Thread: Grubby oil in the D3 gearbox......

Great post Nomad9. I get my D3 serviced at Sovereign Autos in Adelaide (where one of the owners owns a 2009 run out D3) and they recommend exactly what you have done at 100,000Km's. This is based on rebuilding gearboxes in l322 Range Rovers at the 160k km mark - so much for "sealed for life" as you say! They confirm this is LR speak for ' owners wont keep their cars longer than 8 years or so".....interesting though process

"Sealed for life of the factory warranty."

A&B is the ZF sump for the Falcon. You can get it from ZF along with the oil.

Hi CaverD3,
Ah Ha, thanks for that. So if you purchase the extended warranty do Land Rover change the oil for the extended period after the normal warranty period, or do they just let the warranty run it's course and hope the gearbox and oil lasts?

Originally Posted by Nomad9

... if you purchase the extended warranty do Land Rover change the oil for the extended period after the normal warranty period..?

No they don't , but if it breaks they'll probably wear all the cost.
In fact it's risky to change the oil except at a Dealer ( with LR ZF )
or they'll play hardball on faults . This is an enigma.

Hi Neil,
After the warranty period has expired, would it matter who changed the oil? I can't imagine that if LR would acknowledge any faults as their fault after the warranty period anyway would they? I had a Nissan Patrol 3.0 ltr a few years ago and maybe you know or you don't know they had a habit of melting the no 3 piston, it was due to a well documented lubrication issue. Due to the amount of failures they had they took the hit on replacing the engine during the warranty period, as long as the vehicle was servived by them of course. Then after the warranty period if you wanted to pursue a claim for an engine this had to be done though the courts, to recover the full cost. In some cases Nissan supplied a short motor and you were charged the labour, all the parts outside the short motor and any fluids. A new full engine for these was around the $20k mark, in some cases when they blew up more than the value of the vehicle.
My D3 is now outside the warranty period so for me his is a muted discussion, for me it's just an interesting topic, having the definition of what "sealed for life meant" cleared a lot of things up, up until that point the statement was quite ambiguous.
As part of the last service before the end of the warranty period I suspect that LR don't replace the g/box oil. At the dealership I visit every now and again the service guy seemed quite proud that he had D3's out there with 250+ klms on the clock without a gearbox oil change, this sounds like luck more than anything else. The service guy at the time was questioning why on earth I thought I needed to changed the oil. Being a machinery engineer and recognising the importance of good quality clean lubrication, I couldn't understand how he expected an oil to last 250k klms without being changed, the gearbox has a filter in it for heavens sake. If the gearbox was sealed for life, which maybe his perception on life was the life of the vehicle, why does it have a filter, gearboxes have wearing components which contaminate oil which block filters, FACT.

Neil please don't take this as "having a go", I was talking to a guy last night over a couple of wet ones, he drives a Fairlane (his choice), he has the six speed ZF box and yes he was of the belief that the gearbox was sealed for life, life being the life of the vehicle, so I suppose it's just how the sales people put the "sealed for life" statement across when selling the vehicle winds me up a bit.

Originally Posted by Nomad9

... After the warranty period has expired, would it matter who changed the oil ? .....

Absolutely not . It's interesting how many products have an
extended warranty for original owner only. At least we don't have that
with cars , eventhough the 3 to 5 years is the distributor's discretion .
Has the 30 days minimum warranty ever been repealed ?

Hi Forumites,
So as a close out to this job, I've now fitted the steel gearbox sump supplied by A&B Transmisions, great stuff, fitted a treat. The bolts at the front of the new sump pan were a challenge to screw in a cup of tea or depending on the time of day a beer might be a good idea, awkward little things.....
I then toped the oil up, 4 litres in first started the engine and continued to top up, put a further five litres in until the oil started to drip out of the level plug, worked the gears for about five seconds in each position and checked the level again, all good.
Only got the oil to 25 degrees C so I'll have to get this a bit warmer and check the level again, I was tempted to put my foot on the brakes and give the throttle a bit of a work out but resisted, never a good way to heat everything up quickly, could have significant impact if things went wrong.
I got the oil analysis reports back this morning, one for the new oil which as you would expect all very low in all sections, being:- Wear metals, Contaminants and additives and physical tests. I was going to attach these to the post but thought better of it. The old oil from the gearbox came back with higher than normal wear metal levels of copper and aluminium, 251 and 32 parts per million respectively.
When I was getting the plastic protector plate ready to go back on underneath I noticed that the hole under the cat convertor was blocked and there was quite a lot of dirt that was "resting" around the cat convertor. Also last year I did a few beach runs, nothing in the water, close to the edge but not in it, I found an extraordinary amount of seaweed in and around the front of the protector plate, some sea weed was actually singed around the exhaust pipe area. Something I'll be keeping my eye on in future.
So by these results the 90 to 120 k number for changing the gearbox oil seems to be on the money, I suspect this would vary depending on the type of driving the vehicle is used for, school trips would be a lot easier than towing a three tonne caravan around Australia.
One thing that did surprise me was the viscocity, the new oil I put in was a 28 weight oil and the old oil that came out was a 31 weight oil, I though the oil would have been a lighter weight oil.
OK, so that's a sort of close out on this little episode I hope the information proves usefull to you.

So nomad looks like the oil viscosity increases with use. This would mean putting a higher viscosity oil eg SIN ATF may increase further in viscosity with use?