J.R.

Law or no law unless they think they can take you for a lot of money or sell you a new vehicle you will just be met with a gallic shrug. They simply dont want or need the grief especially with a non French speaker. That is probably what Welshbloke meant by a challenge and expensive.

My late cousin rest her soul came back to the UK from South Africa in last century and they brought with them her VW Polo (manual choke) back then it was a smart economic decision. One cold day she could not start the car and a passer by helped out and told her to use the choke, she did not even know where it was having never needed it in SA, a couple of miles down the road it spluttered to a halt choked up, someone else helped out and rolled his eyes when he had to explain to her that you need to push it back in, of course her asking him to explain better what he meant by gradually did not go down well (its a hard concept to explain but easy to demonstrate when driving), he assumed she had only just bought the car and had never driven a manual choke vehicle before and was aghast when she said she had been driving it for 5 years 😁

Agreed, it is nonsense. Oil consumption can decrease if it was ever measurable in the first place. To me as someone who drove for a couple of decades with manual choke cars that needed you to be very in tune (pun unintended) with the engine, its temperature and the outside temperature to avoid it choking up or leaning out and spluttering on acceleration it is shocking to realise there are drivers of petrol engined vehicles out there that have only ever known automatic chokes (or probably been completely unaware of them) and that have zero perception of cold start enrichment and the effect of short cold start journeys on fuel consumption.

Wow, that sounds reasonable, the poxy Office de Tourisme in my old town rented them for that much for half a day and all their bikes EV or pedal power were in an atrocious condition, completely unroadworthy and dangerous, none of them had a clue and nobody could even adjust brakes, saddle & handlebar height, mend a puncture or adjust derailleurs to stop the chains falling off. I got so fed up with having to rescue my renters when their bikes failed, take them & the bikes back and argue their corner for a refund that I not only strongly recommended that they did not hire a bike but warned them that when they broke down, not if but when not to call me but of course they did.

I like the fact that you can (presumably easily) create a roadmap showing you where you are going to stop and charge/empty contents of bladder and that is the Satnav route which the vehicle will follow. I can drive 500 miles in between 10 and 12 hours with only one mandatory pee break, possibly 2 but in my country its just done at the side of the road. I dont need to refuel if I start with a full tank unless towing, I stop more frequently because of fatigue and a craving for coffee and something to eat. Now whilst you can do all that on the autoroute the eating is expensive and if I'm towing and need fuel I try to find a shopping centre with supermarket and petrol station, there are many around but it would be nice of the car could plan that. I can search for them at any time but all it shows is a distance as the crow flies and a compass bearing, getting there from the autoroute might be a massive detour involving driving many mile to an exit then many miles back in the same direction. It would be very good to have it planned out.

Tried that, it backspaced the character break and when it let the text box instead of deleting it it started deleting the following text. No great problem, its just a quirk, its better than most. There is another quirk which results in people making double postings. If you write a reply or quote someone but by then it is not the last page (there have been subsequent postings) when you click "submit" nothing appears to happen, so you click "submit" again and maybe even a 3rd time without being able to see that your posting has been made and duplicated on the next page.

Tried that twice, problem was I had already posted it before seeing that it included something that I had not (intentionally) quoted, thereafter I could remove the text but not the quote box.

That is the connector engage/disengage lever and almost certainly wont be available as a seperate part. You will have to knife and fork something with small tywraps or lockwire and judiciously drilled holes to retain it. Its not a connector that you want to come adrift or have partial contact as any contact problems will immobilise the vehicle. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It doesn't actually look broken, have you tried re-assembling it?

I cant seem to delete the misquote above, only the text, please ignore it. Was this really energy being created from nothing or was it the release of latent energy like nuclear power or a simple reversible aircon unit? Even solar energy is not being created from nothing or an infinite source, granted its infinite in our timescales but so was once thought to be coal, oil and even fish according to my father when I was lovesick!

The laws of thermodynamics are not new ideas except perhaps to you 😃

Wot he said!

🤣🤣🤣 We just need to find a way to disobey the 1st law of thermodynamics!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It can never be done efficiently the energy used to create the hydrogen and oxygen will always be more than that liberated by the combustion. It can be done by burning oil or through solar power, both are free resources but with a cost to extract, both give far better efficiency being used to directly propel the vehicle than from creating hydrogen fuel.

I would look very carefully at that, I think it is a bypass valve for if the filter element is clogged, I think they allow unfiltered oil to pass under that circumstance but what if instead it is passed back to the sump? 💡💡 Its a lot easier to get at than the oil pump PRV, maybe the oil flow is described in one of the self study guides.

Thanks, I was working on the cold pressure readings. A worn oil pump usually manifests itself with taking a long time to prime and knocking on start up, it sounds like a foreign body between the PRV plunger and its seat or a damaged seat, that would explain the increased pressure drop when oil is hot. Another possibility, was there any engine work done before the drop in oil pressure? There are often restrictors to limit the oil flow through the cylinder head and OHC valve gear, on some engines they have been a metering hole in the head gasket which either blocks with carbon starving the cam followers (happened on my SJ410) or fitting a pattern part gasket with a bigger hole results in oil pressure drop. There can also be restrictors to limit oil flow to piston cooling jets, a leak from the timing chain tensioner is also a possibility. I have just noticed that you wrote: Maybe something fitted has failed, a crack in the tensioner housing. It happened before the oil change so not that and you have checked the filter O rings, oil pumps usually wear very slowly so I doubt it is that unless something is preventing the PRV from properly sealing, back in the day we would grind them in. I dont think it is a blocked pick up pipe guaze as the oil pressure would increase when hot not decrease and when cold it would decrease with revs. I believe oil is being recirculated and not getting to the main gallery in sufficient quantity to create the normal backpressure so either the PRV (my gut feel) or an enlarged orifice or cracked timing chain tensioner housing.

I have one but to date have only refuelled my enemies cars from it!

Composted disc backplate.

Can you not do the same test with the oil pressure guage connected? Do you know what the switch point of the oil pressure switch is supposed to be? You really need to know that, I am guessing 1.25 or 1.5 bar, you need to know what the oil pressure is when the light is coming on. Being a little low is not an issue if it continues rising linearly to the pressure relief limit by say 3K rpm at normal running temperature (so you also need to know what that is) a lighter grade oil will give lower pressure but putting a thicker oil in is worse for the engine especially when cold. Modern engines with crankshaft driven oil pumps (is yours) running thin oils do not develop such good pressure at low RPMs where it is not needed but flow huge amounts of oil at higher revs, if the PRV sticks the pressure can go through the roof, my 1.8 Zetec race engine (early pre production engine befire the PRV recall) blew the filter O ring out sideways on the starting grid at Lydden Hill.

Thanks for that, from the lack of response I was beginning to think maybe I had missed a massive elephant in the room and nobody was telling me.

Given that with government encouragement you (the UK) now have a plethora of energy suppliers none of whom seemingly actually supply any energy, they just buy and resell and create a smokescreen of green claims, they are selling you grid electricity that they did not supply or create, so why can you not simply charge your vehicle at any charge point and the sum be added to your electricity bill from your energy supplier at your agreed rate? Better still, charge at your destination whether it be a public place, fuel station, business or even a friends house and be billed in exactly the same way? They could make it so that if you go over your monthly direct debit any further charging would be taken from your debit card. Too simple? It's far less daft than encouraging random unrelated businesses to be energy (not) suppliers.

That seems a reasonable asessment and on that basis the petrol station with 12 pumps that Graham spoke of would be capable of 240 fill ups per hour, rather than 144, I suspect the average for a busy service station that has judged the right ratio of pumps to footfall would average 144 across all opening hours, the 24 hour Tescos that I used when in the UK never ever had a pause between customers on any pumps day or night. The supermarkets have got it wrong in my country, instead of having a forecourt large enough to park up after to pay at the till if that is your desire and/or to buy expensive junk food and coffee they have 2 pumps on 24 hour card only payment, the ones I use, they have their own exit lane, the other usually 8 pumps all filter into a clogged lane leading to a payment kiosk open from say 9am to 18.00 with a harried cashier not selling anything value added except bottled gas which I buy, that is on the card only side, it means I have to walk into the queue of motorists waiting to pay, pay for my gas after she has taken the payment from the first car then desert her post to walk over and unlock the gas cage. The fuel station does 4 times the amount of business outside of kiosk hours because all the pumps are on card only payment, many times the revenue and zero staff costs!!!!! The stupidity is as much the fault of the unions as it is the majority of motorists who crazily will not use a credit card payment pump but will then join a long queue of cars in a single lane to pay by card at the kiosk - go figure! The services at the autoroute are laid out like a Tescos, all pumps filling cars non stop, parking adjacent, no-one leaving vehicles for 10 minutes, fuel at 15-20% more than off the autoroute and a restaurant and shops selling good quality meals for a resonable price.

"Smart charging", now there is an oxymoron if ever there were one!

A couple of relatively cheap special tools help the job. A socket drive spreading tool for the steering knuckle. A long reach socket drive hex key to hold the damper shaft against the undoing of the top mount nut. I misplaced the latter and bought a pair of American vice grips made for gripping cylindrical objects like the chromed damper rod without damaging them. Replacing the strut to ARB drop links at the same time is worthwhile, they are very cheap and sooner or later contribute to the creaks and noises.

In parallel with one of the main battery leads, functionally it could be either, I think its the negative because of the warnings to use a battery charger on the earth stud not the battery negative terminal. I cant do any more than describe because thankfully my car is just old enough to not have stop/start and a battery mismanagement system.

Definitely sounds like top mounts but for me its a relatively easy job having had to replace springs and bump stops on successive vehicles, the last time was cheap shonky bearings, worked fine but then one became noisy and graunchy again within a few months, replaced it again and no more noise, bench testing the failed one it appears in good condition, rotates smoothly, no seperation or loss of balls (ooh err!) like the first failure, a mystery but not mystery where the noise was coming from and your description matches my symptoms.

Yeah but (to them) you are a bad risk, you have had a total loss claim recently, I'm surprised it wasn't more ie had not gone up as much as your current insurers stuffed up your premium on the replacement Superb. That was my thoughts after several years back, pre Covid most tiny villages in Northern France and probably across most of France ended up with public EV charging points, about the same time that supermarkets started installing them although those are no longer free, like everything in France they cost big, far more than any work done for paying clients would be, funded by the EU and various other national regional and local authorities the Mairies typically pay about 10% but of an already abusively inflated price, they don't mind paying the money for virtue signalling knowing the public purse picks up the other 90%. I have never ever even once seen a vehicle charging at any of these other than the supermarket ones when they were free, I suppose in recent years some must have done though, the price per kw is eyewatering. Plenty on autoroute services many are being completely rebuilt from the ground up, restaurants, seating area everything with the funding coming from them increasing the number of charge points. They have to remain open on a limited basis during the works which makes it even more complicated and the works more expensive, the 10l splash n dash I did last week was at such a job site, only 2 fuel pumps open out of the original 10 or more, toilets in the building and a tiny kiosk with a fridge selling sandwiches and crisps, there was a food truck outside for the lunchtime meals, driving out of the calamity I counted 16 new and functional EV charging points all unoccupied. There will of course be more fuel pumps after the site is finished but understandably not as many as before, another place that was undergoing the ground up rebuild while still functioning is unrecognisable now and a great improvement but I do wonder if in EV ownership stalls or falls whether they will be getting new grants to remove the charging stations and fit more fuel pumps.