Ed Poore

Mike do you have a straight edge or second head you can put on? I had intermittent water loss issues on my 300, nothing drastically major and could have been a pipe etc. No issues on the head gasket when I took it off but put a different head onto it and touch wood haven't had an issue since. Your propensity for blowing head gaskets makes me think there must be an underlying cause.

The mechanical power of the engine rotating the alternator induces a voltage in the field winding (what the light is connected to - basically it's "grounded" through the alternator). Essentially that induced voltage is ~12V which means that you get 0V dropped across the light which means it goes out as there's no current flowing. I think it's pretty common practice to fit a parallel resistor to the bulb as well in case the bulb goes you don't kill the vehicle through lack of charging (you detect the bulb has failed because the light doesn't illuminate when the ignition is on and engine is not running).

Well if it had been Friday then I could have given you a hand as we'd be on the way to Oswestry. @Jon W is nearish so might have some useful contacts.

I've got almost the opposite issue with the 6x6. She's plated to 4t gross and 8t train which seems to put it into HGV territory. The previous owner was diabetic so had it downplated on the V5 to 3.5t. It's got a 2t payload if at full 4t gross which is handy. This was a little over 3.5t on the back. Glynn stopped loading it when the tyre looked close to the bed.

Hmm., odd I thought most were rated to 3.5t except the station wagons which were 3050kg?

6x6 was 2200kg with 20kg of ratchet straps, two labradors at 30kg each myself (probably round up to the best part of 3 labradors). That's with 3 axles and 6 tyres (14 ply 7.50s at the time on 1 tonne rims they weigh a carp load each).

One way to help mitigate against it (particularly with metal fuel tanks) is, particularly if they're sitting idle for a while, to keep them brimmed. Metal tanks are liable for forming lots of condensation. A friend who runs heavy plant has the "policy" that each machine's tanks are brimmed at the end of the day. Not only does it mean they're ready for work the following day but he's noticed a big drop in maintenance and fixes due to bad fuel and diesel bug since he started doing that. Brimming the tanks basically helps prevent condensation forming. The fuel system in a diesel is reasonably well sealed so a full tank doesn't have humid air in it which then cools overnight and condenses (bearing in mind in plant equipment the tank itself will likely be quite hot because of where they tend to be installed).

Looks a nice versatile bit of kit. If you ever want something a bit bigger let me know I have a few friends who quite often grab bargains. The G. Dufour only set me back scrap value and collected. It did show just how capable the little JCB was. It was dead at the time with a dead starter and although I could have left it on the trailer in the workshop I needed to free up the trailer so the neighbour came around with his tractor. It could just about pick it up by taking all the strain and curling the bale spike with the slings. We managed to get it just inside the workshop door eventually by pushing it sideways with a bottle jack off his tractor (JCB was slightly in the way). Once I replaced the starter a couple of weeks later it just simply picked it up as if it was nothing and I could move it further into the workshop.

If its not bloody obvious Mike is damn good at this. I vaguely recall a message from him a few years back. I'd asked him to make me some dodgy / bad fibreglass and carbon fibre samples (E.g. With dirt, air bubbles etc in it) for a sensing project I was working on for a customer. The message was along the lines that he ****ed up and messed up by not messing up... Basically even though he was specifically asked to do a bad job he failed and had to redo it again to try and mess it up.

Out of curiosity @Stellaghost what mill and lathe do you have? Just ordered up some ISO40 tooling for my G. Dufour mill so looking forward to being able to do some hefty milling on that finally.

He's had lots of practice with two daughters 😂

Admittedly I've not tried it on WiFi - largely because WiFi doesn't work well with 4ft thick heavily iron impregnated walls. At home I'm just using PoE and the NVR is plugged straight into the network with a cable. Actually thinking about it the one at the farm for the lambing is PowerLine (Ethernet over mains and the adapter provides an access point). That's been fine all lambing season. I previously tried HikVision at the recommendation of a number of people - plugging one of their cameras into one of their NVRs proceeded to blow up the PoE hub. The quality was particularly carp as well, I'm actually quite impressed with the Reolink stuff.

I've recently started using camera systems made by Reolink. I have to say I'm mightily impressed, quick and easy to setup. Either power or PoE, some have WiFi built in. 8k video, motion detection, alarms etc., all built in. Got Mum a PTZ version (pan, tilt and zoom) and we mounted it in the lambing barn. In a 20x5m section of the barn it was good enough even with night vision to see if a ewe was starting to lamb. Could even talk to them . All I'm saying is £100 and three screws (provided) and running a cable for power is all you need, you can take it with you as well.

The Lexus V8 is just an engine. The Defender it's destined for is still pottering around quite happily and dare I say it putting in more graft on a daily basis than a lot of vehicles on here do in a month . All I can say is no nasty vibrations or rumbles from it and cruising in comfort on leather Range Rover seats.

Needs to be driven to get a rumble

Light is relative...

I think he's more worried he'll need an artic to pull the trailer if you're let near it.

Put some twist locks in the corner and some jacking legs then you still have a usable trailer

And finish the engine swap so you have a vehicle to deliver it

If it can be got further south for next weekend (Guildford / Aldershot area) I don't mind running it down to Mike.

I also hadn't appreciated with the LT230 you can still retain the locking feature (as far as I know) with an ATB centre so as far as I'm aware the only downside is you can't "spec" a heavy duty centre with the ATB. When bought an Ashcroft LT230 I thought by having an ATB in the centre I'd lose the centre diff lock. I think it was @V8 Freak that corrected me. I'd had a heavy duty centre specced anyway so it was swings and roundabouts. It would be nice to remove slop though, most of mine currently comes from the transfer box output shafts. Mind you I haven't found the roundtuits to check things over properly.

What @Bowie69 said - having ATBs in the middle just means it's less likely the centre will spin freely. An open diff will always split the torque 50:50 between outputs but if one of the outputs has little to no resistance on it then all the power from the input ends up going through to that output. In the instance of open diffs all around then you only need 1 out of the 4 wheels off the ground to lose forward progression, if the centre diff is locked then there's a 50:50 torque and power split so you need one wheel front and rear to lose traction. If you flip it such that you have an open diff in the centre and two ATBs in each axle then you need to lose traction on one of those axles to lose forward momentum. Depending on the particular ATB then this may be possible with one wheel only but definitely if both wheels lost traction (e.g. jacking up the entire front-end).

Well don't feel too bad. When I snapped the first crank and was swapping out the engine for a new one we could not get the damn thing to fire - knew it had at least 3/4 of a tank of diesel. We hooked up Bob's 3 phase 10hp compressor to the fuel tank filler and filled it full of rags as some have suggested. Still no bloody firing up. We'd checked the fuel lines multiple times (both of us having worked on Tdis for, well Bob since they existed) and saw nothing wrong. Wracking our brains as to why the damn thing would not fire. Eventually swapped the lines on the fuel filter over in desperation after about 90 minutes of farting around. Fired straight up

I recall somewhere saying that it was down to the packaging in the engine bay. The engine was shoe horned into the RRS and thus doesn't get the heat out as well. The proper RR was designed around the engine and had more effective cooling around it thus making it a bit more reliable turbo wise. There's also the theory that the owners of the RRSs tended to tweak and tune the engine more often than the owners of the full fat RR thus just increasing the likelihood of something going wrong.

If it's like plasma then it may harden the cut edge which unless you hit it with a grinder makes it difficult to work with.