4x4 Action Group

Yesterday I was chatting to the workshop owner who looks after Swambo’s Fiat. They specialize mainly in Italian cars, new & old, from Fiats, Alfa’s, Lancia’s, Maserati’s & Ferrari’s, so he has extensive experience in what makes an engine last long. He actually just finished reassembling a 3.0 V12 Ferrari for a 1966 Ferrari 330.

His best advice for making an engine last very long is that oil changes with high quality oil are critical. A number of cars on sale have stipulated oil change intervals that can be best described as optimistic by their manufacturers. It isn’t just the engines pistons that are dependent, but also things like turbos are also dependent on healthy correctly spec oil.

I had a Cooper Works that had supposed intervals of 25kkm but my mechanic reckoned that what came out didn’t look like oil. It looked like grease. My wife’s Fiat has 30kkm intervals but we change oil & filter every 15kkm. But he reckons 10kkm is preferable.

Which brings me to the 2.7 TDi crank snapper in the Disco. I saw one next to the road earlier with the bonnet up & suspect that the inevitable had happened.

It’s well known that both the Peugeot 407 & Jaguar S-Type use a version of that 2.7 engine yet they appear to last a lot longer in the Pug & the Jag.

So I looked up the oil service intervals:

Peugeot is every 10000 km
Jaguar is every 16000 km
Land Rover is every.........25000 km [emoji102]

It’s not a very good starting point for longevity, especially with its inherent flaw. Yet people will still buy them......

Did the Peugeot 407 really come out with a 180Kw V6 Diesel engine?

Wikipedia confirms that indeed it came out with the 2.7 Diesel (150kw) and 3.0 Diesel (177kw). Those must have been pretty potent!

KurtG wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 06, 2019 8:41 pm

Wikipedia confirms that indeed it came out with the 2.7 Diesel (150kw) and 3.0 Diesel (177kw).

One of the reasons why PeeJoe never became a crank snapper, despite having the same motor, was explained to me by Neil XJJ & Apoc.
The PeeJoe is significantly lighter than a D3 or D4 because of the two Chassis system Land Rover decided to use on the Disco...

Their outputs was about the same as the original D3, circa 150 kw & 440 Nm.

But the weight of the Pug & Jag were no more than 1700 to 1800 kg, whereas the D3 was around 2.5 tons. The Disco has a unibody mounted onto a ladder frame chassis. That was always going to be heavy.




The 2.7 only was available in the 407 coupe but it’s a pretty sexy looking car.

VW had a 15k km service interval on its 2.0l VW TDI bus. I took an oil sample after a service and send it to Wearcheck. Dust and other contamination were out of spec so I reduced intervals to 10k km.

Think the very high intervals recommended are based on conditions in Europe were they have better quality fuel and not the harsh conditions of Africa.

Also, Europe want to reduce impact on the environment (old filters and dirty oil) so they extend the service intervals

Or save on the cost of services under motorplan?

XJ Junkie wrote:Or save on the cost of services under motorplan?

Winner winner chicken dinner [emoji1787]

[emoji3541]

Mad Manny wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 06, 2019 9:23 pm

KurtG wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 06, 2019 8:41 pm

Wikipedia confirms that indeed it came out with the 2.7 Diesel (150kw) and 3.0 Diesel (177kw).

One of the reasons why PeeJoe never became a crank snapper, despite having the same motor, was explained to me by Neil XJJ & Apoc.
The PeeJoe is significantly lighter than a D3 or D4 because of the two Chassis system Land Rover decided to use on the Disco...

Well. Close. Not so much accelerating the weight as that only happens periodically , but overcoming drag to maintain a speed. The D3/4 is a brick and the drive train, wheels , weight all contribute to the drag.

If it’s using 3 times as much fuel at a given speed , load on the crank is 3 times as much, that’s a no brainer.

And sure, more regular oil changes certainly reduce wear.

But the reality is that an awful lot of Motors take a lot more strain and snapping a crank is unusual to say the least.

The bottom line is that the crank is as weak as a politician’s morals when faced with a fistful of cash.