dr_mat

Another one.. I need to do this too, and I'm glad to hear you made it with the dash in place!

I think it catches on the clutch pedal assembly when it's in a certain position, from memory. Check it out.

Got to do mine .. I'm told you can swap the matrix without taking the whole dash out. Did you manage that?

Not many G60s left now.. bit rarer than the VR6. Rare is not always good.

You need to put an ammeter in circuit with the battery and measure the amount of current that the car is drawing when everything is turned off. Many multimeters will have a "10A" mode that would do ok. Just make sure the engine is cold and the fans aren't going to come on or anything like that.

Like all things Apple, you are paying way over the odds for admittedly well-chosen but otherwise commonplace hardware that you could get anywhere else for less. For the Windows users on the thread.. well yeah Windows rots over the years. If you were really bothered about it you'd create and log in with a new account, or do a reinstall every so often .. or run Linux, which doesn't..! You do this to yourself.. ;) Windows 8 is a monumental mess. It's taking PCs down to the level of functionality of tablets instead of the other way around. As a touchscreen desktop/tablet/laptop front end for a bit of casual web browsing and maybe running a game or two it makes some sense, but for a PC you are actually expecting to do work on, it's a mighty dumb idea. YES you can still run the old Windows 7 desktop interface but NO you cannot make it the default, you have to run it as an app on the Metro UI front end each time you login. (Imagine doing this on a server over RDP.) Me, I have a couple of three year old, cheap, high-end HP Elitebook laptops running Ubuntu Linux as the compromise that provides performance, security (without bolt-on system grind-to-a-halt anti-virus crap) and low price.. Maybe it's not for everyone, but if you're not frightened of getting your hands dirty so to speak, it's really not that difficult to get most of what you want done, done.

But before you replace the battery, make sure that you don't have a dodgy circuit somewhere that's draining it .. otherwise you'll knacker your new one as well.

You might want to look under the dash and see if the steering column universal joint is tapping against the frame that carries the pedals when you turn the wheel..

Surely you'll be wanting to buy a new one, given how much of a complete git they are to fit .. ?

You do know the VR6 is a bloody clattery engine in original form, don't you ... ? :)

I'd always heard that the built-in amp in the iPhones was pretty much reference-quality tbh (certainly way better than the average downloaded mp3..), this concept of bolt-on amps for them has passed me by .. I assume you are really looking for something more powerful?

Pinking? Happens more noticeably at low-to-mid revs in high gears with your foot down .. ?

I've never seen that on my VR when it's on the rollers.. maybe that happened on earlier cars? Usually only puts the light on if a sensor goes open circuit.

Spinning the wheels won't put the ABS light on, that light ONLY ever comes on if there's an actual component failed (or, as said above, it's doing the ignition-on self test, after which it should always go out and stay out). I don't think that the ABS gives a monkeys about the thickness of your brake pads, so I doubt that's related to it.

Yes the big centre box is dual-skinned and they do tend to grow a coating of rust very quickly but it's nothing to worry about and they'll last for ten or fifteen years. Cost from VW UK is (was) around £300 + VAT, and that didn't include the front box either. Now obsolete as far as I'm aware.. The front box is actually separate and costs £100 + VAT on its own. I believe this part may be common with the Golf of the same era so they're not so difficult to buy.

Yes, print through was a bigger issue on the longer cassettes. I know there were people who insisted on winding tapes back and forwards all the time .. The time I noticed it the most was when a track starts - there's a pre-echo on a tape that's been sat around for a long time. Surface noise .. print through - it all saps your s/n ratio and squishes dynamics, unfortunately. But then, so does bleeding-ear CD mastering.

You never had any print-through? I did mostly get rid of wow/flutter issues, it tended to go away with cleaned transports and decent quality cassettes. I had a Philips deck that I did most of my recording on. Manual calibration for each tape type, but it worked pretty well, all things considered.

Heh, well nothing ever really dies out.. I just got the latest release from Autechre downloaded in 24-bit WAV files - sounds brilliant, but they also did a 4-LP pressing on heavyweight vinyl. It's all coming back.. Quality equipment will always produce a good result. The only thing that's changed in the intervening decades is that mediocre systems have become less awful..! I also have hundreds of carefully recorded tapes .. so I do still have a modest cassette deck around (Yamaha KX380). I'd have to admit it's connected to the computer, not the hifi, however! :) I've digitised hundreds of my tapes and replaced lots with CDs too (usually used CDs, very cheaply). I wouldn't say I really download much, and I'm more of an album collector than a compilation maker. Not all bands make "albums" worth listening to in their entirety, I'm aware, but still! I am just about old enough that my parents still had a reel-to-reel when I was very small, but my first playback equipment was cassette. I do miss using it to be honest, though the sheer convenience of having everything I could ever want to listen to indexed and available at a few keypresses on the squeezebox is hard to ignore, and the quality through a decent DAC/Amp/Speaker combo is better than I had before I went this way, too. As for sound quality, I've become a bit of a pragmatist on that front. I do think that everything analogue produces a very human-ear-friendly type of distortion, unlike bad digital systems, but I do also think that digital has more potential if used the right way. (One thing I definitely do NOT miss from cassette is wow and flutter. The absolutely rock solid bass definition from a good digital playback system is quite amazing.) Anyway, good luck with the sale. I'm sure you don't need it, though, because serious gear is always desired. :)

Nice! If I'd had the money twenty years ago I'd have loved to use decks like this. These days of course, I don't record anything, ever.. Closest I get is chewing CPU time doing lossy compression of downloaded flac files so they don't fill up my phone too badly ..

So, turns out there was a coincidence, but it wasn't the coincidence I was expecting. The garage had to do some work including replacing a length of the "blue exciter wire" to get the car to charge properly last year when it was in for a service. Since that time the mid-speed fans have never come on .. turns out that's because they didn't quite get the fan thermostat connector plugged in right. I took it off today, checked all the lines for output voltages and everything looked good. I bridged the contacts and the fans came on with both speeds just fine .. so I plugged it back in, firmly, and it all works again. I still need to swap the heater matrix of course ...

Akira is now available on an excellent blu-ray remaster.. Superb quality rendering of a ground-breaking if not utterly bonkers film. http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Akira-Blu-ray/1872/

THat's quite a large heatsink. Apparently not enough though ..

It's never been changed, and I've not checked it out yet, but it's weird that it goes at the same time as the heater matrix, no?

The problem is that a 1w LED bulb produces half a watt of heat, but distributes it over a tiny tiny area, leading to a really microscopic hot spot. If you use the high-power LEDs then you need a carefully designed heat distribution package for it. The lamps that use "many" low powered LEDs (20 or 30) are much more reliable because packaging is much less critical.

Question. In my comment above I pointed out that my VR's stage 3 fans have been coming on periodically when stuck in traffic over the last few months. This is weird because in seven years of ownership they NEVER came on at all. I now know that the heater matrix has gone .. so my question is this: how does a failed heater matrix translate into a coolant fan problem? The temperature gauge on the dash rarely goes high, and I've check hoses etc under the bonnet and all hoses are hot, the radiator is hot, there's no obvious pressure build-up and I'm not losing fluid, but the slow speed fans simply never come on any more, so either there's circulation problems such that the sensor in the rad never sees the real engine temperature, or totally by coincidence the sensor in the rad has failed (or, I suppose, it's fuse..?).