Trev16v

This is why we drive with a little £50 DVR mounted in the windscreen now, continuously recording a reasonably good video stream to SD card. The view through the windscreen is continously recorded for every journey. Whether or not such evidence can be presented to argue a case I don't know, but if I or the wife should be unfortunately to be involved in a bump again in future, it'll be good to have. In my opinion anyone who even remotely cares for their vehicle and NCB should invest in one of those £50 DVRs.

Do you still have the shell? If so, I'm after these panels in good condition: http://the-corrado.net/showthread.php?71889-WTD-Front-floor-pan-quot-connecting-plate-quot-sections

Do you still have the shell? If so, I'm after these panels in good condition: http://the-corrado.net/showthread.php?71889-WTD-Front-floor-pan-quot-connecting-plate-quot-sections

Hi Matt, many thanks for taking those images for me. It's much appreciated. To be honest, looking at them I'm quite concerned about the amount of surface rust that has managed to creep in. I have a feeling those panels may turn out to be a bit too thin in places. I gave it some thought and in the end I have bitten the bullet and ordered brand new (and stupidly expensive) panel for the one side from VW Classic Parts in Germany. With that said, I am still on the lookout for a decent pair of salvaged panels as a backup, in case this one doesn't materialise from Germany. CazzaVR, did you have any joy in looking at yours for me please? I'd still be tempted to come and cut them out if they're in good nick. Trev

Happily, VCDS/VAGCOM will communicate with the 9A ECU. I think it's commonly said that the 9A ECU doesn't support comms because it can be notoriously difficult to make it work, but I figured out why this was and modified my interface so that it does. (I wrote some blurb about this in the big VAGCOM thread.) Using VCDS was really helpful last year when trying to diagnose some issues with our 9A Corrado. I used it to set the ignition timing and CO properly, and it also flagged up a very intermittent closed throttle switch that I might never have otherwise discovered. So, if the OP wants to get the car down to me in Oxfordshire at some point, we could wang my laptop onto it. (I realise that this would mean at least getting it to start and being able to limp it over.)

Any luck, gents? :)

About 200ish all in with postage back and forth, if I remember right. Removal of the rack is about as fun as hammering nails into your eyes, but it's not too bad. I rebuilt the front suspension on the wife's Corrado 16V last year and had the rack done by WPS. I completely lower the subframe to do it, while supporting the engine. It's just time consuming more than anything.

Sounds like it. Not good news. You can use a company like Western Power Steering to have it rebuilt. I've used them twice in the past.

Here are some pictures of the panel concerned. First of all, right side of car. This is the one that I want to replace. I realise it's not that bad at all anyway, but I have had to cut a couple of inches of rust out to form the large hole that can be seen, so I would rather just remove the panel and then refit a decent one. Also, the metal has quite thinned from surface rust - it only looks clean because I sandblasted it. If it comes to it, I'll re-use the same panel but repair it nicely on the bench with the TIG welder. I just don't fancy doing any nasty upside-down welding on this car. The left side of the car. This panel is okay in terms of not being rusty, but some tool has really jacked on it in the past and really crushed it in. I might try to just hammer it back into shape, or again, replace it. These panels, where they're "corrugated", form the underside skin of the sill. It's particularly important that replacements are very clean around the area where mine has gone. Chaps - once again many thanks in advance for any help with this. Also if it's any help to you Matt if you're prepared to cut the panels out, I could indicate on one of the pictures where the seams are if you like, though they're probably reasonably clear.

Hi Matt, that's awesome. Could I trouble you also for the images you have please? These metal floor pieces are commonly mangled so it may work out beneficial to get several to work with.

Hi mate, That's awesome. When do you think you'd be able to look for me? As I'm tempted to tackle this over the jubilee week. I'd happily PayPal beer money to you upfront for the hassle of getting there and doing pictures. Trev

You have a severe mechanical problem if the timing belt is stripping. It's nothing to do with oil pressure or blocking off the charger oil supply. How well does the engine turn over by hand? Specifically, how well does the head alone turn over by hand? It could be that your head has been overheated in the past and now the camshaft no longer turns as freely as it should, or something. Did you refit all head bearing caps in the correct orientation and location? The only time a belt will lose teeth is if it has been very perished by oil contamination and it is old, and / or valves have met pistons (16V engine). There's something horribly wrong with your cylinder head if two brand new timing belts have stripped. Or... thinking about this a little more, are you sure you have tensioned the timing belt propery, or is the belt starting to slip on the crank sprocket that should be driving it? Or is it definitely tensioned properly, but the belt's teeth are literally being ripped out?

I have a Golf G60 Syncro. I wish to replace the "connecting plate" sections (as they're called in ETKA) that are situated on the left / right of the car immediately beneath the bulkhead. On the Golf G60, the panels used are the same as those used on the Corrado; they're different to those used on the standard Golf MK2. When you look underneath the Corrado right at the front of the sill on either side and at the bottom of the A-pillar / bulkhead, you'll be familiar with an area of the floor that is pressed into quite a complicated shape. It's the area that people (unfortunately) commonly jack under and hence it often gets crushed out of shape, because it's not very strong and forms a cavity behind it. This part spans from the front 6" or so of the sill, and stops just before the structural box-section that runs beneath the floor sheet on either side. Here's a diagram that shows the component: The component is items 8 and 9 in that diagram (left and right, respectively). These are obsolete from the maindealer now, and were stupidly expensive when they were available (considering it's just a 12" square bit of pressed metal). What I will also do later on (when wife / baby / time permit!) is take a proper photograph of the area in question on my G60 Syncro, where I can show clearly where the seams are and where the piece is spot-welded in. The side I think I will definitely remove and replace (or repair) is the right-hand side piece (passenger side on a RHD car). What I'm looking for is someone who is breaking a Corrado and scrapping the shell, who can confirm that these areas are in very good condition (the right-hand piece more importantly) with no or little crush damage and nothing more than the slightest bit of surface rust along any seams, and is prepared to chop the areas out with an angle grinder so that I can then remove them properly by drilling the spot welds (or perhaps the seller might be prepared to remove them by drilling the spot welds for me - I am happy either way). Or, if the car isn't located across the country then I could perhaps pop over and do it. I'm located in Oxfordshire and work over in Gloucestershire. Any help getting these cut out from a scrap shell would be extremely appreciated and I'll stump up generously in return! One thing I would need to ask beforehand is if the seller would be prepared to scrape a bit of underseal back quickly to just check that the areas are in good condition, and perhaps take some pictures for me before I travel. The areas on my G60 looked very good until I stripped the underseal. Cheers, Trev

In the past I've seen someone actually cut the metalwork around the rear glass in order to extract them when removing from a scrap shell!

I agree that the fact that a given interface uses an optoisolator should not be an intrinsic reason for it not to work with the 9A ECU. Rather, it's going to be more to do with the complete design of the interface. Specifically,the 9A ECU doesn't seem to be able to sink much current when it wants to pull the K-line low. What I've found is that an interface should have a K-line pull-up resistor of not too much lower than 1K. I've used both an interface I made myself and also a trasparent blue eBay one (which sounds similar to yours), and I had to increase the K-line pull-up resistance value inside the eBay interface from 560R to 820R before it would work reliably with the 9A. Prior to doing that, I could see on the 'scope that the ECU wasn't able to pull the K-line low enough towards 0V. (See post #306 on page 31.) (Being able to communicate with the 9A ECU successfully turned out to be extremely useful. I managed to get the mixture calibration done, and it also helped reveal an intermittent closed throttle switch fault that I may never have identified otherwise.)

Guys, Just update to my earlier post about successfully using VAG-COM with the 9A KE-Jet ECU. Previously, I had success connecting reliably using a homebuilt interface. Next, I bought an unbranded USB / VAG-COM interface off eBay to try that. It's in a transparent blue plastic enclosure and has an FTDI USB IC. I found that this commercial interface did NOT communicate with the ECU, and a quick use of the 'scope revealed why. The problem was that the interface's internal pull-up resistor on the K-line, 560ohm, was just too 'stiff' for the 9A ECU to be able to pull down to near enough 0V. I changed it for 820ohm, and bingo - communicates with the 9A's ECU perfectly. I expect this is the reason why many VAG-COM interfaces won't talk to the 9A 16V ECU. There's the fix! Trev

James - can't personally help with your VCDS situation but if you needed someone to replace that laptop display then I could do it for you easily if you needed someone to do it (brand new replacements obtained on eBay very easily); however I'm possibly a bit far from you being in Oxfordshire. Just another question regarding the 16V 9A ECU if anyone can advise. I am aware that when the old 1551 tool is used to read group 00 from this ECU, the ECU disables the digital idle control to allow you to properly set up the ignition timing. (I did notice some time back that the 9A ECU appears to use digital idle, or "spark scatter", to control idle, thus giving an unstable timing mark when you use a strobe gun on the flywheel.) Can anyone confirm whether using VCDS to read group 00 has the same effect? I'm hoping / presuming it does. Edit: Hmm, okay - according to VCDS online documentation, the 'Basic Settings' window is equivalent to 1551 function 04, which is what the VAG manuals tell you to use to read group 00 and disable the digital idle. (If anyone needs it, the 9A timing manual that mentions this feature can be found here: http://doc.vw.org.ua/ignition/b3_28_ignition_system.pdf. If you browse through the directory structures, there's lots of other useful information. It's best to refer to the Passat B3 or CIS or KE-Jetronic files; don't try to find Corrado 16V files there.) Cheers, Trev

If you use a little mirror and torch behind the white plastic switch you'll eventually see where the little screw is. As it happens I need to replace the ignition switch on our 1993 Corrado, and I can see exactly where the screw is -- but it appears that it'd be almost impossible to get a screwdriver to it unless the right-hand ignition barrel housing is separated first, which would mean removing the two bolts with sheared heads. Yuk! Not entirely keen on the idea of using force to remove anything either. It's a similar situation on a MK2 Golf, where the upper bearing housing has to be removed completely before you can get at the screw properly. But at least it's quite easy to remove the housing on a MK2.

Thank you for this reply some time back. Many months later I have finally got round to looking into this again, as I wanted to be able to communicate with the ECU in my wife's 9A 16V. I've now done this successfully and hopefully what I've learned will be helpful to others. I'm going to go a little technical here; anyone wanting to just know the solution can skip to the end. Last night I put together my own interface which quite simply consists of three transistor level shifters/inverters for bi-directional Tx/Rx on the K-line and Tx drive on the L-line. I used this interface circuit through a serial to USB dongle (which most probably contains an FTDI IC). I've been trying to versions of VAG-COM: An old V409, and the current VCDS-Lite. I used the oscilloscope to see what was going on over the K and L-lines when VAG-COM was attempting to communicate, and from this learned of some interesting quirks. When VAG-COM first attempts to initiate a connection with the ECU when you hit the "01-Engine" button, VAG-COM does the following things: (1) First of all a few bytes of data are transmitted at relatively high baud rate. (2) Then, VAG-COM sends the 5-baud (200ms per bit) 0x33 initiation byte. This it retries many times over; it happens each time you see it do the "retry in 2s" countdown. I don't know what VAG-COM is doing in step (1) because it's NOT how initiation should begin. I can't look at the data in detail because my 'scope is a crap analogue one but I'm assuming it's an AT command that VAG-COM first sends to try to discover if you're using an intelligent adapter (intelligent adapters are AT-command driven, and they save Windows the burden of having to write to a COM port at non-standard baud rates). Then presumably it falls back to 'dumb' mode after that, generating the 5-baud initiation bytes itself. What I realised however is that the 9A ECU stubbornly refuses to reply to the 5-baud initiation bytes if it sees the high baud-rate data at the start. However, if power is switched on to the ECU at a later point during one of the retry wait periods, the first activity the ECU will see on the bus will be the 5-baud 0x33 that it recognises, and it'll then happily respond. Furthermore, the baud rate setting in V409 / VCDS need not be touched at all, I found. In fact, I struggled to see the baud rate setting actually have any effect at all on what I saw happening on the bus. Need to investigate that more. Another thing I notice is that sometimes when ECU does respond (i.e. sends response bytes back after the initiation command) but VAG-COM doesn't register it! I suspect a timing issue within VAG-COM itself. So in summary, I can connect to the 9A ECU very reliably if I ensure that the ignition is OFF when I first hit "01-Engine", and I only turn the ignition on again when it is counting down from 3s. If that fails, cycle the ignition again when it says retry in 4s. If you hit "01-Engine" with the ignition turned on, the ECU will absolutely not accept a connection. I leave the baud rate at default setting. This advice is based on using a dumb interface (which, in my case, is one I put together driven via a USB/serial adapter). Next I'll try some readily built ones off eBay.

I would get your existing one reconditioned. You could use a company like Western Power Steering for this. They do a pretty fast service. I used them to recondition the rack on my Golf G60 Syncro for me.

Hi gents, Going by the information provided right at the beginning of this thread, I've always understood that the 16V 9A ECU cannot be read by VAG-COM, and that the only information that can be read via VAG-COM on the 9A Corrado is fault code data from the ABS controller. This was pretty much confirmed to me recently when I borrowed VAG-COM from a friend, and when I used it, it was only able to detect the ABS ECU and not the engine ECU on our 2L 9A Corrado. However, I've been reading various threads on here relating to troubleshooting on the 9A and read lots of comments from people using a diagnostic utility to read fault codes and other real-time parameters from the 9A engine ECU, which can then be used to diagnose faults with the lambda sensor, etc. So, should it be possible to read the 9A ECU via VAG-COM after all, or is another diagnostic protocol (i.e. something other than VAG-COM) used? EDIT: After even more searching I came across this thread: http://the-corrado.net/.archive/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=33509&hilit=9a+fault+codes. The information here suggests that I need to use VAG-COM interface that is not optically isolated; I think the interface I used was indeed opto-isolated. If this is true then it would be extremely helpful if someone could please suggest a source for a VAG-COM interface which has been tested and confirmed to work with the 9A ECU. Thanks, Trev

Gents, Many thanks for the suggestions. And yes, this really had turned out to be a very weird situation. I had spent about two whole days trying to get that car to start. As I said, what was happening was that I was getting a very good spark and plenty of fuel into the engine. On every attempt to start, the plugs would be wet. On that occasion where I removed the fuel pump relay, it initially started and ran for a few seconds on the residual pressure. With the FP relay back in, it almost started but then went back to how it was. In accordance with the advice kindly given above I did check the temperature sensor. The resistance across it was approximately 2.80K at ambient temperature. I don't have the temperature / resistance graph for this sensor to hand, but 2 to 3K at ambient sounds about right for a typical Bosch curve. Anyway, what I did was I removed the FP relay again. And sure enough, it started and ran for a few seconds. But what I did this time was I restarted the engine another five or six times. Each time, it ran. I then put the FP relay back into the fusebox, and then the engine started and ran absolutely fine. And it has done so ever since without problems. This has been so utterly bizarre. I reckon that the process of washing the brake fluid residue from the engine bay caused moisture to enter the distributor cap, and this possibly caused non-fire and thus engine flooding to happen. But what I am wondering is perhaps I never sufficiently cleared the engine of fuel. At one stage I turned the engine over without the spark plugs - surely this would clear the bores sufficiently. But no, it seems that I needed to start the engine several times, until the system pressure really had totally gone. Then fit the FP relay, and off she goes. :cuckoo: Trev

Hello, For several days I have been trying to get my wife's Corrado 2L 16V (9A, KE-Jetronic) to start. I have only just replaced the ABS unit on this car. During replacement of the ABS unit, I only had to disturb very few engine components: the distributor cap, and part of the inlet pipework. Car turns over but now totally refuses to start. You get a few slight firing attempts perhaps, usually when I try to start it after drying the spark plugs. But after a few cranks, it keeps spinning over without any signs that it is starting to fire. Spark: I have a very good bright spark at all spark plugs. The spark plugs were tested by grounding them to the top of the head. This eliminates ground issues, and shows that the distributor and hall sender are good. (I had also tried a new distributor and coil from my 16V G60 previously, just to completely eliminate them.) Fuel: The spark plugs get very wet, very quickly. It's fuel, and it evaporates off them as soon as they are taken out. Strong fuel vapour out of the exhaust after cranking for a long period. There is definitely fuel going in, and seemingly quite a lot of it. This morning I took the spark plugs out and dried fuel off them (yet again). The engine was also turned over for about a minute with the plugs out and fuel pump relay removed to totally dry out the bores. Spark plugs put back in. FP relay left out. The engine actually started and ran very nicely for about three seconds, running of course off the residual fuel pressure that had been in the system since the last starting attempt (which was the previous night). I put the FP relay back in and tried again; this time it almost started but then it reverted back to just spinning over without any signs of firing. I have not taken the plugs out again yet, but when I do, I know that they will be extremely wet. It seems like there is excess fuel going in when I attempt to start. This car WAS perfectly fine, and has been fine in one and a half years of ownership. Now it is suddenly like this. Any ideas please? The only idea I have at the moment is to ensure that I haven't caused damaged to any of the wiring associated with, say, the throttle position sensor, etc. Thanks Trev

Okay, this afternoon I went ahead and fitted the ABS unit from the wife's previous Corrado, which was exactly the same car and had an equally low mileage (about 70K) and was broken up after it was rear-ended. I'm extremely glad I kept all of the mechanical and electrical parts off it. After fitting the 'new' ABS unit, I fitted the pressure bleeder and I had new fluid flowing out of all four corners without any problem at all. The only issue I have now is that the pedal pretty much wants to sink to the floor. I think that I must still have air in there somewhere, even though I shoved lots of new fluid through. Any tips on this please? It's now too dark for me to continue working on it and I shall have to resume at the weekend. It's far too bad at the moment for the car to be driven. I hope that the old ABS unit really was definitely faulty after all that effort! What does bug me a bit is that I never tried the pressure bleeder with the old ABS unit. I only tried the pedal method. In fact, I even drove the car around gently outside the house with the nipple completely undone on that caliper, and still no fluid ever came out. And when I did move it around with that nipple undone, I had a very firm brake pedal. In fact it felt too firm. I hope all of this confirms that the valve must have been stuck in the old unit.

Hello Gareth, Many thanks, that's very interesting. Yes, it certainly seems that it's a problem that the self-diagnostics cannot 'see', as you say. When the diagnostics check the operation of the solenoids, for instance, I expect that all it does it check that the solenoid coils are present (and non open-circuit) by measuring current flow into them. But if a solenoid has become mechanically stuck, presumably it would have no way to determine this. What really pains me in all of this is that the ABS was working absolutely fine until I let the fluid drain out. I can't understand how I could have damaged it so easily. Fortunately I do have the spare ABS unit from the wife's old Corrado which is exactly the same unit, and that was working fine. So I do have another one I can fit. But, before I go ahead, how can I be totally, 100% sure that I really do have a fault with the unit? It's a lot of effort to go through if it turns out there's some other stupid thing I have overlooked. And secondly, how on earth do I avoid doing such damage to the replacement unit? I am guessing that I should just ensure I pressure bleed fluid through the unit before ever turning on the ignition, and never power it up 'dry'. Many thanks for your help, it's much appreciated. I could in theory brave the rain and replace that unit this afternoon, but I need a sort of final push to convince me I'm doing the right thing! Is it a fairly common fault symptom for a valve to stick? On a final note, I did just go out to try the method of holding the pedal while turning on the ignition. I had the nipple open. When turning on the ignition, the ABS did its usual self-check and the light went on for just a couple of seconds. But I could not hear the pump continue to run, and nothing came out of that nipple. Trev