J.R.

I have a Chinese one the equivalent of the BT200 but it was a fraction of the price, in the teens of €uros I recall. The important thing to have is the ability to tell the machine the batteries rated capacity in all the various formats that the manufacturers give be it CCA, DIN, JIS, EN, IEC, GB, SAE, MCA, BCI or CA. The battery you test will have a CCA rating written on it but unless you know the testing regime they used to get that figure the tester will not give the correct result. I do not rely on the 45%, 65% etc "life remaining" as it is meaningless, I tested a 780ah quite knackered battery recently it came up as either 45% or 55% cant recall which, of far more relevance was the 520ah CCA, that meant something to me, I knew I could fit it to a car that only needed a 520ah battery and it would crank it like a brand new (520ah) battery, knowing that I had fitted the larger 060 battery to my vehicle over the factory fitted 047 520ah would have worked just fine but lost me the reserve I had invested in. How much further and how fast the deterioration from 520ah would be is guesswork. Have a look on Ali-Express, Temu etc.

Ha-ha, you know that they are bullshi**ing or idiots when they come out with stuff like that! What its likely to be is due to a build up of tolerances or possibly a skimmed cylinder head the timing marks wont align, moving the belt one tooth puts the mark out by the same amount but on the opposite direction, which one is right? You might see that its slightly closer in one position and choose that with perhaps just over a 50% chance of being right or you do a heads or tails! The problem for the committed mechanic is that the engine will seem only a tiny bit flat if at all, only the owner could tell any difference and only then if they had mechanical sympathy and neural connections with the engine. I have bought a couple of second hand cars cheap with the problem, they both had recently had cam belts replaced and the owners were not convincing when asked why they were selling, they drove flat to me but I could not be sure even though one, a Suzuki SJ410 I had already owned an example, given the cam belt changes it was worth a look, both times the timing marks were 50/50, both times moving it one tooth made the engine far more peppy.

Its all irrelevant and you are playing into their hands by trying to find a defence, you are on holiday not preparing for a court of law and even if you were the opinions of random people on the internet count for nothing. Tell them that you havn't broken it, that it opens the car and cranks the engine, you neither know nor care why it doesn't start or what it is going to cost them to fix their non running 10 year old rental vehicle, they will either own the situation or they wont, if you have not paid a deposit what are they going to do? The disinterest in their problem is the key (pun intended!) once you start debating whether your hôtel key fob could have affected it you are playing into their hands, if they could and will get the money out of you by charging your credit card with a customer not present transaction they would not be wasting their time debating, if they can and do then you oppose it and you will get the money refunded unless you have signed something admitting liability.

Plain keys without the remote control buttons can still have an RFID chip, all vehicles since around 1995 have had them and in the early years at least many if not most were not remote control keys. Given the immobiliser cutting in and the dash display its fairly certain that the key contains an embedded RFID chip. These will no be affected by magnetic fields, indeed they are designed to function within one. They are trying it on regarding the key and their speculation as to how you are supposed to have damaged it but hire companies have loads of tricks they can exploit, more often its the budget ones that do so.

That made me laugh!!!!!!!!!!! Whose word do you think counts? FWIW I very much doubt that you could have done anything to damage and old school immobiliser key short of pulling it apart and breaking the RFID chip but they hold all the aces, they will have preauthorised your credit card or taken a cheque as a damage deposit, they will simply take what they want out of that whether you feel you can accept it or not.

And how did you come to that conclusion?

Yes that is the key to success, took me years to learn of it. If you are working from the top then an Allen Key works well to block the tensioner as you dont have to try and turn your hands sideways. Hand singular as the other one will be releasing the tension with a long 19mm open ended spanner. Make a note of the belt route before removing, once its off it is anything but obvious.

The repair kits with connector and terminated wires to splice into existing loom are a fraction of the cost.

I bet like me you can fit that cylinder blindfolded now!

I don't think you will regret the move Pete, I never ever wanted to drive a diesel but ended up in a 98 1.9TDi Alhambra 90hp which was OK for my work but did not really inspire me, the economy was good though. Then the day before I was moving to France with the Alhambra loaded to the gills my chauffeur pal offered me his 3 year old Octavia with 188k miles on it for £3.5K and the impulsive person I am said OK! I had to squeeze all the stuff into the Octavia and to my great surprise it swallowed the bulk of it, 20 years later I am still driving Skoda TDi's and would not consider anything else although I will one day add an EV as a second vehicle. The 1.9TDi PD engine in the subsequent MK2 Octavia was a little gruff after remapping but had huge torque and you are absolutely right it is the sweet spot for uncomplicated reliability. I think there will be no going back for you!

Does it appear to be engaging and sealing now? If so then that has made my day!

They are feeding you Bull***t as is common, there is no machining on the master cylinder, its a plastic moulding with a moulded plastic operating rod and a single plastic piston with a sintered toroidal magnet to activate the pedal sensor. It cannot be disassembled unless cut apart with a grinder or making special tooling as it is clipped together during manufacture. The fault will have been the concentric slave cylinder drawing in air through the O ring joining the feed pipe to the cylinder, more moulded plastic parts, lifting the pedal up causes a partial vacuum and draws even more air in. If they really did replace the master cylinder the only reason it is working now is because the system has been bled, the fault will reappear unless they actually replaced the slave cylinder, its an odds on chance that they may have done as they are story tellers.

That was bad luck, I'm still running an €18 delivered master cylinder 3 years down the line. At the risk of repeating myself you are pushing the rubber olive hard onto the pipe until it clicks (like retracting a foreskin 😄) before inserting the pipe? It takes a lot of force, its very easy to assume that it is in position because its sitting and holding on the pipe but the correct position takes a lot of force especially with a new seal and the engagement "click" cannot be mistaken, you feel it and hear it. I was doing it wrong before out if frustration I forced it, its unlike any other pipe seal and most mechanics would get it wrong.

Hear-hear!

Do you have a replacement stereo head unit?

Might be split, might be grease from when it was last fitted, give it a squeeze like an MOT tester and see if more grease comes out.

OK, I understand now, the pipe f(rom the master cylinder) to the slave cylinder will not fit into the master cylinder properly, it will be the olive seal which is available as an individual part.

Confused as to your changing from slave cylinder to master cylinder, whilst I have only experienced the leak on the master cylinder due to the assembly having to be done blind by feel I think it is exactly the same deal on the slave cylinder connection, actually its the bleed block AKA peak torque limiter.

The pipe that pushes in to the master cylinder has a rubber olive that must be pushed hard onto the pipe until it clicks and then the pipe pushed into the cylinder, doing it any other way it will assemble but leak. It sounds like yours is missing the olive, maybe left in the old cylinder.

Thanks for that, enjoyable viewing!

Given that discs and pads with zero wear are routinely shown on the service invoice to be "75% worn" (its simply a keystroke code in the invoicing software to make money) then I'm not surprised they would start the scare tactics with pads that maybe are approaching 75% worn.

Its precisely what the vehicles alternator does every time after the vehicle has been started and with a minimum of a 90 ampere alternator, many far more than that, the charging rate will be 10 or 20 times what most battery chargers are capable of. There is probably one journey in a thousand on a modern vehicle that results in the battery being less charged at the end than when the vehicle was started, a good example of that would be anyone with a stop/start vehicle daft enough to follow your repeated imploring and start a journey after a "preventative full recharging" where the alternator would not charge the vehicle until it had dropped beneath the 80% S.O.C. or whatever the B.M.M. software dictates.

Which would be a shame because VOSA would come down hard on them if they did what I suspect.

Not unless the refrigerant mass is low. Its been between 30° and 40°c here nearly every day for the last couple of months and I have the aircon on full all the time although once its cooled to a certain degree the duty cycle of the pump is reduced. I believe mine is a little low on refrigerant because I recharged it using the manifold gauge readings and not by weight as the scales I have time out while filling, I do notice a slight drop in MPG on reference runs, down to 55mpg from 57mpg on a 4 mile there and 4 mile back journey, straight 80km/h Route Nationale with one set of traffic lights being the only time to slow down 50% of the time.

And still make an obscene profit.