Dave W

Possibly one thing to consider is that the petrols go for much less money and the newer they are the bigger the price difference. If you assume (rightly or wrongly !) that depreciation is going to be about the same as a percentage of the current value, then look at the saving you make you could be looking at quite a lot of fuel

That FFRR was an absolute steal at that price, I wish something like that had come up when I was looking for my last one ! Generally the D3/D4 RRS FFRR market price is dominated by mileage as much, if not more than, age. Most of them will have had at least one turbo changed by around 80k miles so buying after that is not a bad thing. Ours had had a turbo changed 6000 miles before we bought it. If you haven't driven one and are under the assumption that the D3/D4 or FFRR is an "update" on a D2 then you really need to get out there and test drive some ! I held back moving from my V8 P38 to a FFRR because I was loathe to buy something with more mileage on it than what I had when it was just a newer model. When I actually went and drove some I realised that these are far more than just an update, they are a VERY different vehicle to anything that came before. Where the P38 was mostly a kind of natural progression from the last RR, the FFRR makes the P38 look like a Series 1 !

The latest addition to my "fleet" is a VW Transporter (T5) that I'm converting into a camper van and, although there is a huge enthusiastic following for the vans (they even wave at each other and have arguments on forums about whether or not they should wave) and loads of aftermarket spares suppliers, it's quite scary when it comes to getting decent info on the mechanical and electrical aspects of it. You know you're heading to the dark side when you have to rely on a Haynes manual for most of the info you need ! It's a 5 cylinder diesel 2.5, they have problems with MAF sensors, cracked and warped exhaust manifolds and, on the manual versions, the fancy DMF clutches. The EGR system sticks but you can buy a bypass kit... The central locking is prone to stopping working due to water ingress into the electrics under the driver's seat, the windows in the rear are notorious for leaking when it rains and the sliding door supports/guides regularly collapse and need to be replaced. Any of that sound at all familiar ? For the first time in over 20 years I have a vehicle without a Land Rover badge on it and I don't even know which garages in the area can MOT and service it, let alone repair it ! With my Land Rovers of all ages I have a choice of 3 trusted specialists for any work I don't have the time/inclination to do myself, with the VW it's either a main dealer or a "normal" jobbing garage...

When I converted my Sankey trailer into a camping trailer I needed to add a frame to support the trailer tent and needed to also find someone who could make a cover for the frame that would accommodate having the tent bolted through it and onto the frame. I designed the frame myself and got a local fabricator to bend it up for me and get it coated (Zintec, I think the coating was called). The frame I used was much heavier duty than needed for just the canvas as it needed to support the weight of the tent and us sleeping on top of it. i then took the trailer and frame to Canvasman and they measured it up and custom made a cover to fit it... http://canvasman.co.uk Very pleased with the end result. The finished frame... The canvas from Canvasman... Tent mounted on top...

I spent ages looking for a replacement for my P38 (another car that everyone told me was a money pit before I bought one) and was looking at D3/D4, Sports and FFRR. in the end I went for the FFRR simply because for a similar year they tended to be lower mileages than the D3/D4 and much higher specced for the same money. The sport was never really an option for me, primarily because of the boot shape being awkward to fit dog crates into. It's always difficult to filter through the horror stories versus the totally reliable version and, let's face it, the more you know about a marque, the more horror stories you've heard. As has already been pointed out, talk to any mechanic that works for a main dealer or spends all his/her time working on a single marque and they will give you a long list of potential problems. After all, how often do mechanics see reliable vehicles ??? My dad worked for IBM as a troubleshooter for their main frames and often joked that if he was in the market he'd not buy an IBM because he'd never seen one that wasn't broken... Anyway, there are some potentially big bills involved with all of them and my first year of ownership (2007 FFRR TDV8) has not been without it's issues. 6 months in I had a "suspension fault" start coming up on the dashboard which turned out to be an air bag with a small air leak. This cost around £250 to put right with a new strut. I had a rear parking sensor fail which cost £100 to fix and have just had a couple of links in the front suspension replaced which cost me another £200. All in all it's not been the cheapest car to run but then it's not been the most expensive either. I'll be keeping it for another year before changing it for a newer model and, if I'm honest, the cost of running it is far outweighed by the pleasure I get from driving it.

I've seen it done using "Classic" Range Rover parts before, one of the guys in our club built his out of RRC parts that he collected over time. His was pretty simple, using a "manual" control with 4 switches - one for each corner. The switches allowed him to raise/lower any corner individually and I believe he used a simple link across each axle so that, when activated, the axle would articulate in an "active" way with the side being pushed up forcing air into the other side, forcing the wheel to the ground. That also gave him an "auto levelling" feature across the axle. I've often wondered about using the airbag pressure to automate a control system or possible even a gyroscope (quadcopter style) to auto level the vehicle when off road ! It would still need some form of height measurement for each corner though as a control, which I've always thought must be the most vulnerable part of the system off road. Maybe one day when I run out of other projects to do !

With such a small amount of time I think I'd concentrate on a few areas, all of which are accessible without going off road... He could definitely head into the Vic High Country. Even sticking to normal routes you can get to see a lot of the area and there are some really nice drives through the mountains and through the ski resorts. If he likes mountain biking most of the ski resorts offer MTB hire and routes too during summer. Thredbo is the main one that we visited on our way to the off road tracks, Thredbo itself is a bit too commercial for our liking but the views from the roads across through Jindabyne, through Thredbo and into the Alpine NP are amazing. There are a few decent camp sites in the NP including the one at Tom Groggin that is accessible from the tarmac road and is where the 4x4 tracks start. Rather than heading to Thredbo directly I'd take the coast road and meander down that way until cutting across to Thredbo. There are loads of places to stay both in the coastal towns and the national parks. If you want to experience camping in woodland with wildlife running through your camp site, Bungonia NP camp site is excellent. We went down to Eden before turning NW up to Thredbo and spent a couple of days there on the coast before heading inland. From Thredbo you can then skirt around and head into the NP however you want as it extends all the way down to the outskirts of Melbourne. It all depends on how much you like mountains and forests I guess ! I'd then head north on the back roads towards Orange, lots of places to stop on the way up including, especially if you've seen the film "The Dish", the observatory at Parkes. You could head up to Bathurst and, if there's no racing on, drive around the circuit before heading into the Blue Mountains. There are a number of visitor centres in the Blue Mountains with trails and guided tours of the rain forest. "i'm a celebrity, get me out of here" is filmed in the Blue Mountains. Depending on time, from the Blue Mountain NP you can either keep heading north west through the parks until you hit the coast then head down to Sydney or head back to Sydney directly. Wherever you end up, the NP centres and the local town information centres have loads of leaflets and displays showing the local attractions and they're well worth a visit. They'll also be able to give some advice on road conditions. Remember that this time of year is right in the middle of the bush fire season so as well as restricting what you can and can't do while camping there is a real risk that roads may be closed so it's worth checking regularly.

It depends on the surface you're likely to drive on and if you're running tubed tyres, tubeless or bead locks. It's only something you can learn with experience as their are no hard and fast rules. It can also vary with tyre patter and size ! That said, if I'm running on and off road, such as on a green laning trip, I usually run at around 24psi as a decent pressure for road use that's good for most off road scenarios. If I'm running off road all day, such as at a trial, I'll drop them as low as 12psi if I'm running tubed tyres or 16psi for tubeless, any lower than that, especially with tubeless and no beadlocks means you risk knocking the tyre off the bead if you hit a bump or slide sideways into an edge. With beadlocks I'll run as low as I feel necessary depending on the terrain. I've even taken the valves out all together when running in deep sand and sand dunes where steering isn't an issue. Running on wet grass or in sand or mud you can run lower pressures than you would if you were on a rocky track where too low a pressure might encourage cuts in the tyres or even pinch punctures.

Not sure about the combination although I can't see it would be a problem as the heater/flame is fully isolated assuming your air inlet and exhaust will both be exiting out of the bottom of the under-seat box. You'll want to build some sort of protection for that pipework though as it's a bit vulnerable off road just there. I think your biggest issue will be the physical space, the Airtronic is not exactly small and the under seat box doesn't have all that much room to grow so I'm not sure there would be enough space, even with a custom box, to fit both in. Can you not just put the aux battery in the battery box ?

Thanks, it's starting to make sense now, from fridge's build and a bit more trawling it looks like the GEMS version uses a simple "normal" connection and the Thor version uses a banjo connection. Looking at where the pump is mounted I might be able to use a standard P38 pipe if I get one to match the pump.

I'm considering buying one of these pumps to fit to my LSx engine as part of an attempt to move the alternator somewhere more sensible than it's current position, I'm not sure if this is specific to the Thor engines or if it's used by others too. As I don't have one in front of me I was wondering if anyone can help decipher the connections it would need. I'm assuming the big pipe on the top is for the pipe to the reservoir. From the picture it looks as if the casting next to that pipe is a mounting point ? The machined face at the bottom (left on the pic) would then be the pressure output to the steering box but why is it such a large area ? Does it use a weird coupling or some sort of intermediate part that bridges those three holes ? If anyone has one of these for sale, especially if it has pipes with it, I'd be very interested as it's one of the few serpentine Land Rover pumps that I've found that work clockwise. I looked at a 300TDi pump which seemed easier to fit but they run anti-clockwise which doesn't suit the space I have available.

They're not too bad, I've not found space a problem even on some bigger projects (like an embedded web server I wrote for one of my projects). My 3D printer uses an Arduino board to drive it and that's a pretty complicated and bulky piece of code. By comparison the compiled code I use on more traditional embedded controllers, MicroChip PIC for example, always takes up far too much room and I end up having to cull the code to try and make it fit - never had that issue with Arduino boards. The biggest issue I find with Arduino in the mainstream/standard environment is that it drives you towards a simple sequential program whereas other systems generally encourage you to use a (much more efficient) interrupt driven architecture. In simple terms with Arduino, if you are monitoring a switch, for example, it is normal to execute a never ending loop and each time through you look at the state of the switch input to see if it's changed. In an event driven environment the hardware will generate an interrupt when the state of the switch changes so you can execute the code you want for that change at that point. It may seem trivial but the more complex your project and the more "random" the events you are looking for might be, the more of a limitation this lack of interrupt driven architecture becomes. Many people follow the "easy route" in Arduino and use the sequential system that most of the examples use and then find they have to relearn everything later when their project starts tying them in knots in massive if/else statements in the main loop. If you look at the example LED flasher code above each time it runs through the loop it spends 2 seconds "delayed" during which time it's not doing anything else (it's actually running a timer interrupt using timer0). If you add any additional code, such as monitoring inputs or updating graphic displays then the delay between flashes can start to change, I know it's only an LED flashing but suppose you were trying to time something more accurately as you would need for a speedo, for example, or as in a recent project of mine, how long an injector is open for ? A much better way to flash an LED (and monitor a switch, come to that) is to use a timer to generate an "interrupt" every second. An interrupt forces the processor to go off and execute a specific piece of your program regardless of what else it might be doing at the time, before returning to where it was. You can set interrupts based on timers and you can also set interrupts based on the state of an input pin changing. Just using those basic interrupts can allow you to accurately time events whilst at the same time respond to user inputs and there aren't many projects that I've worked on where some aspect of it doesn't involve timing something.

You need to use different wheel nuts for alloys (just putting that out there first as I have no idea how familiar you are with them). The reason i point that out is that I can't think of any stud that wouldn't be long enough for an alloy wheel nut to reach which is why they marked the studs that are suitable so you wouldn't accidentally fit them to inappropriate studs. You can use alloy nuts on steel wheels but not the other way around. If you look at the end of the studs they should have a shallow slot shape marked into the end of them, if they haven't then the studs are not suitable for alloy wheels. If you need to change the studs, in theory it's fairly simple - take the hub off, remove the bake disk, "tap" the old studs out with a hammer and "tap" the new ones in. In practice you may need to resort to foxy acetylene to heat the hub up and all manner of cursing and swearing to get the old ones to move after being stuck there since new !

When you disconnect the AFM or the throttle pot or most of the other sensors, the ECU uses a default mode to continue running without them. It's actually more common for a faulty sensor, once disconnected, to make the engine run smoother than the other way around. Did you complete the troubleshooting guide ? That covers off the majority of the wiring and ensures the sensors are in the right ball park. You need to take a methodical approach to fault finding on these engines, using a "scatter gun" approach just leaves you running around in circles, which, from the posts in this topic seems to be what you are doing at the moment.

It's probably not directly related to the handbrake, it's not uncommon for the handbrake cable to act as an earth cable when the main earth cable is either disconnected or has a bad connection. Sometimes it can be felt as the handbrake getting warm when you start the engine, in extreme case it can melt and/or weld the handbrake cable. Check the earth path between the engine, chassis and the battery. It's a single large cable that runs from the negative of the battery, has a "flag" connection that bolts to the chassis and then goes to the engine block. I usually run my own earths as well with one to the bulkhead and one to the transfer box to improve the earth connections around the vehicle (many of which feed back through the bulkhead).

Check the feed from the ignition coil to the ECU, there's a wire that comes from the coil and joins into the loom by the MAF sensor connector. If the LPG kit had tapped into that for it's RPM input then it may have been disconnected or disturbed. Without that signal from the coil the EFi system will not inject fuel or run the fuel pump after the initial prime. It looks like a thick black wire normally and can be mistaken for an earth. I've lost count of the number of hotwire EFi systems that this particular wire has rendered dead after some work on the engine.

It's been a while since I messed about with standard setups but that fuel pressure sounds too low for an EFi, I usually run mine up at around 55-60PSi but I don't know off hand what a standard RV8 would run at so it may be OK. Anyway, it all sounds like a lack of fuelling, restricting the return will boost the fuel rail pressure and richen it up. There are two possible reasons for it running lean, lack of fuel or too much air. With the above in mind, the first thing I'd do is make sure you haven't got a split pipe in the air system somewhere. Any air getting into the inlet manifold which bypasses the MAF sensor will weaken the mixture. If it's not too much air then you're not getting enough fuel and that can be down to either a "mechanical" issue such as low fuel rail pressure, an electrical problem (bad earths on the injectors, for example) or a calculation problem. Most calculation problems can be detected using the standard fault finding tests using a multimeter at the ECU plug. One last thing, given that you have disturbed the fuel tank, can you confirm you have a filter before the regulator ? If so then you may want to change that as it might be restricting the fuel flow and if you haven't then you may need to get the injectors cleaned as they may be partially blocked.

As this is in the competition section, it's worth pointing out that any spacers you fit MUST be TUV approved for UK motorsport under MSA regulations. It used to be the case that only up to 25mm spacers were allowed in the regs but this was changed a few years ago (mainly because 25mm spacers were just too dangerous on a Land Rover due to wheel nut sizes) and 30mm was the thinnest, safe, practical option. At the same time though, they also added the TUV approval requirement and many spacers on the market don't comply with that. As others have said, I'd rather get wheels with the correct offset than mess around with spacers but if you want to fit them and understand the risks then just make sure you get TUV approved ones if you want to compete in the UK.

Chassis number 4F016 (16th Mk1 Ibex), earliest pic I have of it is this one... probably taken not long after it was built.

Both good choices but having driven 16000 miles around Australia and another 14000 miles in the UK on our current set of Cooper ST MAXX, I can say they've handled absolutely everything that has been thrown at them without any issues. For an AT tyre I've not been able to fault them, I even managed to finish well up the order in a recent club trial on them which was pretty good considering everyone else was on more aggressive tyres. Just fitted STT Pros to my competition motor for it's trials tyres, based on my positive experience with the ST MAXX.

The Madman system I have just uses two stainless steel self tappers screwed into the expansion tank about an inch apart, has worked for 3 years so far without any issues and the warning light did come on the one time it was needed to !

John Craddocks are probably about the cheapest, they also do some very good offers on wheel and tyre packages if you need wheels too. Alternatively Tyreleader.co.uk are OK, just bought some STT Pros from them.

Assuming you mean Australia and not Austria, a lot of that will depend on when he wants to go. There are so many places to go and so many areas to visit but many of them are only open for certain times of year. As an example, Vic High Country has a lot of nice, not too challenging routes but they are closed off during the winter (now) unless you fancy skiing. The Simpson desert is closed during the summer due to extreme heat. Many of the roads in the Northern Territories are closed during and after the wet season. Pretty much any time of year there is somewhere in Australia that would be good to go to but end up in the wrong place at the wrong time and you're going to be very limited on what you can do. On our circuit of Australia we came across a lot of beautiful and remote areas, many of them only accessible by 4x4 along dirt/sand roads. The Vic High Country was probably the most pleasant surprise as it'd never come up in our pre-planning and we only drove it after a recommendation from a friend in Sydney. The biggest disappointment was probably the east coast, north of Sydney as far as Brisbane. For a short, 2-3 weeks visit I'd look at flying into Perth and either heading north up the coast or heading into the south west depending on temperature/time of year.

It's a Range Rover/Discovery, the outer half shafts and drive flanges are all one piece. The hub may not be have the same origin as the drive flange, they are interchangeable.

235/85 is fine with 8 inch rims, I've even seen tyre width tables that have 235 as the recommended tyre width for 8" Just checked on the BFG site and for your tyres they show 6-7.5 as the min/max rim size so maybe 8 is pushing it a bit ! I fitted 235/85 Cooper STT Pros to 8 inch rims last week (Cooper can be mounted on 8 inch) so I assumed they'd all be the same but it seems not.