On or around Sun, 05 Sep 2004 18:20:56 +0100, RichardK-PB enlightened us thusly:
does it need to be road-legal?
if not, then there's no need to worry about any of that lot...
the smokescreen, if whitish-blue, would probably die down once it's thoroughly warm. classic sign of an old, worn diesel.
if it's oil smoke then you'd need to keep an eye on the oil level.
Well... yes and no. I'm not going to be using it as a daily hack or anything - I suspect that diesel or no, even my Supra will be better on fuel, and it'll do more than 45mph (I didn't want to go faster, and the Landie seemed to be in thorough agreement).
It will be taxed. It passed an MOT in this state last year, it hasn't been anywhere (the seller was asking £1,500 for it originally), and I'm sending it back there. So /passing/ the MOT is unlikely to be an issue. As long as the damn thing won't fall apart, I don't care - road travel will consist of the occasional trip through town to the dump, and a 15 mile country road run out to the railway before 'offroading' on the dirt track, which frankly I'd be happy to tackle in the Beetle (a real Beetle would have no worries), except there is a sump guard (VW's memories of the VR6, I reckon) and it 'rattles' the stones in the middle of the railbed - there's a good six inches clearance everywhere else! Supra can't do it, though - autobox's sump is /low/.
I like the sound of that. Whitish blue, TONs of it until we'd driven about 8 miles, then idle was clean, still a little when driving.
Little bit of black when revved hard to see if I could pull out of a junction without applying in triplicate (I could; it's sharp enough off the line - I know in the wet, my 2.25 petrol was quite happy to swap ends if I was too confident with it ;) ).
So all I'm really worried about is if it will fall apart. The body to chassis mountings, as I can gather from looking online, would appear to be two outriggers under the A-pillars - so my kinked sill/bend could be them having failed in the past and been replaced badly (compensating for the kink), or a bend in the chassis (is that even feasible? I can't imagine there being much Landie left if you hit something hard enough to bend the chassis).
Oil level was good. Water was good and clean. Heater worked, expansion tank had water in. And joy, a new alternator from paddocks(?) appears to be £22. In fact, everything seems cheap, but there's a lot of 'everything' to a Land Rover I guess.
Richard
Needing that length of time to warm up I'd be checking that the thermostat is present and working correctly. My guess is it's either missing or jammed open.
One year of disuse, I'd be inclined to agree. Standard service item IMO
- I only shy away from changing them on cars with soft alloy heads and thermostats actually in them instead of some sort of housing ;)
Richard
On or around Sun, 05 Sep 2004 21:58:27 +0100, RichardK-PB enlightened us thusly:
Oh, you can bend the chassis easy enough, run it into something solid. I know someone who did just that. However that needn't result in it being scrap.
for what you want, provided you can get it through an MOT (and that's most often just a case of welding it up, really, provided it's old enough not to get saddled with a smoke test) then everything else can just be patched and/or ignored.
can you arrange to park it where you start the off-road bit? That'd mean it didn't strictly have to be legal anyway, provided you avoid the trips to the dump bit.
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