Camlobe

If it was me, I'd consider other options as well. You can buy tyres in this size as cheap as £50, but I really, really wouldn't unless you had pretty solid evidence that they are ok, The cheapest that I'd consider would be Nexen Nfera SU1 at £85 (I can't honestly remember whether the SU1 is better than the SU4 or vice versa, but there is a worthwhile potential saving there). Next up would be Avon ZV7 tyres, which squeak in just over £100. They are a bit bland, and have a habit of picking up stones and crud, but aren't at all bad. Only a bit more expensive are Vredestein Ultrac Satin at about 107. The one big thing that Michelins have always had going for them is life: anyone can make a hard tyre that lasts, but historically Michelins have been the only people who have made (an expensive tyre) that both lasts and has wet grip. A bit less true, these days, and Michelin does some tyres that are specifically more aimed at track days, etc, and that aren't intended to have long lives. In any case, I'm sure I've seen one review that had a better life out of the Goodyear F1 assy 5 than PS4. Unfortunately, at around £150, there isn't much of a saving there.

You might want to have a look at All Tyres 365 or Tyres Guru, where they are about £150. Camskills, often good for non-mainstream tyres or fitting, look to have them about £140.

A word of warning about Autodoc: Price and selection of parts can be good, but delivery can be a bit slow, and badly defined, so it can be difficult to know if parts will arrive on time, if you are on a tight schedule. Also, in this case, you'd expect a bit more warning about the various different brake systems.

In a way, I'm a bit disappointed that no one has yet turned up to argue for disks made from an unobtanium/nihonium alloy, with a surface finish patterned on the Nazca lines. One comment I should have made is that you want to check that the pad manufacturer does recommend their pads for use on plain disks. I know, brembo, for example makes a point that their max pads are not just suitable for their max disks, but also for plain ones. Also watch out for the PR number; that indicates whose brake system you have (and is probably different front to rear), so you need to get the right PR code. Some people will check this from the car reg plate (assuming the car still corresponds to the original brake system, which will be true in most cases). Other people don't do this check, and/or give you a PR code for you to check. Caveat emptor, and all that kind of thing.

tl;dr version: In my view, no. Given your screen name, I'll comment that I can be fairly accused of driving like a granddad myself, these days, and these are my views, and it will be easy to find people who have the opposite view. Real 'flashy' disks are cross drilled and grooved (ok, this is 'fronts', which make most of the difference, so vented is assumed), and may even be made of a flashy material. So, I am sure that cross drilled and grooved can make a big difference in wet conditions. But, in the dry, or when at least the pads haven't been soaked in water? I have my doubts. I once had the situation where the brakes didn't work because water, and that was dramatic, and unexpected. I think the pads had crazed, and that helped them retain water. This is quite a dramatic situation, and one question you have to ask yourself is 'Do I have worse brakes in the wet?' and particularly if the brakes take some time to grip, then there is a serious case for considering measures to get the steam out of the way. If you do have wet problems, and it is the brakes and not the tyres, then there is a very strong case for expensive disks, otherwise I'd say no. Assuming you go with standard-ish disks, then I would say there is a god case for going for the best pads you can. The trouble with that is actually determining which are the best pads. When I had that problem with wet, it was with Mintex Extremes, and they should have been good, but in that set of conditions they weren't as good as the older 1144 pads, by a long, long way. Oh, and if you don't like what you've got with 'better' pads, you can always then buy 'better' disks. Incidentally, the 'illegal pads' thing: Regulation 90 constrains the 'mu' (coeff of friction) in to a fairly narrow box. You might say 'but I don't care about that'. Unfortunately, with all the stuff like ABS and stability control, the brakes are now inside a feedback loop, and you can get really bizarre effects if you do change mu dramatically. So, even if you don't like it, something like regulation 90 was probably inevitable, even if you'd feel better served by information on the upper useful temp of the pads.

I'm not a big fan of Fatbloke's approach: firstly, I'd rather spin the wheel and use that to to run the rust against a chisel or screwdriver to get rid of the rust, secondly I don't think it will work. I don't think it will work because I think the problem is that the brakes are sticking on, slightly. At least that's what it has been anytime I've had this kind of problem. Now this can be a problem with the callipers being clogged with dust, which is curable with a hammer (use a bit of wood to transfer the blow from the hammer to the calliper, knock so some dust comes out, remove, repeat), or it can be a more serious problem, which may need a new calliper, although it may also be curable with a bit of lubrication (caution is advised, you'd have to disassemble things and use a specialist brake lube). Or it could be the handbrake cable sticking. Jacking a wheel up, and seeing whether the wheel spins freely should give you a clue. Removing the dust; you are often advised to use a wire brush, but I am bigger fan of a clean domestic dustpan and brush, because then you are not going to damage the rubbers, as you might with the wire brush. Oh, and this cure is likely to be short term, and may need repeating, say, at MoT time, which may make the new/recond caliper sound more attractive. This kind of problem does become common as cars age. And Fatbloke's warnings about safety glasses and a mask are points that you should really adhere to, and brakes are a thing where, if you are in any doubt, get someone who knows their job to do it.

I don't, but here are some opinions: i) I don't think this is rational. If I had a race car that looked that good, I wouldn't be considering stripping it. Selling it on maybe, making it go faster, whatever that takes, but not strip it. Maybe that's the way the numbers work out, though. ii) I think, at this level, most roll cages are custom made, so I think the more critical question is 'do I know a good manufacturer of custom roll cages?' (I don't).

I once had a Ford Cougar that had a habit of blowing headlight bulbs every 4 - 6 weeks. The bulbs that blew were always those closest to the battery/front of the car. This rapidly got to be quite a boring habit. The Ford Garage claimed there was nothing wrong with the car, but when I got them to fit an additional wire from the alternator to the battery, the problem went away, and the car blew only one bulb in the next eight years. The other related problem that was cured was that, at idle only, if you played music with a fair amount of bass, you could see the radio display going up and down in intensity in time with the music (without this being a fault with the car, obviously!). So, not only can the static voltage be too high, if the AC component is too high, that can cause problems, too.

Assuming, when you say "I've been told that using just front arb..." you mean something like "just using a stiffer front ARB" (rather than only using a front ARB, and no rear ARB then: The amount of body roll is set by the total roll stiffness, and that total roll stiffness is set by a whole load of things, the (explicit) spring rates (the tyre sidewalls are also springs, which complicates the theory a little, but usually they aren't the biggest factors) and the anti-roll bar rates. If all that you care about is body roll, you could just stiffen roll bars without caring about any of the details and be happy. Usually, however, balance (under/over-steer) is as big a concern as body roll. If you are concerned about balance, then the ARBs at the two ends do opposite things. If you make the rear ARB stiffer, you will make the car oversteer more (or understeer less, if you prefer to look at it that way), whereas if you make the front stiffer, it will understeer more. I don't want to understate the amount of 'art' in this; there are a number of ways of getting it wrong, so you'd really like to go with stuff that people have tested, and not make wild, exaggerated, changes that can cause unpredicted effects, but mild changes are usually safe, but for less roll, a bit more ARB (at either, or both ends) is good, and, if you want to understeer less, you want to stiffen the rear end up a bit more than the front. If you went really wild and stiffened the rear end up massively, the car would probably get a bit uncomfortable and would oversteer quite a bit (and, as Milliken and Milliken point out, at some speed, an oversteering car, becomes undrivable, and while that probably is quite a high speed, you want to stay well away from that). If you run one end super-stiff, you can even reduce the grip (unless you get tricksy with the dampers) because the stiff end starts to patter wide on uneven surfaces.

Alright, as the core competence that I am bringing to this thread is stating the bleedin' obvious, and in spite of not knowing the first thing about Fabia numbering, I'll have a go at: "The odd thing is that the parts listing (and the source - a member on here) say this is from drivers side front door of a 2007 Mk1 Fabia, so the suffix should be SK1, which doesn't correlate obviously to anything I'm looking at on those labels." You shouldn't necessarily expect it to - some modules get carried over from one model a successor, though that's fairly rare, and, with VAG's platform development you'd expect a reasonable degree of commonality 'under the skin'. So, you shouldn't really expect a module to get a number that identifies it as being, say a Fabia module, but more a Small-ish pass car module, maybe even 'fwd, second size group', which could be well and truly incomprehensible, by the time it has been through a German mangle. It does seem that you have 'Hardware 002' (aka HW002) and 'Software 03XX' (or 0319), all of which seems moderately consistent, even if if doesn't really seem to give away much of great import.

Ken: You'd go for "localhost", rather than "192.168.0.0", which, to me seems geekier? Normally, the software would be installed by the Manufacturer (Temic, in this case). If Temic didn't install the software, they couldn't really test it thoroughly, in most cases. Now, there may be a facility for VAG to overwrite that software, but, generally, that would only be used to fix unanticipated problems, and not very often at that (it breaks all of the production test procedures, but if push comes to shove...). Again, normally, you would expect some simple monitor software which you could use to toggle outputs and report version numbers, but, that will consume memory (and development time) so could easily be the kind of thing that is sacrificed. And, if the whole program can be overwritten, the monitor software may only be available by overwriting the production code (although that, in turn, is a recipe for vehicles escaping with the wrong software, and probably the only way the dealer has to deal with that is to strip the module out and replace it, and you really don't want that to happen often).

Errr, asking for a friend, of course. Is there software to compose such things, and does that mean that you could compose T-shirts with more-or-less arbitrary messages on them that no one else could read? Just hypothetically, of course.

Usually, the thing that requires the fastest reaction is start/stop, and particularly, current limit in fault conditions. It isn't all 'deliberate' start/stop, if someone puts their hand, or neck, in the way of the window, you don't want a quasi-unlimited current/torque to be available, on the other hand you do want enough torque to be available to wind the window up or down reliably. So, it has got to be controlled, and within a moderately narrow range, or one extreme of the range will go wrong.

That MC33689 is, these days, an NXP chip, although it would have have started out as a Motorola number, then Freescale. Anyway, the data sheet is here. I'd have expected some kind of power driver(s) along with it, whether that be discrete power devices or some integrated device that drives multiple outputs, possibly also some simple microcontroller (the MC33689 doesn't really have intelligence - it is unclear if that is an issue, but it may be possible to provide whatever intelligence is needed from the other end of the bus).

(I was writing this before Aspman replied.) I'll go for the (probably) obvious, even though it (probably) won't help you much. It is very probably an internal reference, so you'd have to wonder whether knowing that someone's internal reference for this board is 1234567AB2 would actually do you that much good (it would probably be the bare board, or the board with components, and that might include software and version numbers, but probably isn't the board in a box, if that's a thing)? Firstly, it is not on all that straight. Sometimes such things as use for initial alignment of the pick 'n place machines, but if that was the case, I'd expect it to be on straighter (so, probably applied by hand rather than by machine). Also, the code doesn't have a massive number of bits in it; certainly enough for the 1234567AB2 kind of thing mentioned earlier, but not enough for a database index of everything in the entire world. Secondly, there seem to be a lot of miscellaneous capacitors scattered around. You could understand a lot of capacitors for EMC/ESD reasons, if they they were grouped around I/O connectors, but they don't seem to be, not in any organised way, anyway. The values aren't very similar, either, which they would normally be if they were EMC/ESD capacitors. Maybe a stepper motor driver, which has multiple phases to drive? Then, you would expect to see several similar sections, and that isn't apparent. Some of the soldering looks questionable, but not in a way that leads you to suspect dry joints - this is a little excess solder in a couple of places, but that leads you more to suspect that, at the extreme end of the distribution, there might be solder shorts on some boards. While you'd normally expect more organisation than this, and that might raise suspicions about ESD vulnerability, the board should still have been through some level of testing, so while it raises some suspicion, it ought to be alright, really.

If I am interpreting correctly is worryingly low, and is lower than when the car isn't running. That shouldn't be the case, with only idle loads on. While it is just possible that some very unusual condition is causing this, the obvious explanation is that the alternator isn't doing its job of providing enough current to keep the battery topped up. If you replace the alternator, you can probably get a recon one, but that may mean living without the car for longer than is convenient. It may be that your only practical way forward is to get someone to do the work for you.

If the various reasons include things to do with the transmission, it might be worth outlining them, as they may help diagnosis. Anyway, I have had something similar recently, and in my case (2WD car) it was to do with brakes sticking. I came off a dual carriageway and there was an intermittent, rhythmic, squeal. Pulled over and it was apparent that one rear wheel was rather warmer than the other, and the rust pattern was not even (rusty for the outer few mm, clean inside that, and, to cut a long story short, the inner surfaces were worse that the outer, on both sides). Applying the usual technique of precision banging (!), using a hammer and a long piece of wood (the correct piece of wood allows you to bang the calliper, and so free it up, without going metal-on-metal), without taking anything to pieces. This made the immediate problem go away. Problem now has a longer-term cure, in that callipers have been taken off and cleaned, and it has new rear brake pads and discs.

That 7-Zap page is genius, now I've learnt to use it correctly (my laptop very occasionally loses clicks, which is annoying, when you don't notice). I notice that they include Ferodo, which would be the same Ferodo who said they didn't have any pads for my car (although, I probably made the mistake of including the '1KS' PR code, which I believed at the time...but they didn't mention it being the wrong end, or how easy it was to make a mistake with these). In this last week, I've also engaged in e-mail dialogue withe someone at a respectable tyre manufacturer, who, when I asked about tyre size compatibility with intended new (secondhand) wheels, had to have explained what the 'J' dimension meant. A member of the general public I could understand, but technical support at a tyre manufacturer? And also, I use two web e-mails. One of these has started out not sending e-mails, but only initial e-mails where eventually, you get a bounce, but established correspondents are fine. This has led to me thinking '...that wheel reconditioner must be rubbish, they can't even run a mail system' which was entirely unfair. That, plus a few other things, is making me feel a bit hassled right now. I've tried to keep on track, but occasionally I've slipped. I'd still be interested in the info on the Brembo pads (or any others that people like) though. Thanks, again.

No need for the 'sorry', you've been fantastic, so far...far better than anything else I've seen online...and that includes people at brake pad manufacturers.

They have a clip, presumed with some springiness, but it is a completely different clip to the one in your diagram - more a flat piece if metal that is combined retainer and anti-vibration shim. <Edit> a bit like the Teves one, but I can't see the thing at the end, properly, at least not without taking them to pieces. </Edit>

They are indeed the FS111 version. Mmmm, Brembos sound nice....how do you find them (initial bite and dust, primarily)?

Well, I've just talked to my friendly local dealer, and while the right man was away, the person I spoke to came up with the information that the PR-code (he got a bit confused and was talking about calipers, rather than pads - he seemed to correct it, but didn't fill me with as much confidence as a specialist parts person could have) was 1Z5. I checked the first few hundred parts at a supplier and the 1Z5 code wasn't there (and, of course it is not in my Manual, which I find weird, but there you go), so now to try to follow up Wino's information.

Thanks a million for the help so far, but this has got me confused. I have the spring clip on the outside, but I don't appear to have the appropriate codes in my Service Schedule. Assuming (and you know what they say about that word) that the relevant codes start with a '1', I have: 1DO 1K5 1AT 1N3 and 1NL None of those correspond to the brake pads I've been able to see, so I'm in a bit of a quandary. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, so please enlighten me.

Currently, I am having difficulty finding any brake pads for my Octavia 2010 122 hp. It has the Bosch brake system 1KS, 1KT said to be same, but different colour (very odd, is that a VRS thing, or something?) I can find rears quite easily, I can find Teves quite easily, even Lucas, but mine, no. I don't really need them urgently, but as some work is happening on the rears, I thought I'd get something decent on the fronts at the same time. I haven't yet looked at pads I know to be rubbish, or even spent much time on pads I haven't heard of, but I am really surprised by this. So, does anyone either have a place that they know has them, or a supplier they get their pads, of this spec, from? Thanks

Hmm, I have a lot of near answers to this. Some tyres are more rugged than others. I had the experience, a few years ago that I ran over a brick. The front tyre, a Barum Bravuris, in 'extra load' (whatever the load numbers, eg '94', etc, was) was unmarked, but the rear, a Goodyear Efficient Grip (non-XL, as they only made the EG in non-XL, and so its load rating was approx a couple lower at, say, 92), was bruised, and both took roughly the same impact, plus or minus the higher static load on the front. You can, assuming your insurance agrees, run more-or-less any sane wheel/tyre combo, but if the rolling radius goes up, you'll change the speedo reading (some will argue that's no bad thing, given the speedo error, but the speedo error on mine looks like a constant offset, and this will change it by a percentage) and raise the ride height. A higher ride height raises the c-of-g, but not by much. It also decreases the odometer over-read, but not by much. You may also improve the fuel economy, but not enough to stop it looking worse. Tyre cost will change. You'd expect more rubber to be proportionally more expensive (away from supercar tyres) but this isn't really true. More popular tyre sizes don't go up as much as you'd think, so moving away from the tyres used on popular models is usually a bad thing (TM). And then where do you get your tyre damage? Presuming that it is in the sidewalls, that raises another question. If the combination of the tread width and the 'J' dimension stretches the tyre, the sidewall will be more vulnerable to sharp objects (eg nails). If it doesn't stretch the tyre enough, it will be more vulnerable to 'pinching' damage, as is likely to be be caused by sharp edges and/or underinflation, the sharp edges of potholes being a thing. At one time, you could get brochures from tyre manufacturers that included the recommended range of 'J' sizes for each tyre variety and fitting, but I haven't seen one of those for a couple of decades. Now you can e-mail them and they might tell you....might...and that might be for one tyre size, which would mean it could take you an age to find out about a range of tyre sizes. over several manufacturers (although, to be fair, if you are in the centre of one manufacturer's range, you'll probably be in for all manufacturers of similar tyres, but go too oddball, and to the extremes and all bets are off). Simples! (It might be easier to upgrade your council.)