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BogMonster

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Posts posted by BogMonster

  1. Maybe I'm being thick here but the reason I used to use the freespool on my 8274 (which had the same problem) is cos I can't operate the winch controller and pull the rope out to 50-100ft away at the same time...

    Or are we all running wireless remotes these days? (I have one on the MM and, reliability issues aside, it is a huge improvement)

    Obviously if you have a passenger to do all the hard work it makes sense :D

  2. Ooo :blink: I just discovered the second page of the review...

    I have to say I don't agree with the "excellent ride quality over any surface" bit.

    It was good, but not as good as I'd expect for something weighing that much and riding on independent suspension. I was also interested to note having driven a coil sprung vehicle on 17" wheels (235/70R17) and an air spring vehicle on 18" (255/60R18) very shortly afterwards on the same roads, that the extra inch of metal seemed to cancel out the benefits of the air suspension and then some; I thought the coil spring vehicle had a noticeably better ride, the air suspension vehicle seemed quite fidgety on a jiggly road surface (most of the roads here somewhere between jiggly and #kin awful). More to the point, I didn't think it was a great deal better than my Discovery 2 riding on 255/70R16s. I guess if you could get sensible wheels to put on a D3 and not these silly low profile things with tyres made of concrete, there would be no contest, but I'd rather have a set of 16" wheels, slightly less precise handling and a much nicer ride, personally. But I doubt you can fit 16" wheels to a D3 because of the brakes etc.

    As for the comments on the interior ... well I am biased I suppose but I've always really like the "old" Discovery interior - though the new one is undeniably much, much more spacious and very nice in its own right.

    But the whole debate is a bit like a comment I once heard made about computers - just because the Pentium 47 280000Mhz has just been released, it doesn't actually make your old computer any less capable just because there's now something better on the market, if you only want to do the same things with it. That's kind of how I feel about the Discovery 2 which is why I'm keeping mine for the moment :)

  3. Nige

    There are quite big differences between different brands of tyre

    Sit a 7.50R16 Michelin XS against a 7.50R16 Avon Rangemaster to see what I mean....

    ....probably about an inch difference in the height! maybe a bit more (don't have them handy to check but side by side you would never believe they were the "same size")

    so a lot of the measurement depends on what sort of tyre you are using - and I think 7.50R16 is a "particularly variable size" - the metric sizes are more accurately specified - 205R16 is actually 205/80R16 and they shouldn't vary quite so much

  4. I think the amount of cooling generated by an a/c compressor would be insignificant in terms of the air reqd by the engine - in fact it would almost certainly make things worse as if you fitted a huge a/c compressor then it would drag a lot of power out of the engine.

    A LOx bottle in the back would do the trick though :)

  5. I'd be interested to see some test results too :)

    I would think a faster acting TC would be better suited to an analogue temp gauge with a needle on it - with the digital one it would be a bit like a digital rev counter on a race engine - above a certain rate of change it just ends up looking like garbage. I just like the digital one because it has the max/min function which gives peace of mind that you haven't missed anything!

    That was my only concern with a smaller TC was the mechanical strength and possible effects of half a TC going through a turbine doing 100,000rpm - but I have no experience of what the failure rate of these things are, just the general feeling that twice the size probably meant twice as strong :unsure:

  6. Also agree - I used a Discovery Td5 battery in mine when I had an electric winch, not the cheapest but 110 amp hours meant loads of oomph. No idea about elsewhere but they cost about £80 odd here; if I got an Optima it would be somewhere the wrong side of twice that price by the time I shipped it here (I looked into it once and just about died of fright!!). Since I got the MM I don't need lots of capacity but the same battery will go in the 90 when the standard one dies in a couple of years.

  7. My observations seem to indicate that while there is a lag time it does level off fairly quickly with the t/c supplied. Peak change rate seems to be about 20 degrees per second with the 6mm, maybe a little more.

    I have managed to hold absolutely full throttle up a steep hill in 4th gear for slightly over a minute on two occasions while testing, and in the last 30 seconds of that the temp only increased by about 50 degrees or so IIRC, and the last 15 seconds probably only changed by 3 or 4 degrees, peaking at 609 (standard unmodified 300Tdi engine) on one run, the second run I think got to about 585 but again hardly moving towards the end, if I had held it for another 30 seconds I doubt I would have got more than +10 degrees as a peak.

    I guess what you mean though, is that a quick "blast past" somebody might have a short sharp and very high EGT which you never see?

    One thing I had not thought of and I don't know how relevant it is, would the main components not also have a "thermal lag" i.e. the time the pistons/valves take to actually heat up to the EGT will also be delayed, as the thermocouple is? I guess this wouldn't really apply to the turbo impeller though, as it is so lightweight, so would change temp quickly? What I am thinking is that if a melted piston melts at 800 degrees (say) then if it takes 2 minutes for the temp of the piston's metal to get past 700 even with an EGT of 800 then the thermocouple is probably telling you the "dangerous temperature" which is the temp of the components? Just a few thoughts - interested in comments!

    I am not going to push the limits too much with mine anyway - it's just to have some idea of what is going on instead of none at all which is what I had last time.

  8. Obviously a fake, all the ones I've ever seen are that rather disgusting shade of orange!

    [pedant]

    I think you'll find it's Sandglow LRC361 actually, and sand is yellow not orange :P;)

    [/pedant]

    What were you saying the other day about people making silly posts Les? :ph34r:

    I already have a coat, ta :)

  9. That seems very cheap for a UK spec vehicle - not quite as cheap as mine was :P but a very good deal! How did you manage to wangle that?!

    Definitely crying out for some modifications (planned ones not unplanned ones!) :)

  10. Looking at the ground clearance etc its probably still better offroad than a [scrape] <bang> thud <crunch> "where's my exhaust gone?" Freelander anyway.... when I had my Td4 I was unimpressed by the fact I couldn't drive along well-beaten tracks that a 4x4 Panda could have tackled without hearing stuff underneath!

  11. One thing I am still unclear on is whether a "Type K" will always have the same calibration curve i.e. you could plug any K into my display unit and get a pretty accurate reading? The one I have at the moment is fairly accurate, 99 deg for a freshly boiled kettle (before I got it all sooty!)

    However like you Tony my main interest is in peak temps when flogging it up hills etc or towing, fast response time isn't the main thing I need. If mine breaks like yours did I'll probably get a 3mm but until then the one I have is OK I think.

  12. Richard,

    I have had similar things happening loads of times in the past on our three (one now sold) 2.5P vehicles, the 90 I used to run and the 90 & 110 on Dad's farm, and in every case it was sh** in the carb/fuel system and a good clean out solved it temporarily. It drove me up the wall and was one reason I eventually sold the 90 I used and got a Tdi because it seemed to last about 2-3 months at most and then mysteriously got muck in it and started playing up - but on my 90 the fuel filter was rarely dirty, the tank was drained more times than I care to remember and it was always filled with clean fuel from the pumps. I think it must have been the fuel lines breaking up inside or something like that - never got to the bottom of it all I knew was that dismantling and cleaning out the carb seemed to cure it for a while. It was often as you describe, idle was fine but any amount of throttle and it spluttered and died.

    One trip I did once I drove the damn thing about 10 miles home (off road) and it would only run at all by pumping the throttle frantically because the main jets in the carb were completely blocked and the only fuel going in was from the "accelerator pump" in the carb so every pump of the pedal you got some fuel, then it died again. Made for "rather jerky" progress but I got home in the end - probably knocked about 10 years off the life of the transmission though!

    Have you changed the fuel filter? restricted flow through the filter can cause problems like this if it is completely blocked up with gunge. We used to have this problem on the farm vehicles when filling out of 205L drums, because a lot of the drums had water and muck in the bottom and the silly little filter element on a 2.5P only takes about an eggcupful of muck to block it up....

    Something else I would check - does yours have a "vapour seperator" this is a metal can screwed on the bulkhead at the back of the engine bay? - two fuel pipes going in the top (feed and return to tank) and one out the bottom which goes to the carb? If so take this off and blow it out with compressed air - one problem I had on one of the farm ones at one stage was paint coming off the inside of this unit and blocking the outlet hole in the bottom - giving fuel starvation. At least I think it was paint - I took it off and it rattled inside, whatever it was wouldn't come out, so I banged it on the bench a few times in a rage, blew 150psi through it and whatever was inside shot out through one of the pipes, bounced off the garage wall 20 feet away and I never saw it again. The vehicle ran fine when I put the separator back on :D

    Once you have checked the separator I would also take the fuel line into the carb off, blow that out, and check the very fine gauze filter which is inside the pipe fitting where the fuel line feeds into the carb. I think you undo the fitting and take it out and the filter mesh is inside - I have also had problems with that blocking up in the past.

    Other than that I suggest you buy the Haynes manual on Weber carbs and enjoy your weekend wondering which jet was which - I can vouch for the endless fun of stripping these units having done it far too many times :D

  13. I bet it would cost an arm and both legs to replace a damaged bumper.

    Bit like a Freelander, Discovery Series 2 or Discovery 3 then?

    Vaguely sensible bumpers ended with the Discovery Tdi, everything since then (apart from Defenders of course) have been plastic one-piece things, the Discovery Tdi one was at least mostly made out of metal and if you trashed anything it was usually only the end caps which weren't too expensive.

    Both bumpers on my D2 are one piece plastic affairs and it's not very long since I saw one that had been removed by a single ditch crossing (not mine thankfully!)

  14. Posted this yesterday afternoon but it seemed to disappear too.... :unsure:

    I am using Outlook Express 6 for mail at work and I keep all my old emails, now about 10,000 or so I suppose, for future reference - however I archive them off into other folders to keep the Inbox relatively fast loading (usually keep the current year's messages in the Inbox and have a folder for 2003, folder for 2004, etc etc)

    The reason I do this is so I can go up to the Local Folders (top of the folder tree) and search by senders email address and it turns up everything from them which makes things easy to find. However, in the last few months the computer will turn up a list of messages in the "Find" window but when you try and open the message it says

    "Message could not be displayed

    Outlook Express encountered an unexpected problem while displaying this message. Check your computer for low memory or low disk space and try again."

    This is rubbish as there is plenty of disk space and the computer was only recently upgraded from 128mb RAM to 384mb, and it used to work perfectly well with 128mb (the problem didn't start at the time of the memory upgrade AFAIK)

    If I note the folder that the message is stored in, and the date, I can navigate to the location of the message and open it with no problem, just can't open it from the "find" window - which is a PITA because it makes it very hard to check through a heap of messages when you are looking for something :angry:

    any thoughts please? I can't find anything on the Microsoft knowledge base nor Google

    is there a practical limit on how many emails Outlook Express can cope with and am I about to hit it? I can't find anything published on this and I can't believe I have anywhere near as many emails as some people must have!

    Thanks

    Stephen

  15. Loadage by the sound of the above discussion is almost a measure of "rubbishness" (the amount that a spring can support without being in danger of permanent deformation)

    So the "loadage" of a certain brand of orange springs everybody loves, is probably about 50lb :lol:

    It would be a v complex calculation though, to try and work out the max load on any individual spring under cross axle conditions on a steep uphill/downhill slope where quite possibly a large proportion of the vehicle weight is effectively being supported by the spring on one corner :blink:

    Also does loadage refer to the "average load" at rest or "peak load" e.g. if you hit a trench at 50mph and bottom the suspension out against all the bump stops :unsure:

    With leaf springs if you do that you tend to break them (especially on things like Suzuki SJs) but I don't recall ever hearing of a coil spring breaking under those conditions....?

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