Thanks again Chesh for a cracking meet. Great company, and the meal out was enjoyable too. Sorry I haven't put in an appearance since, but circumstances dictated....
As you've probably gathered, the D5 expired on the way home, courtesy of a catastrophic turbo failure. There's about 15mm of movement in the shaft, about a third of both wheels has been worn away by contact with the housings. Anyone interested in seeing pics? This little lot resulted in the sump being emptied in about 10-15 minutes (which luckily was *just* enough time to get me to the pub I was heading for!). I recovered about a litre of oil from it (capacity is 6.5L)...and probably another half litre from the intake pipework!
A second-hand turbo later, and I'm back in business. Changing it was easy enough...just a shame about the weather! Oh...and it dieseled like hell for 2-3 seconds on the first test run (and slipped the clutch). I'm not sure what the engine speed was, but certainly above 5k! Moral of the story...drain the intercooler!
The car sounds just the same as it always has, so I'm not too concerned. There are a few rattles, but they're nothing new. I think it's a mixture of tired DMF, a knackered engine mount (or two) and something in the aux belt area (Roger says alternator pulley, and I trust his judgement). It had timing and aux belts fairly recently, and I think all the tensioners were changed - I'll have to check the file. I think the intercooler is probably partly blown (I was getting a management fault at high speed and full load the other night, which I've been reliably informed is classic failed intercooler (i.e. slight boost leak) behaviour. Boost leaks elsewhere tend to be more severe, so throw it straight into limp-home. To be fair though, trying to use full boost with the weather as it is is a waste of time anyway, so I'll look at it in the spring.
cheers
James