sepulchrave

Conversely I reckon it's electrical, the injector loom is a good place to start on one of these.

I think the crank pulley can jump a tooth with the cams staying in phase with each other because the sprocket is much smaller with much less wrap-around for the chain, it's easy enough to check.

205 45 16 is the correct size, particularly if you're slammed on air.

Any engine that burns its valves and slips its timing like that one does is well worth avoiding, at 12 years old with commensurate mileage it's probably not worth repairing. Hopefully that'll help the OP make up his mind.

That single cam engine is a ****ter.

Aren't all the Mark 2's twinks?

It's easily identified, the timing chain has slipped, the cam position fault was the clue, your garage was too dumb to check. Unfortunately it needs a new chain and tensioner kit which comes with new sprockets as well, you should stop using the car until it's fixed.

Not on an ASZ it won't.

Solder and heatshrink will fix it just fine, just repair one wire at a time and cut any wire with damaged insulation so you can get the heatshrink on before resoldering it.

It's really not a great engine, it gives trouble in all the VAG vehicles it's used in, usually injectors fail, but EGR and DPF issues are common to all Euro 5/6 engines from all manufacturers that don't do motorway miles. If you're not doing motorway miles DON'T buy a diesel, 'twas ever thus, but particularly so nowadays, maintenance costs are becoming prohibitive, spend a bit more at the pump on petrol for peace of mind.

Yes.

Crappy map.

Your logic is massively flawed, instead of spending £700 to fix it, you'll now spend £725. If you've ever seen a clogged DPF you'd know that a can of magic jizz ain't gonna cut it. I cut one open recently because the idiot owner wouldn't believe me, I showed him the matrix solid with Ash and explained it was way beyond any cleaning process known to man, I drilled a big fat hole through it with an SDS bit so he could see the sludge went all the way through.

That Jabbasport RARB is too stiff, always was, it's a track mod, alright on slicks, pants on the road.

You're on your own, I don't think the engine will idle properly once warmed up and will feel very flat and may stall without warning. Good luck.

I'd say no, I doubt it would even run properly, E85 works well on most modern turbo cars because the wide band lambda system will adjust fuelling to suit and the anti knock properties of ethanol allow much more ignition advance. Your car is not a turbo and may not even have a wide band sensor.

The Internet is brimming with anecdotal nonsense, let me give you a recent example: I was repairing an Alfa 16V TS that had eaten its cambelt immediately followed by all sixteen valves for pudding. Rebuilding the existing head would have been prohibitively expensive so I sourced a guaranteed good secondhand head from a specialist breakers. The owner called me in a panic, he'd been reading on the interwebs a widely circulated myth that you have to replace all the big end shells when this engine bends the valves as the sudden load on the piston will dent the shells! I kid you not! Anyway I had to calmly explain that it wasn't necessary because if the bottom end were that fragile then the big end shells wouldn't survive the internal combustion process either. He then asked if we could do it just to be on the safe side, so I said no, I'd finish the work we'd agreed needed to be done then when the engine was restarted if there was any noise from the bottom end I'd investigate further. Needless to say all was well and it was just a load of anecdotal internet mythology, which is a polite euphemism for a load of something else!

I don't need to know the spec. I can look it up, that's why specs are written down!

So, stick with the spec then, Jeezus pleezus, I could have sworn that's what I said!

Not if the OP doesn't even need to fix the stupid thing at all.

If they're blind holes then the machining is different but; none of this is really relevant since the OP doesn't even need to bother doing them for the MOT so this thread is meandering into irrelevance somewhat.

CNC milling machines don't use taper taps, they use a helical machine tap that does the entire operation in one pass and it would definitely go the whole way through rather than stop and risk jamming.

Get it welded up if it's only just started to blow.

I strongly advise you to use an auto electrician rather than a garage, you can't diagnose and repair this yourself, a sparks can probably come to the car and fix it quickly and cheaply.

Stick with the spec. so much dribbling guff written about relative viscosity, the most important thing is the additive pack used and that it be fully synthetic, SAE numbers are largely meaningless when used as a measure of quality.