Possible binding brake(s)

[totaleclipse]

Would the diff not vary in sound dependent on cornering, acceleration and braking? My noise seems to be based purely on speed, although I've not tried wheelspinning it yet.

To eliminate the diff, drive the car and take it out of gear, if the noise is there whilst freewheeling/coasting you have a wheel bearing, driveshaft , or tyre problem.If the noise is there only in gear, then you can suspect gearbox/diff etc.

Just for reference, even if the car is in neutral, the diff is still turning as long as the car is moving, so a noise in the diff would still be there, no matterwhat the gears / clutch etc are doing.

if you find a wheel thats not turning nice, remove the driveshaft and turn it again, if it now turns nice then its either cv or diff.

[jasper5]

With the greatest of respect, I know the diff is turning, but in neutral,it's not under load, that's why, in my earlier post, I said to go on and off the throttle to load up the whole transmission.
Coasting in neutral will allow a noisy wheel bearing to be heard without the gearbox being loaded and disguising the noise, as I said, if you load up the transmission by pressing the throttle and the noise gets louder, then you look for a transmission noise rather than a wheel bearing.

Of course, it isn't unknown for a diff bearing to be noisy, even not loaded, I had one a couple of years back on a Land Rover Freelander, the n/s diff bearing failing is very common on the Freelander, but of course, that is a different vehicle altogether.

I guess all will come out in the wash, as they say.

[teamster1975]

AKA Bodgitt and Leggitt.The original bodger since 1980.You break it, I bodgitt.

Nice one Jasper

[mjb]

Got a lift to EuroCarParts at lunchtime, picked up the cylinder. The old one had issues with the idea of coming off the gearbox, but a 2' breaker bar to push it in and a hefty pair of mole-grips to turn it and it snapped out. The push rod had very little movement and was coming out at a funny angle

New one in, try to bleed... nothing

So I try to use my nut. Ignored what the Haynes Book of Lies said and went to look for the master cylinder behind the engine. Oh look, it's nowhere near the bottom where the haynes says it is! So I look at the low pressure tube coming off it and followed it to the brake fluid reservoir. The SIDE of the brake fluid reservoir!

Since I was doing this at the side of the road with the n/s against the kerb, the bloody clutch wasn't able to to take in any fluid. So I jacked the n/s right up (about 4" higher than the scissor jack - didn't want to go higher since the road surface is awful and the handle end of the jack was several inches off the ground), I let the o/s tyre down so it was flat as a pancake and with the reservoir brimmed (and flicked to knock out some air) I put fluid into the clutch. One stoke of the clutch at a time between reservoir fills.

It's not right as there's a lot of air still in it, but my god it's SO much better than it was The vibration's gone, acceleration is a lot sharper (guessing the slipping's gone!) and there's actually some FEEL to it so I don't need to spend 10 seconds finding the bite point before setting off at the lights

So I went to work, parked under a lamp in the car park and bled the front brakes. They're not sharp by any stretch of the imagination, but they are now powerful with lots of feel. It's more progressive and the bite position is lower than it was on the old fluid, so I can toe-and-heel again!

It's all coming together! just the noise and the missing cylinder(s) to deal with now

So in summary when changing the brake fluid on a D9 with hydraulic clutch:

1. Bleed the brakes FIRST. 60 full strokes of the brake pedal fills a 500ml bottle of diet coke.
2. Bleed the clutch LAST
3. NEVER EVER do it with the nearside lower than the offside. The ideal situation is to have the nearside front the highest corner of the car

TODO: bleed the rears, re-bleed the clutch, identify noise, identify missing cylinder(s) and cause

I've got an OBD interface on the way to assist with the latter. Hoping the ECU can tell me which pot(s) ain't firing. With luck it'll be just oil in the plug holes or the rear bank 'fake' coil pack (£70), but I'm going to be pessimistic and guess that it'll be the coil pack (£260ish). Chances are I'll probably end up getting a set of plugs while I'm at it, just to finish off MartinV6's service (thank god he did the hard part!!!)

[puggy]

Well done mj old lad ,quite a lot of inginuity used there, top marks

[steve_earwig]

Oooh, kerbside mechanics, just my favourite Good to see you're getting some results there anyway.

I suppose you should get a clue if you take the plugs out (facehugger on standby )

[mjb]

I suppose you should get a clue if you take the plugs out (facehugger on standby )

Got to get a new inlet manifold gasket first :/

[Welly]

That's the sort of thing I'd try, feck up, panic, smash the place up, sell the car for nothing and leave

Well done m - and especially well done for getting stuck in like that

[steve_earwig]

Got to get a new inlet manifold gasket first :/

I know, you'd think they'd make service items easier to get to (who am I kidding?). There's always someone breaking coupes on ebay...

[mjb]

That's the sort of thing I'd try, feck up, panic, smash the place up, sell the car for nothing and leave

That's what being an ubergeek does to you - it ingrains into your very being the fundamental concept that everything in the universe is logical and can be explained, and if it seems otherwise, you just don't know enough.

Once I'd fitted the new slave and was just pumping air through it I took a step back and dropped the assumption that the Haynes was correct and I wouldn't be able to see the master cylinder, so I looked for it, found it and saw it wasn't p*ssing out brake fluid, so there were only 4 possible explanations:

1. Master cylinder had a duff piston
2. Leaky pipework
3. DOA slave cylinder
4. Dodgy layout of the reservoir

Frustration (and by extension, extreme violence) only starts to set in when I hit snags like a bolt I can't physically undo, like the crankshaft pulley on the tubby, or the ridiculously hard to get at bolt on the manual headlamp adjuster on the saloon (had to replace a headlamp cluster for my dad last weekend, the swelling on my hand and arm's only just going down now, but the bruises remain)

Well done m - and especially well done for getting stuck in like that

Didn't really have much choice - I'm not walking for over an hour to get to work every day! My knees can't take it!

[mjb]

Got to get a new inlet manifold gasket first :/

I know, you'd think they'd make service items easier to get to (who am I kidding?). There's always someone breaking coupes on ebay...

To be fair there's not much they could have done about it to make it easier - the engine sucks in air from the middle of the 'v' so the inlet manifold has to go somewhere... I think all if not most FWD 'v' engines have the intake manifold bent over the rear bank so it all fits in the engine bay.