KiNeL

So very J.R. FWIW although not directly equivalent (surprise surprise there are no EU standards) the French Yellow 2 Crit-Air sticker is recognised in Spain as 'equivalent' to the Spanish green C sticker where LEZ's are already in place in Madrid and Barcelona and due to come in in many other towns and cities in the near future. The reverse however does not apply! Unlike France, where it's perfectly possible to apply for a sticker for a non French registered vehicle, currently in Spain no such facility exists and it's unclear how foreign motorists are supposed to proceed without risk of penalty. It's suggested that they get a free pass presumably on the basis that the vast majority of foreign cars likely to be circulating in Spain will be of an age where they would qualify for a sticker anyway. Broadly the benchmarks are post Jan. 2006 for petrol cars (Euro 4 and above) and post Sept. 2015 for diesel (Euro 6).

Regassing without checking for leaks is a waste of time and money but a great earner for the cowboys who offer such 'services'. If that's the road you want to go down then you can buy a DIY kit. Properly the system should be evacuated of gas, with the quantity of recovered gas being recorded, then both vacuum and pressure tests performed, Only if they reveal no leaks should the system be refilled and payment made only for any additional gas required over and above that which was recovered. I had a system regassed a couple of years ago and IIRC what with the testing etc. it took about an hour and cost me €70 (£60), much of which was for the additional gas.

I recall changing the alternator on my MK1 1.9tdI Octy - twice! What a pig of a job. If I recall correctly after struggling to get it out from above no way could I get the replacement in the same way and from underneath it wasn't much easier, just a TIGHT fit both ways. Without a doubt the worst job I ever had to do on the car in 10 years and 300,000 km! Why twice, the first replacement I bought packed in after a couple of weeks! JR, you have a message.

Slightly tongue in cheek perhaps but in jest, absolutely not. Were I looking for a Yeti replacement, which I'm not, then both would definitely be on my list of possible candidates. If the quirkiness of the Yeti is one of it's appeals then the Toyota outdoes it in spades. I wonder do you say the same about the Kia Soul which has previously been mentioned?

Potential Yeti replacements. Toyota FJ Cruiser Jeep Renegade

Another GY Efficient grip user here. Only had aged Champiron (not typo) to compare with but the GY's are vastly better in all sectors particularly road noise which can be a Yeti weak point. Living in Spain I have no need of all season tyres nor am I particularly bothered about wet performance, other than for occasional screen washing the wipers only go on about half a dozen times a year and one of those is at the annual ITV (MOT)!

A change is not an upgrade and frequently can be the exact opposite!

No pics of that and I appreciate what you're saying however mine was far rattier than that leaving no question in my mind that it had been retro applied.

Believe me that tape was NOT original! I haven't looked at the other side yet but it's on my list of jobs to do, I don't think I'll be stripping the door Having done a bit more research on CAN Bus I can confirm that those two wires are indeed CAN High and CAN Low so with both broken there would have been zero communication with the doors.

Had a fun yesterday morning sorting out the passenger doors which had become bereft of all functions, windows, central locking, mirror control - unfortunately with the front window down! It happened on Sunday evening when wife was in the passenger seat and had let the window down whilst I'd stopped to pick a package up from the local Amazon locker, no trouble prior to that although the car has had a couple of Door Control Module faults, 01332 & 01334', ever since I've had it plus a couple of faults on the heating & AC but none of them producing any actual issues other than an intermittent refusal of the tailgate to resister as having been opened resulting in the doors relocking after 30 seconds or so which I'd assumed was something to do with the actual tailgate catch. I checked the fuses but nothing there so turned my attention to the next likely culprit - the wires between passenger door to the A post - and sure enough found the two thinnest ones broken, Needing more room to repair them I took the door card off and unclipped the loom which allowed me to pull it through about another 6" or so when I also able to observe that someone had been there before me evidenced by the now exposed section of loom being copiously wrapped in black electrical tape although oddly when I peeled that all off I found no evidence of any previous repairs, looks like someone may have been looking for a problem expecting to find it there but had been wrong. Anyway having repaired the wires, and rewrapped using proper loom tape, everything sprang back to life and a subsequent CARISTA scan and reset gave a total clean bill of health including, as far as I'm able to tell so far, a fix of the intermittent tailgate fault. Clearly one of those wires must have been broken for some time, possibly before I bought the car as I only bought the CARISTA maybe 6 months ago so had no knowledge of any standing faults prior to that, but the second one going was curtains and I wonder if the previous taping up had put an unnatural strain on them although why they chose to use such ridiculously thin wires in the first place is a mystery? Looking at the wiring schematics the wires (orange with green tracer and orange with brown) go to the door control module and are annotated CANL-K and CANH-K which I'm guessing means they are something to do with the CAN BUS.

The Roomster has always looks ill proportioned and ugly to me, cut-&-shut as JR suggests. They are not common here in Spain but when I do see one I'm always half expecting the Pope to spring up through the roof, the back end just looks like it's made for such antics or wheelchair conversions.

I have a light rattle which has so far defied detection. It 's only really noticeable when two up, trouble is that from the drivers position (LHD) it appears to be coming from the passenger side but to the passenger it's on the drivers side! I just turn the music up which serves the dual purposes of drowning the rattle and annoying 'er indoors, the perfect solution! Only kidding

Great, thanks for that. A PS to the Aux in recode: It's thrown up 3 CANBUS error codes. 00470 Combination comfort Databus in Single Wire 01305 Databus for Infotainment 00469 Data bus Display / Infotainment in the single wire enterprise All to do with enabling Aux in without the official wiring harness being in place I presume. Not that I'm particularly bothered by the errors but I've read somewhere that disconnecting the CANBUS wires from the radio might eliminate them so happy to do that if true.

Bought a Carista on Amazon on special offer, under £19 with free delivery (Prime). Principal reason was to enable the AUX in on the Blues radio. It came with a 1 month free trial of all features but for some reason I couldn't activate it either via Google pay, Paypal, or by credit card so I downloaded a cracked app and ran that instead, worked just fine and achieved what I wanted. WTF is that about anyway, why shouldn't Aux in be enabled automatically, just a whizz for dealers to charge £££ to do it if you ask me! Browsing around I found a 1 code for oil quaility (where 1= Bad & 2=Good) which is odd because I only changed the oil and filter around 1200km (750 miles) ago using the correct 502.00 oil,thoughts?

Never seen anything like it in a car hydraulic system but I've been doing some research and come up with this, similar can be found in multiple places. "If the brake fluid is not changed it will continue to absorb moisture, and eventually it will crystallize and form deposits inside the brake system that can cause the seals to fail and components to seize." If that is the cause then the surprising thing is that it's happened so quickly (11 year old car which presumably had at least one or 2 changes during it's early life) when, like a great many I'm sure, I personally have never once deliberately replaced the fluid on any vehicle I've owned. I suppose it's possible that typically higher background humidity in Spain could be an accelerating influence. That will change this week as I don't want to risk similar problems arising in the braking system where repairs could be a far more involved and expensive proposition. I'll temporarily evict the MGB from the garage so I can do the job in air conditioned comfort. I already have 1lt of genuine VW fluid bought expressly for that purpose but being a lazy b****d..........!!!! It will be very interesting to see what, if anything, gets flushed out.

Autopsy done. No problem getting in as I had no plans for keeping it so just hacksawed around the periphery. Found loads of white crud inside but only a small proportion of magnetic debris. Most of the crud in fact dissolved with water and the glass shows what I was left with which was crystalline and most of that had come from the segmented brown seal/bush Seeing all that makes me think it might not be a bad idea to pull the slave and check that for crud although I suspect both the hydraulic pressure and push back from the clutch cover would overcome any sticking issues there. I think if I were to encounter the problem in the future I might try an aggressive flushing first.

I hope never to be talking about an MC swap in the plural! I knew about the seal from the video but it must have dislodged slightly when I fitted the pipe or perhaps the slight movement of putting it back into its support clip on the chassis rail disturbed it. The fact that it bled and gave a working pedal is indicative of the extent of the leak though, i.e. dripping rather than gushing, start to finish I doubt I lost more than a couple of thimblefuls of fluid. I don't know what sound insulation you're talking about as the connection is well away from the bulkhead so leaking fluid would drip directly down and pool on the naked chassis leg, hence my piece of black tape because being a white car a tiny drip would be difficult to see otherwise. Thankfully so far it's dry. Being more familiar with hard brake pipes with flared ends secured nuts prima facia the push in design seemed unnecessarily minimalist but considering that it's widely employed not just by VAG group vehicles but also by other manufacturers that's obviously just me. Curiosity of course demands that I disassemble the old cylinder to see exactly what has gone wrong inside it!

So bit the bullet today and decided to replace the MC. Based on the instructions from the manual (see attached) it didn't appear that daunting of a task but typically it didn't go to plan. I'd fabricated a T10005 tool from a welding clamp which performed the task reasonably well but also took the precaution of acquiring a replacement for the clip, more on that below. Getting the old cylinder out went well enough but trying to fit the new one with the new clip I just couldn't get it to click in place, then it happened, the helper spring popped out, why I have no idea but hey I thought, no big problem I'll drop the pedal out and refit it - but oh no, for some unfathomable reason the bolt which holds it in is inserted from the steering column side meaning that there was no possible way to get it out without either removing the entire column or taking the complete pedal assembly off the car. What they were thinking I can't imagine as there is no need whatsoever for it to be fitted from that side, it's a simple 8mm bolt acting as a pivot and can go either way and from the opposite side it would have come out without issue. No way was I going to remove the steering column and after considering - but dismissing - the angle grinder option I set to removing the pedal assembly. The video I posted earlier came in handy as it gave me a clue for removing the top nut which I could barely see but did mange to remove using three long 1/4" extensions through the gap under the steering wheel all the time wondering how I was going to refit it as I do not have a 1/4" 'wobble' extension. Once the assembly was out I cut away come of the sound deadening padding which was partly obscuring it which at least gave me an improved view of where I would be working when refitting it. On the bench I examined, compared, and measured the new clip against the original and discovered that not only was the new one about 1mm longer between the arrows but also that the slot in the end was narrower so there was no way it was ever going to fit so I chucked it aside and reused the original. I reassembled it all on the bench as per the video and refitted to the car, the top nut was a b*itch as anticipated but I eventually got it back on. I bled the system and quickly got a good pedal but then noticed a weep from the pipe where it fits in the MC so removed it again, checked and refitted the rubber seal, after which is sealed correctly, as a check going forward I put a piece of black duct tape on the chassis member immediately below the connector which should immediately reveal any drips. As stupidly expensive as they are I may invest in a new seal just in case. What should have been a max 1.5 hour job turned into a half day marathon and being of 'an age' Instructions.docwith all the contortions in the footwell I expect to be totally seized up on the morrow!

For those who can't (or won't) get it, at 2 mins what the guy is effectively doing is pulling a stuck down pedal up from the floor when it snaps into the 'up' position - why, because it's being held in the locked down position by the helper spring being in an over centre attitude. Clear now?

Exactly!

Each to their own Having just found this video now wondering if the problem is anything to do with the actual MC at all! Skip to 2 mins for the salient moment.

Ha, clutch has been performing flawlessly - until this morning when it stuck down at the first start of the day. It's now approx. 1500km since the last instance. Torn between living with it and replacing the master which I already have, it doesn't look that much of a task and know I should do it but I've become a bit of a lazy bas*ard not to mention that presently it's in the mid 30's here so if it's to be done it will have to be an early morning job. Ironically per my last post I also did my 110,000km oil change today. As an aside I must say that compared to my previous MK1 Octy, which was a PITA, at least until I cut a square out of the under body shield by the sump plug, on the Yeti it's a pleasure as the drain plug is completely accessible without having to removing a damn thing and the the dual drain filter makes it a mess free 15 minute job!

If that is so then why does my base spec model (no built in sat nav) have a roof mounted antenna?

300 miles or so now and clutch still behaving itself, did flush it through with fresh genuine VW fluid this morning though. I'd bought 1lt with the intention of flushing the brakes through at 110,000km which is when I plan to next change the engine oil. Have to say what came out looked as clean and pristine as what went in. Were the original master cylinders all plastic?