Aragorn

Fairly sure its pressure rather than vacuum. The top hose is notably maintaining pressure. Not rock hard, but a firm springyness that goes away once opened. The odd thing is its never overheated, the gaskets have been bad and its been pressurising the system for years at this point and the only time i've seen it above 90c was when the rad had a big leak several years back. I've put off so long because despite the pressure and coolant consumption, its never actually caused any problems. Just a little annoying that i've now fixed it and its still broken, thought i did sort of expect there would be something.

So i've had it back on the road for a few weeks... not done huge mileage. Initially it was still using a fair amount of coolant until i noticed it all over the side step... Fixed the poorly clamped hose on the coolant tank and that fixed it. No longer seeing coolant on the carpet inside (replaced the heater core o-rings) and i'm no longer seeing coolant all over the underside steering bars/panhard rod etc (not even sure where that was coming from, waterpump maybe?), so there are certainly some improvements. However i've noticed it seems to retain pressure in the cooling system when cold... Nowhere near as badly as before mind, but still... For instance i topped it off on sunday, with engine etc fully cold. Did a short trip sunday to the local shopping centre then the wife took it to work on tuesday (~15miles total). This morning with the engine fully cold, opening the expansion tank made a loud "tissshhhhh" noise. Water level has dropped a few mm, though cant be 100% sure as the cars not parked on a level surface. I've ordered a pressure gauge as i'm intrigued to see just how much pressure we have. Logic would suggest it should return to atmospheric pressure when its cooled down unless something is getting in there that shouldnt?

Also the head bolts were all well torqued, most required a cheater bar to crack them off. None were obviously loose.

Fought with the other bank over the weekend. Lots of steam cleaning evident on cylinder 8, piston was completely free of any carbon deposits. Oddly this cylinder also fouls the plugs with oil, so not sure whats going on there. Some of the cylinders look really bad: And ofcourse, the camshaft and lifters are knackered. All the lifters are dished and some have fairly heavy groove worn in the middle. I think given the uncertainty, i'm going to ignore the cam and bores and put it back together with the new gaskets and see how it goes. If the coolant issues are fixed, then i guess i need to give it a camshaft. As for the bores, i guess a compression test and go from there? The heads are back on. I've ordered new bolts for the exhaust manifolds as those are ruined and are some imperial thread despite being Thor heads (which should be metric seemingly). Once the bolts arrive i can start reassembling the top end and accessories.

Yeah its a fair point. Though i'm not sure there are any obvious "easy"/"affordable" conversions... The M57 conversions look nice and the parts are fairly available, but i'm trying to avoid Diesel these days. A truck 5.3 LS would also be pretty sweet and super affordable overseas but sourcing the bits here is very expensive. Maybe an electric motor is the answer 🤣

one imagines if you want steel gaskets, you can buy modern MLS gaskets for the Rover V8 fairly readily? For me its a bit of a balance of cost. The range rover doesnt get a lot of use, falling very much into the third car for towing the trailer to the dump and running to the DIY store at the weekend. So while the petrol-head wants to go thru it all properly, new cam, fresh lifters, MLS gaskets and head studs etc and build a really nice engine, the frugal scot part is saying "leave it all alone and just fit fresh standard gaskets" because its really hard to justify the expense. If the block is leaking that ofcourse leads to further questions as to whether its worth spending £££ on fixing it properly. I'll pull and inspect the lifters before i put it all back together just to ensure they're not wrecked though. If it is a liner leak, i guess i'll try a dose of KSeal or similar.

Do you mean these? Would certainly explain why cyl 3 has water in it!

I've pulled the passenger side head from my P38 (1994 GEMS 4.6) (drivers ones proving to be annoying!) but i'm curious about some of the findings. The engine was pressurising the cooling system, slightly, and using coolant, but drove fine and you could do 100's of miles in it a day without issue. Lots of short trips seemed to guzzle coolant, but a long trip would only use a little, suggesting it was leaking more when cold perhaps? Spark plugs on 1 and 3 would turn orange over time. Its been like this for several years and i've finally decided to fix it as it seems to (finally!) be getting worse with some signs of water on the other bank. I'm particularly curious having removing the head though, of how exactly its ended up the way it has. Examining the head and pistons, you can see that 1, 3 and 7 all appear to have signs of steam cleaning, with the clean areas of the piston crowns and clean areas of the head. 5 looks pretty normal. Moving over to the gasket, cylinder 1 has obvious rust on the firing ring, so we can imagine thats certainly a path between the water jacket and cyl 1. Oddly enough for the cylinder with the most obvious water route, its the dirtiest of the three cylinders. Cyl3 has a small amount of rust on the fire ring too. I guess i'm pondering how water got into these cylinders in the first place to rust the fire ring though... Especially 3, it doesnt appear to be near any water... Cyl 7 fire ring looks fine, infact theres nothing obvious at all around cyl 7, so not sure why its showing signs of steam cleaning. It is ofcourse adjacent to the water jacket, so it certainly could be leaking across from there. Is there anything else i can check while its apart? Cylinder liners being the obvious question mark. Ive put a stream of photos on imgur: https://imgur.com/a/PyyyvxJ

Yeah mine does the same about half the time, just poke the barrel and it pops out. Not entirely sure ricks issue is the same though, ignition shouldnt stay on even if the barrel is stuck.

Mines a 60kwh. The 80kwh version has the same towing limit though. The 80kwh AWD version can tow slightly more at 1200kg. The data i can find online for the ID4 shows exactly the same limits as the Enyaq. So if his really cant tow, its likely hes just been unlucky and got stung by the "we might not put a towing weight on the V5 if you dont order a tow-bar" clause. FWIW, my dealer was useless, told me i couldnt tow as i didnt order the tow bar, but the V5 and VIN plate clearly shows otherwise. Theres even a tow bar listed in the official accessories catalog, he claimed i couldnt order that because i didnt get tow bar prep, i pointed at the brochure and asked "why does it have two part numbers then, one `with prep` and one `without prep`..." he had no answer and said he'd look into it, then called a few days later saying they had no stock of the towbar and no ETA. Also just realised this was a several month old thread 😂 Happened to restart the browser and this opened in one of the tabs and i set about replying without realising it was a comment from May! Sorry!

Interestingly, I have an Enyaq, which is essentially the same car. It can tow 1 tonne, Skoda sells a roof rack for it (and i've taken it on holiday with a Thule rack fitted just last month), and it has 5 seats (we have three child seats in the back of it!) It weighs a bit under 2 tonnes. Heavy, sure, but not really any different to any other modern vehicle of similar size. Its pretty much the same size externally as my P38, just a bit lower and more streamlined in shape. People like to mention the battery weight, but forget you've removed 300+kgs of turbo diesel, complicated autobox and emissions kit, and replaced it with a much lighter motor and transaxle. In practice, most EV's weigh about the same as an equivalent combustion car. Clearly if what you say is true with the ID4, its more about marketing than technical limitations. For instance, Skoda does say in the manual that if you dont order it with a towbar from the factory then the car "may" not have the towing spec specified on the VIN plate/V5 (which in turn would mean it cant ever tow). However mine was ordered without a tow bar and the V5 and VIN both state it can tow 1000kg. I'm actually a bit annoyed i didnt order the towbar though, as retrofitting one is going to end up costing twice as much. Granted a tonne isnt huge, but its better than 0!

Missing values are 2.5v and 5v i just could not get the nanocom to capture the 2.5v point. I might reconfigure the DAC to output a constant 2.5v and see if that will give me a reading. I did get multiple readings for the 5v point, but it displayed 788kg/hr, which doesnt fit the curve at all. I suspect they've set full scale around 4.8v and anything beyond that is probably used to indicate a fault. In any case, 777kg/hr is around 270hp worth of airflow, so i dont think it'll ever be going beyond there in normal operation.

Had another go last night, and it was a frustrating hour fighting with the Nanocom. Seriously unimpressed with that POS tbh. It refused to stay connected to the ECU when displaying the "AIR - IDLE" tab. you'd get 20-30 seconds at most before it would just stop updating. To get it to reconnect, you had to exit all the way out to the main screen and go all the way back in again. and every time you did that, nanocom stops logging. In the end i just used my phone camera to record the screen, and manually plucked the values out later by rewatching the videos later while sat in front of the computer. Ofcourse each time you start logging its in a random place in the sequence, so you need to do it multiple times to actually see all the figures. Managed 14 of the 16 data points the arduino was outputting which when plotted in excel makes a very nice looking curve. I then used the "trendline" function to plot a line and used the resulting equation to produce 256 data points from the curve. its not 100%, but its very close and i'm sure its good enough for an old V8! So we're getting somewhere. I'll post some of the data in a little while.

I would like to get some points near full scale just to check, but yea, its already pretty close. Might not have time to touch it again until the weekend, will see how it goes. The failure methods are varied. Two i've had have died when hot. The car would start and run fine from cold, after 10, 15, 20mins driving when the under bonnet temps get up, the engine will start coughing, spluttering and becomes completely undrivable. Unplugging the MAF fixes it immediately. I've had two where even from cold the car started but was chuffing black smoke out the exhaust like a diesel just trying to get it to idle, and was running extremely rough and again pretty much undrivable. The used one i've fitted most recently seems to read high but does at least allow the car to be driven. I presume the ECU manages to correct it so far with the fuel trims, but will eventually run out of "trim". Im not really interested in trying to "correct" a broken 25 year old MAF. I want to be able to replace it with a new high quality modern unit. And hopefully some others can benefit from the efforts. The engine will actually run without the MAF connected, and drives pretty well, infact you almost wouldnt know (though i'm undecided if thats a function of how bad the "working" MAF is, or just excellent default programming on landrovers part...), however its quite hard to start with it missing. It takes a moment for the ECU to realise the MAF isnt functional and to switch to whatever default program it has, and it needs a tiny fettle of the throttle to coax it into life. Too much throttle and it'll flood, not enough, and it'll fire then die out. Unfortunately while i've got the "knack" to get it going the wife doesnt, and the first time she drove it without the MAF she ended up stuck in the nursery car park unable to get it started, which as you can imagine went down like a lead balloon.

That was also something i considered, the problem is to do that you need a known good perfectly working 20AM, and i'm not sure those exist any more I also know for sure mine is knackered, as its registering about 6 times the airflow at idle than it should. Its also the fourth or fifth used one i've bought, and they all eventually go the same way. Finding the Nanocom values was a bit of an eureka moment, as its showing me exactly what the ECU thinks a given voltage means in airflow. I just need to iterate the process i started above and capture all the values. I've only got a few points so far due to the limited time i had yesterday, however its already producing a curve that looks at least somewhat sane (some of the values are a little off because i pulled them from some notes i made while testing the current MAF):