duncs_c7

Thanks for that bluenose!

Naturally I agree! I'm quite surprised I haven't even had a sniff of interest to be honest, seems like people are keen on the brighter colours... but at this price you could afford a couple of re-sprays before you've spent what you would on a dealer car. Alas, it will probably end up at a dealer now and someone will have to pay £25k+.

Price now reduced to £22k as I need to sell soon, I think it's comfortably the cheapest R400K around now, and it's a great car. Please pass on the details to anyone you know who might be interested.

Link to pistonheads advert: https://www.pistonheads.com/classifieds/used-cars/caterham/all-models/low-mileage-2004-r400-k-series/9558944

Still for sale.

Reluctantly selling my R400 K-series due to imminent house move, 17k miles on the clock. Looking for £23,000 The car has just had a full service and MOT, so is in in fine fettle for a summer of fun! It's a 2004 factory build in black with gold noseband and gold Caterham 8 spoke wheels (sorry, I don't know how to put up photos but can e-mail them on request!) with the following: Roller barrel throttle bodies Full wet weather gear FIA roll bar LSD 6 speed gearbox Dry sump Just Add Lightness LED rear lights Removable 260mm momo steering wheel Tillet seats (drivers side adjustable) Areo filler Lowered head lamps with black 5 3/4 " lights Updated lenses and Philips bulbs 12v socket under the dash FIA battery cut off switch Wide track Heater Carpeted interior and boot Repack-able exhaust ACE shift lights Aero filler cap in black Carbon fibre dashboard Carbon stone guards Carbon cycle wings Carbon areo whiskers Carbon fibre number plate light Laptimer with remote trigger switch Private R400 plate Black pack screen and lights Black gear knob 13" Superlight 8-spoke wheels powder coated gold by Lepsons of Kent (recently done / immaculate) 4 point Caterham harnesses Avon ZZS with less than 1k miles on 2 keys and immobiliser fobs Good condition, a few paint chips here and there as to be expected. Folder full of receipts and service history. Sevens & Classics and James Whiting since I've had it, and Sevens & Classics with the previous owner too. Any questions, please ask. E-mail me at duncinnes@yahoo.co.uk Now sold.

Thanks for the advice guys. I run Comma Motorsport oil, for no other reason than that is what the previous owner used and he seemed to know what he was talking about!

I am not using the dipstick that comes with it, that's next to useless. I drop an alu rod in to dip it. I've never tried to dip it, clean it, and re-dip. I'm not actually sure how long you have to dip it before it subsides, 30 seconds or so?

Look like this (sorry, dont know how to put up photos): http://i.imgur.com/koc3OwN.jpg

Looks like air to me. Well checking the dry sump is immediately after switching off the engine from warm. I was kind of hoping it was just the pressurised system whipping it up a bit!

Anyone else find there's small air bubbles on the dipstick when they dip their oil?

Think it's the standard procedure: jack up front, open rad bleed plug, open heater, top up from reservoir, then I did a bit of gentle hose squeezing to clear any bubbles. Appears to have worked at least. That's the plan, for a while take it for some short to medium distance drives and keep monitoring everything.

I'm not sure what else I can do, I also don't want to replace a head gasket that's perfectly fine. If it is the early stages of HGF then no doubt the issues I've been having will return. However, given that it started just after having the hoses replaced and appears to be fine after bleeding is surely evidence that there's a good chance this was the issue?

Well I did in fact manage to bleed the coolant system, it really wasn't as difficult as I was expecting. Weirdly, it seems to have fixed everything. Plan now is to fit new leads anyway, and then just keep any eye on things for a while. Might send it to someone for a once over as well.

Is it possible that the coolant system wasn't bled properly when the hoses were replaced at the last service? Either way, having looked up the procedure I'm guessing it's not something I could take on! Might be time to ship it to someone with some skills!

I think the fan was on before I got back. How would I test for products of combustion? For what it's worth, the coolant at least looks normal to the eye.

LG smartphone and the normal browser and also tried with chrome.

Right well after not having time to think about it for a while I thought I'd see the lie of the land today. So coolant reservoir actually had a bit in it (when I left it before it was dry), which I thought was odd. Anyway topped it up to near the max line. I also noticed there was some oil on the floor, it appears to be dripping from the driver's side at the bottom where the gearbox and engine join. No evidence of anywhere else in the engine bay. So anyway, I topped the oil up, ran the engine for a while (which seemed normal), checked the oil and the level seemed fine. Took it out for a drive, expecting the misfire to be there, but at least wanting to get to the bottom of the coolant issue. Weirdly initially there was no sign of the misfire when I drove it round the block so I decided to take it a bit further. Sure enough it started appearing again so I decided to head for home. When at home, before turning it off I took the bonnet and nose cone off to look for signs of the coolant leak. The fan was on at this point. The coolant reservoir was now full up well over the max level. No sign of leakage. So I shut the engine off, and then all the coolant got sucked out of the reservoir and I could hear the cap squealing as it was continuing to suck. Put a little more water in which soon got swallowed up, wouldn't be surprised if it was full again later as there was nothing visible externally so I can't see that it's going anywhere. Does any of this make sense? I do start to get the feeling misfire is related to heat levels, in which case I presume it is a doomsday HGF situation.

How on earth do you get paragraphs to work on here?

Ok, will keep that in mind. Best place to buy the leads? Redline?

Good stuff, thanks revilla. Ignition lead is definitely an easy one to eliminate. You guess correctly that I wouldn't be confident to recalibrate it with a voltmeter/laptop!

Any other suggestions?

Obviously I'm hoping it's not HGF. Is there any checks I can do to verify that either way? The oil doesn't look 'milky' which is one symptom I've heard of. The car is 2004, but only about 16k miles... but I suppose it could have been abused in that time.

It's definitely got a cable plugged into it somewhere, so I reckon so... I'll give that one a try. Thanks.

Hi All, Some of you may have seen this on FB already, but I'm not a big fan of FB so this is probably a better platform for advice for me. My R400K (RBTBs/dry sump) has developed a problem whereby at around 3000rpm it just loses all power and jiggles down the road popping and spluttering. You seem to be able to get through this 3000rpm ceiling by holding a very very light throttle until it slowly judders past it. However, at speed sometimes the power will just drain away and it will fall back to the 3000rpm ceiling. The issue has occasionally re-occurred at other revs both above and below 3000, but it's more intermittent. It only happens under load, revs as normal when not under load. At the same time I've found that I'm losing coolant, there was splatters around the engine bay and it was dripping when stationary, so it seemed like the hoses (replaced at the last service) were perhaps loose, but having tightened them up it's still losing it and still got splatters around the engine bay. I don't know if the two are related, and I haven't had the chance to do a more thorough investigation on exactly where it's coming from since it happened. The other thing of note is that somehow some water got into my garage during the big storms not long before so I don't know if any got into the car or not, but it could be a cause of one or other of the issues. When checking for water under the HT leads one of the metal contacts in the head of the lead stayed stuck to the top of the spark plug, it re-inserted but obviously shouldn't do that. The car ran the same both before and after that. So far, theories I've heard include: the dodgy HT lead, throttle position sensor, airflow sensor, HGF, broken CAT in the exhaust, injector wiring. I have to say that although I am keen to learn, I'm pretty clueless when it comes to working on cars, changing brake discs/pads is about the limit of my skills, so whatever the advice is will need to be spelled out! Your collective knowledge is most welcome, I essentially want to get a list together of everything someone with limited skills / knowledge can do to order everything I need. If it's beyond me, then advice on a knowledgeable and good garage in the Herts area would be a useful alternative (and actually just be useful to know fullstop)! Thanks in advance.