Free? Always The Great God Applies Geometry To Everything.

When I mention to you Rolls Royce; what do you see? Do you see the late Baghwan Rajneesh Shree moving up and down happily while in deep prayers inside his chauffeured driven Rolls Royce, gracefully journeying the Santa Anita Freeway for the closet Ashram on his mental GPS?

Do you see two English men in stiffed starched ironed outfits, polishing to the last extractable gleam using soft deer skin chamois, in final preparation before the automobile gets shipped to a camel loving oil Sheikh in the Middle East eagerly waiting to drive it through the next sand storm?

Do you suddenly hear the majestic intro-tune to Dynasty; with Denver oil baron, Blake Carrington smiling accomplishedly right before wife number 1 Alexis who nearly cleaned him out, comes next on screen?

Broads and oil fields; not the best of combo for the baron apparently...Or do you see a few Malays who just really do not know what to do with that piece of British junk anymore?

British junk? Well! The nerve! How very dare me! Sacrilege against Her Majesty Empire! Treason! Court martial! Military tribunal! Padayappa! Cancel the thoosai!

But that’s the deal really; it is a rusting pile of a British overrated piece of junk.

Trust me, with our parking area and sizes; you do not want to side or even considering to reverse park this behemoth motor carriage. You only want it valet parked for you.

A few minutes into the Jalan Ampang jam and the temperature begins to climb. And that’s when you would manually switch on the twin auxiliary Japanese made fans that are mounted on the front radiator. That’s because the Rolls Royce 6,750 cc V8 only had one fan that was coupled to the engine speed via belts and pulley. May have been enough in Buckingham Palace, but it is no good in the tropics.

The engine technology is by now almost 50 years old already and it is like driving those big and massively thirsty 5.7 liter V8 motor GM cars of the late 80’s America and it's not surprising as the gear box is GM THD-700 (for all Rolls Royce past 1992, before 1992 it’s GM THD-400) and that goes for some other chassis parts too. There has been many mentioned on issues with the poorly mismatched of the GM THD series gear boxes to Rolls-Royce engines. One mainly high on the list is transmission hunting at 4th gear. These hunting’s also comes with an annoying clunks each time a change is about to take place.

With those big Rolls Royce engines, the GM sourced THD-700 torque converter would have to put up with relatively a huge drive-train backlash episode each time there’s a change. With the locking up of the coupling fluid, a combination of events including clutch engagement and the drive-train simultaneously shifting from load to override or float can give some very disconcerting system behavior indeed. The clunking of the 4-speeders is certainly very expensive and difficult to correct by conventional means. Well if you can just live with it by all means do so, but if you know that its a bother - one easy fix is to place a manual switch in the torque converter electrical lock-up circuit, and to leave it switched out until you are on the highway. If you have driven one, you would readily know what I am babbling about here (I am peasant class, I have never even been in one; good sirs/madams).A more detailed solution is to lock out the system automatically until you reach 100 km/h or so using an electronic comparator connected to the speedometer speed signal. Not as difficult as it sounds by the way. Another possibility is to block the lock-up unless the cruise control is active. The GM THD-700 comes with a lockable overdrive torque converter called the GM Torqueflite. This is the problem area that’s making the hunting more prone and hard. To disable this function would completely ruin your transmission in a few months of driving. In fact both RR and GM have issued a notice against this.So the cheapest solution would be to drive on in 3rd gear until you reach the highways or at speeds above 120kph before shifting into a full Drive which is 4th gear at that speed, and there would be no hunting and no expensive jerks to deal with but you could be sure those dead dinosaurs are cursing fire breathing expletives at you for the ways of wasting and abusing your share of their hard given juices to the gasoline world as we know it to be. But what is absolutely more important to observe here is that you keep a straight regal haughty face as you drive along with this solution.The car is ponderous at highway speed and the Chrysler derived dumb and dumber power steering with no active inputs, makes sudden lane changing and maneuvers to be quite unsettling for the novice. And if you drive a pre-1987 model, you would be stuck with the massive twin GM sourced Carter carburetors as well. So that is why, I seriously advice anyone looking to own one, if for even a free give away unit, to greatly reconsider that move. Save and respect mother earth, relinquish the Rolls Royce and drive a Myvi or a Kembara. At the end of each working day, you would just appreciate more that wise man in the mirror that’s looking at you proudly.

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