July 2018, Old LRe Magazine Articles

It has been a while since I have had anything substantive to add.  I have a work trip to Stansted tomorrow, so I’ll be going to check on the 109 and giving it a short drive around the storage facility; I hope it fires up as easiy on previous visits, but it has now been laid up for a little over three years and the fuel must be getting stale.  We’ll see on the 1st of August…

 

In the mean time, I thought I’d scan and post up a couple of magazine articles from 2008, since they came up in a discussion recently and the magazine (LRe) is sadly long since gone.  There are two articles by James Taylor, an absolute gentleman and walking encyclopedia of not just Land Rover but Rover too.  The first is about the vehicle as it was in 2008 (unfortunately had a handful of inaccuracies at the time) and there have been several significant modifications since then, including the coiler axles, suspension tweaks, disc brakes, alloys, low range gears and PAS.  These are the top three images below.

 

The second article is about the Alpine trip, already covered in the blog at the time, on which we first met James and his family.  The overheating issues mentioned all happened on the first day off road and were of great concern, but were quickly found to be due to the electric fan being mis-sold and mis-packaged as a puller that sits behind the rad rather than the pusher, made to sit in front of the rad, so it was fighting the ambient airflow rather than boosting it- it was sorted in minutes with a fan rotor flip and electrical polarity reversal and has never posed an issue since, but is a good learning point of not trusting the labeling of such things, especially if made in China.  We learnt several other things on that trip about storage, tent choice and ruggedness/reliability issues of several LR models that we still apply to vehicle purchases today, principally mechanical and electrical simplicity and non-interconnectivity – I don’t like designs where a failure in one system will knock out several others.  The trip was superb, the driving, the sights and the participants.  I intend to do similar trips to Scandinavia, Portugal, Corsica/Sardinia/Malta, and would love to try Canada and Australia if I can ever afford the shipping.

Comments

  1. Hi Nick,

    Thanks for dropping by to say hello, it was good to catch up again mate. Just sorry I couldn’t stop work for a proper undivided attention chat.

    I hope the 109 fired up okay for you.

    Regards,

    Neil.

  2. It fired relatively quickly, but was lumpy and unresponsive to the accelerator for a minute or two. I was wondering about the fuel and fuel filter, it being stood over three years, but it suddenly cleared and was entirely normal again. Evidently, it was air in the injection system. My bet is that the spill line braided hoses are perishing and allowing air into the system, the fuel very slowly draining to the tank. It’s typical on Tdis, even with Gen Parts (very expensive) hoses after a few years, but it’s a very cheap and easy fix with replacement hose – no need for the £90+ Gen Parts component that comes with the unions and hard plastic line to the pump; it just needs the 4mm braided hose for less than £5 that I always kept a roll of in the RRC after having it repeatedly on that engine.

    Once running properly, it drove just fine. The pulleys were initially a little noisy as they had very light surface rust, but a few cycles on the steering sorted that out. The brakes and clutch were perfect.

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