A quick trip up to the local LandRover specialist shop and hooking it up to a diagnostic thingy, showed the MAF sensor has probably capput. They wanted $497 for a new one. LR main dealer wants over $800!! If I order from a popular parts centre over East I can get one for $289.30 inc GST. Found a new one on eBay for less than $90 delivered from the UK.
Hmmm.....which one should I go for?!? Its even a Bosch one (and did I mention it's new?!), which I'm 99.9% sure is genuine OE on the Disco.
Another case of being ripped off in Western Australia because (and I quote) "we live so far away from anywhere that we expect to pay higher shipping costs". How do the garages selling them get hold of them, and how come I can get a new one from the UK for a fifth of the price INCLUDING delivery!
No-one will guarantee the MAF sensors as they are prone to malfunction at any time, so I'm not really going to loose anything by going for the eBay one. Especially as its a Bosch one.
While searching through some forums (those on the right of this post, coincidentally!), I read about a product by CRC called, surprisingly enough, "Mass Air Flow Cleaner"! This stuff is a spray can aerosol cleaner designed especially for this part. It cost me $22.95 and has made a huge improvement, after just a very quick blast of the stuff. A "proper" clean will take place this weekend when I have more time.ref: How to clean a MAF sensor.
In the majority of fuel injected cars there's a small wire in at piece of pipe between the air box and engine, that gets covered, over time, with dirt and dust, and this usually just needs cleaning with this CRC stuff to ensure the correct info on air flow is sent back to the engine management system. In reality, this ideally need cleaning at every service, or at least when the air filter is changed. But it rarely gets done by garages.
It might just have fixed the problem for now, or at least helped it a bit, and will most definitely do until I can arrange for the purchase off eBay.
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