Well, it's back. And I'd say, on the face of it, James French know their stuff, as they picked up 2 things that had been missed in 3 main dealer visits. Thanks Steve.
The first problem was the crank sensor. It was juuuuust borderline too far away from the exciter ring thing. Which was fine most of the time, but meant occasionally it would stop sending (due to heat expansion, jiggling around etc) and the thing would break down. Then, a few minutes later, it would come back into alignment and run again. 2 main dealers had already looked at the crank sensor and not noticed this.
Having had this sorted, and a couple of other things done (like the EAS compressor - peace at last), I went to pick it up and drive it away, and damned if it didn't pull its "lumpy idle / stall" stunt.
Great place for it to happen as Steve whipped out the diagnostics stuff, plugged it all in and took a look. After some fiddling he found it to be the air flow meter - intermittent fault. This was causing the fuelling to go off the edge of the map. Bonzer, cracked it! The joy was only slightly marred by hearing that they cost £377 + VAT - quite a lot for a bit of warm wire.
But... You try getting an airflow meter for a Range Rover. All the dealers have them on backorder with Land Rover. After much phoning around I found (thanks to Brookwells) that there are exactly 6 in dealer stock worldwide! One in Ecuador, one in Brazil, one in Puerto Rico... and one in Swindon (I'm not making this up). Great, except the Swindon dealer had already sold theirs :(
Apparently Land Rover are quoting the tail end of April before they can even give lead times. What good is that to man or beast?
Fortunately, Brookwells suggested I ring a breaker up in Bicester, and would you believe, they had one come in today. So I drove up to pick it up, fitted it and (touch wood) everything's fine.
So, everything's looking rosy for once. Better not say that too loudly. If anything else happens it's going straight back to James French, because they really know their way around Land Rovers, and they don't charge ridiculous amounts. I'm thinking a southern version of Warren here :) Except they don't have many customers with LRs more than ten years old.
David