Credit where it’s due: I started off with this thread, where the tutorial is for UK models (supposedly it’s easier to access the middle hole from there). My Rover is a non-UK model, with steering wheel on the left (I live in Italy after all), so I had to follow a little more steps to clean it, and I thought I would share.
This is the area you have to access, as it looked once the road has been cleared.As you open the hood, access the right plenum plastic grid, release the clips (red arrows) and remove the grill.This may look complicated, but it's easy, really: remove the screw/clips circled in red, then pull away the gasket pointed by the blue arrow, then raise the plastic frame that housed the grid you removed just before, like the yellow arrow does, and finally slide out the plastic drain panel in the direction of the green arrow.Pointed in orange is the pollen filter, in green the plastic box containing the eletronic control unit, both are hovering on a 15cm deep pool of dirty rain water.I couldn't get a decent picture of the flooded chamber, so I just took one after I dislodged dirt from the rubber tube, you can still see plenty of leaves and pinetree seeds in there (there was a whole pile before), I later washed them away.The ECU box open; there are four clips at the four corners pointed at by the red arrows; do yourself a favour, and raise the whole closed box up outside of the chamber before opening them, or you'll be in for a whole lot of pain (I even broke a clip).Ran an extension cord to my car, plugged a hair drier, and dried the hell out of the ECU, you never know. Temp/RPM gauges and HRW/aircon are still dead though.Captain Hook just convinced Mr. Stupidly Designed Rubber Drain to come out of his nest.Surgically modified rubber drain on a stick, you are now ready, just put t back in (or, rather, think it over carefully, and don't, like me).
I would like to close this article extending my sincere thanks to the cheerful people at Rover who decided to place an electronic control unit inside a chamber where water flows in, and where a useless drain is placed to get it out.
Until now I have experienced two kinds of water leakage in my Rover 75. One of them is (supposedly) causing a failure of the fuel pump power output, so 99% of the times the fuel pumps (both under bonnet and in tank) receive no power and the car isn’t able to start; this leakage is due to the water piling up in a small “pool” right above the BCU and the internal fusebox, where a rubber drain is supposed to prevent this occurence, but fails to do that if you live someplace where leaves and seeds from the trees fall on your car.
The area under the bonnet, the "pool" is right beneath the hood hinge.This area looks terribly dirty, but it's already been cleaned, so go figure what was inside there before. Needless to say it was filled by water, which fell inside the car, falling onto the fusebox area and wetting the passenger carpet.My father says the meaning of this is to prevent dirt pieces from falling under... I say instead it's just stupid engineering. The very first solid thing that falls in there is bound to clog the drain... in my case, a whole load of pinetree seeds filled the drain up to the top.Problem solved, I cut off the tip making the exit wide open.
The other drain, I discovered by pure chance. As I said, I investigated the first drain after the pumps failed to start, so I thought the pumps actually failed; I went and checked the in-tank pump, by pulling out the back seat; behold the surprise, there was another quite big pool of water in the recessed space close to the in-tank pump housing cover. I was able to trace the water stains up to the trunk, close to the rear lights; it was difficult to find the cause because everything was mostly dry, but I noticed a slight running water stain.
Water was stagnating in the corner of the wheel area, and caused a major wetting of everything close to that area.The vertical stain running on the metal gave away the water leakage.The red arrow points to the part were the silver decoration has a screw running into a hole, and that's where the water came in.This is your culprit, the round gasket pressing against the metal lost its ability to isolate the inside from the outside.I putted back everything together, and tested the gasket, even if I was already sure it was faulty. So I showered the area where I suspected the leakage to be (notice the nice courtesy rainbow)There you have it, a fresh water stream coming from the faulty gasket.Small pool formed in the trunk after the test (I had just dried the old pool, which was way larger than this). As soon as you brake, or are driving down a slope, the water streams donwards toward the backseat area, where it forms a secondary pool like the one I found.
I generously added silicone to the gasket area, both from outside and inside, and put everything back together, should be pretty much isolated by now. For the sake of it, I did the same treatment for all the accessible gaskets of the silver lining (there are two on both sides).
My no-power-to-fuel-pumps problem is not yet solved though, this car likes to play games, and when I see the pumps are working again, soon after, at the next engine start, they aren’t anymore. At this point, I suspect a faulty wire.
Vibrating noises while I am driving drive me nuts. It’s as simple as that.
I got my Rover 75 less than a year ago, and the excitement of driving an elegant classy car somehow made me ignore at first the abundant rattles I heard everywhere while I drove (especially behing the passenger airbag), yet I reached a point where I literally went mad and occasionally violently hammered everywhere on the fascia hoping to make the noise stop, but also, let’s be honest, to ease my nerves against the bad machine.
I must thank MikeM from the MG-Rover forums for the written tutorial that helped me through the procedure of solving this problem, and inspired me to make this visual anti-rattle guide.
This glovebox has already been removed, anyway let's assume it isn't: you have to remove the seven torx screws shown in the red circles, the bottom three are under the mat and you have to forcefully unglue it from the floor of the box to make them show. Also, it is advisable to act on the green circled hinges to let the lid slide all the way down.This is just a closeup of the hinge where you need to press the little plastic thing to let it slide further down; do it for both of the hinges.This is the empty socket left after you removed the glovebox, circled in green is the power plug for the glovebox lighting, which you need to unplug before completely pulling out the glovebox; what you're looking for is situated beneath the upper front of the fascia, and is accessible by looking from beneath in the direction of the arrow.Here is your peace hinderer: the BCU (body control unit, even if on the box it's called "Control Unit Body"); cicled in green is the bolt that fixes the box to the metal panel beneath it, what happens is that the tip of the bolt is very very close to that tubular metal frame you can notice, and at around 2k RPM it vibrates rattling against it generating the noise, in the area ponted by the red arrow, below that metal panel.You need something to interpose between the two metal rattling objects to silence them; anything could be good, really, but my choice fell on this packaging material that I wisely saved months ago.I took some 10cm of that soft plastic strip, folded it in two, pulled down the metal plate so there was enough space between screw and tubular frame, and slided the insulator between the two, then released the assemply that simply went lying over the plastic; job done, no more vibrations!Sinbce I was on it, I decided to work on some rattling I got from the underpanel of the fascia over the speedometer. Circled in red are the two screws you need to remove in order to detach the plastic panel, and the green arrows point to the areas where the rattling was apparently originated.I used most of the remaining packaging plastic to create some sort of cushion around the three catches that grapple inside the fascia (indicated by the green arrows). I stabilized the two ends with some insulating tape. Put everything back together, and rattles in that area will be gone as well!
I was laying cables for parking sensors to be used with the Rover 75 ride I got free of charge from my father. Running them from the holes in the bumper to the engine compartment was no big deal, but connecting the main unit under the bonnet to the display in the passenger compartment was a little harder, since I needed to find a way to run it through cleanly enough.
As improvisation goes (and as my father wanted to do himself) you would be tempted to use, somehow, the cable tubes that you see right in the middle of the rear wall of the engine compartment, but that’s gonna be a hard task. On the other side, if you don’t need to run really big cables, you can use a small hole which you can find on the right side (looking toward the engine, and on my car which has the steering wheel on the left of the cockpit) under a plastic grid you have to remove first.
view of the side of the engine compartment where the hole is located
You have to pull out a waterproof rubber neck that’s fitted around another rigid cable passing through there, to free up enough space to actually run your wires through.
Closer view of the hole and the rubber waterproof protection already pulled out
Then you have to access to the cockpit side of the hole.
this is the area where you will be accessing the cable ran through the under the bonnet hole
There is some unscrewing to do here
unscrew both the screw you see in this picture and the one on the opposite side of the panel
Once you remove the screws, you need to pull the panel out, and if you want a more comfortable working environment, also pull out with a discrete force the front panel where the lights switch is located to free up a larger area.
This is the panel pulled out of its place. You can also pull out the beige frontal panel under the steering wheel if you need to.
If you are in a well lit ambient, you should now be able to see the cable probe (or whatever that’s called in english) passing through the hole you just freed
this is how the hole appears from the inside of the cockpit if you look carefully enough
Let the cable(s) pass on the side of the panel you prefer (door side in my case) and then screw the panel back in place, after reinserting the frontal panel under the steering wheel if you pulled it out.
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