ACE priming/bleeding ?

evening all. the guy i bought my TD5 off had done a bodge repair on one of the rear actuator pipes for the ACE system. one of the pipes had corroded through and he tried repairing it with a piece of rubber hose, .any way that failed so he drained it all off and just unplugged it. i have repaired it myself with some plumbing 10mm compression fittings and a short length of pipe. i have filled the system from the header bottle with standard power steering fluid (is this ok to use?) will the system bleed its self, or do i have to do some magictrickery with it? the ally unit thats bolted to the chassis, under the drivers door is making a slight ticking noise and the ACE warning light is still red. can some one shine a light on the subject pretty please.

thanks Steve.

You need cold climate PAS fluid. Your pipe repair will need to be good as the peak pressure is 2,000 psi. to bleed the system You will need diagnostic equipment with an ACE bleed Application to open the valves in the valve block plus ACE is a PITA to bleed.

cheers pal, the repair has worked in the past but that was with a replacement pipe from a scraper, hope the copper can hold out. as for the PAS fluid (GULP) i didn't want to spray land rover cash all over my drive if it failed, so i opted for the cheaper stuff.

You shuld be able to find a supplier of hydraulic bits who can make you up a short high pressure hose with 10mm fittings, even better if you can get hold of a short piece of oem ace pipe and a couple of 10mm hp unions. I have a similar repIair on mine but it was used to repair new pipe which was cracked by accident during fitting. Id be a bit more concerned about repairing rusty pipes. Im not sure about the whole bleeding thing. As owl says ive heard about the diagnostic unit being used but find out how much it goin to cost. I bled mine by taking car for a spin round the road. When I came back to my drive there was enough residual pressure to carefully open connections at rams to release air. Advantage of this is you aint doin it at full pressure which would be potentially dangerous and messy. If you lose all fluid in system as it sounds like you may have, by your red light still being on, it can take time to get the pump primed if it was empty when you first started engine. Its best to turn pump by hand with outlet disconnected to ensure its full of fluid. This means removing tension from serp belt obviously. It will self prime eventually but every turn without fluid is damaging the pump. As above I would only use cold climate pas fluid, its expensive but so are all the system components which might get damaged as a result of wrong fluid. Good luck, hope you get it sorted.

took it to my local land ranger services in Atherton, the guys there are spot on. he told me it will bleed its self eventually BUT the issue i had wasn't the ACE after all, even though the light was on red. Martin at land ranger plugged his box of dark magic trickery in to my landy and it came in with 8 faults and some of them was real random stuff. it turns out, the windscreen was leaking along with the sun roof and a small hole right in the corner of the bulkhead and my ECU was tired of treading water hopefully all fixed now, CT1 is an amazing product and after hoovering about a gallon of water out of both foot wells and then leaving a blow heater in there for 2 days, alls looking well, i just need to take it for a proper drive now to make sure.

once im convinced its all fine, i will be changing the fluid over.