dr_mat

GSF have both, AFAIK.

... it *is* 13 years old .... Leaves bad memories though, eh? I had just loaded a carfull of stuff into the boot on xmas eve 2002, ready to go away. I'd dropped the missus off at the airport that very morning, so I knew the car was ok, didn't expect any problems.. Had finally finished locking up the house, went to get in the car, key in the ignition... click .. click .. click .. No rotation at the engine ... bugger!! three hours later (it was xmas eve) nice mr RAC man came out and basically smirked at me and said "starter's gone - can't do anything I'm afraid".. I had to unload the damn car, again, and prepare a much smaller bag, and go and get the damn train. Which took hours (it was xmas eve...)... And by the time I returned, and *any* local garage was open again the car had been off the road for a grand total of 15 days. :(

The guy's in Missouri. They use miles, not km in the US...

yeh but VW stealers usually charge £80/hour + VAT... That's only 2-3 hours there!

thought services were every 10,000 miles?!

Like I say Kev, not sure, but I think there's a lot of beam pattern shaping done by the surface shape of the lens. Take a look at the postition of the dipped element shield, it just deflects light away from the top half of the reflector dish. The angled beam of light on the left hand side of the road (for LHD) appears to be produced by the shaping of the lens, as far as I can see.

If you can buy just the lens, then that would provide the look without any loss of brightness... Euro lights have the dip governed slightly by the patterning in the glass though (as I understand it), so you may find they won't be road-legal in the UK.

Ah, "club prices". How does one get those now then? Do you actually have to be a dealer these days?

Registration with Ross-tech costs $99, so should be about £55-60 after currency exchange and stuff like that now. The one thing the I don't like about Ross-Tech's policies is that you have to remember to go through a "deactivation" step before any major changes to your OS or system, as it warns that any major changes *could* invalidate your registration. Even changing the clock is listed as a potential problem (which I can understand I guess). You'd then have to perform a re-activation afterwards. Presumably it's keyed against some hash generated from the windows registry. Speaking as a person that very rarely boots windows, but when I do it's to reinstall or perform a major update, this could be extremely inconvenient!! And as mentioned above, the more expensive ross-tech cables have a hardware dongle, so they will auto-activate any shareware software installation.

As for my ABS problems, since resetting the codes, I had the light come on once on my way home (but this was whilst driving, crucially, so probably is down to a dodgy sensor), but it's not come on during cold starts any more. I will not be holding my breath, cos I'm sure it *will* come back on at some point, but...

(Sorry Kev, but a mastery of inane pedantry requires that I point out that torque should be measured in "lb ft" not "lb/ft" ;) )

Well the 2.9 Corrado vr6 (european) did 190bhp/ 181lbft, the R32 golf (3.2 litre, 24v, VVT, VSR) does about 235bhp and 215lbft (approx). I think the 2.8 Corrado vr6 (US) did 175bhp/ 170lbft I'm not sure what the figures are for the newer 24v 2.8 VR6 engines tho. ..google will tell all if you search for the right things though, I'm sure..

I have heard rumours of people managing to change the heater core (matrix) without removing the dash, but most people have to remove the dash. Not sure about the work required to fix the heated seats at all, sorry. Your last question, however I can answer.. Assuming you tell us what you mean by "current VR6". The current cars using the VR6 engine are badged "V6" (at least in Europe), and are 24-valve heads. The R32 is also a 3.2 litre. The new ones are more powerful than the old (courtesy of the extra valves). No Corrados had 24 valve heads, they were all 12v VR6s.

Can't help but think he might aswell have bought an S3 in the first place and modded that instead....

Mine aren't silent, that's true enough. A noticeable tick-tick-tick from that side of the engine when it's revved gently. And having heard the .wma clip mine aren't *that* bad, no question... :) I get the tick-tick noise that you can hear in the clip, but not the rattle.

Bear in mind that clip was recorded with a DV cam perched just on top of the gearbox - right next to the chains themselves... It'll accentuate the problem, no question. I'll try and play the clip at home, and see if I get depressed again... :(

Correction - found it, but it's a .wma. I don't have a windows box so can't play it... I'm keeping my head in the sand for now, thanks. Don't have £1300 right now.

I fully expect they have.. No reason to assume not, given that every other person says theirs have at 100k miles, and I can definitely hear a metallic ticking noise from that end of the engine. It's not really loud, and it's not horrible, but I'm sure it'll need doing at some point. I can't find that sound clip, so I can't really compare to mine...

Yes all VRs were fitted with TC. And yes, I can hear the lovely chains slapping in a lovely manner at 1200 rpm... :( It makes me want to a) sell the damn car b) move to another country c) change my name d) become a farmer. ...or something...

You should try it. Maybe you wouldn't need to replace the timing chains all the time!! :-P Look, on the 8V Cavalier you get NO benefit from reving past 3k rpm. It's producing peak torque at 2600, and you go above 3000 it just gets loud, not fast. Therefore when you aren't racing Kevin and Wayne in their Escorts you let the big torquey engine do it's work. Why waste petrol, annoy the neighbours, and wear your engine by revving it higher than it needs to?

Quite agree Kev, my 2.0 Cavalier had more torque at 1200 revs than the VR6 does, and was trickier to get off the line without wheelspin as a result.. (Of course it also had a shockingly awful chassis and really really poor front-end grip.. But this just made matters worse.) That's what makes the VR6 such a practical supercar tho. You can trundle around and it won't spill the milk when you don't want it to...

Of course, it should work on any throttle opening, mine certainly does. I think maybe Andi meant something like "it's not effective on anything more than 50% throttle", but AFAIK it's not disabled.

But on the other hand, don't walk into too many garages saying "i think my head gasket's gone, can you have a look" - they might just take yer money and do it!

Well, you can notice the noise and the vibration, but you're right, you can't really notice the effect of the system. It's still dead easy to light up the inside wheel... (Or both - at which point it won't do anything anyway..)

Maybe, but not in a good way. I've not tried myself, but I imagine it would be difficult to find after-market shocks/springs that are *softer* than the original equipment. Plus the fact that your originals are likely to be pretty worn by now and softer than usual... You might get somewhere by replacing the top mounts - these tend to squish and harden with age, but to be honest you're gonna have to live with it as a trade off for the large, low profile wheels you're running... Unless anyone else knows different?