N Dentressangle

You'll need to check the results - I didn't see it go through.

It was actually a bit rough. Plenty of filler and naughtiness around the roof / screen interface, plus a good bit of wag in the bonnet and other areas around the shell. The pics flatter it - it was actually a rather dog-eared condition 2 car, which from 20 paces looked really decent. I didn't inspect any more thoroughly than that, but my finger in the air bid would have been £4-5kish.

Does that help?

eta just looked and it went for £5400. I should do this for a living! 54 is not bad, I'd say, and given that a minter is 10-15 I'd say you'd be OK at that money.

I went to this. It was good.

A few dry days meant that it really wasn't that muddy. I managed about 10mins of the video because the blokes were irritating, but the conditions were nothing like as bad as they made out, and all dry and pretty firm, really.

The cars were like they are in the pics - some good for spares only (to my mind) but plenty worth restoring and ideal if that's what you wanted to do. Extracting was no problem - the trackways to the cars were either hardstanding or covered in bark chips, and they had a couple of Loadalls there to help pull stuff out. All of it was only recently moved to that field anyway - much of it had clearly been driven in - so no great issues.

Prices were OK, I thought. No huge bargains, but not silly money either. No reserve on anything, so it made what it made. It's hard to value stuff unless you know the market, but the S2 Land Rovers there went for exactly what I thought they might, if not slightly towards the lower end. A well written ad would see them sell for £3-500 more on Ebay.

So, that's my experience - ask and I'll see if I can remember about any specific cars!

1 minute ago, cpjitservices said:

Thought it was the older model 9-3

Yeah, you're fine.

Just that dodgy Fiat diesel engine you got to worry about ?

5 hours ago, sgtberbatov said:

No idea. I just know it can flex the bulkhead to the point the bulkhead cracks?

Not on that model of 9-3. It's the previous Cavalier based one (and NG900) that does that.

With the alternator fixed, my thoughts returned to try and mend the electric mirrors, which are completely u/s.

In trying to find the right fuse, I moved the (working, electric) drivers seat forward, which got about half way then packed up. Fuckin great.

So, in fixing the seat, I found the answer to the mirrors: both them and the seat are controlled through the memory seat ecu, which is underneath the drivers seat. The battery for the memory leaks onto the circuit board with time so you end up with one of:

1. No moveable seat

2. No moveable mirrors

3. Both

4. A randomly self-moving drivers seat which might jam you against the windscreen at any moment

A good poke under the seat revealed I had previously had all of these, and a PO had re-wired things so the seat worked. They hadn't done a fantastic job, so one of their spade connectors was pulled out when the seat was moved a bit too far forward. Hey ho.

The ECU can be fettled, sometimes, but I decided to call it a draw and settle for working seats - at least I know why the mirrors don't work.

More pleasingly, I did a trip down to Exeter today - 209 miles - and managed 23mpg!!! Embarrassingly, this has made my day.

Agreed - red rocker covers are naff. There's no way to make the factory grey look good either - I've tried too - and I think black like you've done is the way to go.

Now the alternator's fixed, the dipswitch is playing up on mine. Always something!

14 hours ago, Cooper1 said:

might be worth a rebuild.  

A new morse chain while you're in there

Only downside is dropping the box, it weighs as much as a small planet

That will be a pleasure I will happily pass on to the garage. But not for a little while.

Yeah, the VCU is fine, and passes that test surprisingly well. Surprising in that I expected it to be shagged.

I think it's the output bearing on the BW: gets loud with load and speed.

My autobox fluid looked like that, except changing it made things worse rather than better. Sounds like yours is a lot less shagged!

I now have bearing whine in the BW transfer box though, so pondering snake oil additives.

Honourable mention too for:

http://www.avenger4x4.com/

Supplied a decent autobox for a good price, very easy to deal with and delivered to my garage, really well packaged on a pallet.

We had some issues getting the flex plate to mate to the torque converter, and the guy at Avenger was really helpful with phone advice, and eventually turned us up and delivered a different flex plate to suit. Would happily buy old Land Rover bits from them again.

The old autobox was truly shagged. Bands breaking up, semi-shredded and welded together with heat and abuse, so all was full of shards of metal and headed for the bin. Guess someone had run the poor thing low on oil at some point.

All fixed by this chap:

https://thestarterbay.webs.com/

Burnt out diode in the rectifier. This alternator cost the PO £105 4 years and 18k miles ago as a supposedly recon unit. The chap who just fixed it said he thought the rectifier was original, and all they'd done was clean it. They'd also glued on a post for the charge light connector, so he fixed that properly too.

Got a Holden electric rear screen heater on order, and back to trying to sort the sodding electric mirrors now!

2 minutes ago, Cooper1 said:

Blue eh?  

Any pictures

? Oh yes

Full dirty tale here:

7 hours ago, jon.k said:

If only the car new how lucky it was to end up with you!

Indeed. Fancy 'looking after' my RRC for a few months? It's blue... ?

2 minutes ago, Broadsword said:

Wow, you have really been through it with this P38. My problems have been nothing in comparison. Quick question on the engine. Does it have hydraulic tappets?

All Rover V8's do, don't they?

Brilliant, and good persistence! I guess you need it with a P38, although to be fair the Classic ain't much better...

Alternator extracted:

Seems to be a Lucas A133 - obviously been 'reconditioned' before now, but with a post fitting for the battery connection rather than a spade block.

There's a guy in Gloucester who fixes them, so that's probably the better option than an allegedly new one. Of course, it's one of the more expensive of the many types (why, FFS?) of alternator Land Rover fitted to these cars. The A127 is half the price, although I don't see why a RH one of those wouldn't fit...

I'll probably go for one of those stick on kits from Holden. Sod's law says that a used window will be no better, and at least the kit's likely to work.

Helpfully the alternator now seems to have packed up, so I'll be having a look at that today, as well as trying to work out the mystery places where Land Rover hid different fuse boxes on this thing. It would be nice to get the electric mirrors & heaters working - there's no power at the switch, so I'm tracing things back.

I had a 220 Tomcat ages ago - non-turbo. It was very nearly a fantastic car.

The good:

- quick enough for most things

- that shape

- quite well screwed together, with a decent cabin

- decent FWD handling, with plenty of torque steer and understeer available on demand

The bad:

- stupid targa roof, which was a faff to take out and store in a special foam lined bag (yes, I even had that with the car) in the boot. At anything over 60, it generated lots of wind noise. The car must have been only 10 years old at the time, and the seals were in good nick, with all adjusted correctly. It was just all designed in the same way as a big Britax popout sunroof, and needed a bit of cash throwing at a properly engineered answer. That's a theme we'll develop...

- low gearing. Even in 5th, 70 was pulling enough revs to be intrusively noisy. With a biq, torquey M series there was really no need for that. The car could have been a brilliant cruiser, but was probably less refined on the motorway than our '95 Metro 1.1. Did nobody from Longbridge try it on the M42 before they made it? Maybe they got stuck in traffic, or couldn't be bothered to go beyond the dual carriageway bit of the A38.

- stupid boot hatch. Another casualty of designing a new model on the cheap, the hatch the Tomcat should have had never happened, so you're left trying to post your shopping through a letterbox type hatch at the back which feels smaller than a classic Mini's. To be fair, if the last two had been sorted I wouldn't have given a toss about the boot space - no-one buys a coupe for practicality.

I think I had the Tomcat for about 6 months before I sold it. It felt like such a near-miss from being a really fantastic car, and made the typical BL 'oh, that'll do' design faults even more annoying. Definitely a future classic and decent investment, but I don't think I'd have another.

I've never come across degraded elements before but it makes sense.

None of the reviews of conductive paint make me hopeful that it would work on a job like this, so I suspect the Holden stick on thing is the best option. Can't find any reviews of it though, so might also be crap!

Thanks - that's the conclusion I was coming to, sadly.

New screen is the only option, I guess.

Or more realistically, what do we all think of this:

https://www.holden.co.uk/p/screen_heater_12_volt?s

So, gearbox finally replaced with a good used one. Not by me - even if I had the desire, the lack of a lift, transmission jacks etc makes it a garage job.

Time to start on the irritating bits again. Like why the heated rear window won't bloody work. I have 12v at one side of the window, and a decent earth on the other. Opening gambit was getting @Nibblet round to solder new connectors onto the screen to replace the glued on wires:

Mission accomplished - thanks Jim!

However, still no heat. Direct approach tried:

Still no heat.

OK, we have 12-14v at the feed on the LH side of the screen, and about 0.05v at the RH side of the screen, with voltage dropping across the wires. We have continuity across the screen wires, with a resistance of about 300 ohms. The earth wire is well earthed.

Any ideas why this thing doesn't work?

18 minutes ago, sierraman said:

Good luck with the wedding. If you’ve some time to kill drop the engine out of the Carlton. Take your mind off the nerves. I’m sure the new wife will be understanding when you turn up late, covered in oil, fingers bleeding to the wedding. ?

Yeah, good plan.

You'll be fine*

1 hour ago, busmansholiday said:

Good luck for you and your intended one for tomorrow and in the future years.

Absolutely!

Have a great day, and don't talk to her about old Vauxhalls ?

If I were skint and not too bothered about longevity, I'd put new standard shells in the main and big end bearings of your existing engine and put the whole lot back together. Hard to tell without running a finger nail across it, but that crank doesn't look that bad to me - there's a chance it'll work, whereas you know the existing bearings are shagged.

New mains and be's look to cost less that £50 total from James Paddock, or am I missing something?

The Maxi has both hydrolastic and hydragas suspension:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrolastic

Most likely it's sagged. If it's leaking then the leak needs fixing and then the suspension pumping back up.