treks

Yes,it is possible. When water (or large amounts of water vapor) is present in the cylinder the water takes up some of the volume of the cylinder, hence, higher compression pressure. Once the water is expelled through the valves the compression pressure will fall back down to about normal- depending on the size of the leak path in the gasket, or worse, the size of the crack in the cylinder head. However, as someone else mentioned, it is best to these types of test with the fuel system disabled to protect the catalytic converter when the engine starts again. Nonetheless, bear in mind that the object of a compression test in these circumstances is not to find a definitive compression pressure; it is to determine the position of the leak, which will be on the cylinder(s) with the lowest compression pressure.

You are right about the unreliability of these gearboxes- in fact, the one developed by Ford was such a pile of crap that they gave up on trying to work out the bugs. Instead, they just gave it up as a bad idea and abandoned their use altogether.

You mean the Big Dipper (the Plough in the UK) asterism, as opposed the constellation Ursa Major? Sure, this works to find your way if you know what to look for but in my experience, less than a 5 people out of 100 can identify any constellation, much less an asterism that can save their lives.

I know what you mean.These days I only keep evergreens in my garden, so I don't have any garden waste to cart away. I am just getting too old for that sort of crap.

With age comes wisdom. It is indisputably true that having a reliable, cost effective driver is better than driving say, a Jeep. Or a Range Rover

...or want to.

Was it fitted to a skimmed flywheel? I agree with @Barry- I have fitted a great many Valeo clutches to all sorts of vehicles, and never had a problem of any kind. If a Valeo clutch failed on skumar's Jeep there must have been something wrong, and it's unlikely to have been the clutch kit.

Beast indeed. Looks a bit like a monster fruit fly.

Don't be nasty now, @skumar83 has learned his lesson!

Yeah, If money is not a problem and you have a proper technical support team, you can win any competition in any vehicle

There are two Africa's- one where people can do quick, two-week long runabouts in Range Rovers around a few cities, and one where you can get some real off-road driving experience over the 20 000-odd km "route" from Cape Town to Cairo and points further north via central Africa, where tracks can change and/or disappear overnight.So, did these guys do any actual off-road driving, or did they keep to the popular and reasonably well-maintained tourist routes, the same routes the people who load European students into modified 10-ton trucks use? Or the routes people use to cross the continent on Chinese-made scooters? Of course it is possible to cross Africa in any direction- people do it all the time, but whether you are successful or not depends on you experience, your skill, the vehicle you use,the number of people and vehicles in your party, and not least, on the amount of money you are willing or able to spend on the trip. Documentaries? Meh- they never show the real stuff- like experienced drivers in expedition grade vehicles taking three days to do 40 km during the wet season. After all, who wants to be shown getting stuck every couple of hundred meters? Or remain stuck for the week or more it can take for the mud to dry sufficiently to recover a vehicle? Off course, going into central Africa during the wet season is just stupid, but I was forced to abandon a vehicle there because the monsoon season started three weeks early- as it happens sometimes. A proper north-south continental crossing can take up to eight months if you really want to see and experience the continent, and I have yet to see a Range Rover, and particularly a petrol Range Rover survive eight months of real off-road driving.

I never mentioned sedans- I said "rent a suitable vehicle", which is invariably a diesel truck. Sure, you can do a road trip in Africa with an SUV- provided you don't venture too far (50 -100 km) from major centres. The roads around most major cities are generally in reasonable condition, but anything beyond about 100 km or so from a major city (and considerably less in some cases) becomes an overland expedition to the next major city. If you don't want to do cities, any distance between two points in Africa is an overland expedition, and especially so in central Africa, where nobody has been able to build permanent roads- or railways for that matter. However, large sections of the Trans-African Highway system (the parts of it that run around the edges of the continent, at least) have been paved and/or upgraded during the past ten years or so, but there are no guarantees that any part of the Trans-African Highway system will remain paved from one year to the next. If you ever end up in washed out section of the road system in the dry season, when big trucks have reduced it to series of deep trenches that can be deeper than a meter, and run for tens of kilometers, you will find that the limited suspension articulation of an SUV- any SUV- will leave you crested on these trench tops every few meters. Then again,if you ever end up in a washed out section of the road system in the wet season, you need to be in a group of at least four trucks to get through meter-deep mud traps that can run for tens of kilometers. If you can get past the dozens of big trucks that have been bogged down for months in a track that is barely wide enough to allow two ox-carts to pass each other, that is. In fact, a few years ago I had to abandon one of my expedition grade vehicles in such a mud trap because there was no way to get it out of the mud from behind an 18- wheeler that had sunk into the mud up to the top of it's wheels, and from in front of another 18-wheeler that had followed me into the mud trap before the other vehicles in my expedition could follow me in. For all I know, both trucks and my vehicle are still stuck there. So, no, SUV's without proper 4-wheel drive, low range, winches, lockable diffs, rated recovery points, and at least 28 inches of suspension articulation in Africa are not good idea if you venture away from the big centers.

Don't take a Prado into Africa- I have extensive experience of African overland expeditions, and I have never seen Prado's (or SUV's in general) do well there. Best thing to do is follow Gaurav's advice; if you want to do Africa, rent a vehicle from a reputable operator.

Well, it's simple really; it's a taxi for people with lots and lots of luggage that won't fit in any other type of taxi.

Not for at least another 50 or 60 years, if ever, given the worldwide lack of generating capacity and the crap that will hit the fan when the proponents of electric cars finally realize just how much pollution charging a billion cars will produce

@Barry, I'd gladly take you up if I still had my book collection. I used to own a used book store as a side business, but reading, and particularly reading paper books went out of fashion here. I sold my entire stock (app. 160 000 books- all non-fiction) to a variety of local collectors and sellers on AbeBooks.com. Made some good money, but I miss every single book I ever owned; it took a lifetime to collect them all, but I just did not have the space to keep them all when I gave up the shop. I only kept my astronomy books (about 2 000), and I won't give any of those up for any amount of money. As for current reads, I am now reworking my way through Dervla Murphy's travelogues. She is Irish, and one of the best travel writers I know.

@Barry, I could not agree with you more. But then again, perhaps they needed Syd at first to recognize that they could do better- and boy, did they ever do better without him! I occasionally listen to their Syd era stuff, and I still don't get what they were doing back then. To me, it is still just senseless, pointless, random noise, and I am sure that at least Roger and David still cringe with embarrassment when they hear it.

I am with @desertdudeon this issue. I have built all sorts of engines in my time- from screaming chainsaw engines that needed massive turbos to get up to speed, to my favorites, the LS series engines that effortlessly deliver massive amounts of power at barely above idle RPM's. In my opinion and experience, there is nothing to beat the effortless power of a well-built and tuned V8, and in fact, some of the screaming chainsaws I've built used considerably more fuel at high engine speeds than almost any LS I've built running at any engine speed. In practice, there are only two ways for any small-displacement engine to make more power- one is to add more fuel, and the other is to make hugely expensive modifications and then to add even more fuel to make the mods work. Both scenarios affect reliability in the worst possible way. By way of contrast, no modern V8 engine needs major modifications to bring about significant power increases. While most LS engines can be heavily modified, these sorts of mods are almost always done for serious competition applications, which mere mortals like us can't afford to engage in anyway. Therefore, a few simple programming tweaks and maybe an exhaust mod are usually enough to make a modern V8 outperform almost any screaming chainsaw engine in almost any vulgar street racer, while using less fuel than the smaller engine, to boot. And yes, I still hate cars, and not everything is about speed.

@waqaszohair, Barry gave you some excellent advice, but I would add this- enroll in an advanced driving course in Canada that covers driving on ice and snow. You just cannot learn how to do this by watching YouTube videos.

Maybe so, but the thing with buying parts from scrapyards is that you just don't know what you are getting. Sometimes you are lucky and a part lasts for a while, and sometimes you are not lucky, and a part fails within days, or as I have seen on occasion, within hours. It's a bit like gambling, really.

Great!

Removing the rev limiter on this Ferrari requires balls so big they have their own gravitational fields. But I agree- if you keep in mind that rev limiters are programmed into ECU's for a reason, you can get a lot of fun from a sporty engine that revs freely. If off course, you are that way inclined

I was wondering about why people would even consider fitting used driveshafts,but this response puts the issue in perspective for me.

I agree with this. What you get in terms of aftermarket quality depends as much on the market you are operating in, as it does on the make and model you are buying aftermarket spares for. For instance, in my market, I will not find aftermarket Mustang spares for love or any amount of money, while high quality CV joints for Camry's are available from any spares shop.If I wanted Mustang spares,I have to get them from a Ford dealer and wait several months for them to arrive, or import them myself.

It can be as expensive as you want it to be, especially if you want to replace the entire axle when only the CV joints can be replaced.