J.R.

I am 750km away from the jacks & dont even have a tape or ruler to hand to guesstimate the size but I would say around 4.5" 110-120mm, I will have a look at the Ebay purchase history to see what I bought, they are smaller but fit snugly inside the 4 raised lugs so probably 100mm. Editted, it was larger than that, they were 13cm dia & like this, https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/13cm-Rubber-Pad-Rubber-Block-Hydraulic-Ramp-Jacking-Pads-Trolley-Jack-Adapter-/392959311295?hash=item5b7e333dbf perhaps they do have the slots in them, you can see from the reduced diameter that they are supposed to overlap the jack pad but they fit snugly inside mine. One of them I have glued in place with PU foaming glue, the Jackette has probably absorbed too much oil over the years for it to stick to.

Whatever you do don't go thinking that the prices from Superskoda, Skodaparts.com etc bear any relation to the manufacturers price, in my experience they always far exceed the standard price from TPS, people buy because they either dont know any different and assume they will be cheaper or have so much difficulty in getting a price from the main dealer. That said a specific part in a specific colour for a more than decade old model may no longer be stocked by VAG/TPS & if it is I would expect it to be expensive.

There is a guy on Ebay selling custom made jack pads machined from ice hockey pucks, he will have one with a turned diameter to suit your toy trolley jack. Sorry for the facetious "toy" comment but the problem I have is finding jack pads large enough to fill the inside of the cups on my proper garage type jacks, a 1976 Sealey (bought in my first year as an apprentice) and a circa 1965 Bradbury Jackette passed down to my friend from his father & then on to me, - recently refurbished. I could only find one pad large enough on E-bay and that has no slots milled in it.

Glad to see that I am not the only one whose purple tart can rise to the occasion when demanded and give a lot more than its supposed 100%. 135-140 maintained for 3 hours is very good, listen to your body and become attuned to what it is telling you. You will find some days you just dont feel right, everything is a struggle, when you look at the data later you will see that you could not get it up I ran for the first time in a couple of months today and it was very difficult, you lose condition very quickly, it comes back just as quick but only with determination and hard graft. My theoretical MHR is 159 and I have peaked at 201 on the running track, when the stars are in line I can maintain 160 for an hour before dropping to a similar average to yours, when things are right it will shoot up to 160 within 30 seconds of setting off at a very slow warm up pace with the group, a bit like the captain ordering the engine room to get up full steam on the boilers, then there are the days like 2 days ago where for whatever reason it would not go above 117 and I felt very very weary. What is your resting heart rate Olduns?

How I hanker after the days when my trolley jack lived in all my cars (plus the contents of a workshop!) because they were so likely to break down and there were only two jacking points in the same place on all vehicles, under the pressed tin sump at the front (the crossmember if you could be bothered) and the diff housing at the rear. Then Issigonis screwed things up with flimsy subframes at the rear which would happily buckle! You would not dare lift any vehicle from under the cills or anywhere near, even one that had not reached the point of needing its first MOT, even when I had welded in new cills, inner cills vertical membrane floor panels, wheel arches & closing panels I would not dare jack up under my work

You will have to grind down the casing on the bluetooth casing and even then it needs a lot of persuading, if you can find a cabled OBDII reader or another plug that first you will see the size you need to get down to, the housing on the Octavia 2 has no clearance for anything but the standardised plug.

I was your age with the exact same engine and same requirements, I bought a remapped "plug n play" ECU off of E-bay for £100ish and the result was beyond my wildest expectations, drove it for 18 months and sold it to someone who wanted exactly the same as I, he has the old ECU if he did not like it but he does. Only downside of the ECU swap route is the loss off the immobiliser (a big plus point to me!) and a mileage check using VCDS or similar will show the mileage recorded by the donor vehicle for the new ECU, the instrument binnacle reads the correct mileage. A relatively easy job to fit but you do have to angle grind screw slots into the tamperproof fasteners on the ECU cage.

Only if you have a pre-flattened head and the close vision of a 6 year old child.

"I really cant see" is precisely the problem I know that my eyesight is compromised but there were people on here telling me that the indicator triangles for the jacking points were easy to see. In bright sunlight the other day I found them by feel and with a mirror, I thought the problem was me not being able to see close up being over 43 years old (and some!!) but unless you flatten your head first by having a lorry drive over it you have to jack the car up first to be able to lie flat and look upwards to see the indicator mark which is on the horizontal lower face of the cill moulding. I suppose you could dig 4 holes in the ground and avoid having your head flattened The markings are fine for MOT testers where the car is already on the lift before they use the jacking beam, a chocolate teapot for anyone else. Maybe the pesron who wrote the handbook was an MOT tester.

My 110 was getting 2 or 3 times weekly trips of 10 miles out, 90 minute average stop (running club) then 10 miles back and it was absolutely fine on regens, I never felt any happening and VCDS always showed at least 300 miles since the last one. That changed with the confinement and I heard the fans running on shut down a couple of times but never had a regen request. I would hope and expect an EU6 diesel to be a lot better but I am an optimist.

You got that right! Unbelievable that a manufacturer that from the beginning of this century was making arguably the best value and most reliable vehicles backed up with the best customer service should end up making the most unreliable vehicles and destroying their reputation by filling the vehicles with what to me is (and I know I am in the minority) senseless unecccesary b******t. But they know what influences the buying decision & what closes the deal, if people were not so addicted to their smartphones they probably would never include gimmicks that could go wrong & bite them on the bum. New cars being rejected right left and centre for a (mal)function that has nothing to do with the purpose of the vehicle, arguably all these rejected vehicles are "fit for the purpose" under consumer law. You only have to look at the thread titles on the active topics page of the forum to see the way things are going, they have changed dramatically in the last 2 years.

It will not be a short circuit, all the wiring diagram will show is a live, earth and a twisted pair for the canbus. The problem is likely to be the circuit board in the motor assembly. Another possibility is corrupted programming of the body control module, have you recently had a flat battery or sluggish cranking?

Mine is a 2015, unknown history but it looks to have been a fleet vehicle, possibly a forestry vehicle, then was written off in a tiny impact that scuffed the bumper but deployed all the airbags. I have never driven it pre-emissions fix so dont know if its worse, it seems to be regenning more frequently but with the lockdown I am not doing my longer journeys. I have zinc inclusion spots on the bottom of the doors, its a solid colour blue and I would not know they were there had I not been looking for them. I have done 8000 miles taking it to 80K & it has been faultlessly reliable. I have an EGR emulator to fit, I am hoping without EGR there will be less soot in the DPF and less regens, maybe my theory is flawed, when I can get back to the UK for a remap I will have the emissions fix reversed.

How can the internal passages of an intercooler get blocked? Running without an air filter or with supposed free flow one? Turbo blow up throwing oil everywhere? Long term turbo seal leakage? I have often found oil residue in the charge cooler piping at the lowest points. I am really pleased that you have found a resaonably priced solution after all this time! The penny has dropped, its an air to water intercooler! Could this be the result of a ruptured silkat bag? Does the heater function properly?

The ECU does not know what fuel you put in, it does not measure it, it has a 3 (or more) dimensional look up table for ignition advance where the ambient temperature, engine temperature, engine revs, throttle position & many other measured variables will dictate what ignition advance it will apply based on the highest octane fuel it is rated for, as soon as knock is detected on an individual or multiple cylinders the timing will be retarded enough to prevent it. It adjusts the ignition timing and not the air/fuel ratio to prevent pre-ignition or detonation. The ECU does not adjust the fuel/air mixture according to what fuel the vehicle is consuming, I repeat it does not know, the A/F ratio is derived from a closed loop system to create a Lambda 1.0 output from the O2 (= Lambda) sensor which equates to the stoichiometric ratio, the A/F mixture is constantly being varied according to the output of the lambda sensor trying to stabilise the output to 1.0 volts.

As you can probably guess I have yet to throw away perfectly serviceable stretch bolts & that includes on cylinder heads. When I was racing some fellow competitors were mechanics, often main dealer ones sponsored by their employers and with an endless supply of free parts, they could dismantle & rebuild and engine, gearbox, diff etc so quickly that they would always attract a crowd, they never bothered replacing stretch fasteners and like me they greased all their gaskets & would usually reuse them, head gaskets aside but we would grease them nonetheless so they released without needing a clean up or scraping the surfaces. It was all about speed and when you have ignored the recieved wisdom many times & reused the same fasteners or gaskets you know what matters & what has bitten you back. At work of course they would be signing the job sheet for all these parts & the customer being billed, rarely fitted because they would sell them to people who bought the whole deception, if a mate asked if they could get him some stretch bolts cheap he would say "you dont need them"

A dodgy remap or a tuning box?

Never in a million years on fasteners of that diameter, they are well within the elastic limit even with any service load, when I was a jig & tool designer the fastener manufacturers like Umbrako called it the "torque tension" method and it was to prevent loosening under cyclical loads. The manufacturers would have you believe that a sump plug with 20mm threads screwed into an aluminium sump will stretch when tightened with a 13mm A/F spanner & has to be replaced each time, yes they will stretch microscopically but they will return because they are within their elastic limit. No designer is ever going to specify a fastener that is taken beyond its yeild point by the recommended torque plus the service load. I found the Unbrako information but its a PDF that I can neither copy/paste from nor give a link to but the various methods will never take a fastener to more than 80% of yield and its derated where the service load acts in tension.

When I was driving through the flooded areas I was being very carefull of the depth, driving on the crown of the road when I could, driving very slowly etc......................... And then a muppet in a delivery van came bowling through in the other direction pushing a massive bow wave and throwing up water from the wheels which completely obliterated my view, I switched the engine off before the wave hit and sat there wishing him a very painfull and slow death! So even when you take the right precautions you can be caught out.

Your whole exhaust system will be full of oil, it can take months of high speed driving for the last vestiges to be burnt away from where it will have collected in the silencer boxes. I would expect the catastrophic convertor to be in a right two and eight.

The timing will be retarded in response to the signals from the knock sensor & presumably comparison to the crank & cam position sensors will tell the ECU what cylinders to retard. The figures that you will be reading are the variations from the (new) standard map with a higher octane fuel it will advance beyond the datum figure, with a lower octane fuel when knock is detected it will retard, you should not confuse the + & - timing figures with BTDC figures, your BTDC timing will be increasing as the revs increase up to a maximum at a certain RPM by the (new) standard map with it being advanced or retarded from the datum figure in response to the output of the knock sensor.

And what in the fantasy world of a service receptionist would a PSU actually be I wonder?

Bravo for your persistance, I hope it is well rewarded.

The only way to tell is to remove it, you can do so leaving the pulley in place for the aux belt, with luck if the splines are intact there will be enough to grab hold of to remove the centre shaft nut, otherwise its down to butchery. They are a robust part which dont take much load, the centre spline is a weak point but not the straps, rivets etc, as I said I have my doubts whether they really are a shear plate. Remove the cover between the inner wing protector and the undershield and you will be able to inspect it visually.

In which case the shear plate has failed, have a close look, if the straps have fractured then the pump will have seized, it could be that the fixings have fallen out or the rivets failed. Given how easily the aluminium hub can strip I question whether the shear plate is simply a cush drive coupling and has been incorrectly named, I cant see the straps shearing before the hub strips but yours might prove me wrong.