J.R.

You should read the paragraph headed "How the manufacturer will repair"

Is the top gear a different ratio or the final drive gearing different?

Put smaller wheels on it so the speedo says you are going faster 🤣 At least that would actually work and not involve loads of time and labour for nothing.

Incorrect but it must create an OBDII code and illuminate the MIL.

Another vehicle with rubber band tyres.

I would make a complaint to Vosa, its a long progressing crack(s) witnessed by the fractured edges being rusted and should have been visible to the tester, also if you enlarge (if you have eyes like mine) the image of the detached shock absorber you can see that the U bracket for the lower securing bolt is so corroded that it has lost most of the metal around the fixing, you should not be able to see the rubber bush from that angle.

I quite agree but doesnt putting screws in create a boost leak albeit minimal compared to the joint seperating?

Whyever not? You will have driven past it on the way to the MOT.

On what basis do you declare that? Did it happen during the warm up period? Your first thing to do is to have a VCDS or similar scan for fault codes, my guess you will have overboost ones and the variable vane turbo needs a Mr Muscle enema.

Re shorting the probes. The multimeter will probably not show a true zero even if the 2 probe sockets were shorted with a copper busbar, added to that is the resistance of the leads themselves, the longer and more flexible they are the higher it will be. Collectively lets say that you meter displays 0.2 ohms when the probes are shorted, when you take the reading of your circuit at say 0.6 ohms you subtract the 0.2 ohms initial reading to give you the true value of 0.4 ohms for the circuit. When you are measuring higher resistances like 1K, 2K, 20meg ohms etc the resistance of the test leads are of no consequence, its only when you are looking for low resistances like you were that it should be born in mind. Example, shorted lead resistance 0.2 ohms, you measure a circuit at 1K ohms, theoretical true resistance would be 999.8 ohms, I used theoretical because your meter would only be accurate to +/- 2% or whatever equals +/- 20 ohms for that measurement.

That is one hundredth of the resistance of the typo!!! Usually under 1 ohm but you must first check what the meter shows with the probes shorted (mine is different every time) and subtract that from any measured reading. Sounds like you got a good deal allowing for the post covid price rises and you went into the purchase with your eyes open. In September 2019 I bought an unrecorded written off 3 year old Yeti 4x4 Outdoor with 79k miles for £3200, it had a tiny shunt to the bumper which did not even require any paintwork, just polishing of the scuffs, it had however bent the bumper crash bar which pierced the aircon condensor but also caused the airbags and seatbely pretensioner to deploy. It cost me exactly £800 to repair to a good standard commensurate with the other little dings and scratches including the LHD headlights that I needed for France, I still have no idea of its history but its been 100% reliable so had been maintained correctly before the accident with no bodging, I did the repairs properly the only bodges being unseen bits of plastic trim that I plastic welded, none of them have come back to bite me. I have pretty much always bought and repaired salvage for my own vehicles, its a very cheap way to get a decent late model car but if you keep them for too long then depreciation takes away any notional "profit" you have made, buying one repaired by a third party outside of the insurance system will always come with hidden surprises, there is nothing in it for them to spend extra money to do the job properly.

Is that a typo? 50 ohms seems anything but OK. Did you try it on the continuity tester resistance range & if so did it beep? Towbar wiring would have been inert and not caused a problem until a lighting harness connected, as you say you have dodged a bullet and also have bought a car that will continue to surprise you. Does the V5 carry a salvage category marker like CatB or CatC? I believe there are sites where you can enter the reg number and see if the vehicle has been sold through salvage auctions like Copart, they carry photographs so you can see the extent of the damage that has been repaired.

It is a sealed pressurised system, no evaporation should or could take place, this has been the case on all vehicles for the last 80 years.

I hope he isn't filling it to the top like my friend did on his first ever oil change on his first ever car, he told me that my advice of buying a gallon of oil was well wrong, he had to cycle into town two more times to get the close to 3 gallons that it really needed @Smoothrunnings What makes you believe that the coolant is being burned and not expelled?

Check it with a moving coil scale voltmeter, if it switching from high to low then it is doing its job but giving the wrong reading, I reckon it will be signalling a constant high rich reading (cant recall if that is the high or lwo voltage) and the ECU is going to its maximum default lean setting. I think in the absence of a signal it goes to the safer maximum default rich setting, I had that on a 95 petrol Gaalaxy when the main dealer replacing the clutch under a recall left the O2 sensor cable dangling and the cooling fan blades cut it through, no EML light in those days, the car just used a lot more fuel and eventually blocked the catastrophic convertor.

It will eat up the miles, I bought my MK1 Octavia dead cheap on its 3rd birthday with 188000 miles, I said if it gives me 3 years and then dies I will still be ahead of the game. I abused it as a van for 13 years, overloaded the suspension frequently, towed massively overloaded trailers for thousands of miles, only really ever did oil and filter changes and brake pads, I could not kill the vehicle. At 16 years old and 325000 miles it was still running like a Swiss watch, it was the electronics that ended up seeing it go to the scrapyard and me not realising that by investing in VCDS I could have easily found the problem which was almost certainly broken wiring in the door loop. Your plan is a good one and I intend to repeat the experience with my Yeti, I'm already 3 years and 40K miles in, it had 79K to start with. You should budget for a DMF change if it hasn't already been done.

Do you mean they have incandescent bulbs? That would be a standard rear light cluster. If they have standard wattage bulbs and the vehicle was fitted with and coded for incandescent bulbs then there will be no problem with the BCM, they may not be as weather tight as the original, the contacts may corrode or make poor contact but that will just throw up bulb failure warnings when they are working for a visual test, my OE ones do that on occasion anyway.

Trace where they are wired to, if its a high impedance "bypass" type trailer module then aside from being spliced in a dodgy fashion the loading on the circuits is infinitesimal and will not cause any problems.

What are you measuring it with? If you mean the Lambda read out on the MOT testers machine or printed on the certificate then it should be Lambda 1.0. If you mean the voltage from the Lambda sensor then I think it is 1 volt although I have a feeling that wide band sensors have a different voltage, in any case the important thing is to see the voltage constantly swing from high to low as the fuelling alters example 07 volts to 1.3 volts, for this you need an analogue moving scale display multi-meter.

Wrongly. I'm not sure what code reader you are using but in VCDS the code for low regfrigerant pressure and the one for a fault with the temperature sensor are both explicit in their description. I'm sure both places will probably take your money to do a regas which may not be needed and which will leave your aircon still inoperational. The switch can be replaced easily without losing the refrigerant, there is a valve behind it that seals when it is removed, when an operational switch is fitted with VCDS (dont know about your reader) you can then tell if the pressure is too low. On some of the vehicles water sits on the switch which can corrode the connectors or the actual switch body causing failure.

I find many Youtube videos like that on the computer.

Can anybody actually hear what the person is mumbling in that Youtube video? Is it my ears, my computer or the recording?

Re the coupling, dont be alarmed to see that there are circumferential splits and the outer ring looks like it is about to detach, they will be suspiciously regular in their irregularity, like a waveform, I bought a new coupling only to find that the seperation is part of the design and the new one looks identical. I have yet to fit it as the engine has to be moved forward & now am happier with the old one, so is my CT inspector (French MOT) who had failed it when i pointed it out to him. It is possible that the noise may be reduced when I do get around to fitting it. Its a harmonic balancer and the outer mass is intended to be decoupled from the inner drive portion like a harmonic crankshaft pulley, even were it to completely seperate the driveline would not be compromised.

No it was me who screwed up so I cannot deny it 😳 I even had a fellow Briskodian as a wing man because my vision is not so good, we both thought the logical drain plug was the one beneath the filler plug, I knew people had got it wrong so we were being cautious, I was in the UK & the computer in France so I could not look at any schematics. I still do all my own repairs screw ups! 😆 And still in love with the vehicle, did a spirited drive on empty roads this morning, rare that I am in the mood and the conditions allow it, fast but very smooth, in fact the car seems to ride better over bumpy chemin rurales when driven faster. I have the rear seats out carrying tools & 5 bags of concrete so could hear the transmission noise this evening.