head gasket

[iianorthants]

What a joke the stealerships have become, freebie was due for 36000 mile service and over last couple of weeks started loosing coolant, and a black oily scum started to appear in expansion bottle. So  I asked them to check this over first as is a good sign off gasket going.
 Well after they completed service yesterday (pocket now lighter by over £300) they then charge me for time taken to inspect the coolant and do a cylinder pressure test (which they claim was ok). another £100
 Today on way to work I stopped for petrol and now as daytime I  popped bonnet and take a look at expansion bottle while running. It was boiling so hard it looked like it was going to explode.  
 Well at dinner one of the technicians had a look and confirmed just from looking at oil in the coolant that it was headgasket  :shock: . So booked in for Thursday for it to be taken apart at a minimum of £500

[V8MoneyPit]

Has it got a full LR main dealer service history? If it has, Land Rover will honour the head gasket failure. The dealers don't publicise this, so you have to pressure them a little. We asked this before we bought ours and got it confirmed before any money changed hands. Don't pay the bill until you have questioned this, you should not have to pay at all.

It is a known issue with the K series and Land Rover are the only company who have owned up to it. There are MGF owners having to pay bills for a blown engine because MG Rover still won't accept there is a design fault. The problem lies with poor servicing usually, anyway. It is critical that the system is bled correctly. The coolant capacity of this unit is very small, so even a tiny loss will cause hot spots around the engine. The steel head gasket then weeps and accelerates the water loss. If this goes unchecked, the cylinder liners come loose and .... bang! Engine failure.

Go back to the dealer and get them to check with LR about the warranty.

[iianorthants]

Nice to hear !!!!!!…. Rang up to see if they have any news on our freelander being fixed (went in Thursday morn). And excuse I got for not getting finished is that they have had an exceptional amount of breakdown work which has set them back.


 Don’t help there reliability rumours  :shock:

[Wanderer]

And yours hasn't broken down?

Disgraceful service.

Ed

[stealth001]

Hey people  :D

yeah the same happend to me about 4 weeks ago , ive only had the freelander about 3 months and i was coming home from a friends house and suddenly the cars heat guage went straight to the top ... and it kept stuttering ,

so i called out the land rover dudes and they had to change me whole engine ....   lol   lucky it was under warranty     else it would of been cya 1.8 petrol [!Expletive Deleted!]  

hello   td4   freelander  :)        :lol:

[JeepCher53]

I have a stealership near us who have to farm out servicing to a local garage from time to time to keep up with demand! I don't think I'm supposed to know this juicy fact but it makes you wonder how this warranty thing stands up?
I have taken both Freelanders to the "other garage" because he's half the price and actually fixes what I ask for during the servicing and he services the vehicles to Land Rover Service standards! My vehicle is an 00 reg and under warranty (as a used vehicle from Land Rover) so if the stealership ever question the service record I will simply ask if they can prove they carried out the service themselves or did the other guy!! :shock:

[V8MoneyPit]

Despite the fact we like the Freelander we have, we are seriously considering trading it in for a TD4 as soon as we can afford to. Watching the temperature gauge verges on the dangerous at times!

It's a shame, because the 1.8 K series is a great engine..... in theory. But this problem with head gasket failure, and subsequent liner movement, is inexcusable with modern design techniques. It should have been predicted long before any metal was cut. We had programmes at Lotus years ago that could model such things with amazing accuracy. I don't know what Lotus did with the engine but they are extracting loads of extra power and don't seem to suffer the same problem.