J.R.

That sounds similar to the other tales of woe that I have read after garages servicing the Haldex, I did maybe 300 miles and I now consider myself very very lucky to have noticed the increasing final drive noise & to have investigated and tried to put things right the next day. I have diff noise but have done 7k miles and its not any worse (yet!) and may even be lack of soundproofing or tyre noise, whenever I go any distance especially when towing I have anxiety, in many ways I would be happier for it to worsen so that I could fit a second hand diff unit.

If he made the mistake that I and I believe many others have he will have drained the diff oil and tried to refill the Haldex only to find that it would take barely any oil, thus leaving the differential dry of oil except what was clinging to the CW&P. Because I had removed the Haldex pump to clean the filter (which the main stealers dont do) then it had lost a quantity of oil by doing so, therefore when I went to refill I did get some fluid in, just not as much as the stated quantity, and as ever on t'internet various quantities were quoted, I did not twig to what was going on, in the past when I was regularly working on cars I would have recognised that what I had drained was diff oil but they smell very different now and are much thinner, in hindsight the big clue was that it was very very clean.

How many miles had you driven since they did whatever it was they did and what sort of miles, motorway, short slow urban journeys etc? I think I was very lucky indeed having done a couple of hundred miles mostly high speed on the motorway and autoroute loaded quite heavily, it was towards the end of that journey from the UK to France where I started to hear the differential noise, it was the beginning of the confinement so no journeys were permitted which also helped, if I had been doing my usual journey profile the noise increase would have been gradual if apparent at all, I thnk it was only because I got it super hot, most others seem to have failed catastrophically without any apparent warning, I suppose it depends on how much mechanical empathy the drivers had.

This diagram posted on the other thread shows clearly the mistake that I made & the one I believe that the servicing garages have made whenever there has been an exploding diff straight after a Haldex oil change : The correct Haldex drain plug looks identical to any of the other casing retaining bolts around it, it has a completely different head to the other 3 filler and drain plugs, if you correctly identify the Haldex filler plug No 2 then you look directly underneath it and find an obvious drain plug that has the same Torx head, the correct one is hidden at the front of the diff, does not resemble the others & looks like a casing bolt, its very hard to find with a vehicle jacked up but would be easier on a ramp but far from obvious. If you do have an independant inspection then make sure they see that diagram, if you are able have a look yourself.

I wonder if its a cracked Haldex unit or really shrapnel from a grenaded differential making a bid for freedom through the diff casing? There really isnt anything to break on a haldex coupling, its just a shaft with a multi-plate clutch that spends most of its time freewheeling. Sounds like someone else not knowing one hole from another, I would get an independant engineer to look carefully at the differential and Haldex drain & fill plugs for evidence of what has been drained & from where, hopefully he will find that the Haldex fluid is still dirty and perhaps overfilled by topping up with new fluid and what remains in the diff casing is a tiny bit of blackened hypoid oil and that the diff drain plug shows clean hypoid oil stains from where they mistakenly drained it. Was there much oil that leaked onto the ground? Whether it was the Haldex casing which I doubt or the diff casing which I believe there will have been a pretty big puddle growing quickly but it should have looked clean, I reckon it was a small amount of blackened oil. As long as the dealer themselves are not closing down then they will remain responsable for any negligence by their service division. good luck!

ooops! A senior moment. Maybe I didnt see it then.

No justification in reusing them other than to bring revenue to the dealers, I dont even put any threadlock on them, as has been said the wheel bolts hold everything in place and even if the screw did loosen (which they never have in my experience) it could not do more than 1/4 turn before being stopped by the wheel flange. Many of my vehicles have been missing the fasteners when I have bought them, I have not rushed to replace them.

I wasn't moaning about your choice, just interested in whether you had actually started the sport, your response probably answers my question. I sincerely hope that you will enjoy your shiney new motor, its what makes the world go around. I had a 4x4 in 1990 one of the first SWB Shoguns, I did use it regularly in AWD trial events but it was for me at that time a great road vehicle & I especially liked the driving position, a decade later I had a Galaxy and an Alhambra for work reasons but which I appreciated equally for their drving position. Now 2 decades later I find myself in a Yeti 4x4 because I wanted to save it from being scrapped & I needed a project and its really nice to be back in a similar vehicle albeit a more manageable size, I have no justification for owning it but its a keeper because I really like it so regardless of what you use your Land Cruiser for I understand the attraction and its a good choice.

Now that you have spent all the money on the car have you actually tried out these field sports that you have been invited to to see if its a hobby that you enjoy & will continue with? I have a friend who over the years has bought so many new vehicles, 4x4's, crew cab pick ups, Range Rovers, Motor Caravans etc for his latest new sport or activity that by now we all know that the sports are just an excuse to buy yet another new vehicle. I have even seen him push his teenage children into things against their will all of which involved him buying yet another vehicle, in fact it started when they were very young with karting etc. I have known him since my late teens & even back then we would create a story about a rare or out of the ordinary vehicle that we claimed to know was available just to hear the predictable reaction "I have always wanted one of them!" I will leave you to guess what branch of sales he ended up excelling at, he runs a company where there is a constant turnover of "consultants" all of which get a company car if they manage to keep up the b******t for more than a month, he chooses the vehicles and its never anything appropriate but whatever takes his fancy that week, he always ends up driving them a couple of months later when they have been fired, the excuse being that he sells whatever his current steed is & gets to drive what took his fancy while searching for a new vehicle and usually another sport/activity at the same time. Sorry for the long posting but amongst all that I have seen the clay pigeon shooting and hunting one come & go several times.

80 watt reversing lights? Hope that I never get any of them reversing towards me. Just seen the preceeding post, maybe I should get a dark tinted windscreen

In which case disregard my comments.

Compliance is only required of the manufacturer selling a new vehicle or submitting one for testing. Its well explained in section 6.2 IIRC of the link given on the first page, I cant see it from this posting window so dont know who to thank for posting it. It was Xman It also says that the sticker shall not be removeable without leaving obvious and clearly visible damage.

Black handle & not the chrome finished one? The black ones are very weak, mine has half detached but still functions, they are available seperately and have their own part number, the chrome one is much stronger and identical to that fitted to the Octavia 2 I have read so there are plenty of second hand ones available for next to nothing.

I think it was the heat that caused the seal failure of the wheel bearings rather than the loading, although they did mention spacers so the bearing loads would have been increased but the rumbling would not have caused the seal failure. In 2003 (I think) I was pit crew for the John Cooper Works Mini Cooper team at the Nurburgring 24 hour race, the team was financed by and shared the garage with the works BMW team, two of our drivers were German BMW execs, I cant even recall what series of BMW the works team were running, that sort of thing has never been my bag & we had more than enough to keep us busy but they were highly modified, very impressive & they had a mix of experienced drivers and some very young "hot shoe" newbies. Because of an accident the first few laps were under the safety car & we were ejected from the garage because they were bringing in both of the BMWs for a transmission change, seemingly at the lower safety car speeds the transmission oil coolers were not working efficiently and they had overheated, the first car was jacked up & immediately the mechanics were swarming all over it, in no time at all the coolers and transmissions were dropped down into large trays full of ice (it may even have been dry ice) and the whole garage was blanketted in steam, that was when I realised why they were wearing nomex & kevlar gloves. That "hire car" would have needed brake ducting to have run under endurance racing conditions & probably special wheel bearings with high temperature seals.

I have just had a Eureka moment, if I remove the butterfly from the throttle spindle it should have the same affect as connecting a spare throttle valve. It might cause a very unruly engine shutdown though, I may give it a try.

Not even half way through the first tank of fuel yet so its early days but the overall maxidot consumption figure (reset to zero on fill up) is already up to 51.6 mpg compared to the previous 47 and I have only done one journey longer than 10 miles so it will definitely go higher, my regular 2 x 10 mile return trips to the running club are now returning 57.5 & 58 mpg it was never above 45 mpg before (all maxidot figures so higher than actual brim to brim figure). The short slow journey consumption around town may be slightly increased its hard to tell but that was always reasonable, what was wrong was that it did not improve on longer steady speed journeys, now it has significantly. And other than the first time (which freaked me out) there has been no more engine shuddering on shut down.

Didn't really want to respond as have not moved from 17" to 16" but like Urrell my car feels like it drives on rails on 16" wheels & I would never consider going larger for increased grip. But I do understand being happy with what you have and not wanting more is very different to losing something that you once had. Looking at the global markets I would say the Yeti was not designed for 17" wheels and its just a quirk of what they percieve the UK market dictates and makes a poor vehicle out of an excellent one.

My 2001 Octavia was the first vehicle I ever had where the temperature guage reading was falsified, the 98 Alhambra with the same drivetrain told the truth. Granted all guages were damped, some more so than I would like but keeping an eagle eye on the temp guage and getting to know all of the engines idiosyncracies during warm up, stat opening, motorway cruising, driving up hills while towing etc was all part of being able to see faults developing before they became critical, something that I learned from owning a Triumph Stag when I was 21, the seller told me I would have one eye on the temperature guage all the time & he wasn't wrong. Driving home from work & accelerating from the last roundabout up the hill to where I lived there was a barely perceptible climb of the guage, a tiny bit more than I would expect, I stopped immediately even though I had only 200 yards to go, sure enough there was a dribble of water from the water pump seal.

I dont understand your question. but yes I did enjoy the visual content that I saw whilst skipping through, it is certainly a museum that I would like to visit. I was hoping for some info on the 76 Polo shown as the centrepiece, my father bought one in 1977 for his retirement, I had a £75 one 15 years later when unemployed, neglected to hell through its whole life but mechanically still like the sewing machine that my fathers always was.

printing (not sticker) on sun visor is visible to the passenger when its in its stowed position on my Yeti but not to the one eyed driver. Very ugly it is too, - I had a close look last night And it is a series of pictograms without any writing that I could see, but without reading glasses there may have been.

Not a different planet, I was speaking about the law, not that I would take any notice of it but 99.999% of the French do, never believe anything an insurance agent tells you, he knows exactly what the response of the insurers would be and wants to continue taking your money. "Tuning" in France means body mods & radios etc that dont change the manufacturers spec, the average Frenchman (and indeed woman) will have a wet dream on seeing a MK1 Escort with bubble arches and Carlos Fandango wheels, not even a 1" wider wheel, a spacer or a wheel spat was allowed even then let alone a change of the steering wheel, my pal with his MK1 MX5 that I found him in the UK thought he was being really outlaw by using the 4 point harnesses that I gave him, - bolted on top of the OE lap & diagonal belts which he would remove for the CT and eventually took off altogether because he decided he had pushed his luck to long. He did however strip out all the carpets, the doorcards & throw garish coloured strut braces at every position known to man.

Well done that man!

If you can understand a word of the muffled speech coming out under his mask then you are a better man than me. Even some recent mumbling Hollywood movies with overimposing soundtracks with actors like Stallone are easier to understand. And yet there were other people in the museum not masked.

It will be leading to the rear of the car to the towing electrics relay, I found a similar bodge & disconnected it as I could not see what it was doing, had forgotten all about it when I eventually towed & found the towing socket was dead, traced back the wiring all the way to the front of the car before it finally dawned on me. Hopefully it will have an inline fuse but diconnect it & check & then make a proper connection.

The car may have left the factory with a higher rated tyre but that does not mean that subsequent tyre changes have to follow that, the only sure way is to see what tyres are homologated on the EU certificate of conformity for your vehicle, VAG are one of the few manufacturers who will supply these FOC, application is done on line and they are sent out promptly.