6th August 2014

I've never had so much drama with a light bulb before....

One of the park lights in the headlights went out, no worries I thought, good time to change them for some white LEDs to match the Xenon main beams.

Go down to Supercheap, got some cheap white w5w's, they don't work, burn dull with the ignition off, go out completely with the ignition on. Try them in the footwell sockets, they work fine....

Bought some canbus compatible w5w's of eBay, set of four for $10, this should work. Nope, they just flicker for a bit & trip out the breaker. Put them in the map lights & the puddle lights in the doors, they work fine...

Hop on the Freelander forum to see what other people have used, and there is one supplier in the UK who everybody bought from and they've worked so I bought some.

2 weeks later they turn up in the post, so I put them in, and they work. Yay...



But now I've got half the interior lights as cool white LED and the rest as yellowish halogens, so back to Supercheap for some LED festoons... which also work. So now it's all LED...

I should have just put in a standard bulb & that would have been the end of it....

 

26th August 2014

Decided against putting the 4-pots on the front, a lot of messing around and extra cost, although the bling factor would be off the chart, just not worth it.

But I will be upgrading the fronts...just bent my credit card to the tune of $1200

Brand new Volvo XC90 calipers for the front, aftermarket without the Volvo logo.

Centric / StopTech High Carbon Rotors all round
125.39044 336x28 fronts for various Volvo's (S80, XC70, etc.)
125.22018 302x20 rears (stock Freelander2 size)

EBC Redstuff Ceramic Pads (low dust!!!!)
DP31690C XC90 ones for the front
DP31933C Volvo S80 for the rear (same pad as the Freelander2)

And a new set of Centric handbrake shoes 111.09370

Only thing that needs sorting is the front dust shields, apparently they need some "massaging" to fit the bigger front discs in...

 

12th September 2014

Brake parts arrived during the week while I was away, bit of an eye opener as to the size of the front rotors and calipers compared to stock











Still only single piston on the front but easily double the size of the little stock calipers, I was scratching my head as to why there was an extra box, and then I realized that each caliper had its own box they are that big...

Also have a set of Goodridge braided hoses to go on.

Now to find some time to fit them...

 

2nd October 2014

I painted the steel parts of the calipers with an aluminium coloured semi-ceramic paint, looks a lot better than that gold finish. Had to bake them in the oven at 200°C for an hour...



Came up pretty good I think.



The cheap aftermarket calipers didn't come with the anti-rattle springs, so I had to order some from the local Volvo dealer.

I knew that the rotors were worn, but I was pretty annoyed when I got them off and took some measurements.

Front
New thickness 30mm
Min. thickness 28mm
Act. thickness 26.8mm

Rear
New thickness 20mm
Min. thickness 18mm
Act. thîckness 16.5mm

Not happy. We've only done 10'000kms since we bought this thing...

Anyway, it's sorted now & I really like the way it stops, very progressive, no sudden jolt if you move your foot onto the pedal, and the harder you press the faster it stops. The brakes feel very similar to the Jag now.

Fronts before



And after



Rears after, but still to put on the braided line



Braided line



Should be the last set of brakes ever to go on this thing...I just hope the brake dust is better, or i'm gonna go nuts...

 

11th November 2014

Pads have bedded in now and i'm really impressed. The brakes are better than I ever expected, really nice pedal feel and it pulls up like a car with good brakes, not a 4WD. Very happy.

Dust output is a fraction of what it was before, 2 weeks of commuting & the wheels still look good. Couldn't ask for more.

Had a duh! moment today, I always wondered why there was no sport mode for the auto, I just assumed that because it's a 4WD there was auto, or manual mode when you move the lever over & shift yourself. Well turns out that if you move the lever over and don't play with the gears, that's the sport mode.

Even says so on the dash



I've been belting 'round town today driving like a complete %&*# with it in sport mode, it's really obnoxious, wakes this thing up, it holds gears and kicks down like, a car. I'm kind of shocked. Was grinning like an idiot chopping people at traffic lights...LOL

 

9th December 2014

Ticked another little job off, both remotes had stopped working, so I had to replace the batteries, which is a bit more involved than it sounds...

The Land Rover remotes are IP68 so they don't get damaged if you drop them in mud/water/etc, I guess the marketing term is ruggedized. They have a rechargeable lithium battery in them & the housing is completely sealed with glue.

The battery gets charged via induction while the fob is in the slot as you're driving around. Naturally the batteries don't last forever & eventually they won't charge, and you can't lock/unlock the vehicle.

Land Rover think that you should buy a whole new fob for $xxx and then pay them extra to program it.

Ah, no...

The battery is a Panasonic VL-2330/HFN which cost about $5 each from Farnell...got two delivered for $24 (delivery costs more than the batteries )

Replacement procedure:

- carefully prize the fob open along the glued joint, takes considerable force to break the glued seal
- desolder the old battery
- solder in new battery
- check functionality
- re-glue the fob housing back together

rinse & repeat...

My phone with the good camera died, so sorry for the pic quality...

 

And now we are up to date!

Had my first unplanned major expense with this thing. Alternator died at 129'000kms.

The Volvo engineers who designed the engine, in their unquestionable wisdom, mounted the alternator between the block and the intake manifold. It's driven off the crank via a gearbox, no belt. Directly above the alternator is a coolant bleed hose, which can drip coolant directly onto the back of the alternator where the voltage regulator is...

Getting access to the alternator requires removing the intake manifold, which is a heap of fun...



And then, you need a special tool to remove the pulley off the old alternator, and mount it on the new one...

In the US you can buy exchange alternators for about $300, but nobody rebuilts them here so I had to buy a new one. The local dealer gave me a bit of a discount which made it close enough to the cost of buying a new one from the UK, and they got it to me next working day. So hats off to them.

I stopped by the dealers workshop and got their guys to swap the pulley over for me, gave them a carton of Carlsberg for their trouble, puts me in credit for when I need the next favour.

All back together now, along with a new hose and a sponge strategically located below the hose connection, will periodically check up to see if there is any leakage.

I suspect that the alternator had been replaced once before, since there was a hole punched in the dust seal of the pulley, pretty sure they didn't do that at the factory.

Reading up it seems that the 3.2L Volvo's also have some alternator problems, seems to be the nature of the engine...

 

What does SDD stand for? And what does it do? Can I change other things with it?

 

SDD is the dealer-level diagnostic system, it's what the dealers themselves have. Basically you can do anything that the dealer can do, apart from top-secret stuff that needs to be approved by Land Rover themselves before the dealer can do it.

Honestly, it's so complicated and potentially dangerous, and not to mention expensive (buying genuine hardware, not cheap chinese clone hardware), that I would not recommend it to someone who isn't at least 1/3rd a computer geek and 1/3rd a mechanic...

A more user friendly device like the i930 would be better, not to mention cheaper and safer to use.

But just to give you an example of what can be done, today I finally got round to re-flashing the instrument cluster with a custom file. Only been sitting on it for 6 months, too busy, which is ironic since it takes 30 minutes to do...

For whatever reason the early LR2 didn't have the clock displayed in the instrument panel, (it was added to the later models) so you could only see it on the radio display in the center console, which is a bit of a distraction.

My wife reckoned "that was dumb!" so half my luck when I stumbled across some guys on the internet who are pretty smart with this stuff. They came up with a custom instrument cluster file which adds the clock to the instrument panel, as well as a few other nice features.

The standard trip computer gives you trip, range, ave. fuel & ave. speed only. To this they added inst. fuel, inst. speed and battery voltage. In addition the temperature gauge now functions as a real gauge that moves, rather than sitting dead in the middle from 75°C to 113°C. They also added a gear indication so you can see which gear the tranny is in even when it's working as an auto.

Nice thing is the updated file can be flashed into the car with the standard SDD dealer-diagnostic system, you just have to cut/paste the new files into the right folder.

New features;



Clock and gear display.



Instant fuel consumption.



Instant speed, and this is dead accurate with the GPS, even though the dial reads a few km high.



Battery voltage, after the drama I had with the alternator, this is nice to have.

Nice features that should have been there in the first place...

 

Next upgrade, the 480W 14-speaker Dolby Surround system. Actually in the end it's only changing the amp, and adding the 5 speakers.







Front speakers that go in the dash.




Dash already has the grilles, and the wiring, just missing the speakers.










Actually the two dash speakers are just wired in paralell to the tweeters in the doors, so you can fit them without needing to upgrade the amp & they work, would also be an improvement without going the whole hog.





Center fill speaker



"Surround" amp, actually came out of a Jaguar XF... you can see the extra connector in the loom, that's for the rear pillar speakers and the center fill in the dash.



Difference between the amps.





D-pillar panels with speakers built in.









All back together and looking factory.

The amp is not exactly plug-n-play, the amp has to be activated, a small edit in the Car Configuration File with the IDS/SDD....

But once that's done...





It's a massive improvement over the "Mid-Line" system but honestly still not as great as the Audiophile-spec system in the XJR...

For the $350 it cost me in parts i reckon well worth it. But definitely not worth the $3500 I was quoted by the dealer...

Start to finish a shade over 2 hours, including the programming.