@D.FYLAKTOS This is all of the info on the front brakes which I found in TeflonTom's Felicia 1.8T transplant thread.

https://www.briskoda.net/forums/topic/209180-felicia-18t-transplant-thread/page/4/#findComment-2991830

https://www.briskoda.net/forums/topic/209180-felicia-18t-transplant-thread/page/4/#findComment-2991838

This is essentially the same as what I have told you already. The 'little spacer' which is mentioned as being required between the mounting lugs and the caliper carrier bracket is actually some chunky washers with a total thickness about 5mm. I had in mind that the holes in the mounting lugs had to be re-tapped for larger bolts, but I can find nothing about that in this thread so I am not sure now.

Next time I have a front wheel off my Caddy I will check the size of the caliper mounting bolts and confirm on here. I discovered that I have a 14" wheel here too, so I will try that and see if the Mondeo calipers fit under it. It is actually a Vauxhall steel wheel so it will not tell you definitively whether your 14" wheels will fit, but it should show conclusively if they will not.

Edited 16 July16 Jul by Bete Noir

This Caddy has been in my ownership for almost nine years. The work that is documented in this thread I hope bears testament to the fact that it has never lacked for attention, and it has had more money spent on it than I would ever admit to my partner, but nonetheless there was still a shocking discovery to be made. Driving in and out of my workshop, up and down a small step / ramp I sometimes heard a noise like sheet metal deforming. More than once I had crawled over and under the pick-up in search of evidence of the source of this noise, but without success. The same noise occurred when I raised it using the scissor lift for the recent gearbox / driveshafts and brakes work, but now I could see dents in the side panels between the B-pillar and the rear wheels. This is not good!

 

Johnny from S&P Autos, who have now changed their name to Martlet Autos, had a look at the Caddy while it was on the lift in my workshop. It was obvious that it was not as rigid as it ought to be, but it was not at all obvious why not. There is a lot of new metal under there, and no sign of tin-worm, so the cause of the flex in the bodywork could not be identified. There were a couple of other jobs I wanted Johnny to do on it before submitting for an MOT test anyway, so we added further investigation of the structural issue to the jobs list.

 

When the appointment at the body shop came around, tactical jacking soon had the area of weakness pin-pointed, and a bit of expert poking unmasked the full horror.

 

The front lower half of the nearside rear wheelarch was not steel. Rust had eaten away the original metal in this area, and rather than repairing it properly the previous owner had put some effort into hiding it instead. The critical area where the wheelarch meets the sill, adjacent to the rear beam mounting, had been patched-over with fibreglass then painted with stonechip to complete the disguise. No wonder the Caddy was trying to fold in half!

 

NSR wheelarch fibreglass bodge

 

I want to stress at this point that I have never sought or received a ‘dodgy’ MOT for this or any other vehicle I have owned, and nor do I blame any of the MOT testers who have passed the Caddy during my ownership for not having spotted this horrendous bodge. Effort had gone into applying and painting the fibreglass so it looked like the surrounding solid bodywork. I can remember when MOT testers routinely used to run a hammer and a magnet over the underbody, which would have shown there was something very wrong, but I do not know of anyone who still does this as a matter of course. Without that this bodge was very hard to detect.

 

This photo was taken once the repair work was underway.

Getting back to how it needs to be.

Whilst the rear axle was hanging loose and out of the way, the opportunity presented itself to do some work to improve the top spring seats. They certainly look better for it.

At the body shop the work that I had done to tidy the hockey stick trims was completed, concluding with some nice gloss black paint. When the rear bed floor repairs were done they were finished-off with a covering of black raptor paint, but the tailgate inner panel had not been painted to match, and this was a good chance to rectify that oversight.

The Caddy looked better than it ever has previously, during my ownership at least.

There are a couple of results from the latest trip to the body shop which I neglected to draw attention to in the last update, one of which was a conscious choice while the other was unexpected.

 

I have never liked how the ‘hockey stick’ trims extend across the B-pillar. When I bought this Caddy these trims had been unceremoniously curtailed at their front ends, which caused some problems with water ingress to the load area, but was one of the previous owner’s visual mods which I did not hate.

Replacing these trims was an opportunity to do a better job along the same lines, and I had Martlet Autos cut and chamfer the front edges to follow the line of the cab back. In my opinion it looks like they are supposed to be like that, which is a positive sign.

The unintended outcome from the work to the rear spring top seats is that the rear ride height is now much higher. I need to get the back end up in the air again to make sure that the springs are seated correctly (there are no untoward noises to suggest otherwise), and if they are then I need to look again at lowering springs. I still have the springs I bought when I rebuilt the rear suspension, so it will be a little effort no cost job to swap them over.

This update is not about progress on my Caddy, but instead is about an event I attended. I was not there in the Caddy so the relevance to this thread may seem tenuous, but please bear with me.

 

Earlier this month I attended the Retro-Rides Gathering at Prescott Hillclimb. I was there in my SEAT Ibiza, and was lucky enough to be able to take it up the hill.

Wandering around the retro parking I saw these:

I would have really liked to have spoken to the owner of this one. The wheels appear to be the same Renault 16” steels which I have on my Caddy, and the paint colour is remarkably similar. I love the facelift front end too.

This last one is not my photo, so if the person who took it recognises it and objects then please get in touch and I will remove it.

 

The point I wanted to make is that when I bought my Caddy these Felicia-based pick-ups were mostly unloved, and you never saw them at events. This is clearly changing. There are now increasing numbers of Felica and mk2 Caddy pick-ups which have obviously had money and effort spent on them. I think this is great news, and if anyone reading this is struggling for motivation on their own project, I hope this helps.

On 13/07/2026 at 12:42, D.FYLAKTOS said:

I have 14" (factory were 13") wheels so dont know what options i have...

Sorry it has taken a while to check. It is not good news, the 14" wheel does not fit over the Mondeo calliper, even with the 25mm spacers which I have fitted.

Oh No, so i have to move on to 15" wheels and different set of tyres?

I cannot be 100% certain that there is no combination of 14" wheels and spacers which would fit over the 280mm discs and Mondeo ATE callipers, but I do not know of any car which has discs that size and runs on 14s. It is probably fair to assume that 15" wheels are a minimum requirement.

Another job that Martlet Autos got done whilst the Caddy was with them was to replace the windscreen rubber. I really wanted to get it done by an automotive glass specialist, because I figured that they would definitely use a quality rubber or risk me making a fuss if the windscreen (still) leaked. Unfortunately the only place local to me which showed an interest in doing the job on a 30 year old car then lost that interest and ghosted me.

 

Plan B was to buy the best quality windscreen rubber that I could find, but that was stymied by the total lack of choice of rubbers which were available from stock. Literally all I could find was a rubber made by Vika on eBay. Sika I am aware of, Vika I was not. It was worryingly cheap too. Still, beggars can’t be choosers, so I ordered one. I was pleasantly surprised when it arrived and did not feel like it had been made from recycled tyres. Johnny at Martlet concurred, and he is better qualified to know than I am. So far so good insofar as the Caddy’s carpet has been staying dry in the recent rain.

 

With all of the bodywork jobs done, for now, it was finally time for a new MOT. On the way over to JKM for the test there was very clearly something wrong with how the Caddy was boosting. As soon as the boost approached 1bar it was all being dumped very abruptly. This was diagnosed to be due to my re-fitting the N75 valve wrongly, which was a simple fix.

 

In what has become my usual style, I had asked JKM to do a couple of jobs which I did not fancy doing myself. One of these jobs was to fit the braided brake hoses. I bought HEL kits for front and rear, which involved making a couple of guesses due to my Caddy having very few of the original spec brake components still fitted. For the front I bought Mondeo hoses to match the ATE callipers, and these proved to be fine. For the rear I bought a Felicia kit, even though I have disc brakes, but this was not so successful. The issue was that the kit was for a Felicia hatchback or estate, and so contained only one hose for each side rather than the two per side required for the pick-up. JKM did try to source the hoses to finish the job, but could not get any delivered in time to fit on the day that the Caddy was with them. That part of it will have to be deferred to another day.

 

The second job was to fit (another) new sump. The one that was on there had not suffered impact damage like the previous one, at least not that I can remember, but it was leaking badly, more so following my forlorn attempt to re-seal it.

 

Whenever I collect a vehicle from JKM, which happens fairly frequently, I always find myself in the evening rush hour on the drive home along the A27. This time it was worse because I was doing it at the height of a heatwave, there were roadworks on the A27 plus a diversion due to a full closure of another road, so the traffic was carnage! I sat in queues virtually the whole way home, and all while the temperature gauge was creeping towards the red. I had remembered the Caddy as cooling very efficiently when it was in more regular use, but it was definitely looking marginal now. The cooling fan tell-tale on the dash was illuminated most of the way home, but the temperature gauge was only coming down when I was generating airflow through motion. It was a massive relief when I made it back home without the Caddy boiling.

 

The next day I tested the cooling fans, and found that whilst the tell-tale was on, the fans were not. It did not take long to pinpoint the fan relay as being the cause. I swapped it for another, and normal operation was restored. When I tested the failed relay on the bench, it actually ‘unstuck’ after a couple of attempts, but I threw it in the bin anyway, I am not trusting that again after it has come so close to causing a disaster.

Ages ago on this thread I mentioned that I am aspiring to OEM or OEM+ look for my Caddy. At that time, the obtrusively blue throttle body hose was pointed-out as an obvious departure from this look. I already had this on my to do list when it was suggested, but an under-bonnet hose which was doing its job perfectly well has struggled to make its way to the top of the list. This changed when I had the throttle body off a couple of times in the process of investigating the intermittent engine fault (see later), and I realised that re-fitting a part which I wanted to replace made little sense. Having the blue hose off also made it very straightforward to check the diameters of the two ends, to make sure I ordered an appropriate replacement.

That’s better 😊


Reliability issues have been blighting my enjoyment of the Caddy for a few years. I like to think I am a competent problem-solver, but a lot of my attention has been devoted to my SEAT Ibiza, so whilst I have implemented a couple of fixes on the Caddy, I have not spent the time to get to the root cause of the issues. I am lucky in that I never have to rely on the Caddy, so I just have not taken it out very often. This is a shame, and needed to be sorted.

The symptoms were that it started on the ‘button’ every time, even after sitting for weeks, and the engine ran beautifully, until it stopped. No misfire, no poor running, it just stopped. Sometimes it would fire-up again immediately, and other times it would not fire at all. How long it would run for, and how long it would refuse to run for, both appeared to be completely random. Sometimes it was seconds, and sometimes days. I do hate intermittent faults!

These symptoms are similar to what I saw when the ECU failed previously, although with that there was a definite decline in reliability, so as the problems became more common it became easier to diagnose the fault. Fuel supply issues have also plagued this car, both with the fuel pump and the control of it, and even though the old adage ‘if it spits and farts it’s fuel, if it stops dead it’s electrical’ is well-proven, I still could not quite put aside my suspicions that I was seeing more of the same. With this in mind, I started by connecting my tell-tale lead to the fuel pump…

… and a pressure gauge into the fuel supply line.

With those in place it was a simple case of running the engine and waiting for it to cut-out. Except it ran perfectly. I tried several times, for about twenty minutes each time, and it refused to fail. I did notice that the fuel pressure is slightly lower than I was expecting, at 2.8bar, but that pressure was steady and was held after the engine was switched-off, so I ruled-out a pump issue. I will swap the FPR for a 4bar one, but 2.8bar should be plenty for the Caddy’s state of tune, and certainly would not cause the symptoms I was seeing.

My ODBII Bluetooth dongle point blank refused to scan the Caddy for fault codes, meaning that I had to dig-out my trusty diagnostic laptop. For some reason the dongle wanted a VIN in a format that the Caddy simply does not have, whereas the laptop software allows you to try all addresses and scan any modules which respond, and also lets you edit a txt file to add specific vehicles to the options list. This is very handy for modified cars.

Scanning the Caddy gave me the following food for thought:

Ignoring the last item regarding the message from the ABS controller, which is irrelevant, the others make interesting reading, although it took me a while to figure them out. The ECU’s connection to each of the listed components controls them via individual switched earth outputs, and the code 29-10 tells me that a problem with the wiring loom is the most likely culprit. This is particularly interesting because whilst all of these circuits connect to the ECU, they are not all in the same loom at any point. The ME3.8 ECU in the Caddy has two separate wiring connectors, even though the ElsaWin current flow diagrams represent both connectors in the combined T80. One of the ECU connectors, with pins 1-52, goes to the vehicle-side loom. This includes the fuel pump relay and charcoal cannister purge valve connections, on adjacent pins. The other connector, with pins 53-80, goes to the engine loom. This includes the connections to each of the injectors, and the N75 valve, all of which are adjacent to each other in the ECU plug. No wonder I have struggled to diagnose this, it is looking like two separate intermittent faults.

I already have an imperfect mitigation in place for the fuel pump relay / purge valve short circuit, in the form of the bypass switch I fitted previously. That could cause the purge valve to open unnecessarily, but this will not cause the engine to cut-out. I can afford to leave the permanent fix of this until the remedy is in place for the engine loom fault.

I do not understand why the injector and N75 valve controls shorting to each other and/or or to earth would cause the engine to stop abruptly without any sign of rough-running or mis-fire, but nonetheless it is clear that it is not going to be helpful, and needs to be sorted. The involvement of the N75 boost control valve also helps to explain the fact that the fault did not appear when the engine was idling on the driveway, as no boost => no action for the N75 valve.

There are two obvious options for the engine loom fix, which are a) locate the damaged section of loom and make repairs, or b) replace the whole engine loom. I have a few 1.8T engine looms, but they vary by engine code, and I do not have one for the AGU engine in the Caddy. I could modify a loom to make it work, but that is not a quick task. I will make a custom engine loom for it at some point, but now is not the right time. That leaves me repairing the current loom.

If the VCDS log is pointing me in the right direction, the faults are located at or close to the ECU connectors, so that was where I started. Once I had some of the convoluted sleeve and wrapping tape removed from the loom, it revealed some loose ends of cable, and some wires which had three or four solder joins within about 300mm. Neither of these things necessarily contribute to the problem at hand, but they do present unnecessary risks for future failures. While I had my head in the loom I figured I may as well do a proper job, so I exposed more of the engine bay wiring until I got to this.



The vehicle loom ECU connector itself was in a sorry state. It had become brittle, and snapped in two locations when I unplugged it. I had recently bought a genuine new replacement connector, which was handy. The photo below shows the old connector, and I have included it to show the number of cut-off ends of cables, and I have arranged all of the other unused wires off towards the bottom of the picture just to show how many of them there were.

One of the connections which I got rid of was that for the carbon cannister purge valve. I had been planning on deleting the carbon cannister before the purge valve made an appearance on the VCDS fault scan, and there will never be a better opportunity. Whilst the loom was unwrapped it was very easy to remove any trace of the wiring to this valve. I extended the tank breather hose to the front corner of the inner wing, where I will add a rollover valve.

When I had finished rationalising and tidying the connections in the loom, I bound it temporarily with cable ties, before plugging it all back in. The new and newly sparse ECU vehicle loom connector can be seen at the bottom left of this picture.

Before attempting to start the engine, I had one more long overdue task to do. I had noticed that the hose between the induction pipe and the MAF was split, so I had ordered a 70mm silicone 45deg elbow and a Ramair cone air filter, plus an alloy joiner to go between them. Ideally I would like an OEM-look airbox, and I had hoped that a Golf mk4 GTI airbox might fit, but the available space in the Caddy is an awkward shape. At least I got rid of a polished alloy pipe in favour of a black silicone hose.



It was a great relief when the engine burst keenly back into life on the first turn of the key, and with no indications on the dash that I had made any mistakes with the wiring. I did not have the time for a long test drive, but I did a couple of laps round the block, and made a point of deploying some boost (sorry neighbours) with no signs of it cutting-out. The proper test drive will be a nervous time.