tick is gone,Bad fuel???
Ran a load of seafoam, and a tank of pure gas ethanol free fuel and the little ticking noise that I felt had developed while snow busting has completely disappeared. the engine is smooth and clear...

I still want to replace the o-ring at the heater hose to engine connection, but without being worked hard while snow busting it is not leaking at all. It was just situational...

 

in the winter you can run the disco with the coolant cap a turn or two loose so you don't build up as much pressure when snow busting. Just make sure to tighten it when it starts getting to be summer, the elevation hurts us when it's 90-95 plus out and will boil over when you turn the truck off...

 

interesting, never thought about loosening the cap, won't that allow it to escape from the bottle? this was the first time I had snow busted with the disco...

 

Tim who sells the inline mod recommends it and I have had zero issues on 2 discos doing so unless the ambient temps are high. The cap is still on and I don't have any noticeable evap loss. The pressure helps with the boiling point but with a lower temp t-stat it isn't necessary and you can make the argument that the increased pressure with the cap fully tightened can shorten the life cycle of parts in the cooling system. At our elevation in CO however the pressure is needed in the summer to keep us from boiling over after shutting down. It won't boilover so long as there is flow but as soon as that stops it doesn't take long to hit the boiling point.

 

Interesting, I know that if i open that cap the bottle fills pretty quick

 

That is because the pressure and temperature has swelled your hoses and coolant, so when you release the pressure they contract and push coolant back in the bottle.

 

yes obviously, what i thought was interesting is that you think i could loosen the cap while i had the engine warm snow busting without the same effect of overflowing the bottle, regardless of outside temps.

 

A quick update, been a few months.
Nigel decided that before the ACE conversion kits were back on the shelves to start leaking outside the block at the number 8 cylinder head. That kind of forced my hand.
I tore him down and resealed the engine, with a new set of victor reinz gaskets and ARP head studs, cylinders were in great shape and no slipped liners. had the heads completely rebuilt. Gained power and gas mileage across the power band.

a few photos

being torn down


rebuilt heads





ready to drive

 

Nice!

 

Cool thread and so many discussions now with the ACE kit about moving to a different engine. I really go back and forth on what to do. Looking long term, whether we like it or not, electric cars are coming (there are good and bad to that, and I’d personally like to keep my internal combustion engines).

With that in mind, and the inevitable reality of the complexity of a swap to a different engine in an already overly complex setup (think about the SLABS, BCM, TCM, and all the other electrical BS) I think you made the right move. Whenever you swap engines, there are little things that come up and it takes a long time to sort out. If you were starting with a simple platform like a classic Defender, the complexities are more physical in terms of routing and mounting stuff. In the Disco, you have those AND all the electrical hand offs that need to occur. So when you are troubleshooting, you are troubleshooting 2 platforms. Based on your reliability requirement, keeping that part simple seems best.

I think the LS swap is a great idea and shores up some gaps in the original design, but it also introduces some complexity that I wouldn’t want to deal with. For me, I’d rather go through a swap exercise to an electric motor. I’m not set on any of this as I just want to enjoy what I have while I can and hopefully don’t have to go through this any time soon.