FridgeFreezer

I'm not sure LR are being as cynical as you make out... in their day the old ones were better than a lot of cars available to the average farmer... hydraulic brakes, synchros on the gears, heater, windscreen wipers, that sort of luxury! Also nothing attracts the same devotion as the first of something - no-one's cherishing Discoveries like they are older Range Rovers, no-one cherishes Series 3's like they do Series 1's, etc. etc. with very few exceptions. Not sure that makes one better or worse than the other - the original minis are classics but you'd probably sooner have a modern one to go on a long journey or commute in, even if they are a tad more complicated Modern laws (safety, environment, etc.) and modern customers (beyond a few die-hard masochists) want modern vehicles.

COMPARED TO WHERE THE SINISTER ILLUMINATI LIZARD PEOPLE DEMAND THEY GO IN ORDER TO DELIBERATELY RUIN CARS FOR EVERYONE, AS IS THEIR STATED MISSION! NOW YOU KNOW THE TRUTH THIS MESSAGE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT, LIKE ALL THESE FANGLED MODERN THINGS WHAT AREN'T AS GOOD AS WHAT THEY USED TO BE, EEEEH, OOOH ME KNEES....

now I'm wondering if this is the same guy that had the D2 on Unimog axles that was about 10ft tall and equally stupid?

"They haven't seen the car but they've already had this idea in their minds that we've screwed it up" Sounds like the first half of this thread for starters

Yeah, it makes me think "what a prat, bet he'd sell any old cack"

Advice from the last concrete guy I used was a wheelie bin is an excellent way to move concrete - wheelbarrows can't take the weight! Also worth looking for mini-mixer companies that might be able to get their truck up your back passage save a lot of faff.

Did you get any sensors with the gauges?

If you get bored of the 4.6 I might be in the market for one down the line

Also they can only be fitted to certain later vehicles can't they?

What Gazzar said - also those colours are not LR colours; Green is switched fused ignition live in a Series, White is ignition live Red/white is gauge illumination Light green is the regulated side of the voltage regulator which you probably don't want for aftermarket gauges. Green/black is fuel sender (std S3) Green/blue is water temp (std. S3) There's no standard oil pressure sender on Series, Green/Brown was for oil temperature, the Range Rover diagram suggests light green / brown is the std. colour for oil pressure gauge.

99% of the time when electrics are doing something weird that affects more than 1 thing it's a dodgy earth.

Your easiest option is a V8 gearbox from something earlier - any V8 box will work you just need to swap flywheels to suit. That said, I don't think the electronic-shift boxes are rocket surgery but I've not had access to one to play with to really find out.

I have a theory that it's big 4-pot diesels that kill LR gearboxes as they are putting out 4 big thwacks per rev, while an I6 or V8 is dividing its torque over more "beats" per turn and smoothing the shocks out. Also if it's got a DMF that might help as people rarely have those in clunky old diesel conversions - guessing there's a reason modern manufacturers fit them to everything! Whether your lump falls into the "OK with an R380" category is hard to say, LR hung the R380 behind the 4.0 V8 and the TD5 but not the 4.6, I run two 4.6+R380 combos and (touch wood) no issues yet.

Checked the fuses?

The butterfly / throttle stop is not the bypass screw is not the idle air valve... Throttle butterfly should be closed when your foot's not on the pedal. If you have stepper motor drive I'd be setting the bypass screw quite low but not sure of the guidance on that. If you're not using the stepper I'd set the bypass screw to hit a reasonable idle when warm.

Individually they're bullet connectors but cast in a block like that I've no idea.

Ashcrofts have a gear ratio calculator on their website, but there's every chance a 3.9 will pull 33's with a 1.2 transfer box quite happily - it depends what you're doing though, if you want relaxed motorway cruising or more torque off the line towing heavy loads etc. I'd run it and see what you feel like - if it feels like it's revving too high on the motorway then it's an easy & cheap swap.

As smallfry says, the V8 went in front of many gearboxes, the late R380 being preferable all else being equal. If you leave the LT230 where it is and work forward, you'll need to fabricate or buy new engine mounts & position accordingly. 1.4:1 LT230 is liveable with a V8 but it'll be revving higher than needed if you're on normal size tyres, a 1.2:1 ratio (Disco/RR) might be better. It may be stating the obvious but you'll need a high-pressure fuel pump for the EFI as well as a bit of wiring etc. depending on what you're doing.

Watch this space - we're working on it

Whistle/whine I'd suggest turbo boost leak, alternator, or PAS pump. The alternator on the ambulance whines quite loudly if the split-charge switches in with a very low 2nd battery.

I haven't found one yet - there's free electronics schematic programs like KiCad but they don't easily allow some of the stuff you want for a car diagram. Best bet is something like Inkscape IMHO.

Well, the best way is to put a proper blade fusebox in - there' some compact 4 or 8-way ones that would work - it's nice to separate out a few things, and LR don't fuse the lighting circuits because glass fuses can't handle the current

Yeah I've used jacks & stands (ambulance weighs ~2.8t) & engine cranes on it, hammered on stuff on the floor, dragged stuff across it... the only thing that's dented it in a couple of places is hammering on the end of a bar/tube with the other end on the floor or dropping something really heavy & pointy - but honestly it's stuff that would've damaged concrete too. Plus the ability to sweep up easily, clean up spills rather than have them soak in, and roll things on wheels so easily is just great. Also it's brighter and easier to find that m6 nut you just dropped... That was HD levelling screed from Jewson, and epoxy floor paint from Ask Coatings. My garage build thread: putting screed down, and painting the floor. Oh and another thing I just spotted in my garage thread is to run a bit of plastic duct in through the base for the electrics etc. before you pour the slab, makes life easier & neater. I got some ~3" corrugated duct (smooth lined, very important!) and ran it from the edge of the house (where the power was going to come from) under the garden and up through the slab at a convenient point for the fusebox etc. - currently got a power feed and a long network cable to a cheap wifi repeater for uninterrupted tunes / surfing for manuals etc. in the garage. A couple more floor paint glory shots

I can't believe no-one's going to step in and manufacture / re-manufacture replacements, there's millions of vehicles out there with those boxes and they're going to be around for decades yet. Edit: The article doesn't really explicitly say they're stopping production, just that they're stopping delivering them to Land Rover.

There's horror stories for every vehicle and every part - always someone who's had a couple of bad experiences or thinks something (usually whatever they've got in their truck, coincidentally) is the best thing in the world ever. I've run all manner of stuff that people on the internet have told me will be awful and explode and be useless and unreliable and so far they've all been great in fact the best thing I've run was my 1800 Freelander which is a vehicle that gets just about the most hate / worst reputation possible! I really doubt that I can be so exceptionally lucky, after all my lottery numbers still haven't come up There's a lot of stuff people like to point at and deride as being terrible engineering but they forget that every nut and bolt on a modern car has thousands of hours of R&D and testing / optimisation behind it and often there's 50 reasons for it to be that way despite the 1 or 2 reasons you think it's stupid.