J.R.

Towbar fixings do not extend that far forward, the cross member bolts to flat plates each side that slide inside the chassis rails after the crash bar is removed, there are blanking plugs in the chassis rails through which the securing bolts fit. I would be reasonably confident that they are interchangeable, at worst you might need to drill and tap new fixing holes but I doubt it. A tip, when bolting up these fixings through one side of the chassis rail tighten them to death, so much that the penny washers dish and cup into the very large clearance holes left after removing the blanking plugs, if this is not done then if carrying a heavy twin axled trailer you may find that the towbar has loosened and can be lifted up and down at the towball.

Mmmm.............................................................

Everything in the tuning game is made up, words are cheap, I was thinking just that when I commented on the engine for sale a couple of days ago. FWIW I reckon its the standard VAG 170 map, perhaps tweaked for the smaller turbo, its plenty powerful enough for me and still gives oustanding economy, it feels altogether to refined to have been done by a teenager with acne and a laptop on a rolling road. For me the combination of the smaller turbo and the remap could not be bettered, it's the best towing vehicle I have ever had by a huge margin. No boot badges for me, I prefer incognito.

I have lived that for the last 15 years after my first eye surgery, you adapt but I am having to do so all over again after cataract surgery with multi-focal lens implant, now its not just the dazzle it creates a starburst affect where a single light source (headlight, street lamp, head torch) looks like Christmas tree lights but each one 1000 times brighter. Oncoming headlights in the distance expand to fill both sides of the road and both verges, you cannot tell what side of the road they are on, how many vehicles, whether they are line astern or overtaking, imagine mistakenly driving onto a busy 3 lane motorway at night on the wrong side against all the oncoming traffic! In the running club where I used to live people wore stupidly bright LED head torches and had not the slightest clue of camp site etiquette (turn off head torch when at the table or looking at someone to talk) out locale was in the brightly lit town square, all the winter runs were on roads with street lighting yet they would stand in front of you with the thing turned on to its highest setting blinding you, when they were running you could see their misaligned torch beams lighting up the trees above like a summer day, and that was over the streetlighting! The women were the worst, they said it was for their security yet they would run with their back to the traffic listening to music through earpieces not having a clue what was around them, it seemed to be a contest for who could have the brightest tackiest flashing lights, some of the red rear mounted ones were so bright they were like stroboscopes and would have triggered epilepsy, its no fun having to constantly shade your eyes with your hand and having to sit in the dark for up to 30 minutes before you could drive home when the majority of people causing the distress standing in front of you looking right at you dont even notice the reflex and the wincing in pain Its the reason I have yet to join a running club here although I think it will be a lot better, the people are normal.

None Stage 3 I had is allegedly 184hp from 108 standard, they have a rolling road video on their website, me I am sceptical of all BHP claims and rolling road readouts, I doubt the maximum power is that, I never thrash it anyway but the overtaking torque and rev range are night and day different compared to standard and fuel economy is excellent because I dont drive it for the thrill. The far wider rev range and torque means you only need one gear for overtakes, with a 6 speed box its not easy to know the optimum gear when you no longer drive like the road is a racetrack, if its one gear too high (in retrospect) the huge torque will cover it, if one gear too low then the extended rev range means you dont need to upshift.

Actually saying it wasn't cheap, I had a Celtic Tuning stage 3 remap, had I been able to take the car to their workshops in Cornwall they were going to do the rollback FOC at the same time, but it was during Covid, travel from France was very difficult, they had a big backlog so I had it done by one of their dealers, well worth the money! A couple of years later I was in the area for a funeral, I dropped in on the offchance and had one hour to spare before the service, they were very good and did the rollback for me straight away, it wasn't cheap but great service that I could never dream of in my country. My reason for mentioning it is if they will still do the rollback FOC during a remap then you effectively get the remap very cheaply or the rollback FOC whichever way you look at it.

My Yeti was like that, I had the emissions "fix" rolled back and now I notice maybe 2 or 3 regens a year, yes there will be more than that going on un-noticed on longer journeys but its back to how it was designed (by cheaters!) to be, my now ex UK neighbour has an Octavia with same engine, he has never allowed it to be done and wont use dealers for fear they will, his has always been like mine is now and was my benchmark. It wasn't cheap but well worth it to avoid having to keep extending journeys to allow far too frequent regens to complete or have them occur on every journey well before the engine even warms up enough, all that unburnt fuel washing past the rings and diluting the oil is very undesirable.

Your problem is probably not the heater unless the matrix is blocked with Silkat but with the cooling system during the warm up phase, according to you, myself and most drivers have no sense because we leave our manual or Climatronic heating systems set to our desired comfort level when driving off from a cold start. Thanks to Simply Clever Skoda (VAG actually) our vehicles not only warm up far faster than their predecessors but start to produce very significant heat long before the engine approaches operating temperature, your vehicle being the exception, mine is a diesel and even on the coldest winter day it is producing measurable heat after one mile of slow rural driving, very significant heat after 2 miles enough that I can put the fan on full, the engine will reach temperature within 4 miles but on very cold days below minus 10°c it never actually reaches it but the heater output never diminishes. All this is achieved through a combination of devices whose sole purpose is to minimise the warm up time and to maximise the heater output from the earliest possible moment, they are the sliding sleeve water pump, the auxiliary circulation pump(s), and flow diversion valve(s), I do not know what combination of devices are fitted to your car but am certain that as nobody else is complaining about their heater output your problem is due to failure or malfunction of one of them. With VCDS you can check no end of relevant parameters live and/or data log them, actual engine temperature (which will not be that shown on the guage) heater plenum temperature, temperature from the vents, the commanded and actual positions of all the airflow flaps and many more which may explain your problem like the ambient temperature sensor or the sun sensor, the latter could also be a suspect now I think about it.

With determination! I dont know the set up or access on your vehicle but I have I the past angle ground screwdriver or spanner flats on them, not so good when next to the windscreen, or got them moving with a sharp chisel applied tangentially. I have a recollection that when I did it on the MK2 Octavia I managed to bend the thing out of the way possibly after removing one bolt, to release the connector and then withdraw the ECU.

Rings, ends and main bearings on a worn crankshaft, worn bores, cams and pistons is not as new and equivalent to straight from the factory. Old oil pump re-used 🙄 The above seems to be a contradiction in terms. Granted I doubt the bores were excessively worn but should at least have been honed, crankshaft almost certainly within limits, pistons? with the above contradiction I wonder if you would have the knowledge or equipment to make the required measurements. Prior, as in you sent it out to be done or the work had supposedly already been done to the engine? I'm sure the engine will be fine, I expect I would have retained the crank and pistons but I certainly would not be making claims like the above especially the first two and I would be stating what mileage the core unit had done and having some documentation to prove it or saying mileage unknown.

Interesting, so was it drawing in air like I proposed or did you see evidence of fluid leakage? I wish I had tried that, maybe under water to confirm that it was the O ring joint. The joint on the old cylinder was floppy and the seal flattened on inspection, where the pipe exits the bellhousing it was a large clearance hole and the pipe had been flapping around with engine vibration, extension pipe oscillating slave cylinder body fixed and cannot move = differential movement and wear. I thought mine may hav been missing a grommet, I was not the first to have had the gearbox out, but I could not see a part number for it, maybe they have reduced the clearance on later models, I used PU glue to fill the gap but with a solid alloy cylinder there is no O ring joint to fail but equally I did not want the pipe fatiguing.

OK, I see the error of my assumption! On the 2.0tdi it's relatively cheap to replace the master cylinder compared to the slave as you point out so most people, myself included tackle that first in the hope they might dodge the bullet, the bullet that they usually end up biting!

I think this thread needs more pictures 🤣 I especially liked the one of a bag of nuts, no warning label that it might contain traces of nuts though!

My experience is that they dont leak but draw in air which concurs with your statement that there was no fluid loss, I bet you did not see any fluid in the bellhousing. The air is drawn in at the O ring joint between the two plastic parts of the cylinder, I'm pretty sure replacing that alone would effect a 100% repair but who is going to take the risk when the component is relatively cheap and so much work to get to it? - I certainly didn't but I did track down an early revision one piece alloy slave cylinder, the car is a keeper and I do not want to do the job again. You do not need a pressure bleeder, open the thumbturn bleed nipple and gravity will do the job for you in a matter of seconds, if you replaced the master cylinder as well then a little longer. Yes, I know you are probably going to link to a VAG document saying to use a pressure bleeder but I know of what I speak having done the job rather than being a keyboard expert, I've done it all too many times at the side of the road because towards the end I could only drive 5 miles in urban conditions before losing the clutch again, I could do it at the side of the road in 2 minutes flat including removing the air filter and intake piping for access, simply by gravity, no pressure bleeder needed, its a very simple system and the master cylinder has no valves, one piston and one seal, as complicated as a bicycle pump!

I think you have got that backwards.

Well yes but I am well aware that in the vast majority of cases, any "piece to camera" on mainstream TV will be an illusion the vehicle being towed on a specially developed lowline trailer, there are many clues to reveal this if you know what to look for. So yes the trigger is there for me but I can deal with it, I get cross with the message that they are sending out though which this guy has embraced. As an aside is there not a law against him diffusing those images? It seems odd that the womans identity was protected by the blurring, I reckon the guy settled for the tyre being fitted and his money refunded and maybe more in return for his permission.

Watching him looking sideways most of the time honking to the camera while driving on the motorway made me feel very uneasy, on 2 occasions while travelling as a passenger I have asked the driver to stop and got out and walked, both in France, one guy was looking back over his shoulder chatting to the couple in the back seat and would have hit the central barrier if I had not grabbed the wheel, the other occasion we had travelled about 10km from the hôtel to the entrance péage for the autoroute, a group of us going diving in the 33m deep dive pool Nemo 33 in Belgium, the very early days of smartphones and all the guys attention was on his phone not the road, I had to make a quick decision before we were on the autoroute, memories of the guy veering towards the barrier came flooding back and I got out and walked back, I left my diving gear in the car. Watching that video brought back both bad memories

Yes.

Apologies, my reply ignored your fault code which does point to the mixing flap, you could do the last 2 tests just to be certain that is the only issue. Flapaerobics might get it moving again.

You think that you can see it running but have a feel around with the engine stopped, has the shear plate let go? The best way to check is to remove the lower side undershield and see if the centre nut on the shaft is turning. Shear plate is number 2 possibility, number 1 is the modulating valve. A low tech way to see if it is cooling is to put on minimum temp high fan speed and run the engine, if the high speed cooling fans do not cut in within 20 seconds it will not be cooling, they also can be responsable for the pump not being commanded. You could also feel the inlet and outlet pipes for temperature but no point if the fans are not running.

If it turns over like there is little compression then the cam belt is toast and you have at least 4 bent valves for the most optimistic outcome.

It matches the outer stitching, you wont be looking at it while driving!

AC has a seperate controller, key RFID I think is taken care of by the instrument cluster and engine ECU. I dont think there is a key/immobiliser issue when replacing the BCM/CCM, you need to find the correct revision for your vehicle and copy the existing long coding to the replacement one. I would replace the relay or pay Pete to do it, he has younger eyes and more of them than I have now!

Two, left and right, three if you replace the rear one as well. Your welcome! 😁

Forget the caravan, the alarm would be activated whatever towed wheeled appliance was attached to the lights which are connected through the 7 or 13 pin plug, the lights do not have to be illuminated for the bulb monitoring system to know there is a resistance across the rear light feed and chassis earth, removing the plug or cutting the cable removes or shorts out the resistance and the anti-theft system will operate. I suspect that is one feature that my £100 towbar set up does not have, frankly a bonus because leave a trailer plugged in over night and at least one bulb contact will go open circuit before the morning 🥴 I will test it soon to see if it reacts, I know it does if the car is jacked up.