We are holding our annual playday up at Crosshills near Skipton on Weds 30th December 2009

There are a limited number of free places for customers.

Call in at our Halifax shop for more information or use the email submission on www.pennine4×4.co.uk/events

It should be a good do, it is normally freezing up there but there is plenty of testing terrain.

There will be a couple of courses set out, one for beginners and one more challenging.

We are closing for the Christmas holidays.

The shop closes on 23rd December at 16:00 and re-opens on Monday 4th January

A frustrating one this as I asked the garage to check the fuel pump and then get back to me.

As I had not heard anything I broke off from my system development and drove to halifax to plug in to the vehicle.

The reported fault was that the engine would not rev very high. Over the phone this sounded like fuel starvation.

I have seen quite a few Td5 powered Discovery and Defenders have problems with electric fuel pumps.

They have a distinct whine when the ignition is turned on. If the relay is working and the fuse is intact then it is a fair assumption that the in tank pump is goosed.

When I arrived to check out the problem I noticed that the towbar was hanging down, they had diagnosed the fuel pump and not bothered to get back to me.

What a waste of time.  Some you win and some you lose.

We lost double on that one as we didn’t even supply a replacement pump. They fitted a second hand unit.

Last week I was asked to look at a Range Rover Sport TDV6 Diesel.

The owner contacted me and wanted a diagnostic check as he thought that he had a gearbox fault.

I used my Autologic box to query the faults on the gearbox. The only fault logged was a can bus missed message.

This was not serious enough to cause a problem. I asked the owner for a little more information.

He thought that the problem was the gearbox as the car was reluctant to set off.

After a test drive I could see his point.  Uphill with the throttle planted in drive it would move at a snails pace until the engine revs had built up to 2000.

The engine management fault stored was exhaust gas re-circualtion (EGR) related and would not clear for long.

As the EGR system can be problematic on these engines the car was booked in at the referring garage for the EGR system to be checked.

Will post an update when this work has been done

Update

The EGR valves have now been fitted and the problem is cured. Although only one valve was reported as faulty by the engine management system it was aparrent that both were faulty. It makes sense if one valve had clogged up then the other should be in a similar condition.

I have also been informed that the valves can be modified by the insertion of a washer to reduce the exhaust gas flow. This has not been proved by myself so I cannot verify this.

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This is a serious one, it affects me!
It has been an ongoing fault for about a month. it has been so intermittent that it has taken a bit of tracking down.
At the end of September 2009 I was going away for the weekend up in the Lakes. We were planning a bit of mountain biking.
This was a perfect time for my Discovery developing a fault with the central locking.

When I arrived at my Pennine 4×4 shop I tried to lock my Disco up but all it would do was mislock.

With the Autologic plugged in there was nothing obviously wrong. I checked all the door switches and they worked perfectly. Why was it indicating a mislock?

I reasoned that something must have upset the BCU (Body Control Unit) and popped the battery lead off for 30 secs. This cured the fault (for the time being)

Later that evening when we arrived up in the lakes (with a few quids worth of bikes in the back) it started playing up and refused to lock again. (I had turned off the mislock warning)
I manually locked the car that night (using the internal lock switch and the key on the drivers door)
Imagine my suprise when I went to get my stuff in the morning and I found it unlocked.

Luckily it was parked in the farmers barn and it was a very quiet corner of the lakes.

To cut a long story short this fault cleared up on the Sunday when I arrived home.

For almost 2 weeks the Disco was perfect until one afternoon it started again. I noticed that once it had unlocked itself then the central locking would work fine for a while. Strange, something must be resetting.

I then had a couple of occasions when it wouldn’t disarm the alarm, I needed to use the EKA code to re-mobilise.

This was beginning to annoy me and was frequent enough to test things out.

My first line of investigtion resulted in me finding a second hand BCU and swapping that out. This proved that the problem was not in the BCU as the fault contined.

Two days later the radio functions of the central locking stopped working. I then managed to borrow a fuse board and the radio receiver.

Swapping the receiver cured the dead radio fault (although I later proved that there was nothing wrong with my original unit)
I then swapped the fuseboard as the IDM (itelligent driver module) handles the door switches. This made no difference.

At this point I was getting very frustrated, looking at the wiring diagrams I couldn’t spot anything else related to central locking. It was late at night when I went through every option on the Autologic that was related to the BCU. It was then I spotted deep in an unrelated menu that the ingition position one was on. The key was in my hand at that moment so I knew that I had spotted something.

It took a long time but I think that I have finally found the problem. The only problem is that the ignition switch seems to be part of the barrel and they are a lot of money. I am now regretting throwing my old ignition lock away with the switch on it.

Took a look at a P38 with a rough running engine today. It was a late model P38 Range Rover with the Bosch management system.

It had a fresh engine rebuild so there was no mechanical faults with the car. The engine was a little rough and wouldn’t rev past 3000 rpm.

When I plugged in there were a handful of faults logged. These were cleared as I didn’t know how long they had been there.

I normally prefer to reset faults and then look at dynamic values to get an idea whats wrong.

Reading the dynamic values all seemed fine. The oxygen sensors were reading OK, there were no logged misfires. The only strange looking value was the MAF sensor reading. At idle the values were changing quite a lot. I decided to kill the engine and then disconnect the sensor as the Bosch system can run without the air flow sensor.

Sure as eggs are eggs the engine ran fine without the sensor. We ordered a new item and this should cure the fault.