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Jamie_grieve

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Everything posted by Jamie_grieve

  1. Can we try to keep on topic about the defender replacement please?
  2. I haven't seen any which is why I was asking you. I don't have the exposure to them as they don't exist in the fleets of any agencies in any developing countries where I work. That said, range rovers and discoveries definitely don't get the same abuse that defenders get. Same argument exists when it's well known that 90/110 half shafts break all the time yet the same cannot be said of the same parts in range rover classics and discovery ones in normal use. The only difference is the demographic of ownership and how they get (ab)used. That being said, it's still a pretty weak defence when at the end of the day it's still the same pitiful diameter as a defender shaft which are known around the world, even by land rover enthusiasts, to be especially weak compared to those on other vehicles. I suppose they probably aren't going to be very hard worked in the SUV role compared to that of a utility vehicle. As I said before with reference to the Ashcroft shafts, the metallurgy is almost inconsequential compared to the diameter. The one chance to move a weakness in the defender design beyond constraints based on 1930's Rover car diffs and they blew it. That on its own will be a deal breaker for some right there. Saying the D7U shafts are stronger than a defender shaft is like saying nothing at all, there are people with stronger knitting needles. I want to hear that they're stronger than a Nissan Patrol shaft. Can we say that by continuing with the same tiny half shaft diameter as the defender that any measure of redundancy or 'over-enginneering' was not considered as part of the design brief? If there's no redundancy in this critical part of the drivetrain, how confident are we that any redundancy exists in any other part of the vehicle let alone elsewhere in the drivetrain? Surely not even JLR wants to see another epidemic of L322 type gearbox failures across the board or do they have other weaknesses intentionally built in for planned obsolescence? I'm confused, what is an L633, if it's the defender replacement, what is an L851? Can you show us a picture? If it's the defender replacement you have access to, is there any good mechanical news at all that you can share for those few amongst us who would love to consider this vehicle for deployment in places that don't have access to a main dealer network? I'm sure you'll have all kinds of non disclosure and confidentiality obligations but I'm not sure at this stage all of the negative speculation is constructive, there must be something good you can share? It would be nice to have something positive to be discussing that is more than just opinion by a vested interest saying how good something is. Out of curiosity, do you know the ring gear diameter and the size and separation of the pinion bearings in the D7U platform? Are there rubber couplings or cv joints or what on the propshafts of the L663? Are there any grease nipples anywhere?
  3. I'm sure it's just a matter of time until one of us is building an electric defender from junkyard parts or online kits and racing them against the electric version of the defender replacement, well, if it's ever launched before we're all old and dead. The torque delivery from electric motors really suits off road driving and generally it's all packaged in handy modules so should be easy for us to mix and match parts when the prices come down. I can also imagine the future arguments on here when whatever the defender turns into gets all the ten year old range rover motor and controller tech and we start complaining about that instead.
  4. Cheers for the response. Had I been going from truck to car injectors that would have made perfect sense but going from the ev1 car type to the mini truck type just doesn’t make sense as the injectors are apparently so small and feeble. I ordered genuine bosch injectors from my local motor factors and will just go with whatever flow rate they have. Getting flow matched injectors was just a thought at the time but probably not worth the extra effort to find for my application. Any more information on what you were building and thoughts on going to car manifold?
  5. You’re missing the point, it’s been clearly demonstrated by vehicles in the utility sector for the last 100 years that 30mm is not big enough for a half shaft in a vehicle required to carry heavy weight over arduous terrain, especially one with locking differentials. Land Rover has not previously been known for quality materials or metallurgy, do you know something we don’t about new shaft making processes at JLR not available to other manufacturers? I know you believe your competitions to be a measure of the strength of something but they just aren’t. Put the shafts in a test rig and get some numbers or do some calcs but talking about flat shifting in a vehicle clearly too light to put the power to the ground has just no relevance. You’ll see that the numbers don’t lie. Competition rally raid use just isn’t that harsh compared to 10,000 hours carrying and towing tons of drill pipes for example. Components for race cars are allowed to be closer to the edges of their design envelope. I previously showed the types of wear, fatigue and damage that long term use brings. I’m confident that you never broke a factory steel wheel due to fatigue in any competition nor any Bowler has ever done so. There just aren’t the hours in the day for it. Until you have experienced and can become familiar with that type of mechanical abuse it’s going to be difficult for you to see where many of us are coming from, especially when these competition vehicles are generally using lightweight wheels and small tyres.
  6. No, the rest of us aren't finished yet, we're still arguing about the same things 28 pages later with nobody seemingly reading the others posts. It's generally along the lines of: Longbeards. The Defender had all these shortcomings, will the replacement address x, y and z? Hipsters. (in response to the above) The abs, etc, hdc, means this new vehicle will go anywhere and will be better than every other new vehicle off road (which by law also has to have abs, etc, hdc), the old defender without these features could never do that. Have you never been in a modern JLR product with air suspension? Longbeards. But there are basic rules and physical constraints about making a proficient off highway vehicle, wheel travel, ground clearance, approach, departure and breakover angles... Hipsters. (in response to the above) The abs, etc, hdc, means this new vehicle will go anywhere and is better than every other new vehicle off road (which by law has to have abs, etc, hdc), the old defender without these features could never do that. Have you never been in a modern JLR product with air suspension? Longbeards. We get that the electronics help but, back to the basics.. Hipsters. (in response to the above) The abs, etc, hdc, means this new vehicle will go anywhere and will be better than every other new vehicle off road (which by law has to have abs, etc, hdc), the old defender without these features could never do that. Have you never been in a modern JLR product with air suspension? Longbeards. We know the old one was rubbish but it kinda worked because of basic geometry and it was easy to fix. Hipsters. (in response to the above) The abs, etc, hdc, means this new vehicle will go anywhere and will be better than every other new vehicle off road (which by law has to have abs, etc, hdc), the old defender without these features could never do that. Have you never been in a modern JLR product with air suspension? And so on and so forth...
  7. Wrong, if you go back and actually read the previous posts you'll see that this Topic was started to encourage technical discussion and thus far Discomikey has actually been one of the main exponents of technical discourse. Please feel free to add something of technical value as he has too.
  8. No, not even close. The horsepower figure is completely irrelevant, a 30mm 300M shaft likely to yield around 6000lbs ft of torque can easily be broken by a 1/2hp drill motor and a hydraulic pump. 700Nm of torque is equally irrelevant as I'm totally guessing here that your lowest overall gearing is way lower than say 10:1 so it only tells me that the vehicle you refer to is incapable of putting it's torque to the ground either by light weight or poor traction. Regardless of you not managing to break a 30mm shaft, many people have and most other manufacturer of 4x4 utility vehicles have thought similarly and put larger shafts in.Toyota are 33mm, that's the benchmark, Mitsubishi are 36mm, Nissan rears are 40mm. Everything American is at least 35 spline 37mm. Why would they want to continue with the tradition of weak drivetrains? The autobox for sure must be what's saving them. Does that preclude the defender replacement from having a simple manual gearbox? Because there aren't any funds or willingness for decent drivetrain components? I'm sure Mr Ashcroft knows a thing or two about making 30mm shafts yet they can't be used on tyres over 35" and many have broken his shafts with smaller tyres in competition. I doubt there would be more than a 10% difference in strength between his fine products and anything JLR will mass produce. The heat treatment and material specs are very unlikely to be any different than any commercial grade of stock you or I could buy off the shelf. How hard exactly have you actually been trying to break them? Please tell us more about how strong or indeed weak any other parts of the D7U platform are given your extensive testing thus far. Thanks.
  9. I think you want something hard so it doesn't try and bind up on you. Maybe a bit of leaf spring heated, tempered and arched up the way along the top of the axle tube where the spring rubs cunningly curved to match the arc of the axle against the spring would be sufficiently complicated to amuse you yet simple enough to be reliable? All my truck rear bogies just have the ends of the springs rubbing on a plate on the axles.
  10. I'm not sure you will gain anything with the additional complexity of the necessary linkages and moving parts needed for the spring to track the axle compared to just having a slipper pad on top of the axle where the spring bears on it and let it rub away to it's hearts desire. You could trap it in a box section wider than the spring but it wouldn't achieve anything advantageous either.
  11. Regardless of the defender replacement for a moment, it’s awesome that Land Rover’s actually supporting conservation. I know there’s always been a marketing angle to it but the targets of their corporate responsibility could have been anything. I think the pictures here illustrate fairly well the points I have been making throughout this thread about (the lack of) wheel travel and ground clearance.
  12. No dilemma thus far, the defenders you have previously bought are perfectly suited to an individual with a long beard or at least in the 'longbeard' camp. The dilemma will be when the replacement is eventually announced, (by which time you'l probably be tripping over your beard) when you may have to adopt a more modern approach to facial hair, possibly a goatee or designer stubble to go with a man bun and other hipster paraphernalia. I understand a hipster is someone who looks like a forestry worker but couldn't actually start or use a chainsaw, like someone who would want to be seen in a defender but with no idea what low range or difflocks are.
  13. Exactly. I also hope and think the whole thing will be aluminium except the steel subframes which ought to be galvanised as recent protection on range rovers and discoveries has been very poor on these parts. The galvanising would allow the steel to play nicer with the aluminium too. I always thought a Lotus Elise would be a great basis for an off roader years ago as the bonded extruded aluminium chassis is so light yet so strong. I think Fridge is getting confused by what the' longbeards' actually want out of this thing. We want to see an extremely durable, capable, and repairable vehicle that above all is reliable. We don't want to see a rebadged discovery 5 floorpan with no ground clearance, no wheel travel and a weak drivetrain relying on electronics to cross bad terrain with the mechanical and electrical problems that have plagued Land Rover and JLR for decades. Sadly I've yet to see anything at all from any of the press releases to address these fears. I do disagree with the notion that 'longbeards' don't buy or influence the sale of new cars, particularly this one. I would suggest with the marketing that many urban buyers would not do so were it not for the image. Remember the Barry Crump hilux adverts anyone as a case in point? One thing we can agree on is crash safety, A defender is a deathtrap on wheels compared to everything else made in the last 40 years. Nothing had such poor roll over or side impact protection. A child could design something better although I suppose 'we' (I put myself in the longbeards camp here, even though my beard is short) probably do worry about the amount of unnecessary plastic tat that will inevitably be hanging from the defender replacement and the vulnerability of critical components surely to be hidden by thin plastic and / or aluminium underbody 'protection'. Talking of vulnerability, I was surprised at the total lack of support from the longbeards camp about the ridiculous placement of the exhaust!!
  14. Yet another picture of the defender replacement from JLR, I only post it as there's a piece of disguise missing from behind the front wheel revealing some interesting architecture going on there. Also of note, the bottom of the front wing stops more or less level with the top of the rim, much the same as with the defender and previous incarnations of the breed. The line seems to carry on across the door and onto the rear wing where other pictures have shown that part to be removable. I wonder if the whole sill and bottom of the door is just part of the disguise and is removable? If not, I wonder if you can jack along the entire length of the sill? It looks to be made of more than cheese but then, it would have to be given how low to the ground it is. I recently measured a disco 5 half shaft at 30mm so it'll snap at a similar threshold to any of the 24 spline stuff we know already, I wonder if the defender replacement which uses the same platform and suspension will have any unique parts in the drivetrain other than damping and spring rate settings? I'm still going to moan about not one single picture released showing anything other than low profile road tyres after 1.2 million miles of testing. I wonder how much thought they gave to the handling on aggressive mud tyres or snow chains?
  15. Cheers for the response, and a good one at that. I should have said already actually, that is a Bosch injector from a Volvo I was looking for. I think it's one of the most commonly used in aftermarket applications. I'm struggling to avoid the word 'tuning' but that's exactly what it is. I was looking for a set of genuine flow matched ones but the only ones I've found on my feeble searching thus far that claim to be are Chinese knockoffs. It's EV1 connections I need which thankfully seem to be the most common in Europe but not in flow matched sets of 8 because of our predisposition towards cars with not enough cylinders. Some further information on the engine for those in the know as suggestions are totally welcome. The engine is part of the LS series of engines from Chevrolet. Mine has a 9.4:1 compression ratio, I've added a 25kg flywheel to it to help with running at low rpm. Cam specs are: Duration @ .050 in. (int./exh.) 191/190 196/207 Valve Lift (int./exh.) 0.457 in./0.466 in. 0.467 in./0.479 in. Lobe Separation Angle 114° 116° I'd like to have a clean 500 rpm idle and aiming for over 40hp at 1000rpm. I was wondering if the duty cycle of larger injectors would help with sequential injection timinng at lower rpm? Everything on the internet seems to focus on high rpm power for these engines. I'm only interested in the 500-2000 rpm range just now. I will have a variable displacement hydraulic pump driven off the crank and was even thinking about a hydraulic powered supercharger for low rpm boost. I'm also considering adding a turbo, partly for power and partly for noise reduction. The new injectors need to be sized to allow for a bit of boost. One thing I will struggle with any kind of forced induction is that because I wan't boost at low rpm any compressor will be out of its comfort zone going ten times faster. That's the point of this engine for me, something that can go from 500 to 5000 rpm. My lowest gear is about 90:1 so even the tiny amount of torque it makes at 500rpm coupled with a 25kg flywheel should take me over a tree stump with a 40" tyre. I'm not remotely interested in high rpm horsepower numbers. It has two knock sensors I think I'll be relying on pretty heavily to start with. The picture is how I did the pto for the crank pulley. It's an adapter ring turned to sit inside the pulley and is retained by four 8mm dowels and two further 8mm dowels to pin the pulley to the crank. I used the adapter as a drill guide to drill two 5/16" holes for the 8mm crank dowels. The flange face is just the same as a land rover flange on a transfer case or diff. I turned a groove and put a circlip and bolts in after this pic was taken to make it easier to use, the diameter of the inner part catches the bolt heads just like the regular flanges do to stop them turning. The crank bolt holds it together. On an LS engine, the crank pulley / harmonic damper is an interference fit only with no keyway so the extra pins I put in are to stop it turning on the crank when under load. The two pins are drilled half on the crank and half on the pulley.
  16. Yes, but no. The injectors were correct for an application that this engine isn't in now. The original configuration had a rev limit of 5800 rpm at 80% injector duty cycle. The injectors in it have a mini delphi connector that suited the old loom but not my new loom and are well known to lean out and cause problems. They run at 80-90% duty cycle in the factory standard applications. They only flow around 3.180 gm/sec or 25.2lb/hr @ 58 psi compared even to the smaller displacement engines of the same family which flow 30lbs. There are around ten different factory injectors for the LS family of engines, none of which are recommended by 20 years of peoples experience it seems. I wanted an injector with which the Megasquirt community was familiar with and that all the data such as dead time and offset was available and around the flow range of other identical engines and easily obtained base map tunes. The same injectors I'm looking at have been used in a number of rover v8 builds and I think are well suited to the application and will have enough flow should I add a little boost. Have you any suggestions to find reasonably priced flow matched injectors? Cheers for being the only one to respond too!!
  17. That right there. If diagnostics was open source for the defender replacement it would alleviate most of the fears of the last 22 pages here and owners could actually modify certain non safety related systems, override others or at least diagnose and repair faults. Although one fear with an easy to repair vehicle like the defender is the proliferation of companies like Britpart and others selling substandard parts. If land rover sold parts at reasonable prices it would prevent this at a stroke. Why do some get a 60 or 70% discount depending on status and another owner pays full price? Why does land rover find it has to charge £575 to change the front pads and discs on an old Defender? I remember changing pads every month in a coal mine, I can only imagine the expense with a vehicle using traction control regularly. It's of particular relevance, as with the Toyota 70 series, many vehicles are sold to, and operate in regions with no dealer support whatsoever.
  18. Thanks for posting, I couldn't bring myself to do it. I still think there's an elaborate hoax going on.
  19. I got a Megasquirt Gold box to run my LQ4 after the factory loom and ECU was as cut out from the vehicle, the aftermarket ECU and loom almost worked but had the immobiliser (VATS) enabled which cut power to the injectors. I imported the gold box from EFI Source who makes them in the states after really struggling to find any open source information on tuning LS type engines in the UK. It arrived after getting mugged by customs and general confusion between the US postal service, UPS and Parcelforce. DHL is the only way to ship small items from the States I think. The LQ4 is going in an off roader bolted to an LT95 4 speed from a 101 with a trailer / Perentie PTO on it. I'm only now at the stage of needing it running properly and need to change the injectors to an EV1 type. I was looking for an injector that is well known and supported in various applications and was thinking the Bosch : 0280155968 'green giant' 440cc injectors are about the right size for my application. There are a lot of Chinese knockoffs of these things which seem to have sold in large numbers but less so of the genuine ones. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Genuine-BOSCH-0280155968-Fuel-Injector-0-280-155-968-GREEN-GIANT-440cc-EV1-4/112888562774?epid=249286692&hash=item1a48aec456:g:FA4AAOSwpNxatUhJ Has anybody any recommendations for where to get 8 flow matched injectors from, preferably in the UK? I have never used megasquirt in my entire life so it will be a learning experience for me for sure. I'll post random updates here and probably a lot more questions. I have sooo many questions but also thanks to everyone who's posted here in this sub forum, especially Nige which is partly why I went with megasquirt instead of Holley or any of the other big names. I added a picture just because posts are boring without them and I don't have any pictures of injectors I don't have. The front suspension is a one link.
  20. Why does Mercedes continue making money from constantly updated unimogs then? Iveco joined the money making utility bandwagon with the Daily 4x4, Jim Ratcliffe also thinks there's money to be made from the projekt grenadier, there's a market and money to be made from a decent utility vehicle, even at the price point that JLR would need to come in at, although a few bits of old range rover dragged out of the scrap bin won't cut it this time round regardless of how much new pedestrian friendly plastic tat gets nailed on top. The market for a utility vehicle at a lower price point is massive, if JLR with TATA's help could get into that, it would put them on the map in places they haven't been in decades.
  21. That is exactly the truth. At 0:36 you can clearly see the front wheel has run out of downwards travel and the traction control has kicked in holding the wheel at 0:37. This tells me two things, one they're either not fitted with a front locker or aren't using it and two, the people trying to convince me or themselves that the d7u platform has more travel than coils and live axles are mistaken. The (lack of) wheel travel here and is almost identical to the video of my friends disco 5 I posted earlier. Just to be clear, I'm not one of these people saying old is good, I'm in the 'old was garbage and should be burned with fire' camp. I just think a huge opportunity has been missed if this is the defender replacement and I don't understand why anything as simple as a utility body on a D7U platform should have taken 5 years to develop, unless it's just a clever hoax which I increasingly believe it to be. There's also nothing particularly durable about that suspension either.
  22. Are they testing it off road? Have you actually seen any video or pictures to that effect? I haven't but of course I may have missed it. I believe it was purely a publicity stunt and nothing else. They've had that same suspension for at least 4 years, what's left to test? Testing compared to the competition? Well, the competition would appear to be Jeep and G wagon as they arranged for their stunt. The Jeeps already did the 'trail approved' thing years ago, have the badge on the wing and land rover is playing catch up here. G wagon has the history and development that doesn't need mentioned and is constantly conducting trials for various military and international organisations that JLR will have to try hard to get into. I disagree with your comments on the exhaust, it's quite frankly a ridiculous place to put a piece of thin metal which when squashed will seriously damage the engine and your chances of getting home. Contrary to what you may believe, diffs don't get damaged scraping them on the ground like exhausts do.Your comments on this surprise me actually, You don't just poke a rock through a diff, millions of live axles out there prove you wrong, it's not impossible, it just doesn't happen. The placement of the exhaust is not an elegant design, it's just plain stupid like the oil coolers that Red90 posted. It's not a design feature to alert you to reaching the available ground clearance , it's a poorly executed afterthought like the oil coolers. Hitting those low hanging fragile looking alloy lower arms will be a different story to hitting a much higher steel axle case on a rock, it'll be interesting to see how they last when they get hit and how the tyres fair when the bushes flog out if this is actually the final design which I doubt. I'm with Red90 on this, he clearly stated short arm independent which is not used on any of the vehicles you mentioned. There has never ever been a successful independently sprung commercial vehicle, not the Pinzgauer, Tatra, Hummer, Champ, Gipsy, Mutt, DAF etc, they've all been one hit wonders and all sharing the same instability, maintenance and reliability issues. Try looking at this from a fleet user or remote areas operation standpoint where simplicity, whole life costs and durability come into play and less from a JLR fanboy perspective to understand many of our legitimate concerns.
  23. I was just gonna post the exact same pictures, you all beat me to it. Can anybody confirm any differences in the defender replacement rear suspension pictures from Moab and the discovery 5? I'm not intimately familiar with the disco 5 but that looks pretty much identical to how I think they look. Are we actually being hoodwinked here? Are they testing the torsional stiffness of the new body perhaps with old disco running gear to keep the real thing under wraps? I can't believe they'd launch the defender replacement with disco 5 suspension. Don't get me wrong, the disco 5 suspension is great and perfectly suited to a discovery which is on road 99% of the time or towing trailers but not for a Defender replacement. I also don't think it would have taken so long to develop and launch if it was just a reworked disco 5. I thought the Defender replacement was going to be on an all new platform anyway? Also, the exhaust actually runs under the suspension and is the lowest point on the vehicle in an area very likely to contact the ground, there's no CTIS visible, antiroll bar disconnects or any other modifications to make it more robust or improved for off road prowess, same tiny half shafts too. nah, I think this is another marketing stunt to try and generate interest like the ones to coincide with the Paris motor show. They just happened to park up and let a bunch of journalists take pictures next to two competitors vehicles?
  24. There's a lad called Daniel Watson runs around the UK most weeks, he's based up your way.
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