J.R.

I have noticed it several times this winter but only on the coldest of days and when I have been driving very slowly sightseeing or slowly for economy, it will likely happen on the journey I am about to make, it did last time and will go away after climbing the hill on the route or not happen at all if I leave the AC off.

You did not report a falling brake fluid reservoir level or more importantly the circumstances during which it occurred. I have a lot of experience on this topic but cannot give an opinion in the absence of relevant information.

It will display 90°c for any engine temperature between 70 something and 110 or so, someone did an actual test on here but I cant recall the exact figures. VAG have been doing it for 2 decades now, if they didn't people would be complaining all the time, as it stands it's only in rare circumstances like ours that we see the changes momentarily when the temp falls outside of the fiddle limits and even then the guage does not fall as much as it should. Having the needle sit at a rock steady 90°c creates a false sense of security, when it exceeds it it is in fact by a big amount and will keep climbing.

Normal behaviour during warm up in cold temperatures if you are driving very economically and not going up hills, accelerating to overtake etc, more noticeable on the more thermally efficient diesel engines. A few observations: Your coolant temperature was not at 90°C that is the fiddle factor of the electronics, true temp will have been equal to the oil temperature. At the higher fan speed settings you are pulling more heat from the engine than the excess heat from combustion. With the AC on the air you are heating air that has already been frozen by the AC so you are taking far more heat from the engine cooling system than needed, if you turn the AC off you will not see the guage dip and recover and you will have warmer feet for the first 2 miles of your journey.

Did you see it with your own eyes or are you going on what the garage said? If you did see a frayed belt do you really know that it came off of your vehicle?

You need a Priest!

Meditation? Buddhism?

Please share with me your secret! As long as it does not involve battery charging, GT85, invasive computer systems or 35mm cubes of old sponge I am up for it 🤣

That is correct, they trot out the same Bravo Sugar to any customer with a problem they cannot be ar5ed to resolve. How can they know that something that does not yet exist will cure a problem that they are unable to find the cause of?

Likewise on an old school starter the acceleration of the starter motor shaft and the inertia of the bendix assembly will pull the pinion along the helix and into mesh with the ring gear.

The noise is the sprag clutch, the solenoid can be as lazy as you like or you can deliberately keep the key turned and the starter should not make any noise whatsoever aside from the almost silent motor whirring without any load on it. Ignore it for too long and eventually it will lose drive when cranking, make an awfull screech and the engine will not turn, don't ask me how I know so much on the subject 😳 It has only happened to me once and I have not seen another one fail but there is no mistaking the noise the OP's starter is making. Most people do not realise that the sprag clutch is there, it's not visible and they hardly ever go wrong but if you think about how a pre-engaged starter works then you realise there has to be one to protect the starter motor from grenading, on an old school inertia bedix starter the acceleration as the engine fired would throw the pinion out of mesh and you would simply hear the motor whirring, the same noise that you would hear if a solenoid was lazy, not that screeching, it is unmistakeable.

The surround and grille will simply lever out, best to equip yourself with a glass filled plastic trim removal tool to prevent marking the soft textured finish.

Do not grease the pinion, if there is any stiffness it will be in the solenoid or actuating arme anyway but it is a complete red herring. The pinion can disengage as slow as it likes, people with slow reflexes or hearing loss may not even release the key for a few seconds, as soon as the engine fires the pinion freewheels on the internal one way sprag clutch (roller ramp clutch) and when they start to fail they make the exact noise in the video, the same noise that an alternator pulley makes when the same one way clutch (fitted for a different reason) goes bad. On a large capacity motorcycle engine the starter pinion is in constant mesh with the ring gear, the ring gear carrier drives the crankshaft through a one way clutch, this will be spinning freewheeling at 11500 rpm without a murmer but if it fails then the starter motor will hit 100K rpm and vaporise, or as I found to my cost if you fit the bike engine and transmission unit into a race car and go into a spin unless you have lighning reflexes to declutch you will end up with a pile of smoking shrapnel under the bonnet. If you can source the part the sprag clutches are easy to replace and repair an otherwise functional starter motor for very little money.

Thanks for your informative response and for putting me in your shoes, thats what I was asking for. I agree without new car sales second hand choice would become worse and worse for more and more money, Cuba is a good example, I have to admit I would be more at home on Cuban roads and driving and maintaining a 50's relic than joining the ranks of new car owners, it would not have been the case 15 years ago, not because I was younger but because the way new cars have evolved. Anyone else with why they prefer buying a new vehicle with the current offerings?

Or they have every idea of how to fleece an unwary customer

Perfectly normal behaviour dependant on the battery SOC, the current being drawn by the electrical system, the ambient temperature and the engine revs. You have nothing to be concerned about with the voltages you have quoted. I had a digital LED voltmeter and would see those variations and more all the time, the PCB got broken by the insertion of USB plugs so I replaced it, the new one has a bar graph changing colour LED cascade, the printed voltages are too small to see without a magnifying glass and bright light, driving stop start in crawling for over an hour on the Paris périphérique I noticed that at idling sometimes one green bar was showing, sometimes orange and once or twice hovering on the red, I was a little concerned until I was able to read the actual voltage figures. The difference in the 14.2 and 13.7v you mention above, which by the way is two tenths of four fifths of eff all, is explained by the post cold start charging and the much easier warm restart with a hotter battery. There is a reason that manufacturers don't like us to see readings like battery voltage, water/oil temperature or will fiddle the readings to give a consistent acceptable figure except when outside of limits.

You make it sound like driving an older car or repairing a 50's Beetle is a bad thing! I wasn't criticising your choice, I respect it, I just wanted to know what is the attraction that outweighs the grief and having to deal with the main dealers. I appreciate that you dont have to have your vehicle serviced or looked at by Skoda but if your car develops or exhibits any of the characteristics that now dominate this forum you have no choice but to go to a main dealer to (battle to) exercise your warranty rights or to poke up with it. It seems like the second option is far less grief than the first. I also understand that if its a company car or you choose to lease then it has to be a new vehicle but the same question could be asked of the latter.

I owe you an apology, had I recalled that you said you used standard M10 bolts to pull the flange together I would have warned you that the ARP bolts were not the ISO standard thead pitch of M10 x 1.5. It is common practice to use a non standard thread (usually finer pitch) in high load applications where the correct fastener must be used specifically engine bearing caps, driveshaft flanges so I was not alarmed to see the M10 x 1.25 thread. Now I know that VAG have used an ISO standard thread then I no longer have any concerns about the fastener grade or being a setscrew, as you have deduced the load is taken from the fasteners to the counterbores. Given that it seemed to reassemble without a struggle I would say that the bolts were never fitted and are amongst the every growing box of bits left over at the end of jobs.

Yes, that is what I was saying earlier and why any damage to those bosses and counterbores is undesirable. But this is a driveshaft joint with a rubber coupling and not a flywheel or crankshaft pulley so you should be OK. Well done on finding the fault and especially on saving the situation!

Serious question to any new car buyers on the forum. What benefit do you enjoy with a new car that makes it worth putting up with all this K-rap? From my side the overwhelming benefit of buying second hand cars is never having to have any contact again with a main dealer sales or service reception. You may choose to do so but it is a choice, I prefer to have ownership of and responsability for any problems with my vehicle and to learn from the very sad experiences of new car buyers which ones to avoid buying second hand, which at present looks like most!

Even that 17" tyre looks skinny to my eyes.

I had the same experience with the blanking plate on the PD engine which was supposed to be fit and forget, guaranteed to work faultlessly 🥴 I worked out that I had to allow some EGR gas flow so that the MAF would see a drop in airflow, I kept enlarging the hole until it ran correctly without a fault code but was well aware that in the future, any small change in another parameter o maybe the metering hole closing up would put it into limp mode again. You have to be able to set out on a journey confident that you wont break down or if you do that you know what it is and can deal with it, with the EGR simulator I can disconnect the plugs and reconnect the loom to the EGR, throttle body and MAF and it will be back to standard. Now that I have had the emissions fix rolled back I probably dont need the emulator but I keep it because I dont like Polar Bears! 😆

My knowledge and experience is that removal or disabling of the EGR system has to be done in such a way that the ECU still thinks it is fitted and operating correctly, hence the existence of the EGR emulators. As we agree, EGR is not required for DPF operation, the ECU actually inhibits it but removing it, disabling it or blocking the port will cause the engine to go into limited operating strategy. The ECU program when EGR is commanded will be looking for a drop in the mass air flow corresponding to the calculated volume of EGR gases being ingested, when it commands the EGR flap to move it expects the position sensor to show this has happened, when it commands the throttle valve to partially close to pull the EGR gases through it will again expect the position sensor to reflect this, if any of these signals do not change to within the correct values it will put the engine in limp mode. The EGR emulator disconnects the wiring from the EGR, it becomes a dead, passive unit, if the valve is closed it can be left as is, if it is stuck open then the port blanking plate needs to be used, it modifies the outputs of the mass air flow sensor, the EGR position sensor and the throttle body position sensor when EGR is commanded so the the ECU sees the values it is expecting to see and not the reality. I believe that during these periods of commanded EGR( but in fact no EGR) the fuelling is probably out of whack because it will have been modified to allow for the recycled exhaust gases which are not present. You probably know all of the above, let me know if you think I have made any wrong assumptions, I did a lot of thinking before deciding to go for the EGR emulator.

It would help if the OP actually were to say what the temperatures being displayed are rather than "they are constantly changing" also not having given their location so we dont know if the outside ambient temperature would be below zero or in the 40's. Suffice to say if the readings fluctuate fwithin the range of 70°c to 120°c then its the oil temperature display, if they are similar to the outside temperature then thats what is being indicated unless the sensor is faulty. He also does not say if he has a Maxidot display, if he does then it's been a manipulation of the menu controls and can be reverted to how it was. I feel for you if your ambient temperatures never go outside of that range! If you select ambient temperature to be displayed in the maxidot it will indicate outside of that range, I've seen 44°c on mine, the automatic low temperature warning display comes on at +4°c and will go lower than -5°c, I have seen - 12°c and I'm certain it would go as low as any Arctic or Antartic temperature could be.

He really should look for one with the relevant VAG approval number, they call it "mid SAPS" but what does that really mean? It is not low SAPS which the VAG approval requires. I shot myself in the foot buying 20L of Mannol oil which was described as low SAPS by the seller but it does not say anything other than suitable for post combustion treatments, it does not mention SAPS at all on the packaging or the Mannol specifications, it's all very wooly and intended to mislead and I fell for it. I am using it for now but keeping a close eye on the DPF differential pressure readings.