Ed Poore

I had that with a friend - has a lot of experience off road but we set ourselves the challenge to see if we could get his P38 and my 110 to the start of our land in the Highlands. We'd been doing tracks all the way up from the Lakes and around the north west of Scotland and each time he asked me to compare it to my planned route. Well, this track's a little easier than the access road... He got so nervous he phoned a friend who turned up a well set up petrol V6 SWB shogun (he and his father were responsible for Portalrover and the 6x6 designs). Anyway we set off and the first "obstacle" is a long loose 1 in 3 slope with the odd boulder that tends to wash down and the odd tree to dodge. "**** Ed - this track is looking tasty", "um, we're still a mile and a half from the start of it"

The tensioner replaces the blanking plate on the front of the timing cover. The idler pulley sits on the threaded boss below it. To tension you put a 1/2" breaker bar into the centre of the tensioner to, well, tension it and then nip up the three bolts that go into the timing cover. Only reason for suggesting it would be off the shelf parts and potentially more wrap around on the pump. But if the pulley on the pump is much smaller I don't think you'll take out the slack in the standard belt so no better off. Although you do have additional adjustment in the pump itself by the sounds of it.

Is it worth changing to the aircon setup? You'd get a bit more of a wrap around the pulley which will mean you can transmit more power through the belt or cause it to slip less as there's more friction. That's why they have that setup, when the pump kicks in you can feel the engine coming under load.

Silly question but you do have it routed the correct way around the pulleys? I thought mine was miles too long until I realised I'd got it routed the wrong way. Mind you the air con drive pulley is about 4" in diameter so if you've got a smaller pulley on the pump then I can see it being too short.

What about disconnecting the pipe from the pump first to see if you can get an indication of the pressure and flow rate it's putting out first? If that seems reasonable then it might be your pipes need cleaning out - maybe an airline up them might help blow stuff out (might want to do backwards). I've been contemplating adapting headlight washer pumps for mine, not got around to it yet though.

The simplest way I've found is to take one of the old bolts, cut it to roughly 1/2 or 2/3rds of it's original length and then sharpen the end to a point on the lathe or with a grinder. You should then be able to use this to align the bushes (whacking it in from the opposite side to the way the bolt will go in), then you can insert the bolt from the other side and knock the podger out.

To be honest I tend to follow James' advice and pop down to the local ag factors place and buy 019 batteries. You can (if you fill in the dip in the middle of the battery box) pretty comfortably fit two 019s side by side in the standard battery box. Interestingly I had two Bosch Silver / S5 or whatever they were called in the L322 (which people had ranted and raved about on the fullfatrr forum) and they were a bunch of poo, incredibly easy to kill and for the price it wasn't worth it. Had a Yuasa in the 110 which winched the 110 across the yard when I killed the second crank, forgot to ask Dad to put it on charge when I left to go back home. Cue battery that held charge but struggled to deliver when cranking the 110, been used as an electric fence battery absolutely fine since then. Never really had an issue with Yuasa or Varta. I think it was a Varta AGM that was in the 110 before I had the Yuasa and that was the original one from 1994 in it, that got replaced in 2012 I think .

OK, not been outside to check but I'm fairly sure that my belt (which is for the air-con) is a ERR2215 which is a 4PK1322.

I'll try and remember to take a look tomorrow. I've got an aircon pump on mine for the diffs.

The STM32s have a number of analogue inputs. What we've done in the past is simply measure across the cable, you don't usually need a potential divider then because you're only measuring mV. Provided the ADC can be floating with respect to ground.

To be honest the Arduino doesn't need much of a steer. There's plenty of code available, they've done a pretty good job at making it accessible for everyone (including kids). However, if you've got some prior experience of micro-controllers might I suggest the STM32 range of micros. The Arduino's have become quite expensive for what they are and there appears to be an ongoing battle between "Genuine" Arduinos and clones. For half the price of a genuine Arduino you can get an STM32 Nucleo that is of the same form-factor (a wonderful decision on their part) and are compatible with the Arduino shields, except that you get a full-blown ARM core with far more functionality. You can also program them using the same environment but should you want to move to something more advanced then that's easy enough (things like the mbed OS for example) or hard-core like myself and doing it all from bare-bones and at the command line.

What sort of cable run are you using? Not using hall effect but we've built and bought plenty of LCD based things from the likes of Farnell / RS and put them into the digger and tractor for checking the alternators etc., are working. We haven't bothered with hall effect sensors because you usually get plenty (read enough) of a voltage drop across the cable itself. So measure the resistance of the cable accurately and use that for calibrating the gauge and away you go. No need for extra shunts and/or hall effect sensors. I'm sure a man of your skills @FridgeFreezer can whip up something with a little micro-controller easily enough.

They're also usually better quality... I don't think I've seen a straight panel on a >300Tdi vehicle, they all seemed to be much thinner.

I like that alternative!

I took my L322 down on long trips to the south of France and up to the Highlands (the Highlands involved more off-road) and to be honest the only thing that's likely to cause issues are flat tyres and the battery. A decent service before hand and recovery and a decent spare tyre should see you through. An IID tool is invaluable thing to have regardless because you can read all the faults and clear them which might get you out of trouble. I can't quite remember but I seem to remember the fan belt on the 3.6TDV8 is a pig to do, I only did it when I was replacing the alternator so had to remove more stuff than normal. Fridge's recommendation of water is a good one because it's often those that while you can wait on recovery you often think if only I had some water then I could make it to the next service station. I used to carry a small (typically 1l) bottle of oil, maybe a 5l bottle of coolant and a couple of other items like that in the spare wheel well or the storage box to the right under the floor in the boot, the IID tool lived under the Venture cam in the dash. It's those things that will just make life easier if you do lose some coolant or oil that allow you to top it up enough to get to the nearest petrol station / garage rather than having to wait 4-5h for the recovery lorry. An extreme case was travelling up to Scotland a few years ago, the 110 had had a serious off-roading weekend before going up and there was some serious off-road up there. On the M6 north near Kendall a wheel bearing failed, it ended up delaying us 36h and costing about £600 (included finding a hotel that had a spare room that night and would take a dog) to carry on. On subsequent similar trips I've started carrying a pair of wheel bearings and the necessary tools because it'll only take me half an hour or so to swap one out rather than a day and a half delay and hassle of trying to find parts and a garage. But I would emphasise that this was on a trip where the vehicle spent a good deal of the time bogged over the top of the wheels...