FridgeFreezer

Indeed, some folks can grenade diffs with a 110hp TDi while others can cruise serenely round with more than double the power and never have an issue. Just like some talented folks can roll a Ferrari.

Without wanting to re-litigate a discussion that's been had many many many times within the club committee (Miketomcat will be getting PTSD reading this thread, I know I am!) - while a lot of this stuff sounds sensible, and can work for more regulated stuff like race series where trucks are built to hit the regs, it never works in practice in the "club" environment where people turn up in anything and everything. There are very good sensibly driven trucks that arrive on trailers with no MOT and there are total sh*tboxes that have a hooky MOT and get driven like banger racers because they're going in the crusher on Monday morning anyway. Tyre size/pattern is a tedious one to enforce - people in non-competition clubs fit a vast range of size & patterns to their toys as they get used on road, off road, green laning, farming, whatever - as well as usually going to events held by 3 or 4 different clubs, so if one club says "you can't have bigger than X or more aggressive than Y" they just won't bother turning up, the other clubs will still rent the site and let them tear it up just the same until we ALL get banned, a bit like 7 Sisters... Also my 37's measure at about 36" so are they 36 or 37? Is a Maxxis Creepy Crawler more or less aggressive than a BFG Mud or a Simex or a Trepador or the 15 different Chinese remould copies out there...??? Some poor b*st*rd on the gate has to try and go round looking at people's tyres with a tape measure in hand and have the argument about what's an aggressive treat pattern or not... oh we let your mate in last month with what you're sure are knobblier tyres than this so now you're going to kick off, fun times! Half of them don't even realise which club they've turned up at - our events officer was greatly amused by the chap who turned up on Monday with no membership and said "Oh I didn't realise there was more than one club?" Unfortunately people at the club level are not going to switch a £500-£1000 set of tyres just to please one club or site on a truck that they use for other stuff - and the challenge boys are going to fit whatever's the "best" thing within the rules of the challenges they enter. Also ultimately 7 Sisters is a bit too big to have marshals sat on every track or to tape off every cut-through - hell, we've been going there 18 years now and there's always tracks that none of us have driven before that we'd never have known to tape off in the first place... the land owners would have to do it themselves or issue a very detailed map to stand any chance of catching all the potential problems.

Do we have a medical advice sub-forum round here? I was going to say Nige should be the moderator but that's putting the lunatics in charge of the asylum

I still think you could've made it work if you really tried

Dare I say it was nothing to do with it "stopping development", but more that it would stop those with the biggest chequebook from being able to buy their way to trophies as per so many competitions across almost all manner of sports Can't have the proles turning up in cheap motors and beating the guy who threw 100k at his truck but never learned how to drive it!

Very few micros have enough IO, but GPIO expander chips are cheap & can be added on I2C or SPI easily for basic ON/OFF IO. With regard to Simon's excellent comments, the automotive electrical environment is harsh, often very noisy especially on older vehicles, Littelfuse have a great appnote on it: https://m.littelfuse.com/~/media/electronics_technical/application_notes/varistors/littelfuse_suppression_of_transients_in_an_automotive_environment_application_note.pdf "Suppression of Transients in an Automotive Environment" Some key points are the sorts of spikes and drops you can get from things like engine cranking or jump starting: It's easy to design something that works on your bench from a nice 12v wall-wart power supply or USB adapter but it's very different making it survive (and work reliably) in an old Land Rover.

You're joking??? Both of them are never-ending jobs lists / rolling rebuilds although the general trend is towards "more done than not" they'll never be 100% perfect. Big jobs this year: Replace all the brakes on the ambulance, swap to discs on the rear + vented on the front because it very much CAN get them hot enough on alpine passes to warrant it, also we've never really touched the brakes other than maybe some pads & a sticky calliper in the 10 years we've now owned it so they must be due some love. The ambulance also needs a new bed foam and, like the 109, there's a ton of little bits really want sorting out. I suspect the driver's footwell will need doing too. For the 109 I might even start looking at the winch, but that's mostly going to mean spending big lumps of cash with the hydraulics chap unless I get really lucky and TBH it's managed this long without one at this point the winch would mostly be a project for the sake of a project, although if I can keep the thing up together and get out to more events in it that would mean more marshalling duties and some justification for having a winch. I do have vague plans to maybe start a few jobs on the RR, lifting it up and rolling the axles out to see what's wrong with them might be a start. I came close to buying a portable hydraulic lift last year to do some bits on the Mini, I'm thinking that one of those would also enable the RR body & chassis to be separated and propped up in the shed / moved to be worked on but that's the thick end of a grand for a piece of equipment, and right now finances need to recover a bit.

As I think has been said in another thread, with that carb swap and lord knows what else non-standard it could easily be a mismatch between gauge & sender on your truck.

We don't have any info on that - depends how "blanket" this ban is and how much they distinguish between events. I suspect stuff that sticks to the main fats tracks they'd continue to allow, although they did restrict them to AT's after a nasty accident some years ago which spawned a lot of rumours at the time. Rest assured we'll keep in touch with them, the problem for us as a club is that if we have to start putting very strict rules in it limits the turnout and/or makes the marshalling job almost impossible - for a non-comp club to start seriously scrutineering vehicles or having to police every truck/group on the site would be prohibitive. Like it or not, a lot of folks these days are running bigger tyres and you won't get them to swap for one "play" event, and as others have said there's not a great correlation between tyre size and damage, it's more about the drivers - some eejit in an old disco on knobblies with open diffs can tear stuff up that other trucks on big tyres or lockers would just cruise through. Most damage I see on any site is folks being what I would generously call "over-ambitious", no matter what they're driving - some of the biggest messes we've had have been caused by near standard trucks ending up where they really shouldn't be. You won't change that - even sites that mark out routes in difficulty levels fare no better from what I've seen.

If you're getting fuel injected then the ECU is seeing a signal from the ignition telling it the engine is turning, and it's injecting fuel which means the ECU is alive & the injectors & fuel pump are working. I suspect the dying is the ignition side of things - ignition amp or coil or the like. The high idle could be a stuck/gummed-up idle air stepper (back of plenum) or a few other things, ISTR the 14CUX likes to see a speed signal from the gearbox and can get a bit funny without it. It's a very simple old hector and the problem will be something simple too.

TBH as long as we have access to get a rented portaloo or three in we can live with a bare field, if a site owner has the ability to supply loos or running water / electric that's a bonus. And as Ross says, we'd happily look at any site that will have us - further away ones would ideally be big enough to justify a weekend trek but I wouldn't rule anything out, Sunday's always quieter at 7S as lots of folks break their trucks or head home early.

I've heard more than a few folks on here who run 200TDi's with no fan fitted all year round.

TBF the photo you posted was from a play site where they don't really mind what happens. 7 Sisters we explicitly brief people NOT to churn up the edges of the main tracks, but of course there's always exceptions. I get the impression other clubs/organisations using the site were not as careful as we tried to be. We've got the letter direct from the land owners and they explicitly say they're not running ANY more 4x4 play days. No need for internet rumours.

Can confirm from experience that the round 2A heater works surprisingly well if there's an LS6 in front of it, Jez reckoned it even created a warm current while underwater

It doesn't sound like the environment agency were involved - what they have gotten fed up with is people cutting across the main tracks which erodes the edges or cuts/blocks the drainage ditches, and of course the cost of getting machines up there and reinstating the main tracks vastly outweighs the money they make even from fairly well-attended 4x4 events. So ultimately it's people not following the site rules and f***ing it up for everyone.

If you have 13v with the engine running and things switched on then the alternator is charging the battery. Whatever is wrong with the engine would be a separate thing, the only way the alternator could drag a 200TDi down is if the it seized up but even then it would make a hell of a noise and shred the V-belt.

A long time ago now Dirtydiesel lent me a set of 255r16 XZL's and they were... not good. Probably last a million miles on a Land Rover and bullets would bounce off them, but they were definitely designed for something weighing 7.5t or more, even when one of my rims sprang a leak and let all the air out the truck was still sitting level on 0psi and they didn't have much bite off-road at all, I'd reckon BFG AT's would have done better!

Easy check is if it doesn't have an air bleed hole / jiggle pin it's likely junk.

There's been a few rumours floating round but we've now had official confirmation - Walters are stopping 4x4 play days indefinitely due to site damage We're busy looking into alternative sites so happy to hear any recommendations. Other than that - thanks to everyone who came to a Shire LRC weekend up there, it was good to see you all! A million years ago!

I mean, if Escape can come from Belgium you are on thing ground excuses wise

21st April but it's not in the calendar yet as I haven't updated the website yet

Would be good to see you at one of ours - you can bimble gently round Mannington too, but that doesn't make for such spectacular photos! Here's a few I've liberated from faceache: I do like this 88.

A few pics... A highly kitted 130, wheelbase can help at this site but not when your front end hits a vertical wall. It's hard to see in any of the pics but nothing in the woods is on the flat - this was coming up a fair slope before you count the big holes dug by previous trucks. The GULF bobtailed 110 is an interesting truck, although he does make all the smoke. This is a steep climb that's pretty dug out, not exactly sure what they were aiming for going across it There was a lively discussion on driver error Vs navigator failure going on, the front plasma snapped and the rear winch motor fell off although they did get it out in the end! Cones can't stop meeeee! 3 minutes ago there was no-one to be seen, the moment someone tries something like this they all come out to point & laugh STUCK! It's not often I get that bottoming-out feeling but all 4 wheels were spinning and there was absolutely zero movement! In my defence, @Escape was in the passenger seat and told me it would be fine perhaps I shouldn't listen to the man who brought a Lotus to an off-road site?

For the contacts yes, the coil side could be 5v as that'll most likely be what all the logic runs on - that or 3.3v but I think automotive stuff stuck with 5v for quite a while for robustness.

It probably won't care about the snorkel unless it's significantly restrictive, and even then it will only matter at full throttle / high RPM as there's not much air flowing in the bottom left of the map.