J.R.

€88 now from Germany with free delivery if you havn't already ordered. Hope your treatment is going well.

That is good to know, mine will get a much closer inspection and be replaced if I am in any doubt, I have the same mileage. Nobody has ever described me as a normal person so if you can hear swearing in French then you will know where it is coming from. From your description of the pilot pin, whose purpose is to prevent the propshaft dropping if the joint fails I had already decided that I could create enough clearance without shifting the engine position, your garage seems to have confirmed this. At my next house that I take posession of soon I will be fitting a vehicle lift in the workshop, the trouble is that can't hapen until after several years of renovation and hence several years of grovelling on my back in the gloom and not being able to exert sufficient force for many driveline & suspension jobs. I will have earned it by the time I get the vehicle lift but will I still have the enthusiasm and youth to make proper use of it?

The light comes on when there is 1/4 tank indicated (plus the 5 or 6 litres reserve capacity) so those who refuel at that point are only ever using 36, 40 at the most litres of their fuel tank capacity, or to put it another way, they would refuel 3 times compared to twice for myself.

That makes no sense, did you mean "empty"? If so then yes, that would be the lower 50 litre figure, if you drive beyond zero miles remaining to the point of running out you will get the full capacity in, and some in my experience.

56 litres capacity but the fuel guage will read empty and the dash display show zero miles remaining when there are still 6 litres of "reserve capacity" I actually thought it was 55 litres plus 5 reserve, all of my Octavias I managed to get over 60 litres in when driving 50+ miles with zero range showing, perhaps the MK3 is different.

That has always worked for me except for if the wiper arms have never been removed for a decade or have lost their protective caps & are severley corroded, the rear wiper on the Yeti by its design having a 180° open area for the washer jet leaves the threaded spindle and splines completely exposed, that one was really tough going and needed a slim puller, wooden wedges and tapping the spindle which risked breaking the rear screen.

Already explained in my text that you quoted. Their only interest is the monthly return on their investment, when its sold on by BCA at the end of the term at a closed to trade auction the winning bidder will probably not even have noticed and certainly would not bid any less than they would have done, they too is only interested in the return on his investment. How much less do you think the customer should pay in monthly lease fees because of a rusty wiper spindle which you believe makes the vehicle substandard quality? Put yourself in the shoes of a leasing company if you are capable, would you really want to spend even one second of your time on this nonsense?

It is the revison number, the higher the letter the later the revision, the later revisions will be backward compatible. In the absence of a known weakness that was resolved on later models do not assume that a higher revision letter means a better product or quality, the quest for cost saving in materials, machining and production time can often mean later components are not as good or robust as earlier, the 6 speed concentric slave cylinder being one of them. I only concern myself with revision numbers on electronic controllers like the body control module, steering wheel slip ring etc, there it can be very important, some are "low line" revisions for budget models and dont have all the required inputs & outputs. For the diff I just searched for the basic part number and VW, VAG, Skoda etc.

Correct, use the part number for your search. There are no different ratios for different vehicles because the transfer box takes drive to the rear wheels after the front differential, so all the transfer boxes and all the rear diffs for all the vehicles have the same ratio which makes parts swopping much easier. I will no doubt be proved wrong now and happy to be so if it adds to my knowledge. Second hand diffs are cheaper if they come without the Haldex pump and controller, despite the best efforts of mechanics using the wrong hole percentage wise very few fail in service as they are really robust so the breakers can't get shot of them, I have followed them listed for 6 months with the price dropping.

Second hand ones are £2-300 on Ebay.

Scary.

48mpg at 130kph towing an Ifor Williiams GD85 8'x4' 400kg? trailer on autoroutes. A few mpg more when towing my much lighter 5'x4' goods trailer, a little less when I have it converted to a van trailer with a 4' high box extension, it does not drop the MPG much & I think it is running in the hole in the air made by the Yeti, it dropped more with the Octavia. Recent 500 mile removal runs towing massively overloaded (a couple of tonnes and some) removals trailers (they are mobile site cabins) flat fronted 1.8m wide by 2.5m high towed at 90-100 kph (much less on hills) 28-29 mpg there have been some 6 return trips always at the same mpg unladen or laden although I go slightly faster unladen. Towing a 1700kg twin axle 7.9m doasyoulikey caravan (what I am currently living in!) at 80kph on B roads 30mpg.

The PD engine had a quick start feature where it would start in a maximum of one revolution if the cam sensor was working, it would take 2 revolutions otherwise to know what cylinder to fire on. I'm not convinced the Common Rail engine does the same as it always cranks a little longer than the PD did.

You have done 300000 miles on the original clutch, it is not worn or slipping and you want to fit something that will last longer..................... OK, I get that you intend keeping the car to do an equivalent mileage or more, I would venture that you drive with mechanical sympathy to have got to that mileage as I did, I bet when you remove the standard clutch it will not be significantly worn. You should of course replace it but I for one would stick with what you have that is proven to be up to and beyond the task.

Scary. On every new to me vehicle whether new or second hand I check the oil level every week, if after a decent period no discernable loss shows and if the vehicle has a low oil level warning system like my Skodas have all had then I will leave it to do its job but every time the bonnet gets opened all the fluid levels get checked despite them all having low fluid warning systems, I also check those systems with VCDS and also manually where possible like removing the brake fluid reservoir cap. I check all my tyre pressures religiously once a week and the treads visually more frequently, this has at the least saved me from having to replace repairable tyres (screws/nails in tread, bead leaks) and at worst from causing an accident. The above was considered essential responsable behaviour when I started driving, I realise that times have changed but the dangers havn't, when I see insouciance expressed in that way I do find it scary.

Good luck! It sounds like you are in the nightmare scenario that against my normal Chancer character I sought to avoid, that of the car not running and my old ECU having been reprogrammed & sold to someone else.

Now if you had mentioned the ECU change before..................................... Immobiliser data is exchanged between the ECU and the instrument cluster, if you swap an ECU the engine won't start, I cannot explain why yours ran initially for 30 minutes but what it is doing now is expected as far as my understanding goes. I had my MK2 Octavia remapped with an exchange ECU, so as not to send mine to the UK for reprogramming, have the car off the road while waiting and the risk of loss in transit I opted for a pre-programmed "plug n play" ECU, this had the immobiliser function disabled or hacked so that it would work on my vehicle, my understanding being that without that hack the vehicle would not start because the ECU was not recognised. Some spotty teenager behind a computer screen will be able to sort you out! If you have the original ECU then refit it, if you dont then take it up with whoever took yours in exchange and supposedly coded it. That was the other reason I went for a preprogrammed ECU, had there been problems I could revert to the original.

Now if you had mentioned the ECU change before..................................... Immobiliser data is exchanged between the ECU and the instrument cluster, if you swap an ECU the engine won't start, I cannot explain why yours ran initially for 30 minutes but what it is doing now is expected as far as my understanding goes. I had my MK2 Octavia remapped with an exchange ECU, so as not to send mine to the UK for reprogramming, have the car off the road while waiting and the risk of loss in transit I opted for a pre-programmed "plug n play" ECU, this had the immobiliser function disabled or hacked so that it would work on my vehicle, my understanding being that without that hack the vehicle would not start because the ECU was not recognised. Some spotty teenager behind a computer screen will be able to sort you out!

Have at it with a hammer or other destructive tool of your choice, you have a new alarmon order anyway. My AliExpress alarm module sent the car to Coventry!

What is your cranking RPM? There was some stupid ECU coding on these vehicles whereby if the engine is not cranking fast enough the injectors will not be commanded, it may have been on he earlier vehicles, someone else will hopefully confirm. The immobiliser will do the same initial firing then cut out, have you changed keys by any chance? I'm sure in VCDS you can find a log of engine shut down events and causes.

Switch ignition off, operate wiper switch while key remains in ignition, in fact I think its before the car is locked as I have operated the function with my knee while getting out.

I thought the posting from Black75 was a reply from yourself, sorry for the response, I know better than to bite when a troll pushes buttons but had thought it was you. I will now edit out the bit replying mistakenly to you.

You missed your target by a country mile there but did give me a good laugh! My last vehicle Octavia 1 Combi Elegance bought in 2005 at 3 years old with 188000 miles for £3K, I drove it for 14 years taking it up to 350000 miles.

A lovely tale but it would not happen, the bulb circuits are monitored to protect the output transistors of the BCM, iff too high or too low a wattage bulb is detected (a higher or lower volt drop than the specification) then that outputs from the BCM will be shut down, it is why people fitting LED bulbs, incorrect wattage bulbs etc have problems and why the intermittent contact from a standard bulb fitted to the DRL's of a facelift Octavia 2 will result in the bulb never illuminating, my BCM can be programmed for LED bulbs. A transistor could be overloaded, reverse biasing is what usually does for them, but it wont affect the other outputs and the PCB track will not burn out. If people shunt one output to both rear foglights and the circuit protection does not cut in then the IC can handle the current, I would remove the RH bulb if running a shunt wire to my LH foglight, I'm not even going to bother this time, my CT tester is a sensible guy. You methods of the change over switch and the relay or transistor circuit would work well, years back when I enjoyed playing with and learning electronics I would have done the same, now life is too short for me to be concerned what side my fog light is illuminated.

Nothing wrong with them, I would happily drive on them till they reach the legal limit. How much tread depth do they have? Or to put it another way, how much money are you throwing away? Surface cracking will not cause a blow out.