dr_mat

Well that's just wrong. Sounds like something is seriously pulling some current off the electrical system.

GSF do genuine Bosch refurbed alternators on an exchange basis, though it sounds more like you might just need the output regulator.

Well you'll have to take the fans off at some point, unless you're buying a new rad with fans already fitted .. :roll: ;)

You can get the rad out sideways.. if you take the fan assembly off the back of it while it's in-situ and then remove the battery. Lean the top of the rad back, lift out the right-hand end, tilt it upwards till the bottom of it clears the battery tray.. slide out sideways .. A local mechanic did mine for me this year, took him about three hours, which isn't bad considering he'd never done one before. (The fan disassembly has a book time of 1 hour, on it's own..)

The battery is reading a good voltage, 13v, suggesting it's well charged, but it takes some time after a charge cycle before the battery "relaxes" to it's natural output voltage, so come back after 30 minutes or so and measure it again. Also, could be the run-on fans? They'd only run for a short while, but if they were shorting somewhere you'd pull 20 amps without blowing the fuse - easily enough to empty the battery in a couple of hours. This circuit wouldn't necessarily be active when you're testing it, see..

What voltage are you reading across the battery, immediately after a run, with the ignition off? (A new multi-meter is a fiver in maplin, in case your voltmeter is screwed, and a clamp meter will safely tell you what current is flowing through the wires without you having to disconnect them..) Best bet is to put a clamp meter on the big battery lead and pull fuses out till the current drops to below 0.5 amps. (Ideally below 0.1 amps, but I don't think Corrados are capable of getting that low .. )

The gap doesn't look too outlandish, nope. But if that is in fact a split TM, time to get it replaced. If it's just a split in the strut coating, then don't worry...

I'm just wondering how many more VWs you can buy and put (nearly) the same wheels on!

Ahem, Henny, someone already mentioned that .. ;)

The mk5 golf is about a foot and a half taller (not to mention wider and lower), and frontal surface area is a huge part of the drag calculations, so actually that doesn't paint such a rosy picture of the Corrado's aerodynamics at all!

New heater matrix all come with built-in bypass valves.

Yes I think so. They tend to lose definition as they get hot, so the engine stops, and won't restart for a while till it cools a little. But could just be a loose connection causing it to momentarily loose signal, couldn't it? .... Btw overrevved probably means someone did something stupid like dropping it into 2nd at 90. You can't force the engine to overrev just with your right foot cos the ECU limiter kills the power, you have to force it to overrev through the gearbox ..

ECUs ending "CP" are generally coded. Anyway, that's not really the issue, it's more making sure you get another part that is compatible with your wiring loom and engine sensors. So if you had an ECU part "AG" you'd be best off looking for another one the same ...

.. or from the passengers?

Most modern cars have a load of plastic panelling underneath to try and smooth the air flow. The C was "old skool".. i.e. "cheap and nasty". I think the C's stability in cross winds is more about it weighing a stack load more than anything else it's age, and it being a bit squat compared to the cornflake boxes people buy now.. :) It's general aerodynamics are very much an afterthought (the spoiler for example)!

I think you'll need one the same, otherwise you might need to change some other parts of the wiring loom. Plus, since it's the CP model, you'll need to get it coded to match your keys...

Interesting you mention this, but remember the previous mondeo shape? I seemed to see hundreds of those with split rear bumpers flapping around at one side on the motorways. It looked very much like the bumper was acting as a bit of a parachute..

Ah, ok, the Cambridge one. Don't know much about cambs general SC resource, but the astrophysics dept have a big Altix... Cost per MHz isn't what's most interesting, btw, it's $ per GFLOP that's most interesting, and then it gets a lot closer than you'd think. And then there's the application itself... There's always going to be a premium for doing NUMA in hardware, that's inevitable, but it depends on the application workload. So-called "embarrassingly parallel" applications (e.g. ray tracing) scale up regardless of the interconnect used - and PC clusters are GREAT for this stuff. But apps that do a LOT of inter-process communication hit a scaling brick wall unless your interconnect is phenomenally quick .. I've seen cases where an app running on pc clusters on 512 cores runs SLOWER than running it on 64 cores. Of course in those cases we sell 'em an Altix and it runs many many times quicker. :)

The national supercomputing resource at manchester uni? That's a pissy cluster now, it used to be proper machines, proper scalable machines.. The PC cluster rules the world now. Why make it well when you can make it cheap and do the rest in software?

Ah, ok. Politically awkward to use all the CPUs.. :) McLaren use IA64 processors (and lots of them). In fact, a lot of the F1 teams seem to use IA64. Must be something to do with that 8GFlops/core of 128-bit floating point goodness..

What are you running it on?

Sounds like it's gonna be one of the holy triumvirate: the MAF, the lambda, or the ISV at fault.. You might also have a crank sensor problem, but that's very hard to diagnose. (The fault gets overwritten as soon as the engine stops.)

Fortran is nice and efficient because it's very limited. It's great for maths, cos that's all it does. And the net result is if you compile -O3 or -O4 the compiler can turn your dodgy algorithms into streamlined machine code. The C compiler, for example, can't make anywhere near as many optimisations simply because C is so much closer to the machine code anyway. I used to write fortran at Uni .. Of course, in the real world, people like McLaren use StarP to do their math modelling (on a bunch of Altix machines). I don't think they do much algorithm coding in fortran any more.

Indeed, it's not that simple, but the net result is slower airflow over the top of the car, which results in the reduction in lift. (Due to the differing air pressure above/below the car etc etc ..) Apparently...!

Really? Cool. Someone gets a white christmas. If you happen to live up a mountain near inverness, anyway.. Doubt it, since the angle of attack of the spoiler compared to the airflow is quite high, I suspect that you'll find it's past the stall angle, so could never be used as a wing..