J.R.

Well things got progressively worse so the bullet had to be bitten, there was only one suspect left, the concentric slave cylinder so it was off with the very heavy 68kg transmission unit and a DMF clutch & slave cylinder change. Having ordered a new old stock cylinder from Ebay France and comparing it to the latest revision one that came with the clutch/DMF kit I was fairly sure what the problem would be even before tackling the job, the old one was a one piece aluminium casting, the new one was plastic and moulded in two pieces with an O ring sealed joint hidden within the bellhousing. The connection stub sticking out of the bellhousing could be wobbled around and it turned out to be the joint rotating, the joint on the new part was solid, sure enough the O ring had a flat on one side and had wear marks, it was allowing air to be drawn in despite the head of fluid above it but had not leaked even one single drip, that part remains a mystery. The thrust bearing was faced with plastic where it contacted the pressure plate fingers and had indentations, I dont think this damage was relevant to the problem but both my new release bearings had metal contact faces. The DMF had slight wear and the lateral oscillation may have contributed to the indentations on the release bearing or vibrated the fluid joint allowing air ingress, it was silent at low revs as is the new one but at high revs its much quieter, now its a diesel sound rather than a high rev death rattle. I decided to fit the aluminium cylinder so as not to risk a future problem with a 1ct O ring requiring transmission removal, I think my car may have been originally fitted with an alu cased bearing & that the clutch has already been replaced, some bolts were loose, the starter solenoid connector broken and other indications that the job had already been done by an inexperienced or slapdash mechanic. Also someone had abused the clutch, pressure plate & flywheel had burn marks, the pressure plate was dished, 1.5mm over a 40mm wide contact face and the drive plate worn thin on the outside only. The clutch and its hydraulics are behaving perfectly since replacement, also the gear selection is much improved as the counterbalanced quadrant that the cables attach to was loose on the selector shaft spindle (more signs of being worked on), so loose that the spline would soon have stripped and I would have lost all gears

Simply slipping in a modern engine................ Only if you are McGyver Not taking the mickey out of you Xman but it just made me laugh, I come from an age and had the skills where that once would have been a simple task to me, those days are long gone sadly. Actually fitting the engine would be the simple part compared to all the other stuff that you go on to list.

Brake bleeding will achieve nothing other than perhaps give you a spongy pedal to offset make things even worse, the problem is vacuum (not pressure) related, either the vaccuum pump, a leak elsewhere (but I think the servo has a seperate vacuum accumulator) the servos itself or an intermittent blockage/leakage from the vacuum hose or a union.

The covers as fugly as they may be are an improvement

I dont trust anyone with my nuts, even Mike!

Are you getting to use my old headlights Mike?

I believe that butane, or probably propane is a regrigerant gas and if the system is vacuumed down as it should be then it would actually work, well at least for a while before sending you off to meet your maker. Fire & explosion risks aside, having a different specific heat capacity it would be very incompatible.

Its been illegal to sell the kits containing R134a in the EU for a very long time, even Ali-express sellers had to knock it on the head, some got inventive by describing the contents as air freshener or leak test gas but they quickly got shut down, I had to bite the bullet in the end and buy a 13kg cylinder from Lithuania & even that was dodgy as they should have insisted on seeing that I had the correct installer accreditation. The ones that are sold now have R134a in great big lettering and equivalent or alternative in tiny lettering, and they are dodgy as hell as they dont print that the contents are really butane gas. I very much doubt that it will mix with R134a as a top up and as has been said it would make your vehicle into a ticking bomb.

I had disregarded that thinking that the top GRP ledge would not be strong enough to support an MOT testers type axle lift, they weigh 100kg on their own plus you can add maybe 1250kg when lifting the front axle of a front engined FWD vehicle.

Your Climatronic system should set the system to recirculation mode when reversing, I'm fairly sure that is a seperate flap but perhaps it also stops air coming from the vents to prevent you breathing any exhaust fumes that might get through. So your hypothesis about the car getting its knickers in a twist and thinking it is reversing could be a good one. I would disconnect the reversing light switch and see if the problem goes, it may even have sticky contacts.

Thankyou

Could you possibly find the makers name Cheapas?

Blindfolded you could pick any random person from the street and I guarantee you that they would not know less than where you took it and you might even get lucky. Kwik fit and all the others of their ilk only have to know how to find and connect the two fill couplings to the lines from their machine, press "start" & then go and navel gaze for the next hour, if they were competent they would have looked it over and seen that the vacuum did not build up quick enough, or at all, or hold for the test period, they could then have said "there is a leak somewhere" or seen that it charged alright but did not cool and said "its holding a charge but the high pressure side pressure is not raising" etc, instead its "Computer says no!" and they trot out the confident "we confirm that it needs a new compressor" which really means computer says NO!, we know nothing of these things, give us our money, go away and take it somewhere else.

Unless there are any fortune tellers on the forum nobody can answer your question for you, the second hand ones I bought were fine, others may be foutu, its actually incredibly rare for a compressor to fail despite the recieved wisdom, if it really had then the system would be full of metal shavings & require the filter/drier and condensor replacing at the minimum. The faults are either not compressor related at all which you only find out after having been shafted to replace your one that would have functioned perfectly or if they are then it will be either the modulating valve or the shear plate or drive hub all of which can be replaced in situ for little money. The obvious candidate on your vehicle will be leakage from the pressure sensor cause by corrosion where water has pooled on it and/or corroded electrical contacts from the same water, that is easily replaced and you dont even lose any gas remaining in the system. I am assuming that you have tried to have it regassed and they have said there is a leak, I bet you it wont be the compressor or if it is then it will the the coupling O rings that cost peanuts. But hey, replacing a compressor brings in loads more money & if that doesn't work we can scratch our heads and find the real cause. A new compressor from Maxspeedingrods will cost little more than that second hand one, but they can have their faults, at the minimum you must check that the drive hub nut is tight & is loctited.

4mm bore or inside or outside diameter? I have a collection of thin wall copper tubes (brake, fuel & hydraulic pipes) and use the largest that can be persuaded to go through the kinks & restrictions. Several advantages: Larger ID for a given OD = more fluid flow You can feel & hear when you hit the sump bottom. You can heat the oil until it flows really easily, a plastic tube will collapse under the vacuum when softened by the heat.

The obvious question to ask you is was the car running normally after they looked at it for you and if so what is it that you are expecting from them? I suggest having an independant VW specialist check it over for you including scanning for fault codes would be money well spent in giving you piece of mind and having something tangible to present them with as a warranty claim.

Dont do that or you will invalidate the guarantee

I very much doubt that your compressor has a clutch and if I am right then you should take everything that the garage says with a pinch of salt, already they have topped up their R134a bottle with your valuable refrigerant = stolen.

I just checked my spare pulleys & hubs, yes you can do what you propose, the hub has to be removed to access the cirlip retaining the pulley & bearing. First job is to remove the centre hub shaft nut while you still have something to hold onto, hopefully the splines wont be stripped, if they are then its really difficult in situ & with limited tools & once I managed to bend the pump shaft, its a very small diameter. As long as the pump shaft can turn freely when the hub is removed you have a very good chance of doing an effectve repair, use some bering fit or whatever on the splines as one of my new compressors stripped its hub & the same happened to its replacement which appeared to fit well, probably made of cheese.

No lift but am borrowing the pit in a friends sous-sol (a drive in cellar) otherwise it was going to have to be on my drive

A vacuum guage wasn't, it gave a very usefull comparative display. I had one because I was young and we all wanted our dashboards stuffed with guages unless we were lucky enough to have a Jaguar or 1600E Tincorner, it was of no real value to me as the roads then were my personal racetrack Then I had to drive back from the Norfolk Broads to Gatwick with a blown head gasket pressurising the water system, I extended the radiator overflow pipe and routed it under the bonnet/wing shut line so I could see the steam coming out, no more steam = refill radiator time I tried to eke out as many miles as I could between enforced stops & the vacuum guage was my ally that day and that day only!

Ladyboys!

That will not be coming undone as it is with the damage you have already done, forget stud extractors, the bolt extractor in the photo looks to be a small enough section to actually get in there and might be worth the investment. I see only 2 solutions: Carefully chain drilling a series of radially spaced holes going up in sizes until they overlpa and hopefully the bolt head can be detached leaving the thread in the driveshaft which probably would then remove with a very expensive decent stud extractor. Find a larger hex nut and socket that is not too big to fit in the counterbore, bore out the centre of the nut on a lathe until it can be hammered over the damaged 24mm bi-hex, then arc weld them together, the heat alone will probably ensure that it will now undo but you need to improve your technique to stop the socket slipping off which caused the damage that you have. I have to replace my clutch next week, a few days ago I loosened & retightened by drive shaft retaining bolts with a breaker bar and scaffold pole being very carefull not to allow the socket to displace, it would have been easier with a second person helping, it was touch and go as the bolt heads were very corroded after 6 years in what I suspect was a seaside environment.

All part of VAG's race to the bottom & selecting suppliers on price alone, if I buy a pattern part from Ali-express for centimes I should not be surprised to find that it has been moulded from recycled diddlydidos and self destructs from UV within a year even if it never sees the light of day but VAG know how to design & specify something that doesn't, indeed they never used to fail prematurely, the one in my 2006 Octavia could have won a tug of war against a pit bull terrier. It was "Simply Clever" design & I really liked the idea, estate cars always catch a lot of road muck very quickly.

Fitted a non android Erisin unit to my pre F/L MK2 and I cant recall if the parking sensor display worked as I would use my mirrors and rely on the audible warnings, soon after I fitted a reversing camera and it had the trajectory lines which moved with the steering, I'm pretty sure that it took up 2/3 of the screen and the bit on the right was the parking sensors. The Climatronic stuff never displayed but its not needed, the climatronic display tells you all that you need to know.