Mark: Hi, it's Mark from Top Local. I'm here with Bernie Pawlik, Pawlik Automotive in Vancouver, 23 time winners of Best Auto Repair in Vancouver as voted by their customers. So we're talking cars. How are you doing Bernie?
Bernie: Good.
Mark: So 2013 Range Rover Supercharged, you took the body off. What the heck was going on with this vehicle?
Bernie: Yeah. So we've got a kind of exciting show for you. At least we hope that we can pull it off. 2013 Range Rover Supercharged, basically engine overheated and damaged. Needed the engine replaced, repaired or replaced. And so we, started the procedure, the best way to get the engine out of this vehicle, believe it or not as to actually lift the cab off. It's like a Ford F350 or something diesel, you know, where you basically take the cab off to service the engine. You know, we do a lot of in car repairs and this is actually the first time we've pulled a cab off one of these.
So I thought it was pretty amazing what you find underneath the cab. So I think we'll just get right into the the video. We're not going to show you the full end repair. This is just kind of the preliminary part. This will be part one of at least one more podcast.
So let me get the screen share going. I apologize it might be a little clunky getting stuff up. So this is a video and I'm going to kind of scroll through it manually, but that is basically the cab off the vehicle. and I'm going to go, we'll kind of go backwards a little bit here. You can see the cab and we didn't clean the leaves out yet, which you can see in the wheel well. That's basically the cab off the vehicle. Back down, there's the engine and radiator, and I'm going to go back right to the very beginning. And we're gonna kind of go through this bit by bit, and I'll just show you some of the things you know, on this vehicle, because it's pretty cool.
I mean, most impressive thing I found is just how much stuff is underneath this vehicle. You know, it's, it's shorter obviously than a Ford diesel truck, but there's just so many bits and pieces and parts, which is what makes these vehicles fantastic. So if you can see right here, I mean, they're...
Mark: Can we wait a second? How long did it take you to get the body off of the vehicle?
Bernie: Yeah, it actually took up, I think it took about five hours.
Mark: There's gotta be a heck of a lot of stuff that needs to be taken apart.
Bernie: Well, there is a lot, but this vehicle is designed. I mean, you'll see, as you look around the pictures, you can see that, the vehicles designed, they build the whole chassis everything, engine, transmission, drive train, all the suspension components. Everything's put together and then they drop the body on top. So there's a lot of wiring. There are brake lines. But it's actually not that difficult of a job. It's complex for sure, but not that difficult. So, this is with the body off again, there's the front, the bumpers sits over front here and you've got your radiator, your air AC compressor condenser in the front here, some air conditioning pipes. The engine sits here. It's a supercharged engines with superchargers on top.
This little thing flopped here, that's the power steering reservoir. So again, that needs to be unhooked from the body because it's attached to the body. There's an air spring here, air strut for the suspension, the left front wheel. And this is one of the places where the cab mounts down to the vehicle. So it's a cushioned rubber insulator, large bolt goes through it to mount the cab.
We look back a little further. We're looking back into the transmission, the transfer case, and I'll just move the video forward and we'll just kind of look down the car and I'll try to stop it at the best kind of picture quality I can. See if we get something a little clearer here. There's a transmission, the transfer case, this sort of, sorry, it's a little fuzzy here, but this is the transfer case actuator motor. You know, with these vehicles, they have all those various modes of, you can adjust it for sand or grass or uphills and downhills. There's a number of components in the system, but this motor here we'll be changing, with those different modes. It'll change the transfer case operations. So you can see this as the drive shaft here. It goes to the front axle, the drive shaft to the rear, the mufflers, exhaust pipes, for one side of the vehicle.
So we'll just move a little further down. I'll just on the engine too, these are the ignition coils on top of the engine. You normally don't see this cause there's plastic covers over top. So there were kind of moving past the transmission, transfer case and we're moving towards the rear end of the vehicle. Here we obviously see the rear tires. You talked before about this, but this vehicle has the sway bar, the electronic sway bar system, hydraulic sway bars in front and rear. So this it's so nice seeing all this stuff off, cause it's so easy to replace it now. Whereas, you know, when we have to replace these parts in the vehicle, it takes hours just to haul these things up.
But this is the hydraulic unit for the sway bar where you can basically disconnect the sway bar. We did a previous conversation on one of these. Parking brake on this as a module and cables. And that's where this is located. This leads out to the wheels again, like just super simple to replace. Normally there's a, a body on top of this vehicle. Rear suspension. Again, there's mufflers around the back, for the nice quiet exhaust that you get on these vehicles.
We'll just kind of wander around the back of the vehicle. There you can see that, sorry that was a nice clear picture earlier. But again, the hydraulic unit for this air spring. There's some wiring that needed to be disconnected, wiring connector. So there's quite a few of them that needed to be disconnected. There was one around the back, the back bumper area, the spare tire. You can see parking brake module, the air suspension unit. And, there's one of the rear air struts, another cab mount. So you can see the cab mounts there. There's the rear differential and the drive shafts. So again, I don't if you can see but everything's very, there's a lot in this vehicle, a lot put together, you can see why these vehicles are not cheap to buy.
You're buying a lot of components. When you go on these vehicles. Fuel tank. This would be where the fuel pump is located, fuel lines, vents, and so on. And then just trying to find a clear picture. There's a rear drive shaft.
You still with me there Mark? Am I? Yep. It's still some somewhat interesting.
Transmission again, we've got a little blurry video. Here's a catalytic converters. Again, it's a dual exhaust system, so there's one on each side here. Oxygen sensors are these components here. So again, we're looking forward here, the right front tire, the suspension strut, the engine. We'll just work our way around here. What do we got? Good, clear view of the transmission and the engine. So, what we ended up doing with the engine, you're going to see some pictures in the future, but, we ended up removing the cylinder heads because you know, first of all, the engine had been overheated.
We assume the cylinder heads were bad. We, we did end up, replacing the engine with a used one because the engine was, it was too badly damaged from the overheating. And we'll talk more about that, but you know, these valve covers, you can remove all these components in the car, but when it comes to the cylinder heads, there's just too many pieces crammed right against the firewall and against the body to remove it in the car. So this is why we took it out. And once you've got it out, we pulled the engine off the transmission, put it on an engine stand and just made the repairs much easier to do.
Mark: Why did the engine overheat?
Bernie: I don't know, this job was referred to us from another shop, and he had done some repairs on it. I think he replaced a thermostat and water pump. I don't know the history of that, but he just didn't want to get into doing a service so large, take on something like this. So he referred the customer to us. And, so that's why we're doing the work. So I don't know the cause of it yet. I know that there were no leaks when the vehicle is brought in, but certainly once we get this engine back together, we're going to be extremely careful to road test it and make sure that everything's in good shape.
There's no leaks. There's nothing that's going to cause it to overheat again. Because certainly after a repair like this, you don't want that to happen.
Mark: Can I ask you one more question. How would that show up? How would an overheated engine typically look, I'm driving it. Well, how would I know?
Bernie: Well, if your car has a temperature gauge, the gauge will probably shoot up to high. So this is important. You know, those gauges are there for a reason. Most cars don't have much in the way of gauges anymore, other than a speedometer and a gas gauge, and some of them, you know, a tachometer for engine speed.
And then, you know, a coolant temperature gauge. Even a lot of vehicles don't have temperature gauges anymore. They have warning lights. So if you have a car with a warning light and the red, and it'll always be red, if it comes on. Shut the engine off. If the temperature gauge goes up full, shut the engine off. You'll also notice and you may not see it overheating it like early signs, you'll notice coolant, dripping on the ground. It's antifreeze. It comes in a variety of colours depending on the vehicle. You have usually for a Land Rover, Range Rover, Jaguar, it's an orange coloured antifreeze. You'll notice an orangy liquid on the ground. You might get steam under your hood. Those are some of the things. And, also too, if your heating stops working all of a sudden, you might be low on coolant because the heating system in the car, it uses the hot coolant from the engine to warm your car.
So you're in the winter and all of a sudden you've got no heat. That could be an engine that's low on coolant and possibly overheating. That answer it?
Mark: Yep, absolutely.
Bernie: Cool. Excellent. Just another thing, this is sort of with the fuel injection, this is a direct fuel injection system, which we've talked about in other podcasts and different vehicles. So this is a high pressure fuel system. There's high pressure pumps located way down on the side of the engine, which we'll probably look at it in our next video. And again, pipes, these are extremely high pressure, so it's important that they're all fitted properly and don't cause any problems or leaks.
Coming around the front of the engine we've got another reservoir. There's a radiator, a good view with the hoses off. And, of course that's a critical thing to make sure it's working properly. And if it's plugged or leaking, that can cause engine overheating. I think we're coming around to the cab where we started. So we're full circle around the vehicle.
Mark: So as an owner, one of the things that would prevent this from happening would be that I'm paying attention to the engine temperature gauge, or the lights that are happening. Lights aren't as accurate as a gauge. But if I'm noticing that engine temperature starting to creep up, I'm going over the Coquihalla or something and I'm matting it, trying to set speed records or whatever stupid reason I'm trying to go too fast. And the engine is getting too hot time to stop. Time to slow down.
Bernie: Absolutely. Especially you mentioned the Coquihalla for those of you who don't live in British Columbia that's a very steep long highway grade. Very, very steep goes for, I dunno 30-40 miles perhaps. It's all uphill and there's some exceptionally steep parts. So I mean, it's a place where, it's an engine testing ground. Every time you drive up that hill, you know you gotta watch your speed. A lot of engines have been cooked going up those hills. So, I mean, it's not unique, if you have any mountainous terrain, those are where things happen, but you can still overheat your engine on a flat surface. It just doesn't quite happen as fast and as critically as you do on a hill.
But, yeah watching your gauge, warning lights, these are important. They're put there for a reason. And you know, a lot of times we don't look at our gauge. I mean, I drive all the time. I don't look at my gauges most of the time, but you know, if you're going up a steep mountain drive, then I keep my eyes on the gauge.
It's a good thing to do. If you're driving up the mountain to go skiing somewhere. It's just, you know, it may not even be more than a 10 minute drive up a hill, keep your eye on the gauge. It's an important thing to do. Can save you a lot of money. Like a lot of money. This is a extremely expensive repair job.
It used to be a few years ago, you know, engines weren't that expensive. They've just become astronomically expensive to buy even like there's nothing used that's cheap. It's very expensive.
Mark: They're very complicated. Burning dinosaurs is a complicated deal.
Bernie: It's become complicated. It used to be really easy at one time, but then, you know, our air, I'm surprised any of us could breathe. Either you either burn the fuel and you don't care what comes out the tailpipe, or you make it nice and clean and powerful and then the engine becomes very exceptionally complex.
Mark: So again, to reiterate the reason that you're going through all this shenanigans to pull a cab, the whole body off of this Range Rover is because ultimately it's cheaper and faster and easier for you to do the job right than it was to leave it on and try and finagle the engine out of there.
Bernie: Absolutely. Exactly. There's a few vehicles that are like this. I mean, they're not cars because car bodies, it's a unibody. It's all put together. But any like trucks, you know, like Ford, we've done a lot of F350s, you know, the 6 litre cab off things. But when they started doing the 6.4, 6.7 litre, the newer versions, they just designed the vehicle. Any repairs like this, the cab comes off. So they actually made it easier to remove the cab. Then like the 6 litres, we can still pull them off pretty fast, but the newer ones are even quicker because they know that, you know what, anything goes wrong here, let's just make the cab really easy to remove. So that's smart thinking. I guess, you know, a lot of people will go I miss the old days where the, you know, the engine compartment is huge and there was tons of, but they just don't make them all in, in there and doing stuff. Right. They don't make them.
I had a friend who had a, a Plymouth fury from the late sixties and it had a slant six engine. And when he opened the hood, it was so big. I remember looking, you know, you could actually put two, six cylinder engines in this thing. Of course you could get the thing with a 440 or a 426 Hemi, which would probably mostly fill the engine compartment, but there was just like, so much extra space. You go what the heck. That's why people bought Volkswagens and small imported cars because, Hey, wait a minute. There's just a lot of waste here.
Mark: Yeah. Well, even in my 65 Valiant with the slant six, there was lots of room in there.
Bernie: Yeah. Lots of room. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, that was a compact car.
Mark: So if you have a Range Rover in Vancouver and you have a problem, the guys to see who are experts, deal with lots of all makes and models of Range Rovers, all years, all kinds of issues. These guys are the experts Pawlik Automotive. You can reach them at (604) 327-7112 to book your appointment. Check out the website pawlikautomotive.com. Hundreds, including many videos on Range Rovers, Land Rovers, Jaguars, et cetera, et cetera, all makes and models and all types of repairs. YouTube channel Pawlik Auto Repair. Same story there. Thanks for watching. We really appreciate it. If you like what we're doing, leave us a review. Thanks Bernie.
Bernie: Thank you, Mark. Thanks for watching.
