retropower

Thanks! To be honest the rangey is a bit rough n ready by comparison as it’s my own so I can get away with the odd shortcut. Nothing silly obviously but my metalwork on customer stuff is rather nicer but somewhat slower!!

The guilia is rather nice! 2.7ltr millington engine and sadev 6 speed sequential box plus carbon panels with a lot of careful prep so you can’t tell they are carbon! :-) The stratos engine is an Alfa 3.2 24v v6 with forged pistons and steel rods and an Eaton m112 supercharger from a v8 jaguar and fabricated charge cooled inlet manifold etc etc. should make 450hp ish and completely flat torque curve. Did a similar setup on a 2ltr Vauxhall xe using an m90 xjr6 jag blower and it made 85% of its peak torque everywhere from 1800rpm to 7000rpm!!

Got a few excuses though for the slow progress, amongst the vehicles we are building is one for car designer Gordon Murray which is understandably occupying some of my brain plus we are in the current months “car” magazine. We’ve been in many magazines but not a big mainstream one before. Nicely written article too! Here’s a couple of pages from it!

Long slow slog of panel prep with maybe 1.5 days a month available to work on it....getting there though in baby steps

As above an ls3 would make a lot more sense I think

A suffix k or L r380 in good condition will handle that no problem.

Pm sent

Funnily enough we have an E91 330d manual, but it's in the 330d lol and I think I better leave it there as it's my wife's daily car! What's at Peterborough and when (remember I'm not really a Land Rover person, im new to all this shenanigans!!) i think it will be getting there by early winter, but I doubt it will be fully up and running until spring next yr or so. Have to remember that although this is the only car I'm building for myself, im building around 15 customer projects all from the ground up (much more so than my Range Rover!!!) and in a lot more detail so my brain gets a bit frazzled

Nit picked and stoppered everything (though prep leaves a bit to be desired I have to say!!!) then etched and extra high build primed the lot

Prepped sunroof, prepped and filled and blocked tailgate,

Ruddy long day on it today. Brazed up holes in rear corners, tig welded patches into bad rear corner. Filled rear corners, straightened and filled quarters, blocked everything flat. Re-filled quarters twice more (being ba******) blocked each time, all in Upol D so no sinkage but bugger to sand.

No, we buy them through Northampton motorsport (who we use for almost all our engine Ecu mapping )

http://www.liferacing.com/products/pdus/pdu-16/

We use programmable pdm's a bit on customer project vehicles, but not the ones you mention. We are using Life Racing stuff at the moment, not dissimilar to Motec

Cheers!!! Just wish I had more time to spend on it! Ah well, trying to get 1/4 panels, rear corners, sunroof panel and lower tailgate prepped this coming Saturday. I'm kidding myself if I think all that will get done, but you've got to aim high lol!!

Thanks! Going a metallic jaguar grey for the panelwork, early type grille and headlamp surrounds in Matt black, fabricating ends for the later steel bumpers to get rid of the plastic corner bits and then they will go Matt black too. Losing the side rubbing strips. Will be fitting Matt black 8" x 18" boost type alloys

First bit painted....yay!

Whether it's got the same properties after welding I don't know, but it definitely welds surprisingly nicely! I used 4043 rod (again, whether that's correct I don't know but it worked for me and the welds panel beat ok without splitting) the r380 isn't any different between long and short stick internally. Big change between suffix j box and suffix k and L though

Hi, no im using short stick r380 from a discovery 2 td5. Rebuilt and modified with larger rear bearings. With the panels I'm repairing them just the same as I would with steel ones. Cut out the rotten bits, make up new bits in ns4 aluminium and tig weld them in, body file flat, bit of filler to tidy up

Yea the merc 6 speed (320cdi) is tough from the Ines I've seen, but the gears are smaller than r380 ones and it's only rated to 360nm so less than r380. I don't know the "best" solution but I build a lot of vehicles and I like to find out stuff for myself. As far as I can see r380 failures are either snapped mainshaft on disco 1 boxes due to cross drillings or snapped layshaft due to stupid tiny 5th gear extension support bearings. All the rest got updated over the years, particularly for suffix L td5 boxes, but it's like Land Rover never ran a test mule in 5th gear and had the scale wrong in the drawing at some stage with the rear bearing pair. With these uprated I don't "see" why there should be a problem, but that's scuppered it now saying that lol

Another few hours done. Finished blocking roof. Etch and high build then 320grit dry and 800grit wet, few bits to nitpick but close now. Also repaired the alloy rot on both rear 1/4 panels and tig brazed up the pinholes in one of the rear steel corner sections. New lower tailgate has had its debt pulled and now looks like a brand new one. I've never seen one with NO rust before!!! Must get a pic of that lol!!

If it does break, rather than mess about spending money in bits and bobs, I think a big lump on the tremec and adaptor makes sense.

Will be interesting to see how the r380 fares. I know they don't have a good reputation but dimensionally they should be capable of a pretty decent torque level. I "think" that a lot of the weakness is poor quality of manufacture, coupled with a few undersized components. We will see. The cost of finding out isn't too dramatic. Still more money than I wanted to waste though! I've looked into the Mercedes options and they don't look much better in terms of manual boxes. The ml 6 speed was weak enough (rated to 360nm) that merc derated the engine on the diesel ml on the manual version.

Ps I'm trying to not run the auto box so wouldn't be using the controller already. I'm still committed to the r380 route and if that fails I'm going tremec I think

Interesting! Think I want an easy life though! I have seen a few vnt controllers out there but most are still in development and I don't really want hassle as it will be my main vehicle! I'm not averse to this sort of adventure but I spend my days doing this sort of thing for customers so fancied something simple for my own car lol