jamieb61

thanks jules the reason i thought it had gone in the first place was that the mechanic told me and on reading up on the symptoms it seemed to fit.. yes the casing from the first one is ok. the smsller wheel turns, the one providing the drive to the front wheels i believe, but the bigger one which goes to the back doesnt. is it an easy enough repair job then? sorry whats a cough bar? cheers jamie

the ird on my 2000 1.8 freelander went recently, and being a builder and not a mechanic there was no way i was going to try and do it myself! i put the car into the nearest garage to where it broke down which was an official opel service gragage(i live in spain) i sourced a replacement ird second hand from ebay as the scrapyards here didnt have any and a new one was over a grand and had it sent over. when he had fitted it the mechanic called me and said that it was working ok but i needed a new gearbox too, nightmare..but i got on with it found a gearbox again on the internet and sent it too him. on fitting the new gearbox he tells me that when testing the two together he heard a loud banging from the bottom of the car and sure enough the casing of the ird was cracked and spilling oil out. now he is saying that this has happened because the replacement ird i bought must have been faulty and all he meant when he had previously told me it was ok is that it 'looked' ok. i have no reason to mistrust the guy i bought it from as i bought it as working and the fella has masses of positive feedback on ebay and not one thing negative, which leads me to believe this mechanic could have mis diagnosed the problem. 1000 euro's later and my car is if anything worse than it was when he started!! i am reading lots of posts about the v.c.u being a known killer of i.r.d units...is it possible that this is the problem?? this of course would make him responsible for breaking my new ird and i could claw back a bit of money at least...he hasnt once mention this section of the car, i have been under the car and to the untrained eye it all looked o.k but i am no mechanic. please please any advice on this would be very much apreciated, as i cannot afford to buy yet another ird just for him to break again because he hasnt fixed the real problem:(

hi all! recently towards the end of a long trip a slight knocking noise developed from the bottom of the engine on my 2002 1.8 freelander. the noise got louder and louder until i came to a halt when the noise got unbearable and i could hear something was seriously wrong. the engine still ticked over fine and i could still engage all of the gears, it was moving that was the problem...every 5 meters or so a grinding of metal. ok so i got the car picked up by a recovery truck and taken to a local garage where they diagnosed the problem as being the ird unit or transfer box as they called it. i sourced myself one second hand because it was too expensive to buy new and had it sent out to me in spain. took the new part too the garage only to be called 2 days later telling me that the gearbox is gone too! and not only that but it had taken them 10 hours of labour to find this out, without even calling me! obviously i am very annoyed because i would have wanted to go and see for myself that there was another problem straight afetr the new ird was fitted. now i am a builder not a mechanic so i need some advice before i confront them on monday morning..... 1.does it sound feasable that both items went at the same time and only after fitting the new ird can you discover the gearbox has gone too?. 2. does 10 hrs seem close to how long it would take to remove/ replace ird and open up the gearbox? i suspect that as i am english they may be trying to pull a fast one. either way they should have called me after they fitted the ird which was the work we had agreed too and let me come and inspect the new problem to decide what i wanted to do right? thanks for reading and hope someone can help! cheers jamie