Talbot

That is utterly stupid behaviour on your part. Keep doing that sort of thing and you'll do it to the wrong person one day and end up with a knife in your face. Or worse.

Minor tinkering day yesterday. One dead glowplug on the Merc, which means removing the inlet manifold to get to the plugs. This would normally be a ballache, as there is a "bastard bolt" that can only be accessed from below, so to get the manifold off usually means having to jack up/use drive-on's for the front of the car, undertray removal etc and reach up with a hex-drive to remove the bolt in quesiton. As luck* would have it, the manifold has been off many times in the past, meaning the casting is broken and the bolt missing, so you can do everything from above. Cheeky bonus. The dead one was the second one I checked and the glowplugs were being compliant and came out without fuss, which for an OM606 is a bit of a miracle. Back to starting smoothly on six rather than knocking like a bastard on five-and-a-bit cylinders for the first 30 seconds. Also serviced my housemate's 2018 Fiat 500. Thankfully it's one of the 1.2 models, not a twin-arse model, so it was pretty straightforward. The oil it takes looks like water, and it feels very strange puting only 2.75 litres of oil in a sump (especially when the merc takes 9!). irritatingly had to make a sump key. I've got a 12mm hex-drive somewhere, but could I find it? Of course not. So an M16 bolt had a 12mm hex duley ground into the end of it, and the sump plug came out nice and easily. Changed the plugs too, and it fired straight up, which is always re-assuring. The old oil from her car is now in the fuel tank of mine, to be burned off as part of the 75 litres of fuel it currently has in it. Best place to dispose of it. Still haven't replaced the dead number-plate lamp in the Merc, so it beeps at me every time you turn the lights on. ~3 years and counting on that...

I'll be willing to bet there was a comment from someone at some point saying "that's impossible". "Hold my beer..."

Surely it must have gotten to the point that the vast majority of easily-thievable valuable cats have all been removed and weighed in now? The only ones left are either inacessible or low value.

if it went with an OM engine, I'd be inclined to shove the MB gearbox in the ovloV and just do a custom on the propshaft. Far easier and cheaper than putting in an adaptor plate and turning the 122s gearbox into mixed metals.

OM604/5/6 engines are right on the crossover for having fully mechanical or electronically varied mechanical injection. There are various versions of each, and pumps from the OM601/2/3 engines (which are all fully mechanical) are often able to be moved over to the appropriate engine to make them fully mechanical (EG an OM603 pump bolts onto an OM606, is fully mechanical and can be tweaked* quite a bit. There are also aftermarket (and exceptionally reliable) standalone controllers for the bosch inline injection pumps. Also, the width is deceptive. A lot of that is the inlet fannymould, which is regularly chopped about. The PAS pump also hangs out a long way, and is very easily re-locatable. The actual engine is barely any wider than an XUD.

Shove in the OM605 as mentioned earlier, then you can purchase bits from "superturbodiesel" and make it do this: https://bangshift.com/general-news/videos/6-05-the-mercedes-benz-om605-diesel-yeah-they-can-hustle/ Childish? Yes. Will it piss off your neighbour even more? Yes. Hilliarious? All day long.

Patching up a vehicle to MOT standard = barely acceptable repairs that will last about a month. It always amuses me when "MOT standard" is quoted. Essentially it means the bare minimum patch job with zero corrosion protection, crappy welding and a load of splodge walloped over the top of it. MOT man gives it a poke and it doesn't collapse? That's a Pass. Won't be in a couple of years time tho. It'll be a monumental fail when most of the structure comes away in your hand.

Or plastic quarter-turn fixings. Which must be cheaper than Stainless or indeed mild steel bolts. Plus quicker to remove and refit.

Looking at this image: Which is an XUD9A removed from an LDV Pilot, it looks like it has a very different sump, with engine mountings as part of it. I assume there's a similar one around the other side. The thermostat housing is clearly different for the hose layout (but i'll bet it still gets in the way) and I've no doubt the pipework on this is different from the usual FWD arrangement to get the heater hoses somewhere sensible. Other obvious differences are the cambelt covers due to the lack of the engine mount there, and it looks like the Auxilliaries are a bit different too. It's really quite different from one in a FWD arrangement. I think you would need one. Or the engine from a FSO Caro Diesel. If there are any left!

Really? If they find corroded fixings or some other issue that means the job takes longer, they just charge per hour labour to do the job. In the event of corroded fixings on an undertray (which is a shit design in the first place.. they should be able to last longer than 5 years) even if the mechanic had to grind them off and then use new fixings with penny washers, that might be another 1/2hr labour and a few quid for fixings. This is a classic case of a Main Stealer living up to the stereotype.

There's a few issues. Not least is the angle of lean the engine needs when installed, which can lead to quite significant weight difference across the front. The sump design is better as a FWD too, as I understand it can suffer oil starvation in a RWD application. Some baffles welded into the sump may help on that though. It is also possible to modify the sump oil pick up and stand the engine up somewhat, but if you do that it's then a surprisingly tall engine. Also the plumbing is a pain: The top radiator hose ends up at the bulkhead rather than at the front of the car, and all the heater hose connections are in the wrong place meaning the underbonnet is full of spaghetti pipework. The worse issue is getting the engine mounted, which can be a complete mare as where you would traditionally have the engine mounts on a longitudinal engine, there is very little to attach to on an XUD. Where the engine wants to mount (at the cambelt end) there is usually a radiator in the way, so you have to get quite clever with fabrication to make it fit. An engine that is already designed longitudinal is "drop in" by comparison.

As much as I very much like the XUD, it's not very well suited to RWD applications. A Mercedes OM605 with manual gearbox from a rotten C250 Turbodiesel though....

You need to be careful. Keeping a working and operating vehicle like that will attract the bearded explorer to come and trespass all over your land! Actually, that Zinga trial is really useful. It also explains why when I've used similar zinc-based paints on welding, and then overcoated it with bitumen paint, there has been zero corrosion many years later.