geoffbeaumont

Yeah, Les - get your act together Where's a moderator when you need one

The Lucas Hotwire (and, I think, the earlier flapper) EFI systems coarse tune themselves for the first five miles or so after being reset (disconnected from a power source). They then switch into a fine tuning mode that is only capable of small adjustments. Under normal driving conditions they are in fine tuning mode while you are on LPG and do not lose their saved course tuning, so switching back to petrol is no different to starting the engine on petrol. Where you can run into problems is if you've had the battery disconnected and cleared the coarse tune settings. If you run the car on LPG while the ECU is in coarse tuning mode it'll save wildly incorrect settings and be unable to correct them once it's in fine tune mode. The fix is simple - if you've had the battery disconnected, drive the first five miles on petrol. Megasquirt, on the other hand, isn't intended as a generic 'one size fits all' black box - you tune it specifically for your engine (well, you could just drop someone else fuel maps in - but you'd lose one of the benefits of MS). As such it has no need for a self tuning mode and your fuel maps will remain exactly as you set them up. If it's being used with an EGO sensor it will do the fine tuning, but that is 'on the fly' not saved - same as the hotwire fine tuning mode.

If you can possibly afford to, go for the injection ones. The venturi type suffer from one or two issues such as a tendency to flash back (frontfire?) if you start on LPG (bad news, it can blow your intake hose apart or worse. Much worse if you've a flapper type EFI system) and poor idle stabilisation (because they put the gas in before the throttle so there a significant lag before a change in fuel mix takes effect at low revs). They also tend to be less efficient, although I don't think there's a lot in it. If you do go down the megasquirt route you have to go injected - megasquirt isn't able to run a venturi stepper motor (although I'm sure it could be made too - just no-one's written the code, so far as I'm aware). I've got a venturi kit but if I was fitting a new one I'd go injected.

She runs! Spent the weekend over at robhybrid's sorting out knackered engine number two. All went remarkably smoothly and she started first time (much to our surprise...). Got a couple of hours work to do before I drive her home next weekend, but nothing too demanding. Set the ignition timing, fill the coolant, stick the bonnet back on. Take her for a drive and change the oil. Jobs a good'un It turns out reassembling the oil pump with instant gasket was a really bad idea We let it dry first but it still compressed too much and jammed the pump. Result: stripped teeth on the dizzy drive (both gears) and shards of tooth everywhere Timing gear and the oil pump itself had survived, but I'd assumed worst case and bought the bits so we changed them anyway. As for priming the pump, took Rob about two minutes to attach the broken dizzy gear to a steel rod and grind the teeth off. Can't get a better drive tool than that I've also got a very smart black sump as Rob got a bit carried away cleaning it...

VeryDisco's got one on her bumper - "I know your BMW is faster but I'm still in front of you" or something like that - to go with the patch of shiny silver paint on her NATO hitch that was all the damage a few months back from some dosy bint in a beemer hitting her hard enough to give her whiplash. But of course you know that - I recall you beating me to the title change

I'll probably be making my own snorkel anyway, so I can adjust for that to some extent - just make the pipe a bit shorter Or Machynlleth in a dry spell...* *Yes, I do realise the folly of building a truck to cater for dry weather in Wales...

They do a self cleaning one now (ie. it chucks the muck out a side vent instead of collecting it in a bowl). If I go down the precleaner route I'll be getting that type 'cause I'm lazy and it needs less maintenance

I think the mounts on the 3.9 and later 3.5 are the same? Alternator mountings on the 3.5 disco engine that's just replaced the 3.9 in my range rover were, I think, exactly the same.

Iam? Scary thought, my megasquirt is still sat in a cardboard box... Wot fridge said, basically... You can have it use two lambda sensors now - needs a small amount of extra circuitry, but maybe worth it if you're doing a V8. Thinks it's coffee only at the moment, and the milk frother is not recommended for production use You're talking at cross purposes with fridge - the table switching is like having two ECUs - you don't actually need two. You should be able to achieve what you're after by something like this; set up all the petrol injectors on the first bank of injector outputs and all the LPG ones on the second bank. You then set up fuel maps for these such that you have one set of maps that gives you petrol but no LPG and another that gives you LPG but not petrol. If you have megasquirt controlled ignition timing you can change the ignition maps too. I guess you'd need to wire a few other bits of the system up to megasquirt too, but you might be able to either cheat and say share the petrol fuel pump switching to also operate the LPG solenoid valve, or use the arbitrary switchable outputs if the conditions available are suitable. The table switching simply takes a switched 5V input. I'm picking up a 12V input off the gas kit to operate a relay which switches the 5V when the gas kit kicks in and changes the ignition map. My gas kit is a venturi one, so I can't control it with megasquirt, but switching to LPG injection and putting it all in megasquirts hands is something I've considered for the future. All this is from memory, and megasquirt's got quite a bit cleverer over the last few months, so it's probably not entirely accurate - read the links fridge gave, and ask questions on the megasquirt forums.

I was planning on fitting a snorkel, not a roof mounted chicken feeder...

Found some dealers for them in this country. No prices, but worth investigating. Looks like they do standard snorkel rams too, if I decide not to go down the precleaner routes. Saw that last week - it helps in that I can get a better idea what that size of precleaner looks like in place, but not so sure about the flow rate. Just because someone supplies it doesn't mean it's up to the job...

The newer ones don't even have a bowl - they eject the crud out the side. So pretty much zero maintenance JCB engine is probably bigger, but does it rev as high?

I've only seen those moulded snorkels for the left side before. I take it you can get them left and right handed, then? Mind if I ask what they cost you?

They're definitely more than I'd try lifting between a couple of people. If you've got a suitable bar (say a scaffolding pole) you could perhaps sling it from that and lift it with two people at each end? Not sure about headroom - we needed lots when we did mine, but that was mainly the hoist arrangement (Robhybrid's DIY digger attachment). We had a barn and a four post lift to play with so we weren't worrying too much about the ceiling.

Wikipedia puts it at 170 kg (375 lb) dry weight. No idea whether that includes ancillaries - it's for an early 3.5, so a later car with extra bits would offset the saving from not having the intake manifold I guess. No idea how accurate that is - wikipedia is notoriously unreliable. This site (www.v8church.com) says only 320lb depending on ancillaries - it appears to be just someone's home page, so in the absence of more reliable confirmation take that with a pinch of salt too.

Forgot that one - thanks DEANO I didn't have anyone handy when I did mine, so I wedged a torque wrench between the brake pedal and the seat.

As ram tops seems to be hard to come by I was looking at sticking an air precleaner on the end instead - found some that could be made to fit (these ones looked promising), but no prices. I vaguely recall someone on here saying precleaners on snorkels had been tried and didn't work out. Anyone know if that's right, and if so why they didn't? Seems like a great idea to me... Going by the crude engine capacity x rpm = flow rate calculation suggested by astro_al, I reckon the range of flow rates for a 3.5 V8 are in the region of 50-402CFM, for a 3.9/4.0 56-460CFM and even something silly like a 4.8 will top out at 550CFM (not that I'm every likely to stick one in my truck... ). That's based on an idle speed of 800rpm and max of 6500rpm. The specs for the precleaners linked above give the flow rates for the various models (they stock other ranges but these ones were reasonably compact and wouldn't look too silly ) - there are none that quote a flow rate range anything like that large, which suggests to me that if I fitted one that wouldn't restrict air flow at high revs it wouldn't actually be spinning off anything much at the engines normal operating revs. For instance, the smallest one that will cater for a flow rate over 400CFM (KC91) has a minimum flow rate of 388CFM. On a 3.5 that roughly equates to 3140rpm, so the cleaner would only be working if you boot it? I think I'm talking myself out of this idea, but I don't know how accurate my flow rates are. Does anyone have any personal experience to offer? I know these things work well on generators and the like, but they're running at more or less constant revs which makes things a whole lot easier...

Easy rule to get round these - never, ever, click on a link from an email to a particularly sensitive site like paypal or your online banking. If you get an email telling you you need to login, type the site address directly in your browser (the normal address you log in to, not one from the email). If the email was genuine there will normally be some kind of alert on the actual site too. If not, the worst you've done is lost a couple of minutes of your time.

Anyone got a steam hammer? Reckon that'd trump the lot of you

Worth checking whether any other bushes were missed out - I don't think the standard bush kits include rear A-frame bushes (and garages seem to hate doing them). Mine still aren't done even though I supplied polybushes for everything - MJA in Bromsgrove insisted they never wear out and it was just risking wrecking the ball joint for nothing. It sounds very like the way my truck behaved when one of my swivel bearings was failing. That's easy to check - just jack the wheel off the ground and see if it can be rocked in the vertical plane (horizontal movement only would be the wheel bearing - vertical could be either, but I suspect you'd have some horizontal slack too if it was the wheel bearing). Swivel preload is harder to check, but it fixed similar behaviour from my parents discovery - at least one garage had failed to diagnose the problem, another spotted it when the truck was in for unrelated (gearbox) problems. I'm not helping narrow it down, am I?

Unless it's a 'pop into your friendly local landrover specialist' job, I probably won't have a chance to deal with it in time (I'm away on training in Poole for the next couple of days). PM on its way, O2GF74.

Where can you buy them from? Might be worth the investment if I can get my hands on one before the weekend. Else I might take you up on your offer

Might do that, then - there's a good fasteners wholesaler down the road from work. Mutter...that one's a sore point. We kicked off the catastrophe we're patching up now with a sheared oil pump bolt (and went downhill from there...). Still not sure how we managed to jam the oil pump Is that different from the main timing cover gasket? I'm glad the truck's sat in Rob's workshop...hope his fabrication skills are up to his usual standards this weekend... The engine's been sat for about a month and half, but it hasn't been stripped down completely so I'm not too bothered about cutting the fuel and just turning it over on the starter motor to prime it. Or plan B...switch the working vacuum advance onto the dizzy from the old engine and use that instead (that's the 'spare' drive gear anyway).

The ones on it are pretty new anyway - swopped of my old engine. Cheers Nige - hadn't thought of that. Been there, only it was head bolt But copper grease in an alloy block...? Think I'll stick with engine oil for that one... It won't be five years though - this engine's done about 105K, so it's good for at most a couple of years with the mileage I do before it needs a full rebuild. Hopefully the original lump will be going back in then. Had that one too Guess we could stick the one from the old engine on - it's only 1yr/20K or so old, but it's a Britpart one, and I was told by a few people when I fitted it that they'd had them pack up after a year or so anyway.

Heading over to Robhybrid's this weekend to sort out the V8 we put in my truck last year (and broke in the process...). We need to strip down the front end to see how much damage we've done in there - we already know we've bust the oil pump drive tooth and the distributor gear - I'd guess the timing gear will have to be replaced too. I need to put in an order for the bits we need, so...what are they? The engine's a 3.5 out of 92K disco. Oil pump gears Dizzy drive gear (we've got a spare one of these) Timing case gasket Water pump gasket Timing gear (Rob's got a used duplex one, but I'm a bit wary - don't fancy yet another bust engine) Oil pump gasket Am I missing anything?