J.R.

Thanks for that, if the quarantine & travel arrangements allow it then that may well have saved me £45.

Me too, I bet there are hundreds of them!!! I went into the loft of my hôtel yesterday and found 3 rear seat headrests carefully wrapped in plastic bags, I think they were from my MK1 Octavia, may even have been the MK2.

I didn't have any requirements but now I have one & know what is usefull to me I would have the same requirements if looking again. I have a Garmin forerunner 235 for 3 years now and it has been excellent in respect of all the things mentioned, the battery life is just showing signs of being reduced, I am not tracking any activities at present because of the confinement & it needs charging every 14 days, might even be 10 which is less than before. The sleep tracking is very good but it cant tell if I am sleeping or awake reading, but to be fair I'm not an insomniac and rest is as good as sleep, there is no movement and the heart rate is at minimum so I might as well be asleep. It is the app that makes my watch so good, with my eye problems this year I cant really read the stats from the watch & in any case they are very limited, its the app that does all the number crunching, an example the watch will have recorded your GPS tracking but its the app that adds the elevations and makes the corresponding calculations. I would say as long as the watch will function & can be used easily then the app functionality is perhaps more important. It is very good at measuring the deep sleep which is what is important to me and when I awake refreshed I can see why. It showed me sleeping for 3 hours till 2pm yesterday but it was while the watch was charging!

If you AC is working then its unlikely to be that, the centre plate of the clutch can break up.

The more I think about it I would be better off using the rear crash beam that was removed as the basis for the new towbracket, it has far stronger fixings to the chassis, the manufacturers ones for the towbar steel plates rely on the fasteners being tightened to death and the washers being crushed to prevent the fasteners flopping around like a ***** in a bucket, they shake loose when towing a loaded close coupled 4 wheel trailer. The beam will probably need re-inforcing but it will protect the rear of the car far better than the towbar does and I will get back the towing eye socket it ever I need to snatch tow anyone

Agreed, towbars are absolutely not suited especially the modern type that have a huge cantilever to avoid cutting a hole in the rear bumper, this is what can happen when a normal load is simply applied in a different direction The towbar could be so strong but for the stupid "up & under", it also rotates around the two bolts that hold the extension to the crossbeam and comes loose, I was going to bush & ream the boltholes this week but I might re-engineer it completely to make it as strong as it should be, problem being the cut out already made at the bottom of the bumper infill panel. Overall I think it will be worth it, my proper fabrication machinery & equipment are in the UK though.

I doubt that any of us would try to snatch recover someone else using a towing eye but if we are being towed or pulled out by an inexperienced person it can happen nonetheless. That said the towing eye (unless its one of the recalled ones) and the attachment point are immensely strong and at worst will result in damage to a £65 replaceable crash beam. VAG must have been really dedicated to scraping the bottom of the barrel to have had to recall the forged towing eyes because of bad welding.

You should really specify your location if you use terms like passenger side or at least say that the vehicle is LHD. Two possibilities. 1, the E/M clutch on the aircon pulley if your 2005 does not have a later type compressor, they are known for breaking up. 2. The one way clutch in the alternator pulley, but beware, I cant recall if that was only fitted to the MK2's. Good luck, that is a great, simple, reliable and long lasting engine.

I am pleased that your persistance has paid off, it must feel rewarding.

Smear the side of your vehicle with fresh cow manure each time you park, that will keep them away and the bonus being it will look less like **** than the things costing mega-bucks

Does anybody take responsability for their actions and "suck it up" these days?

So you tell a garage what work you want them to do because other garages have said that is what is causing the noise, the noise remains so you take the garage to court for doing as they were instructed. Glad I stopped working for customers when I did.

Legal battle over a 5 year old car bought second hand 18months ago. Good luck with that one.

Why do you want to tow a vehicle out of trouble using the front towing eye? If things went very pear shaped I would rather have a headrest between me and the ballistic rope/strap & shackle. Having rebuilt a front end on a Yeti I can confirm that the towing eye threaded socket is in the longeron of the front crash beam, directly in line with the chassis rail, if snatch towed the beam would be the sacrificial weak link but be warned, a very minor impact in the other direction what did not even damage the plastic bumper or foam infill was enough to trigger the airbag module, deploying 3 airbags & the seatbelt pretensioners, rupturing the dashboard and writing the vehicle off. I am pretty sure the rear threaded socket is in the same crash beam but that has been removed to make way for the towbracket on my vehicle.

Do you pay the VRT tax only once on first registration or every year? I like the system here in France where you pay only once for the carte grise and its valid for as long as you own the vehicle, first registration of an imported second hand car does cost more especially if its a high CO2 rating and soon there will be a lardar5e tax as well, you could get hit up for €30K for a new Wagmobile but a 10 year old Octavia II 2.0 TDi cost me a very reasonable €107, its a shame the Yeti persuaded me to sell it, for the €130 pa insurance it would have been worth keeping as a spare car which is what many do. I was hammered on the Yeti because I had not budgetted for the malus tax on first registration, it would have been a lot less had I bought one one year older but it was still only in the region of what you are speaking of for VRT and is a one off payment which I hope will be amortised over at least 10 years, my last car (MK1 Octavia) gave me 13 years.

You know you are going mad or dreaming the day that you get the correct parts first time, or second or even 3rd time from ECP

Sounds about right, there must be 5 times the surface area on the OE paper filter. That looks like one of those (snake) oiled cotton ones, I used them for decades on Caterhams but only because they were the best of a bad bunch for exposed to the air sidedraft DCOE filters, when I moved on to motorcycle engines I fabricated a proper airbox using an OEM paper filter.

Nothing at all wrong with the old one, that would have been good for another 100K. You should see what used filters used to look like before well designed intake tracts and large filter elements, thats why I laugh when I see people removing the whole shooting match and fitting a tiny so called high flow cone filter which will be black as the ace of spades in no time at all.

At present we only have the garages standard line of text as witness that they new brake discs are significantly corroded, just like the old "brake pads & discs 75% worn". The rears dont do much work at the best of times, pretty sure with the ABS and all the other 3 letter acronyms operating through it that 70's technology like a load sensing valve would not make a good companion!!

It is not a consideration, I only have tiers risques, they will always pay out to any 3rd parties but not for damages to my vehicle under any circumstances. I would not be looking to have any accidents whilst driving to a place of safety to either repair the puncture or replace the tyre.

KennyR. Aside from the lack of homologation what is it that you have against thinner space saver wheels from another VAG vehicle? I note that the Ebay listing calls it a space saver. I have all the volume under my variofloor filled with breakdown & survival equipment so wanted a slim space saver to carry on top for longer journeys. I researched and sourced a 125/70/18" one as it has precisely the same rolling diameter, its load capacity is identical at 775kg and has a higher speed rating of 99M, I will only ever use it for emergency use, I carry a tire plug kit, a mushroom plug kit and also tyre foam & a footpump. I realise that its not homologated but given its rolling diameter, load and speed ratings I am confident it would have been had they been minded to go along that route. Is there something that I am unaware of?

No way would rear discs be showing that amount of corrosion after only 8 months. Its probably a line that they add to all the service bills in an attempt to rob people, they probably forgot that they had taken you so recently. I dont doubt that the 2015 discs would have needed changing, mine is a 2015 and had spent its life in Scotland, the rear discs were in a right two and eight and I changed them at the end of last year, I have done 8000 miles since and with the confinements there has been a lot of non use which would allow corrosion to proliferate, they still look like new. Have you actually looked through your wheels at the discs? Did you check that they were actually changed last time?

I love that program!

Nobody can have any idea what a noise is just from a description of banging/ticking, you will need to be more specific, engine type, where approximately the noise is coming from, under what conditions, revving, idling, driving, accelerating, over-run etc. The ideal would be to post a video with sound from a mobile phone.

Something is seriously wrong with your HR figures, I believe that you are +/- 55 years old, your max heart rate would be 165. You should be exercising at a minimum of 83bpm even if its the first time in years, over a short period of 30 minutes if you are in reasonable health it should be pushing 140bpm, that is the average not the peak, your average of IIRC 68 bpm is completely implausible especially with the calories that are supposed to have been consumed. If you are as fit as you claim then you would have no problems exceeding that for short periods, my MHR is 159 and I can maintain an average of 169 over 1hr 20 mins when exercising with a maximum of 185, if I can connect to the file of the screenshot I will upload it.