J.R.

It reaches an indicated 90°c! Avocet, those figures are pretty much exactly what I expected but its nice to have them confirmed. Fudge factor starts at around 55°c guage will read a steady 90°c between a true 77° and 94° which was the limit of your test and unless your engine was overheating with say a stuck waterpump shroud then you would not be able to exceed that anyway. I reckon, and this is only from anecdotal evidence that it would stay on 90°c until the true engine temp reached 105-110°c at which point it would jump up to the true reading, this is why you get reports like yours that when someone slows down or turns on the heater matrix the temp drops rapidly to 90°c, too rapidly for it to have really done so. Give a big thankyou from me to your willing co-pilot and also to yourself!

But he should charge his battery as a precaution anyway, its coming to the season where like the adverts for Xmas we will be getting constant reminders.

It does if they are not tapped all the way through or are done with a taper tap, both accepted practice to minimise machining costs.

Please do, it would make interesting reading. In the last 5 years my visits were far less frequent than the decade before but still enough for me to become somewhat habituated by changes, there are some though that I believe are glaring, it would be interesting to see what was most noticeable to you.

As odd as a man who chooses to show off his towbar to female friends.

It was years ago, you will have to do your own leg work, I only used one spring per side, they come in various lengths and rates, 3 springs sounds like a bodge. You can either buy the ones you want, take a chance and if they are too strong then source weaker ones but you would need to know the rate of spring they have used, sellers don't like giving that away because die springs cost peanuts compared to what they charge for a solution.

I can see the test port on the pipe just in front and underneath the one in question, I reckon it is air con.

The hose looks like an air conditioning hose to me with the crimped end and what looks like aluminium solid sections. If you trace the solid sections back and forth you should see a test connection port which should be covered by a black cap, if its been in the garage its probably missing. I think it is probably missing a fixing on a retaining bracket but could be a pump problem, does the noise stop if you turn off the AC?

It's not the end of the story, you have not said if the compression test was good, if the car now runs, that you have had it back for a week or two and everything appears fine.

Broken cable(s) in the door loop, most likely drivers door.

There sure is, there are plastic detent latches, its not a friction fit but like most clip together plastic parts once you have taken its virginity it becomes promiscuous!!

"Price is a percieved indicator of quality", one of the basic economic principles taught at very early stage in an MBA course, for me most of the learning was simply being able to put a name or a phrase to what I had already worked out and knew instinctively from working at markets and also buying & bicycles from a very early age. Wasn't it one of the car companies that had an advertising campaign that said "Reassuringly expensive!" that is like having you over, rubbing your nose in it and laughing at you.

Thats about right, it has to gradually fudge the indicated reading so that it climbs progressively, by the same token when you start to overheat it does nothing while its within its untruth range but once it exceeds the 105°, 110° or whatever the upper threshold is it wont jump straight to the true temperature which it really should but does it progressively by which time your engine has overheated further and maybe caused more damage. As someone who used to drive all their cars watching the temp guage like a hawk (if you have ever owned a Stag you would understand) i used to be able to see and even predict the minutest fluctuations according to road conditions, speed, wind etc and would immediately know when something was starting to play up well before it caused a problem, I have not been able to do this for 2 decades now since driving VAG vehicles, they really should dispense with the temperature guage and have an overheating warning light.

Its been 30 years since any car advert informed anything about the car, they are either aspirational lifestyle memes (not any lifestyle I would aspire to mind, I would rather slit my throat) or just completely wacko but intending to make the car look cool. It all started with Renault and Nicole and has gone downhill ever since. The worst one ever for me was the group of teenagers in a Corsa I think but might be wrong, the entire advert showed them cruising around unfeasibly deserted urban streets staring at the infotainment screen sending and recieveing text messages to and from other idiots driving other connected Corsas. Oh for the days of Woofter Wollard telling us that the gearlever falls nicely to hand 😆

The high oil temp has nailed it for me, there is something amiss with the cooling system, towing an unladen trailer with a frontal area less than the CSA of the towing vehicle should give the engine no more load than the same weight of passengers. Your vehicle should never have overheated under those circumstances, I had wondered whether it was a problem with a fauly coolant temp sensor but the abnormally high oil temperature is the key, the oil was actually cooling your coolant! Even without fans it would not have overheated, there seems to be little or no circulation through the radiator. Is the heater working correctly at all temperatures and on both sides of the cabin? It could be the old Silkat teabag bursting. TBH the cooling system is so efficient on these vehicles that your waterpump shroud might be permenantly deployed.

Are you serious? - Skoda UK or VAG!!! 😲

To paraphrase StevenSmith: Perfectly normal in the circumstances you described.

They did not have the heat management system that VAG has, 80-90 is not optimum, the oil cooler also works as an oil heater during the warm up phase and also when descending long inclines laden on a closed throttle.

That made me smile, 10/10 for your first posting on the forum!

I would not expect any overheating in the circumstances you describe whatever direction the wind was in, not even in the height of summer, I think you have a problem somewhere, possibly the cooling fans not working but at motorway speeds they should not be needed, more likely a sticking water pump impellor shroud. This is what i just wrote on your other thread: I have towed large frontage storage trailers loaded with probably double that for 500 mile trips and the temperature guage has never risen, oil temperature has reached 115°c perhaps more a few times though. I should add that many of these journeys were at the height of this summer where we had temperatures over 40°c and my fuel economy was down to 24mpg to give you some idea of the load on the engine and the ambient temperature, the guage never rose from the 90°c mark, my vehicle does not have towing preparation and has also been remapped from a standard 108hp to an alleged 184hp without any cooling system mods, I just have a £100 Ebay towbar and current sensing relay both fitted by myself.

All good observations, I will look at your other thread re the overheating, I have towed large frontage storage trailers loaded with probably double that for 500 mile trips and the temperature guage has never risen, oil temperature has reached 115°c perhaps more a few times though. The only way we will know for sure what the difference is between indicated and actual coolant temperature is to run VCDS while driving, something I will not do as i only have vision in one eye and very rarely do I have passengers, certainly not the sort to be happy comparing data fields with a computer on their lap.

They are bearings for selective assembly having measured the clearances using plastiguage, the colour coding is always on the back of the sheel where it cannot be worn off.

This info is decades old so may not be relevant and comes from my experience of building race engines albeit not for many years now. With Vandervell bearings there were two types, the standard white metal over steel bearing caps and the VP prefixed (Vandervell Performance) white metal over a copper alloy over steel shells, these race engine bearings would look identical until the white metal wore sufficient to expose the copper alloy (whose name eludes me) beneath, this was soft enough to continue functioning as a bearing and protect the crank, usually the low oil pressure and noise would precipitate their replacement, the crankshaft journals would usually be servicable whereas with the standard bearing shells (V prefix???) once through to the steel backing it would trash the crank and often throw a conrod. Often the big ends were the standard shells and the main bearings the copper backed ones, the white metal over the copper backing on the OP's bearing may only have been over the bearing surface and not the oil groove, that could be a modern production cost saving so a worn shell would look reddish all over and a new one grey with a red stripe in the oil groove. The bearing in question does not have an oil groove, surprising for a main bearing, was it perchance the rear bearing with the broken cap?

No but I have no end of experience of incompetent dealers blaming everything that they cannot resolve on a failed ECU. The actual failure rate of ECU's in service is infinitesimally small, you have more chance of extra terrestrials fiddling with your vehicle than ECU failure. None of these functions are controlled by the powertrain ECU, but it will have an input from the ignition switched positive feed. The above sounds like a problem with either/or the alarm horn and the immobiliser in the instrument cluster but definitely not the powertrain ECU although garages will often diagnose that with the intention of making the customer take their car elsewhere as its the most expensive repair they can think of.