poiuytre111

Sorry, gearbox died and I wrote off the car. Mine had a new cambelt fitted professionally about a year before so I would argue against a timing issue. I think it is something to do with the egr letting air into the inlet tract in an unintended way so was thinking of removing/blanking or cleaning mine though it was hardly a major problem.

I think the fabia uses an active aerial which is powered "down the line" i.e. 12v through the aerial lead. Most other radios will not feed the required current so you need an adapter between radio and aerial plug which is probably just a choke in the 12v feed so that it doesn't dampen the radio signals and a capacitor in the direction of the radio itself. You say it worked initially - maybe you were just lucky with a very strong signal that didn't need the external aerial.

It looked to me if there was oil at the flange above the turbo - could this just be a leaking cam cover gasket - just a thought.

Except in that the cable would need to be tighter for the same degree of handbrake effectiveness.

Of course, the other fairly common issue would be brake fluid leaking from rear cylinder(s) causing a reduction in braking efficiency for any given force from the brake shoes. Have to remove drum to look for this although a loss of brake fluid at the master cylinder would eventually give this away.

They are indeed still available - tried to PM but perhaps your inbox is full.

The wedges should be properly adjusted before tweaking the nuts near on the handbrake - if the auto adjust aspect doesn't any more, you will have to do it manually every now and again. Slacken the nuts back off to untension the cables and get the wedges right then tighten as required.

PM sent

The SDI has more in common with the previous non-PD version of the 1.9 TDI engine though for all I know the block/cylinder head might be similar. The ECU is different, you would need a MAF and MAP and gearbox would also need changing with the associated drive shafts. Clearly not an attractive proposition.

Personally I would check the MAP sensor and associated wiring, only because I had similar symptoms and found a MAP wire that had been caught in something and worn through/broken. If the MAP sensor doesn't tell the ECU about the boost being achieved, it will try to provide more up to the point it smells a rat and goes into limp mode. Having said that, your reference to boost coming and going at 3k revs is hard to explain - you sure there is no stickiness in the vanes actuator at the extremes of travel ?

OK so I don't own and have never driven a VRS but I did watch the Top Gear episode mentioned above. As I recall their conclusions, I might have expected all the talk on here to be about handling mods but upgraded turbos and maps seem to dominate - just a bit surprised, that's all.

I have read this thread through and have the following to offer:- Fix your current drain as there is little point replacing the battery only to ruin a second one, if indeed the first is ruined. As was pointed out early on, this requires a process of elimination until you get down to about 30 to 50 ma. At 140ma a brand new 60ah battery will be flattened in 17 days - do the sums. I would expect a car to last considerably longer before flattening its battery. Take out bulbs in the interior and boot light and so on. Your current battery is probably on the way out but the means by which you judge this are flawed so it many not be. If you really had a "dead cell" you would lose the 2 volts it should contribute plus another 2 volts as they often go negative, leaving you with about 9 volts only. Your cranking amps shows an excellent result and I would not be rushing to change the battery, myself. You shouldn't be surprised that a CTEK will charge a battery more after it has been standing a few hrs. When you take it off charge the battery will show anything over 14 volts but will normally fall back a little to 12.6 to 13.2 say. When you next apply the CTEK it sees a different set of circumstances and will act accordingly.

You ask about the difference in engines but perhaps more of an issue might be the difference in gearing - the early cars were particularly tall wheareas the later cars had a more normal final drive.

I know there are 3 variants of the central electrics module and that it looks a bit tricky to get to but does it require significant programming (VCDS ?) - I assume it would. I looked into this a while back when thinking of retro fitting cruise but I would expect central locking, elect seat heating etc all to be configurable.

Black smoke means engine is getting more fuel that the available air will let it burn so often due to boost problem, turbo or pipe leak but I also would have expected any kind of inlet-side blockage to lead to this - diesel inlets can get very congested. Turbo problem could include lack of movement in the variable geometry - easy enough to check from top of engine by wiggling. If this is it, could benefit from Mr Muscle though some on here are skeptical, but many others claim it worked for them. I can't see injector cleaner doing any harm - give it a go if you already have it.