Frontera 2.8 TDI Diamond

Offered then retracted £200?!! I would have told them to shove their deal there and then... shocking!!

I said the same.

I guess it was for the best though as it would be bean cans by now if they did accepted it.

I think that would work, I measured my pipe today and the outlet at the rocker cover was about 16mm, the silicone pipe comes in meter lengths which is more than enough. I was thinking of just joining it to the old pipe at the air filter end to save buying a reducer, I'm hopefully going to order some pipe and I'm sure I've got some copper fittings laying around, will let you know how I get on. All going well I'll get some pics this week and see about starting a thread

Hi, for some reason it wont let me put a picture up in the messages, I found this one, hopefully it will help

Time for another update, mostly general tinkering: 

The passanger sunvisor was damaged and flopping about so I got a secondhand one to replace it. The sagging headliner will be done in the summer time.










I replaced the rear window regulator with a good used one. It worked perfectly and for about 2 days the car had 4 working electric windows for the first time in about 15 years. I was making a final adjustment before putting the door card back on but when I tried to use the window it was completely dead. Not only that all of the other windows were dead. I checked fuses, confirmed power was getting to the switches but no windows worked. I posted on the facebook owner group and got some feedback about a circuit board on the back of the passanger switch. I dont know if I shorted something out or if it was just a coincidence but the likely cause of my issue was said to be a board on the back of the passanger switch per the advice I got back. I ordered a secondhand switch and sure enough all the windows now work again. So thats good as its another job off my original list and the door card could go back on for good...I hope.









I got a few other small pieces when I ordered the replacement switch.

The diesel cap on the jeep was a universal type, I assume the original got lost at some point. I replaced it with an original and gave the fuel door a quick clean.





I was missing some of the plastic wheel nut cover so I got some of those too. Most part for these frontera are discontinued so secondhand only for these also.







I "refreshed" the power steering fluid the lazy way.....empty the reservoir, refill with new fluid,  drove the car for a bit,  turning lock to lock plenty of times, empty reservoir again, refill, drive car again etc



I also flushed out the old clutch fluid, it doesnt look like it but that is fresh fluid in the last pic, the walls of the reservoir was still a little dirty, I should have cleaned the inside of it but was rushing and short on time that day.









On another day I investigated the non working fuel gauge issue more, I managed to jack the back of the jeep up so I could get my hand on the sender unit connector to get it off. I managed to do it but sadly all my wiring checked out.









Strangely the low fuel light started blinking one day I was out driving and the guage started to move up a little......this gave me hope of a self fixing car or that my fiddling with the wiring had somehow fixed it....sadly this stopped. The reason why it was doing this became clear today.

I procrastinated for a few weeks after testing the wiring, not really wanting to drop a dirty great fuel tank that I suspected was half full of diesel in the freezing cold, but I decide I finally wanted to get to the bottom of why the fuel guage wasnt working this weekend.

As I didnt want the tank to fall on me I adopted a cautious approach and proceeded based on the limited "equipment" I had available.

I took some homemade  timber ramps I have for servicing and put them under the tank guard/cradle. I then let the air out of the back tyres so the timber was supporting the tank. I loosened the filler neck tubes hose clamps and snipped all the zipties holding the wiring. I then undid the 4 bolts holding the tank on, pumped up the tyres, removed the supply and return hoses when space allowed, then gradually jacked the tank each side to remove timber piece by piece until the tank was lowered and clear of the car. Id say the tank contained about a 1/3 of a tank of diesel so my estimate wasnt too far out.











With some help I manhandled it into my front garden, removed the sender unit and the issue was obvious as you will see in a photo below.








At least the issue is now known, I believe its been a bit of a mystery for about 20 years.

Im not sure if I will try and solder the original wire back or replace it with a new longer piece. I guess the wire broke due to constant flexing and pulling as the arm traveled up and down with the fuel level.

I note that the broken wire isnt insulated.

If I replace it with a longer piece of insulated wire does anyone know how standard insulated wire reacts with diesel? Is a special grade of wire needed for such an application? If anyone knows please let me  know.

And the reason why my guage started working intermittently, I assume as the level in the tank dropped the broken wire was making an
intermittent connection. 

Some A grade tinkering going on there. Its so satisfying to bring stuff up to scratch for little more outlay than your own time. A stab in the dark as far as the broken sender wire goes , i would have thought pretty much replace like for like with a little more thought for route/angles than O.E managed for longevity! Glad you sorted one of my OCD triggers.....skanky fuel neck/cap/flaps. Just so minging to let them get like that.

Yeah, I was thinking the same, bad design, I think Ill route it around the outside of the arm with lots of slack.

It is quite satisfying fixing things for little cost. And for lockdown having a project to tinker with has been a godsend.

Based on what I gave as a gift & bits Iv bought Im at about £560 spent. That includes some new old stock
genuine front brake discs I havnt fitted yet.

I plan to give it a proper clean and polish when the days are longer. There is a significant amount of laquar damage on the roof and metal spare wheel cover (hence why I have a vinyl cover on the spare wheel now) but most of whats at eye level isnt too bad and should polish up okay.

She will never win any shows but I am sure I can improve the overall appearance to a point where it can be classed as "good enough"

Cheers Tim. I think I'll tackle the brakes next weekend weather permitting.

The fuel tanks hold about 80l so 20 Quid giving you a 1/4 full on the fuel gauge sounds about right.

Concluding what I did last weekend I decided to reuse the current wire but extend it so its not under so much tension as the float moves up and down with the sloshing of diesel.

The repair looks a little rough.... because it is..... time will tell if the repair is a good one or not.




I tested it worked before reinstalling the sender in the tank. It did.




I then reinstalled the tank in the car.



And I now have a working fuel gauge.



So if I can figure out what's up with the rev counter (still working intermittently) I'll have a full compliment of instruments. 

Well I think I'm due an update on this.

The MOT is in Aug this year but this jeep will go to my parents at the end of this month as I dont have parking for it and the BMW here. With that in mind I wanted to tick off a job that would be difficult for me to do on their sloping driveway.

On the last MOT the jeep had an advisory stating all the brake pads were low. I also noticed the front brake discs had a fairly significant lip. I managed to get 2 genuine old stock front brake discs off ebay for 35 quid delivered which I thought was excellent. I then got some brembo pads from ECP for 40 quid.

Turns out I got to the back pads just in time.





You need to remove the hubs to get the front discs off. Everything came apart quite easily, no major dramas, I didnt remove the inner bearing from the hub as I read somewhere there is a seal thats easily damaged if you remove it. I just removed as much of the old grease as I could and then smothered it in new stuff. Same for the outer bearing.








I re-bleed everything and yeah there seams to be a bit more bite to the brakes now.

The rear brake pipes came up as an advisory also but I'll have a look at that later, I have some cooper ones if the originals cant be cleaned up. The braking circuits on these frontera isnt split diagonally, per the haynes the braking circuits are split back and front.

Wiper were an advisory also so I changed them.




The intermittent rev counter fault has been solved. Just if anyone is reading this in years to come there are 2 wires going to a hall sensor on the injection pump. I disconnected the sensor in the engine bay, put the meter on the contacts, a helper revved the engine and I could see the voltage fluctuating between 0.1 and 1.2 V. So the sensor checked out fine.





I tried the wiggle test on the wiring but that didnt make any difference so I decided to take the instrument cluster out to check the wiring to that and see if I had an obvious issue with clocks.








The wiring from the clocks to the sensor checked out fine so I carefully dismantled the clocks & I'll be honest I couldnt see anything wrong there either. I cleaned up the connector between the rev counter and the circuit board with electrical cleaner, reseated it and guess what, it worked as soon as I plugged it back in. Result! It must have been a bad connection.



Next I bought myself a grease gun to grease the propshafts, I doubt its been done before. I might have to revisit this one, I'm not 100% sure I got any grease into the coupler nearest the gearbox. I think most of the grease came out around the nipple. Messy job.







In terms of general servicing thats more or less a reset for this old car. I cant think of anything else that needs doing.

The next job now will be to fix the hole in the sill but thats beyond my skills set so I have ask someone who knows what they are doing to help fix this.



I'm now soaking the bolts that fix the side step to the chassis in wd40 for a few days before I remove it in preparation for this work.

Other than that Ive just been smoking around in it. The gearbox is whiny even after the oil change but what can you expect from a 25 year old free car, it's never going to be perfect, overall it drives okay, goes okay & now stops okay. Saying that it could really do with tyres, but that can wait until the winter when I put it back on the road again. My current thinking is it can be my winter retro.

For fun I decided to polish it up as much as I could one day, just to see really.
So snow foam, shampoo, de tar, clay bar, super resin polish, some old paste wax I had lying around and then extra gloss protection on top. And good old back to black! I guess everything is relative, a lot of the paint work is shot on this jeep, but I'll share some pics of how I received this car and how it looked after its big clean.

Based on the starting point I think it came up quite nice and when a car is clean it motivates me more to do other things with it.




*Not My Volvo








So what's left to fix?

The rear heated window will be done when it goes for its summer holiday to my parent place at the end of this month, I'm gonna get my ole man do that for me and the headliner still needs doing. When starting from cold I can see now its idling at about 600 rpm, I think the "quick on start" system may not be working so I'll look into that.

I guess in term of the initial aim, to bring it back from the brink , I'm not too far off the mark at this point. For sure it will always be a 10 footer but to my mind better that than a new Zanussi.