mark_in_manchester

I asked a garage around the corner to look at mine. Serves me right - he changed a drop link, charged me a fortune, and the clunk is still there. I thought I was getting old, fat and lazy, but I'll not be doing that again. Next idea - the drop link attaches the moving part of the shocker ('under' the spring) to the anti-roll bar. The anti-roll bar must rotate in bushes to transfer movement to the other side of the car - so maybe I ought to have a look at them. Or maybe I'll wait until it gets a lot worse and then perhaps it'll be easier to find

Hi mate I am currently chasing this too, on a similar car (same year, 1.4 TDi). The last time it did this - passenger side - it was the inner bearing on the steering rod which was knackered, so you could have a feel around there as you wiggle the wheel left and right (jacked up, of course). This time - driver side - no 'clunk' is audible as I try to do this, but I am fairly sure I am in the right place as it does it when drivers front wheel goes over a speed bump (one of the narrow ones where one can miss it with the other side of the car) - but not vice versa. I am coming down to inner CV joint being boogered, as the outers have both been done not so long ago. Mine does it as you come on/off the throttle - but it also behaved like this when it was a steering issue, which makes sense when you think what the front wheel drive is doing in concert with steering linkages. cheers Mark

Hi folks. The OSR plastic trim piece (which covers the diecast anchor thingy which bolts to the roof and holds the end of the roof rail) has fallen off my car. It doesn't make any difference to using it, but if anyone knows whether MK2 pieces are the same (I know MK2 rails don't have a support in the centre, so they may be different all round) or indeed if VAG used this trim on another car, I'd find that helpful. Having just passed another MOT, and aghast at the price of used cars in general, I'm feeling all motivated... cheers Mark

Thanks again - that part number saved a lot of paddling about in nylon swarf. While the thing is balanced up on blocks I may even fit the towbar I've had hanging about for ages, and do something about the expanses of bodywork underneath which seem never to have encountered any under-seal.

That's really helpful - thanks, particularly for taking the time to assemble those photos. Where do you tend to go for weird little bits with long part numbers? Not sure local factors will get so involved, and I have never got involved with dealerships. (Most consumables seem to be on ebay; pair of hubs was under 40 quid which is not so bad for 4 bearings. I would never have guessed they don't press out from the hub if you hadn't told me). I didn't know pre-assembled shoes were a thing, which suggests I'm going to stab myself and loose all the skin on my knuckles making the ones I have ordered up into sets. Anything weird to know about bleeding on this one? Last time I replaced a slave ('97 Felicia) I managed to wring the end off the copper brake pipe which was seized into the gland nut, and while annealing it for forming a new mushroom I had burning fluid erupting from the end of the system... :-) (These questions are at least in part about me tiptoeing around the electronics in this thing and not wanting to f*ck it up for want of some piece of knowledge I am missing - like Haynes telling me about the abs sensor ring).

Hi folks. A quick 'un-seize the handbrake before MOT' job on my new-to-me 05 1.4TDi has turned into new drums / slaves / shoes. Ugg. Following Mr Haynes, I got a big tube out, heaved on the big nuts and took the hubs off to facilitate access. Questions: 1) Bearing pairs (taper rollers or something else?) appear to handle their own end-float, since it seems the big nut just gets done up *real tight* against the two inners back to the shoulder on the axle. Am I missing anything? One side is a bit stiff - I guess I might replace the bearings if blowing all the crap away makes no odds - anything weird to know? It seems there is a motion sensor ring for abs on the hub which i ought not to clout with a big hammer / squash in the vice. 2) Shoes (assuming spring hold-back retainers are not rusted to goodness and slaves push straight and true - well, we can hope the rebuild fixes something!) are meant to run on 3 plastic (?) buttons per shoe. These are well chewey. I have some nylon (or f*ck it, brass) and a lathe, but I am fast running out of enthusiasm - make new ones and glue them in or wipe a smear of copperslip over the remains and put it back together when the bits turn up? I am old and although I'm experienced I fix things like it's 1987. Hence the questions. thanks Mark, Manchester

Well, 'new' 05 Fabia estate 1.4 TDi continues to impress. Driving 200 miles on motorway, slowly behind artics and coasting downhill, it claimed 92mpg :) I'm taking the interior apart prior to fitting some roof rails I got off a breaker, and it strikes me that now might be a good time to fit rear speakers (Classic model - no interior gizmos) to help my kids pass the time as we tour the nation at 57mph. My stereo has a front-rear fade option, but there are no rear speakers and nothing apparent in the existing loom for them. So the questions: * Can anyone point me to a thread / page / whatever showing how to get the radio out of the dash, and showing me the pin-outs for the speaker connections? * Does anyone know how fancy the bog-standard audio amp is - will it cope with one wire (hot) to the speakers and a return via some convenient bit of bare metal bodywork, or is it a fancier thing which needs a separate return dedicated to each channel (meaning I need to run 2 wires to each speaker). cheers Mark

Thanks folks. I was in luck - the car at the breakers had a soaked, mouldy interior, so the guy was happy for me to mess about with the headlining and wreck it whilst working out how it goes together. So in case anyone else comes this way - each rail is on 5 x M10 nuts, bolts are captive with the rail, and the plastic / rubber 'gutter' insert has steel spacers in it through which the bolts tighten which (as noted above - thanks) I needed to remove too. I had planned to drill through the existing plastic / rubber trim, but I'll be able to replace it. These prise out of the roof; they're very malleable and bend like aluminium trim strips off my old sidecar. I'll have to straighten them carefully. thanks for your replies Mark

Hi folks I'm off to get a pair of roof rails from a breaker, for my new (to me) '05 1.4TDi Mk1 estate. So I turn up prepared, does anyone know what fasteners they use - I don't want to turn up without some wierd torx head driver if that's what I need. Modern cars, harrumph. If anyone has any tips on how not to bugger up the headlining and surrounding trim in peeling it back to get at the fasteners, that would be very welcome. I found the locations of the holes in some on-line manual - I think when I come to try to attach them to my car, I'll try drilling up though plastic 'gutter' trim and sealing it all with black mastic. Very pleased with it so far, though competing with the mpg indicator has me driving like a loon, rather like I did 30 years ago staring at the speedo on my moped cheers Mark, Manchester

Thanks Ricardo - that's very useful to have a clear picture of one which isn't knackered!

Ah - this may be key to my previous indifference to this object not doing what it should. I am middle-aged, tight-fisted, and I tailgate artics at 57mph. In a previous era I might have been attracted by driving gloves and a hat. Thanks for your suggestions, folks. I'll take it off and see how much original rubber is left. I imagine it locates somewhere near the ridges in the middle of the drive shaft which look like they might have once engaged with something rubbery.

Hi folks Flushed with success at changing the head gasket over the weekend (the gasket being the easy bit - my tippex screw-up / losing crank-cam timing / having to work out how to get it back - being more challenging) I was peering under the bonnet and noticed the subject of this thread wiggling around all over, all on its own, on the o/s drive shaft, just due to tick-over vibes. This is ironic - for a while I thought the vibration I could feel in the clutch pedal while waiting at lights was something to do with imminent bearing failure. But no, the thing which has failed is...a vibration suppression device. I could take it off, pack some sheet rubber inside it to make a tight-ish fit, and put it back on. The torsional stiffness would be wrong, so the suppression of resonant torsional vibes in the driveshaft would not occur at the right frequency. I've not yet found a supplier on the web - anyone know whether the dirveshaft is common to Fabia, or anything useful like that? ('Take it off - your car's a dog, and you were driving with a blown head gasket and one working glow plug for a year' is an acceptable response...) cheers Mark

Folks I read on here somewhere of people discussing the merits of various temperature sensors, as a means of sorting out hot Felcia diesel engines which won't re-start. After flattening my battery at 7am in Dublin Port trying to get on a ferry, I came up with a work-around. The actuating coil of the relay which powers up the glow plugs always has a 12v supply, and the control system supplies the earth in order to make it switch. Therefore if you find any old thin insulated wire, you can strip 20mm off the insulation at one end and persuade it into the socket along with the right 'leg' of the relay. (If anyone wants to know, I'll look up the wiring diagram and tell you the number given to that terminal). This wire can be led through the bulkhead and attached to one side of a push-switch - I used non-latching so as to avoid the possibility of leaving the plugs swithced on. The other side of the switch goes onto some bolt or other attached to the car body. If you switch on and there's no glow plug light, push the button, count to 5, and engage the starter. It works fine, and the wife can do it.

On a popular internet auction site, a 'top mount kit' looks like a large rubber donut...is this all there is to it? Any idea if one can jack the car high enough to drop the shocker off the top mount whilst not removing it from its bottom mount, in order to get the new rubber in there?

Hi Folks I'm new here - I have a Felicia 1.9D estate on an R plate. I've a problem with one of the front shockers, and thought I'd ask here to seek opinions on whether to prepare myself with a spare top mount before taking it all apart. The leg binds sometimes where it comes through the top mount, so rather than rotating smoothly and following the shocker body / stub axle / wheel as the steering wheel is turned, the top of the damper rod binds in the bush at the top. The shocker body rotates all the same as one steers, of course, and since the damper rod (and also the top plate restraining the spring) are _not_ rotating, torsional tension builds up in the spring. When this overcomes the friction in the sticky top mount it suddenly lets go with a disconcerting 'bang' and normal service resumes for a while. I suspect the steel cups I could see on the damper rod when I took things apart a little from the top, are meant to bear on rubber, and this stickiness means said rubber is b******d. But I thought I'd ask here first. Obviously I'd rather have the bits on hand when I take it apart, to put it all back together again in one go. But I'm so tight that if reclaiming the existing mount is a possibility, I'd like to know about it! Oh, and I have a different way around the 're-starting a hot diesel' problem, but I guess that belongs in a new thread. cheers Mark