Turbocharger

Playing with a trailer at home today. Specs are: The front is wearing red+white springs & +2" ES9000s from Procomp. The rear sports some Bearmach +2" 125% rate blue springs and some shocks that I found at Sodbury. There is a Milemarker on the front and a cage in the back. The field slopes down to vehicle-left, and ran out of traction with the difflock open and the front-right wheel in the air. With the more favourable slope when the front-left ran up, I had to stop before hitting the trailer. It looks to me like the new +2" front shocks have given more droop but there isn't the weight to push the front springs to the stops when stationary. At the rear the spring just dislocates and is well up into the arch on full 'stuff'. To me, it works well because there's a little 'suspension' left on full articulation; I can't see how to get more front travel without more weight (electric winch?), softer longer springs (bad for the road) or raising the spring mount on the chassis(!). I'm looking forward to putting longer rear shocks on - the 'up' performance is fine and more 'down' travel can only help.

.. but the price of super unleaded has risen in the south-west. And I suspect the lion's share of the diagnostic costs was seen in good light on the stock market by Exxon's investors too. Well done for finding the fault - now the monster is unleashed!

How much would I be looking at paying for decent manual control over aperture and exposure lengths? Les - I used my mobile phone camera for all my holiday snaps and for capturing details of defects and vandalism at work - at 3.2MP it's more than adequate, and I have to reduce the quality to make the photos useable (on the net or into reports). Seems churlish to spend more on a better camera, only to reduce them back down again... There again, I could be a camera luddite.

Just run the front winch cable underneath?

On the bus engines we deal with, 6(ish) litre Cummins with rotary pumps have a very similar arrangement to the Tdi, and tuning would be exactly the same. For an in-line pump, I'm not sure of the fuelling adjustments. I would add, if you're not sure what you're doing, maybe best left alone?

Engineering graduates, eh? No good will come of it, the last one I heard of was spending his days under buses with a tiny hammer in his hand. Welcome to the forum John (MEng)

Chris, Before I book a ferry etc, any plans for campsites? Do you intend to stay in the same place each night, or move on and carry all your stuff to the next place after a day's laning? Not that it's an organised affair, you understand, I just want to hound you on your holiday around France & Spain.

Won't raising the roll centre give more weight transfer on the axle (ie you'll have less grip, but you'll feel less alarmed...) ?

... who will naturally be quite unbiased

I'm definately up for this - a trip to the south of France certainly appeals, and May will be a good time of year for it. I'll probably head down there the weekend before (ferry on 5th), in a similar scenic fashion to my last trip, avoiding the péage. Then trot around the lanes (there won't be any mud, will there?) and blat back up north on the motorways, returning 14th May.

Remember this? I got charged £250 to have my car towed away from the car park outside my flat because I wasn't displaying a permit, despite having made best efforts to obtain one. In the process the truck damaged one of my wheels too. I wrote a polite letter to them asking for £250, plus £100 to repair the wheel (the scratch actually polished out, but shhh). No response for a month, so a second, short letter from me threatened legal action within ten days. Yesterday, I got a cheque for £297.50! I've no idea where that figure came from, but unless it bounces I seem to have made a profit from the whole escapade. B) (For the record, my mother advises me to bank the cheque, then chase them for the rest; I feel this is excessively cheeky).

It's about time I posted up some of my 'More out there' photos. The LR hasn't let me down on local trips for some while, so in September I set off (with my soon-to-be-deaf girlfriend George) to tempt fate; we had a vague plan to see "Yoo-rope", but we'd only booked a ferry to Calais and a return trip back to Dover 2 weeks later. Mostly avoiding motorways, we hit seven countries in 2000 miles. On the ferry to Frenchland, and onward who-knows-where? Somewhere in France, heading south and stopped for a turbo-whistle break. Paris was subjected to "speed-tourism". Seven hours to see as much as we could. Obviously that doesn't mean we could go inside anywhere... Some scaffolding in Paris, quite tall really. It seems everywhere we went had a Notre Dame... The Louvre, avec pyramid. My beam-benders fell off, so I broke out the gaffer tape and braved the rain to hastily avoid blinding half of the continent. We stopped at a reservoir for a walk, a pretty and isolated spot. Some of the incidental scenery was incredible. We rattled down through France and into Geneve. Entering the village of Misery, somewhere in Switzerland(?) Outside the railway station in Zuerich On the car ferry crossing Bodensee (Lake Constance) We found some German biodiesel, we got less mpg (but it was hilly), subjectively no difference in power and a different smell at the tailpipe. Oktoberfest in Stuttgart. Don't remember much else of that night... Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart. This blue car transporter was used to get the Silver Arrow GP cars to the venues around Europe in the '50s, and seems to have been penned by Gerry Anderson. We found a gorgeous campsite in a valley beside an abandoned railway, just next to a river. The Grand Place in Bruxelles .. and the Atomium. This is as far as we got into Holland, but since we were so close to the border it would have been rude not to... Queuing for the ferry home We had a fantastic time and didn't struggle too much with our fledgling language skills. Pleading looks and Euro-Pictionary are a fall-back but most of the time we were actually understood. Or everyone's very polite. Navigation was occasionally awkward because of the laissez-faire attitude to signage around the world. I promised I wouldn't put this one in: ... but this restores the balance, since I left the fridge running in Strasbourg. Overall, an excellent trip. I'd like to do another one a little further afield, maybe spend a day on the motorways first to get through to Spain (and on to Morocco?) or into Eastern Europe somewhere.

Si, Saley et al - it's good to see some real innovation here. To extend the passive damping idea, could you add a little electronic control and force articulation through the link with an active ram (and the software which I know Si has already written!) in a similar way to the Disco2 ACE system?

I'd love to throw a standard Milemarker & ZF74 into the mix but I think I'm up north that weekend. More importantly, is anyone going to be taking videos?

James - lateral thinking says if you extended the downward-pointing part of the breather pipe back to below the level of the tank, it wouldn't leak if you rolled. Of course, if you did start to get any flow through the pipe it would siphon the whole tank out :S

Geoff, don't know if this helps your calcs but the average number of people on the well-used bus system in London is around eight (well, our buses anyway) The biggest drag to this isn't the return journey for tidal flow - there's always peak loadings that will (should) fill the vehicle to capacity if our commercial boys have got their forecasts right. Our issue is that once we've made the peak vehicle requirement to achieve the service, say every six minutes in the peak, we've invested in that many vehicles so we might as well run them through the day, minus a few that head back to the workshop for maintenance. If fuel was more expensive (or the environment was a bigger issue for us!) we'd park them up and swallow the cost of sitting, watching it depreciate. I imagine the commercial issues are very similar for train operators (but with less latitude to alter their operations). John

If you want to post or pony-express your bling bathroom scales to me, I'd be interested to tilt, wobble and roll my Ninety on the farm trailer at home and see if it weighs more when its upside down...

I found benefit in getting some tension on the screw (but not excessive), then clouting the side of the manifold near the screw to 'shock' it. You could also try using a punch to shock the screw head itself.

Tony - your knowledge of my car's spec scares me slightly... Thanks for the offer but as I said, it's not gone pop (or got worse) in 50k. I'll have a look at the front bearing though, thanks.

The rattle's definately by my leg. From the sound transmitted by the gear lever it sounds more like the main box than the t-box, actually. Good call on difflock though, I'll give it a go when I've put a UJ in the front prop. (And anyway, it's not an ebay gearbox, it came out of a mate's racer after two seasons of competition... so it's tried and tested, yeah?)

For the last 50,000 miles my gearbox has sounded like it's trying to eat its way out of the casing under heavy load at low revs in all gears, particularly 4th and 5th; it's best described as a rattle, similar to holding the round end of a Bic biro lightly between your fingers and spinning it with the other end. There's also a chattering sound at all speeds under no-load (ie betwen drive and overrun). This worried me when the 'box went in but if it was going to die, it would have done by now. Tonight I took the front prop off and locked the centre diff because it's UJ time again. There's a little more backlash and 'click' as it takes up drive (as expected) but... the rattle and chatter have disappeared. I can now give full beans at 1000rpm instead of waiting till 1500rpm before planting the pedal. Any idea what might want attention? There's plenty of oil in both boxes.

Any idea on CFM and max pressure for the unit?

... but if they've only monitored two crashes in four years it's hardly representative. Ah, a warm overgarment with long sleeves, my thanks.

If the 300Tdi is in good nick, you shouldn't need the glowplugs at all. Mine aren't even wired in, I find below -5°C it turns over five times instead of three before it catches. While it's cranking 'lazily', is there any smoke? If not, there's probably no fuel getting to it. If you crack an injector line you'll see how long it takes before fuel spits out.

Bish - it's not a V8 any more, you don't need a fuel gauge. Just set a reminder in your phone for a memorable date (the wife's birthday?) and brim it then.