Fire up the Rover

The old Rover 420D was bought about 16 months ago to replace the crappy Laguna, it's amazing that the cost of the Rover with 12 months MOT is within £50 of the cost of getting the Laguna through it's MOT.

The Rover made it's way to Exeter, to the Midlands several times, up and down the motorway to Runcorn, to Devon, touring round Scotland and other trips without a problem and apart from needing some tyres.

I then decided it was time to get an oil change and to be honest, I couldn't be bothered doing it myself. I knew I couldn't get better than a Kwik Fit fitter so I went down there. The Rover was put up on the ramps, there was a sharp intake of breath and I was told that they couldn't do an oil change as the car had a major oil leak.

Now, the oil level had not dropped in 7,000 miles so I thought something wrong here and got it sorted somewhere else. They also informed me of an oil leak as did the MOT station and the next garage that serviced it also said there was a leak from the power steering and an oil leak from the turbo.

Again, i have never had to top up any of the fluids in the car despite it having done over 12,000 miles and so I suspected a gearbox leak as it was a bit rattly at low revs and has done 140,000 miles. The gearbox oil was changed and then I had a loss of coolant which was cured by pouring some radweld into the system but that was about it.

Then in June 2010, we decided to go up to the Lake District for a run, no problems occurred and we stopped at The White Bull in Bilsborrow on the way back for some food and the Pub Quiz. On the way home, Angie said she thought she could smell paint stripper but my nose detected no odour.  In the morning however, there was a puddle under the car and some fluid could be seen to be dripping, the coolant had dropped a little so I though that may be the case and we got in the car and made our way to Runcorn.
As we neared  the end of the trip I noticed that the fuel guage had gone down faster than I would have expected. The big platsic cover that made the old Perkins diesel engine look newish was removed and the culprit was spotted immediately. There are three little rubber pipes linking the injectors together, two of these had perished completely and diesel was pouring out of them, down the front of the engine and all over the underneath of the car.

A new length of pipe was purchased at the cost of a quid and fitted and it seems that my major oil leak has now stopped, it will also be interesting to see what effect that this has on the fuel economy as the car has been doing about 47 to 48 to the gallon.
The thing is, if the fancy bit of plastic had not been fitted to the car in the first place, the leak would have been spotted ages ago, that's modern technology for you.

And one more thing, my gearbox has stopped rattling now.