Tell your lovely wife to go take a bubble bath. You've got work to do. No way in HECK I would let a vehicle kick my butt like that...if it's a money/time decision, fine. If it's an "OMG I guess I'm not man enough" heck no X 100.

My little story. My wife wanted a D2 bad, like real bad, but I'm totally anti-debt and didn't want to get a loan. So we're left with old high mileage pieces of crap because we don't have 10k in cash laying around. We did have $5k, and I found a D2 with 80k 6 hours away. We drove all the way there, turns out it had the following problems:

- Leaking intake gaskets
- SIX dash lights on (Three amigos plus friends)
- Slightly dry rotted tires, and siezed valve stems (little problem but it was irritating big time
- Wife loved it

All semi serious problems. Didn't know a thing about Discos and I'm not a professional wrencher. But wife had to have it so we bought it, got it home and the work began. Four months later and about $1400, I've done the following:

- Replaced intake gaskets and stuff (tstat and various)
- Rebuilt front prop
- Rebuild all calipers
- New tires
- New ABS sensors

Resulting in:

- No dash lights
- Fully functional ABS
- Safety from the dreaded flopping prop
- Sweet looking ride
- Happy wife

YOU CAN DO THIS DUDE. Again it's labor intensive, but if you've got nights and weekends you can totally do this. Your issues are not too hard...that ABS sensor for $600 almost made me choke. I replaced mine with an ebay unit for $55 shipped, 45 mins worth of work. Easy as pie. Some stuff is hard, but have patience and you're there.

</pep talk>

 

Ok so yeah I have calmed down and will be tackling things in a reasonable order.

1. I have ordered a brake switch as that started to fail yesterday. It is sticking in park and brake lights coming and going as well. Fuses look good so I am going with the brake switch. It will be in in a couple of days.

2. Ordered an ABS amigo. Will be in in a couple of days.

3. While waiting for those I will be trying to find the cooland/oil leak for myself. It is pretty dirty so will need to get it cleaned up some I think.

If the coolent leak looks to be from engine then I have found an independent shop close to me that will perform the compression check.

I like the truck and would prefere to keep it.

 

I assume that the 55 dollar ebay repalcement was the sensor not hub? I will have an idea of wether it is the sensor or the hub when the ABS Amigo comes in and I can read the code.

 

Way to go.

Do you have a digital multimeter? They're pretty cheap ($15-20 I think, or $3.49 if you trust Harbor Freight). The Amigo will tell you which wheel sensor is failing. If it's a rear sensor, reach behind the tire and unplug the sensor, it's the only electrical component coming from your brakes. The front sensor connections are in the engine bay near the wheel wells. Set your multimeter to 2k ohms, attach some wire leads, and stick the black and red leads into the sensor contacts. It should read 900-1100 ohms. If it does, chances are your hub is bad. Jack the wheel up and grab the wheel and try to shake it, you could find some movement and if so it's definitely the hub. However even if you don't get any wheel play the hub could still be bad, so verify if the ABS sensor is functioning correctly first.

Here's a theory of mine on how to diagnose the hub/sensor issue (sages please correct me if this is wrong): IF you have a wheel sensor code that CLEARS and doesn't come back on while the vehicle is stationary, it's a hub. If it doesn't clear or comes back within a couple minutes of restarting, it's a sensor. This is because a faulty hub's play wouldn't throw the sensor off until the vehicle is moving.

 

i have the $3 multimeter from HF and its fantastic.

 

That would indeed be an easy way to check to see if the sensor bad or the hub. I will get back as soon as the ABS amigo comes in and I have the code. So are you saying that the front sensors are in the hub but there is a connector in the engine bay that I can check instead of the actual sensor? Anychance that if that is the case that the wire between the actual sensor and the connector coudl be bad and could give a false positive?

 

What you'll be doing is checking the continuity of the sensor. No chance of a false positive that I know of. Essentially you're answering the question, "given that juice is flowing freely to this unit, will it circulate that juice correctly?" At least that's my layman's idea of it...

To clarify, in the case of the both front or rear sensors you'll be leaving the sensor pickup end bolted into the hub and just unplugging/checking the side that plugs into your wiring harness. Again, you're checking for continuity so no need to take the sensor out. Piece of cake check actually.

 

I got the abs amigo in. I took it right out and used it. It was kinda weird in that I plugged it in. It went through the process and went green just like it was suppsoed to. So I srated the truck and it had two of the three lights on still. So I repeated the process and each time another light was cleared. The abs was the last one to get cleared. Her are the results from the Amigo

-----ABS Amigo Box V1 RSW Solutions LLC Copyright 2010-----
|* The information provided is without warranty of any kind.*|
|* IN NO EVENT SHALL RSW Solutions BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR*|
|* INJURY OR DAMAGES resulting from or connected to use of *|
|* this Information or Product. YOU HEREBY WAIVE ANY AND ALL*|
|* CLAIMS AGAINST RSW Solutions ARISING OUT OF YOUR USE OF *|
|* THIS INFORMATION OR PRODUCT. *|
--------------------------------------------------------------
1.--Current Faults---->
Active Faults:
None
Logged Faults:
None
<-END Faults
------------------------------------------------------------
* *
------------------------------------------------------------
..--Previous Faults--->
Active Faults:
None
Logged Faults:
None
<-END Faults
------------------------------------------------------------
* *
------------------------------------------------------------
..--Previous Faults--->
Active Faults:
None
Logged Faults:
Front Right Sensor Bad Output
<-END Faults
------------------------------------------------------------
* *
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Ok so it looks like the message is "Front Right Sensor Bad Output". So I will search around for this and see what I come up with. I turned the truck on and let it run for a few minutes. No lights immediatlyt so I will drive it tomorrow to see.

 

Sounds like good news to me. You might've just thrown the Amigos due to some brake squeal or something. The ABS sensor code isn't active, so I wouldn't worry about it till it comes back.

See, this aint so bad after all

 

its not active because he re-scanned and re-started the truck.