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?

... deep enough to pop my driver's side airbag off its seat.

Yup, despite tackling the Torphichen RTV course and a few of the CCV bits, what eventually gave me a real suspension problem was those good quality South Lanarkshire roads.

I need to do the front radius arm bushes, for which I'll probably hand them into my local indy who has the right tool to get them in (I've heard two-part "polybush" types aren't worth a damn, and proper ones are cheap).

If I take both arms off with the chassis on stands and the wheels chocked, how much of a cock of a job is it going to be to get it all lined up again?

I'll start this one off with - did anyone clock the black P38 in Better Call Saul S2E05? It's the one that the banking firm's lawyers leave HHM in ;-)

I'm about to buy new discs and pads for mine. The front discs were replaced about a year and a half ago but there's a bit of a "wobble" under braking from the front passenger side (although that seems to be getting better) so even though there's quite a bit of meat on them I'm planning on changing them.

All the suppliers I've seem seem to sell grooved and drilled discs from EBC and Terrafirma, or Brtprt. Can anyone recommend a decent disc that's not all boy racer drilled and grooved Fast and Furious stuff which seems singularly pointless on something like a P38?

Also, EBC Greenstuff - worth it? EBC Ultimax ones seem to be cheaper than the "normal" Delphi pads and people seem to like them. Any thoughts?

Not only is RRPub a new site but the forum software that runs it is under active development. It looks pretty good but it has a few oddities and outright bugs, and there are some little tweaks and things needed to make it all look right too.

If you find any new exciting faults or you've got some feature you just can't live without, post it here and I'll see what I can do :-)

I re-gapped my plugs the other day, to 0.7mm since I'm running on LPG. When I fitted them not long after I got the vehicle I left them at the standard 0.9mm, and I didn't really think that closing them up by a tiny fraction like that would help.

It's made a hell of a difference. I could hear straight away that it was idling better, and while the massive flat spot is still there between 2000 and 3000rpm on both petrol and LPG, it's a lot less pronounced. Definitely something worth checking.

I'm Gordon, I chucked this thing up after a bit of discussion with a couple of other UK-based RR owners.
I've got an R-reg P38 (see, we can say "R-reg" here) with a GEMS 4.0 running on LPG. That's actually it in the banner picture (note to future gordonjcp - when the picture changes edit this) when I was out playing at the Cambusbarron military driving area.

Let me know if there's anything you'd like to see on here. Keep it friendly, don't be a dick, in fact act like you would in your local, or your mate's garage.