Maaarrghk!'s TD5 De-restriction bloggy fing

Should have increased your fuel economy really but I reckon the drop is more so because of the fact it sounds so good now under load, it's probably a little addictive to lean on the right pedal a little more than before

Nail on the head there Dave. I do like to make the most of around 80 to 90% of a vehicles power, leaving a bit in reserve just in case. I am now more confident in overtaking and suspect that this is where the fuel is going.

Just fitted centre box delete pipe over weekend and pleasantly surprised by results. A detailed post on that to follow.

Serck intercooler in shed keeps winking at me. How much longer can I resist the dirty little minx?

Maaarrghk said:

Nail on the head there Dave. I do like to make the most of around 80 to 90% of a vehicles power, leaving a bit in reserve just in case. I am now more confident in overtaking and suspect that this is where the fuel is going.

Just fitted centre box delete pipe over weekend and pleasantly surprised by results. A detailed post on that to follow.

Serck intercooler in shed keeps winking at me. How much longer can I resist the dirty little minx?

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Interested in the box delete

£48 from Paddock well spent MJI, if you don't mind the extra cabin noise.

Only put it on at the weekend, so yet to do the full appraisal including fuel figures. Watch this space.

Stage 4 - Centre Box Delete.

Did this a week ago, but waiting for my right foot to settle down before getting any fuel consumption figures.

A few little snags to watch out for. The original centre box has 2xM10 studs fitted on the front flange, the delete pipe does not. Luckily I have a large stash of nuts & bolts in the shed. The rear flange neaded parting with the angle grinder and the studs drilling out. Not a huge problem and expected as the car spent 9 years on a Scottish farm. Another 3 nuts and bolts required from the shed.

One thing that was obvious on removing the centre box was its weight - most definitely a two handed lift.

Fired the engine up and noticed both a deeper exhaust note (expected) and the "whistly twitter" from the tail pipe that I have heard on so many yoochoob videos of tuned TD5's.

Went for a test drive and didn't expect to be anything like as impressed as I was! (Take note MJI, you did ask). Performance gain was as much as I had got from fitting the de-cat pipe, which surprised me greatly. I really did think it would just sound more powerful, but after a week there is no denying a definite power increase with overtaking being noticably easier.

Climbing hills is now a lot easier also, but this is where you really notice the extra cabin noise. Not excessive to my ears, but I'm keeping the original box just in case the family start to complain. Otherwise cabin noise increase is not so bad.

So, onto my test hill. I now find that I can keep above 45mph almost to the top - in fact I am doing 45 for about 50 yards before the hill starts to level out and then I pick up speed again.

Just as a reminder, the standard spec' car would drop down to 40mph fairly early on and struggle to maintain that until the hill was levelling out quite noticably.

So I'm very pleased - about 50% more bang for my buck than the de-cat pipe was.



So far, I have spent the following:-

£36 on K&N filter - verdict, leave it until just before the ecu re-map.

£28 on egr delete kit - verdict, money well spent

£72 on silicone turbo hoses to go with egr delete - verdict, not necessary if you are ABSOLUTELY SURE that your standard hoses aren't de-laminating, but how do you tell? So a good idea to get them done at this point as they should last the life of the car and should never de-laminate.

£74 on de-cat pipe - verdict, made the most of the egr delete and smoothed the engine out a bit, but an absolute swine to get the front cross member off if the bolts round off and they did. A good investment, but need to find an MOT man who is "One of Us" or weld a dummy cat to it.

£48 on centre box delete - verdict, money very well spent.

Total so far - £258.

The car goes much better than it did and returns slightly better fuel consumption. Hills are climbed easier and in higher gear, overtaking is now a distinct possibility. Top gear is reached sooner from a standing start. With the probable exception of the K&N filter, this has all been money well spent. Leave that till later on and we are looking at £222 - not bad at all and relatively affordable if you do it over a few months, as I did.

Now things start to get expensive.

Good write up Maaarrkgh, interesting to read the improvements your changes have made.
I bought my D2 with all the bits done same as you apart from it runs on a standard airfilter and has had an ECU remap. I will look at the silicone hose kit for the turbo as if they are original they are 14 years old now. Will combine that with an intercooler clean I think!
My car passed the MOT last month with the Cat delete, but my guy is a Landrover man!

Very interesting, after the emergency repairs and the service it will be decat first. I am not 100% sure if mine is good standard or gentle remap so will be visiting a tuner in the summer

Thanks for the responses chaps.

ClassikFan, I would definitely recoment replacement hoses. My mate got some from Paddock, but one didn't fit and they told him to chop it down from 90 to 45 degrees - it still doesn't fit! Only complaint I have ever heard about Paddock stuff though and I got all my other items from them with no real issues.

I got my hoses from Derby Performance Hose for £60 plus another £12 for fancy wide stainless clips which are better than jubilees.

Pop over to BennehBoys blog regarding your intercooler. He had big oil ingress problems and has solved them by fitting something called a Provent. I intend to fit one at the same time as the intercooler.

You may have got away with the cat delete due to the age of the vehicle if one wasn't fitted at the factory. Mine is a 54 plate, one of the last, so I have to find a garage who will MOT in a sensible manner.

MJI, plenty on this site about re-maps and Mike at Dynachip seems to be the guy to go to. Best to discuss your requirements with him before the time comes. Also best to do the re-map after everything else has been done, otherwise you would need another re-map should you make further modifications.

Alive also get a lot of praise, although I suspect they might be a bit pricey.

There is an actual tuner about 30 miles away from me.

Just got time before tea for a quick update after deleting the centre box.

Fuel consumption is around 25.5mpg, so that's still around 3mpg improvement over the as bought and un-modified vehicle.

Thinking about investing in a Kenlowe fan before adding the intercooler. Might start another thread to discuss the pro's and cons of that.

The other thing I want to do before going any further is the bleeding obvious, ie, checking the engine is in tip-top condition, with all sensors etc working as they should be. Some may point out that I should have done this at the start and I would not argue with that view. However, I have been doing all this whilst still learning about a car and engine that are quite a bit different to anything I have worked on before and I am still getting to grips with how it all works.

Anyway. Tea time now.....

Just done a little delving into the Kenlowe fan.

There seems to be a view that having an electric instead of a viscous fan results in a warming up of the intercooler. Therefore fitting the Kenlowe may well wipe out any benefit gained in fitting the bigger intercooler.

As I am chiefly after power gains, with any extra mpg being an added bonus, I shall save the money towards the looming MOT.

I know you've passed this point already, but the best way to get the cross member bolts moving is to heat them cherry red first - kind of hard now that MAPP is unavailable any more, but easy if you've got access to oxy/acet...

Plus gas just won't touch them in most cases.

Maaarrghk said:

Pop over to BennehBoys blog regarding your intercooler. He had big oil ingress problems and has solved them by fitting something called a Provent. I intend to fit one at the same time as the intercooler.

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The jury is out on this one for the moment!

The Provent HAS stopped oil build up in the IC, but I've managed to block up the Provent filter, effectively causing the crank case to overpressure resulting in some very unwanted smoke issues.

Concensus on here seems to be that my oil is shot and probably too thin for the miles on my engine - 120K. I have always used Castrol Magnatec 5w30 but have bought some 10W40 to put in as soon as all this rain clears up.

Will let you know how I get on afterward.

Nice of you to drop in Benneh.

I did go for the hot spanner as we have one gathering dust at work. The back bolts I got red hot and they came off with a big chissel and bigger hammer, but the front ones were a bit tricky to get at without removing half the steering, so I just melted them off.

I will keep dropping by your thread for the fate of the pro-vent. I would recomend you take advice before putting anything thicker than the 5W30 in there, but that's just my bad experience with putting (Ford recomended) 10W40 in my tdci mondeo. Not thin enough to lubricate the turbo bearing, so out the exhaust it all flew. The turbo, not the oil.

Are you sure that your current woes are not down to the problem that you put the pro-vent in to resolve?

Might be an idea to start a thread specific to this particular issue.

By the way, I pop down to Millers in Brighouse for all my oils and have no problems as they recomend which ones to use and the prices are reasonable enough, although not the cheapest. You pay for what you get.

Always had an aversion to anything with "castrol" on the tin, but that's just me.

Millers is very good. Castrol is mostly overpriced rubbish for all but a few of their oils.
Mobil 1 is very good too and have had good results with Redline too in cars.
Have only really ran Millers in my Defender and Dad's Disco though.

I get a fair amount of oil in my intercooler and intake too but I suspect the turbo isn't helping it too as it might be giving whatever oil the crankcase can pump out into the intake a boost (pardon the pun )

I'll be sorting that with fitting a catch tank though

Wouldn't mind seeing a few piccies of that catch tank when it's done Dave.

Bennehboy is doing a much needed engine re-build, so as he says, the jury is still out on the pro-vent.

Not added much here for a while as other aspects of the car need sorting out - springs/shockers/bushes/steering, a looming MOT and a mad waste gate that needs hitting with a Nanocom.

That waste gate is a pain as I am not getting the best from the de-restrictions thus far done. I have replaced turbo boost modulator and all its wee hoses and put a new MAF sensor on as the old one has seen better days, but am still getting the waste gate rattling like buggery, especially in the lower gears.

I have a couple of weeks off coming up and will be doing the MOT related work during that time, so I may well fit the intercooler while I am at it, but will not comment on it until the waste gate issue is resolved.

Just a quick update. Car passed it's MOT with an advisory on one tyre (now replaced).

Intercooler has gone on and I can feel the extra grunt that the engine wants to give, but it's all being confounded due to a mis-behaving waste gate that rattles like a tap dancer on amphetamine. Sierrafery is helping me out with this one on another thread.

A proper update when the wastegate issue is resolved.

Re-map may now have to wait until next year as I am currently "resting between parts Darling" as the thespians like to call it.

Recently cleaned out K&N - totally gunged up in 4 months, so will be cleaning it again a couple of times over the next week to make sure it is tip-top. I suspect it may have been over-oiled at the factory, but it was certainly holding a lot of muck - much more than I have ever seen in any paper element filter. Says something for its efficiency as a filter if nothing else.

Hi Maaarrghk, have you noticed any impact on the MAF by the oil from the K&N
I have heard they can interfere with the sensor and cause failure!

I haven't noticed anything Sniffer. As a replacement MAF was fairly cheap from Paddocks, I put a new one in thinking it may solve the problem. Sadly, it had no effect at all. Unless it failed instantly, which I doubt.

Sierrafery seems to think the problem lies before the filter. Hence my wanting to repeat clean the element a few times. Next step is to get the wheel arch liner out so that I can have a good look at the actual air inlet to the filter housing, to check that there isn't half a bale of Scottish hay wedged in there.

If no joy there, I will pipe it up like a Defender, cutting out the turbo boost modulator and see if that has any effect. Of course, the culprit could be the AAP sensor. About £160 off landrover, but you can get them down the internet for about £24.