Nick Taylors blog

The other day I decided to get to the bottom of what was leaking oil over the right side of the block in my 300 Tdi Defender 90. It didn’t take long to track down.

There’s a black plastic thing attached directly to the rocker cover.

It’s the Cyclonic Cleaner, part of the crankcase breather system, Land Rover part number ERR1471. It’s easy to remove, just a single bolt and two hose-clips. On the tube that connects with the engine, there’s a small o-ring. That was my culprit! It had split and was spraying oil down the side of the engine. Now there is an official Land Rover part (LLO100000) for this o-ring, but a quick trip to NAPA had a replacement installed within the hour. Problem solved!

The filter is supposed to be cleaned every 12k or so, but I know it’s not religiously carried out. I cleaned mine in Coleman Fuel (as I don’t have any kerosene handy), and that did the trick. I left it to dry overnight, and the next morning, with just a few seconds of white fumes, everything worked fine.

This year for the Land Rovers “October Service”, I decided to stop using ATF in the R380 gearbox, as I’d noticed that Land Rover had issued a Technical Service Bulletin advising that a gear oil meeting MTF94 be used instead.

After a friends recommendation and some trawling on the forums, I decided that Redline MTL was the way to go (Royal Purple Synchromax also seems worth a look).

Armed with my 32mm wrench (for the drain; sockets don’t fit), my T55 Torx bit and a fluid transfer pump (it’s tight near the filler), I drained and refilled the gearboxes on the ‘96 Tdi and the ‘95 V8.

I test drove both trucks. The difference is astounding. The troublesome 2-3 shift is smooth for the first time ever (without having to think about it), and the downshifts are a dream. It’s hard to believe that just a simple fluid change can make such a big difference, it really is incredible. I’m interested to see what it looks like when I change it out in October 2009.

Next time, I’ll but it by the gallon rather than the quart, as it’s a right faff to mess about with the quart size containers and the pump.

Redline MTL: Highly recommended for Land Rovers with the R380 manual transmission.

Land Rovering – A New Concept – Dormobile Review from Land Rover Review June 1961

Originally uploaded by indigoprime

I was happy to find this old magazine on ebay. I’ve just picked up a Dormobile, so I’m happy to see it got a good review back in 1961!

Yesterday, I bought a 1972 Land Rover Series IIA Dormobile.

It didn’t sell on ebay, so I contacted the guy and made an offer, which he accepted.

Happily, it’s the 2.6l inline 6 engine. It’s also right-hand drive, which is, of course, no problem for me – one of my US-based Defenders is right-hand drive too.

Now, any vehicle that’s almost my age will need some work, but this truck had the good fortune of being an export model, and left Blighty soon after manufacture for South Africa. I don’t yet know much of its history, but I know it spent some time on the East Coast (of the US) before ending up in Reno, NV, where I’ll be heading out in a week or so to pick it up. As the vehicle hasn’t spend time on UK roads, it hasn’t suffered from the corrosive sea-air or salted-roads. In fact, it seems there is just some superficial rust on the bulkhead and a bit more rust on the rear cross-member, which is easy and cheap to replace, should it need it.

The other good news is the Dormobile company in the UK has a lot of the spares I may be needing. I know the roof-vent is broken and the table is missing, and I’m glad these parts are available off the shelf. I spoke to Tim there, he’s a really helpful chap – and pleased to know that “another one had been rescued”!

I’m looking forward to picking it up, doing some maintenance and getting it out into the hills as quickly as possible for some RV’ing, ’70s style!

Now if only I can find a decent Carawagon…

—
Some links
Dormobile Owners Club
Land Rover FAQ – Dormobile
Teriann Wakemans Dormobile Page

In the corner of the garage I’ve had a High Sierra HS-1800/Pro for about a year. I’d procrastinated as I knew the install would be a little “mechanical”, involving drilling the bodywork of the Green D90.

But, having recently attained my General Class license, I though I should just get it done.

Having purchased the “Platinum Package“, I had everything I needed to install the antenna.

Firstly, I lined up the mount at the rear of the D90 (making sure I had garage clearance), and had the top 2 bolt locations line-up in the rear interior and the bottom 2 line-up inside the wheel-arch outside the truck. I braced the nuts and bolts with a couple of sheets of aluminum on the non-visible sides. Next, I drilled holes for the ground, power and co-ax. The ground is a short run below the antenna to the exhaust bracket. The power runs in the top of the bracket to the interior. The co-ax runs a little higher and into the interior with a female-female SO-239 connector.

With the bracket mounted and the basic cabling laid, I added powerpole connectors to all the electrical connectors.

Plugging in the tuning module (basically a fancy switch that moves the antenna up and down, and altering it’s electrical length while showing the SWR), I could see the antenna was working – I could also hear it working!

I knew I wouldn’t like the HS way of tuning the antenna, so at the same time I bought a “Turbo Tuner“. This would enable me simply to hit the tune button on my IC-7000, wait a few moments, and have the Turbo Tuner find the lowest SWR for the frequency I require. As the Turbo Tuner has great reviews, I thought it’d be a great way of doing this.

Alas, I ran into problems almost immediately. Despite triple-checking the connections (one to the CI-V port, the other into the tuner port), and the settings (basically the baud rate and the CI-V address) I could not get it to work. After more experimenting I decided to do a factory reset on the IC-7000 to see if that would help. But that meant loosing all the information I had stored in memory… I had a cup of tea and a think…

As luck would have it, the mail showed up, complete with CI-V leads and my IC-7000 cloning software – perfect timing! A couple of days ago I ordered the WCS7000 software from RT Systems. As soon as I installed the software, I had the rig backed up and performed the reset.

Voila! It worked! The tuner was tuning. But not quite right. The instructions suggest that for the HS1800/Pro antenna the direction should be “normal” and the stall current should be “750ma”. After some experimenting, I had to change the dip-switch settings so the direction was “reverse” and the stall current was “500ma” (so the antenna would reverse direction when it reached the end of its travel).

That seemed to fix things, but then my radio started playing up. I’d read some background on how final stages can be destroyed by ill-using antenna controllers. But I’d done my research and the Turbo Tuner shouldn’t do this! My IC-7000 display was wavering and when I hit PTT most times it would restart.

Then I realised that I’d be transmitting all morning, and the antenna was moving up and down and the rig needs a good 13.8V to work correctly. So I started the D90 and all was well again, phew!

I dressed in the cables, and am ready to give it a good test tomorrow!

My 1997 NAS D90 still had it’s original ICE system in place. It was basically a Clarion head-unit with a 6-disk CD changer. It also has a factory-fitted amplifier driving 4 speakers. Now, I don’t use CDs (except to rip them once), and the changer takes up room in the center console. Plus I was using a pretty awful cassette-tape connector to listen to my iPod/iPhone when driving. After much research I ordered an Alpine iDA-X100 – the revised version of their first “iPod only” head-unit, the iDA-X001.

I decided to keep the factory amp and speakers, the amps is fine and I’ll replace the speakers this summer. That meant connecting the new head-unit to the existing wiring. Now, I’m not going to hack a factory wiring-harness unless I have to so I managed to get a harness that was close enough to work.

As the 1997 D90 was the only year with this configuration, I had to figure out what each on the pins on the factory harness was for. There was some documentation on the web (1, 2, and a useful 3), but I also had to add connectors to the custom harness so it would work with the factory harness. The Alpine unit came with its own unterminated harness, and good documentation (PDF link), it was easy to connect to my wiring.

The pinouts look like this: (click though for large version)

The pinouts for the 10-way connector are for the speakers and self-explainatory. The pinouts for the 8-way connector are as follows:

(Pin 1 is the top left, above the keyed part of the connector, pin 2 is below pin 1, pin 3 is to the right of pin 1, etc.)

1. Phone Mute – not used
2. Amp Trigger
3. Remote – not used
4. 12V+
5. Remote antenna – not used (power for an electric antenna)
6. Illumination
7. ACC – 12V+ switched
8. Ground

Once I had my wiring adaptor cabled, it connected to the factory harness and the x100 works like a dream! Highly recommended.

From Crutchfield, I ordered the following components:
Alpine iDA-X100 Head-unit
Alpine KCE-422i high-speed cable for iPod/iPhone
Receiver Wiring Adaptor for Land Rover
Antenna Adapter

I’ve decided to start using flickr again as I like how easy it makes blogging. For our travel blog, our workflow is based on Aperture and MarsEdit which in turn upload to both flickr and our WordPress blogs. I’m using flickrexport to get my images out of Aperture.

Here’s a picture of one of my trucks by way of a test.

I’m going to have to remember that the pictures cannot be more than 400px wide given the two column layout in my current template. In MarsEdit, I’ll have to use the “small” size for images.

I use RAM mounts on the Land Rovers and the motorcycles – I’ve used them for 7 years and never had a problem despite being shaken around off-road and overland. So after buying a Delphi Skyfi3, I naturally wanted a ram mount for it. They didn’t list one in their catalog, so I emailed them and got this response the same day:

We currently do not have a solution for that unit as it does not have a solid way for us to mount our mounts to their factory cradle. We currently do not have any plans to provide a solution for this particular device. If we see a tremendous demand for the Delphi device we may create a solution but we do not have any plans at this point.

Bugger. Still, the factory car mount may be ok but I doubt I’d use it on the bike. I’ll have to see what alternatives are out there.