an opinion that forum users who run a business shouldn't advertise unless they buy an ad.

Rules are pretty ad-hoc in here, at least until I get my arse in gear to write a TOS for the site. In the meantime, if you run a business that provides a useful and relevant service that people in the Range Rover community would benefit from then go right ahead, as long as you're not annoying folk. If you do okay out of it, great. If you make an absolute mint out of touting your wares on here, a contribution to the running costs would be in order :-)

As always, the overarching rule is Don't Be An Arse.

Anyone up for this? I had the only P38 at it last year, it would be nice to get a wee squad of us up. Details on the website are sparse at the moment but usually on the Saturday it's the "proper" competitions (Tyro, RTV and CCV) and on the Sunday it's a free-for-all around the (quite large) field. There's camping on site, which might be a laugh.

I suspect that my NRVs are pretty tired, given how much air seems to leak out of the exhaust port when the compressor is off. It seems that we can't get new NRVs from anywhere. So, I wonder if we could use something like these with a groove turned in each hex to take a big fat O-ring to hold it firmly in the block?

In answer to a couple of questions on a deleted spam thread, flagging posts sends me a message because it triggers a bug that crashes the database when you try to delete the thread.

Flaskbb is advanced but simple enough to work on, nice to use, adaptable, mostly reliable, and full of all sorts of weird edge-case behaviour, which is of course why it's eminently suitable for a Range Rover forum.

Now, I'm off to unwedge the database again ;-)

My heatshields are all a bit loose and clattery having rusted around where the nuts are welded in. I was thinking about just taking the whole bloody lot off and wrapping the manifolds in exhaust wrap to keep the temperatures down. Any thoughts? Good idea, terrible idea? I'm wondering if it'll maybe quieten down some of the noise from around there too.

... and for once it's not because of the repair bills :-)

For quite a while now I've had a groaning noise under moderate load. It is just audible over all the other noise at about 40mph but becomes quite noticeable above 50mph, and is only present when I'm just on the throttle - not accelerating, not on a trailing throttle, but just "pressing on it" slightly. It's road speed related rather than engine speed related, and sounds almost like a wheel bearing except everyone else I've asked agrees that the bearing seems fine with no roughness or movement. Oh, going round corners doesn't affect the sound. Mild bumps do, a bit.

I did wonder if it was the nose bearing in the diff, but I'd expect if that was bad there would be enough movement to make the seal leak.

One other clue is that I can feel the vibration through the driver's footwell floor. I've almost convinced myself there's an errant socket stuck on top of the gearbox pressing into the transmission tunnel, or some damn thing :-D

How safe is it to drop off one or other propshaft and take the Rangie up to a decent speed? I'm concerned that might eat the viscous coupling in short order. Any other suggestions for how to pin down the noise would be welcome. I'll post an audio clip just as soon as I can work out how to get it off my phone.

I've seen a few that claim to give a firmer ride and better handling, but let's be honest we don't drive these things for the sporty handling and the ride is quite firm enough!

I'm sure it hasn't escaped your attention (although it seems to have slipped right by the mainstream news outlets) that it looks like we're going to end up with the Investigatory Powers Bill signed in to law after all, despite a lot of opposition from all sides. This is likely to have an extremely damaging effect on Internet security, and of course your right to privacy.

What you could do - join the Open Rights Group, write to your MP (unfortunately this really does need to be bits of paper with writing on, emails won't even be read. Can't hurt to send an email too, mind), and tell as many people as you can to find out exactly how dangerous this bill will be.

What this means for this site - There's a very limited amount of information that would be available, if I was asked to provide it. It is likely that if I was required to provide information to some government body, I would not be allowed to reveal that fact. This has not happened. Your passwords are stored as a hash, which is why you can't get your password emailed to you, only a link to reset it (yes, that's broken right now, I know). Passwords are saved using an industry-standard PBKDF2 function. Your password is pretty safe.

You'll notice that there's a little green padlock beside the address bar. This site uses an SSL certificate for encrypting internet traffic, provided by StartSSL. It uses a 4096-bit certificate with 256-bit key - this means that each connection is set up with an immense key, which then creates a shorter key that is only used for a brief period of time before being replaced. Your web traffic is pretty safe.

Now go and poke your MP to stand up against the IP Bill!

I've updated the forum software, and thanks to some very generous donations we now have the domain name that you see right up there in your address bar.

Old links and bookmarks to https://rrpub.gjcp.net will work exactly as they did before but will redirect to the new name. You don't have to do anything.

Report bugs by PM to me, or by email to gordonjcp@gmail.com if you can't log in.

I was at a barbecue yesterday with some other car enthusiast folks, and one of guests mentioned that their Focus TDCi was smoking pretty badly. So of course out came the tools.

Apparently it did have a new turbo a while ago and although it goes okay the exhaust is very smoky. Now one of the things we noticed almost immediately is that coming off boost there's a hell of a flutter from the turbo - I mean real "because racecar" stuff. The other thing was that even at about 2000rpm the soft flexible hose from the compressor to the intercooler had blown up like a beachball!

We're thinking that the first thing to try is having the intercooler off and wash out any accumulated oil and crud - the air filter is pretty oil-contaminated and doesn't look like it's been changed for ages and there was oil lying in the filter-to-compressor pipe, but nothing ridiculous.

Any further thoughts?