dr_mat

Smokey or steamy? What colour smoke? How much oil? Up to you, but really it's a big jump from "slipping clutch" to "new engine"! :)

Interesting. What's up with the door control unit? How much current drain is it causing?

Just replace the clutch! At least inspect the chains before replacing them "for a laugh". The chains job is far more expensive than just the clutch alone. clutch ~ 3 hrs, chains ~ 8-10 hrs.

Last Corrado VR6 rolled off the production line in May 1995, and already, in 2009, it is IMPOSSIBLE to buy a CLUTCH cylinder??? WTF? That's a somewhat basic component they should have tons of! I can kinda understand them obsoleting odd little bits of trim, or badges, but basic mechanical components? They really really HATE us don't they?

Safety is a sliding scale, all the way from "not going out at all" to "jumping out of a plane without a parachute"... Well thought out use of spacers isn't much worse than just using normal wheel bolts, but badly thought out spacers can quickly take you to close to 100% probability of losing a wheel while you're driving along..

Plug in the diags to your ECU, if the MAF has been bypassed you will get an error code. Note that if you allow the engine long enough without the MAF plugged in it will adapt and you won't notice much difference in running. You need to unplug the MAF, then pretty much straight away hit the throttle quite hard - it should stutter big style with a lean cut because it's got no MAF input. If it doesn't chances are your ECU had already decided the MAF was dead. But I say again - the ONE TRUE way to know is to read the error codes. That's what this OBD (on-board-diags) stuff is all about. Save time and effort, ask the computer. FWIW your MAF is *probably* dead, and a quick way to check is to pick up another one. There's usually plenty on ebay for sensible money. You run the risk of that being faulty too of course.. And if you have a late VR IIRC you can buy the same model MAF from GSF for about £60 because it's shared with a golf, or something like that..

This one will always show up if the engine is not running. Ignore it. Not sure about the other two. I would guess your camshaft sensor has a wiring fault. You'd have to trace that back to the ECU and see if there's any chaffed wires anywhere. Not sure where the G68 sensor is, but I'd guess it's on the gearbox somewhere.

Can't really tell, looks alright to me ...

What plastic bearings? I've put two sets of top mount bearings in my VR in the last five years (just because they were off, not because they'd failed), and they were all metal.

Yeah that's easier.. Should read 13.8 - 14.2 volts when the engine is running. It will drop a little if you switch too much electricals on.

You had the right idea - putting it in series with the battery, but something went a little awry .. It's hard to put it into series because you have to somehow add it to the circuit but NEVER break the circuit at the same time. The only way I ever figured to do that was to put the meter in 10A mode (usually you have to switch sockets for one of the probes), touch one probe on the centre of the battery pillar, with the clamp still attached but only loosely, then touch the other probe to the clamp and gently lift the clamp so it loses contact with the battery pillar - that way all the current is going through the meter and the car never dropped power (circuits behave differently when you apply power compared to when they have been running for a while). Of course you need seven hands to do this..

Sure it was "200u amp" and not "200m amp"? If you're drawing 0.2 uAmp (0.0000002 A) the battery will last approx 36,000 years before going flat... I suspect it wasn't properly connected, myself .. ;) FWIW to drain the battery from half charged to "can't start the car" in five days you're probably looking at around 0.2 Amps, or 200 mA or 200,000 uAmp.

If the battery is only reading 12.1 volts it's only 50% charged..

It strikes me that the top mount is almost certain to compress a little during use over time, and someone ought to check the factory service guide to decide just how much compression is "too much" before writing off hundreds of the things. Plus the top plate moves a *lot* as the steering angle changes, so make sure the wheels are exactly straight ahead when you're comparing. Though I have to say that replacement parts on these bloody cars really don't last well. I do less than 3k miles per year yet I still seem to be replacing suspension components repeatedly every five years or so. They just don't make 'em like they used to ..

Dunno, I quite like the "remote controlled car" look of the standard one ...

They might have picked it up .. if it did it when it was there .. Intermittent faults have this really annoying habit of never going wrong when you want them to. I'm assuming that DJmac56's car is a VR (judging by the wheels), so definitely do the ECU relay as suggested above, and with such bad fuelling and idling issues you've got to be looking at either the MAF, the lambda probe (or the wiring for them), or there's an air leak in the induction system somewhere between the MAF and the lambda. You'd have to scan the ECU errors to get some hints about what might be going on there, but if it's leaking air you might be able to feel it. There's also a possibility you just plain have a faulty ECU..! It can happen.

On a purely personal level you got rid of a thing you didn't want any more, and got a thing you wanted, and you probably saved a few quid out of the scheme - and fair enough, I can see why it's tempting to do that (but let's remember you did spend £5k+ (?) aswell). But that's not really what we're getting at. It would have cost a couple of hundred quid to get a new engine fitted in the Clio and though it's an old car it would probably have had another few years life in it yet as a cheap car for some student or a second car. Not any more. Plus you and I paid for that £1k discount, from our taxes. That's money that now cannot be spent on all the other more important things that the government ought to be spending money on... (Such as duck houses and plasma tvs.) Whether the cars are crushed or not, point is that many many perfectly good cars are being forcibly removed from the roads in order to do what? There's no actual benefit to anyone, apart from the few people like yourselves who might have made a few quid (and even on that point I'm sure you could have negotiated £2k off the Astra anyway). Perhaps your Clio was genuinely due for being scrapped, but from what I'm hearing most if not all of the scrapped cars are not in such a bad state. The real bangers that are polluting our air are being hauled around the country on their last legs by people who will simply NEVER be able to afford a new car, let alone get it through the next MOT (so they can scrap it) .. People who would have benefitted from a number of cheap, reliable cars (all with MOTs, remember) coming onto the used market. But no, chancellor says no, you can't benefit. The whole policy is really a subsidy for middle england, a carrot to encourage the people who can afford it to spend the money on a new car instead of doing the environmentally friendly thing and simply keeping their old one going for another few years. Oops I think I'm ranting again. Time to take the dried frog pills I think.. lol

I'd love to have been in the cabinet when someone suggested this policy. I would have laughed them out of the room.

I'd say the same thing if it was a mint condition 14 year old 50k miler Fiesta Popular. It's obscene to destroy GOOD cars. I can see there's room for debate when it comes to 20+ year old tatty 200k milers - they might have plenty of driving life in them yet if you keep up the maintenance, but not everyone wants to be bothered with that. But to be cubing genuinely "young" cars in great condition it makes me want to cry. Just think of all the energy that was consumed getting that iron ore out the ground and turning it into the shape of a Corrado? Vast quantities of it compared to the amount *extra* it would have used as fuel over the next five years when compared against a newer car, even an ultra-efficient one. Have we really reached the point in society where even CARS are disposable? How ironic that the car industry spent the last twenty years making sure their products will last for 20 years, only to be told we need to scrap them after 10? Makes me mad!

That's obscene on so many levels it's just depressing that the law can be such an ass.

Actually I think black wheels work much better on older cars with all the black plastic trim than newer ones. Particularly succesful on a red Corrado. Just make sure it's a matt finish, gloss is a bit bling for the understated looks of the Corrado. For other car colours, maybe a dark gunmetal grey would be better, but on a red Corrado black wheels look good, imho.

Yeah a power cap is just a power smoothing system, it won't actually provide any EXTRA power, it'll just prevent the instantaneous load on your car electrics from causing the car to stall. (It baffles me why high powered ICE still runs on 12v, it would be so much more efficient to run a 48v system (um, four times as efficient in fact). 100 amps of current costs you a ton of heat and resistive losses to the amp from the battery.)

Might be a good idea to uprate your alternator .. 1kw of amplification will pull about 100 amps, and the standard alternator isn't going to come close to that. You can get a 120 amp alternator as fitted to VR6s with aircon. Track one down. Profit.

I bought one anyway, but just wanted to make it clear it won't help much! I often have to park > 10m from the front of the house so there's really no chance I can run wires anywhere and the solar charger is IT, the only choice I have.

I have the same problem. But look at the figures: Output power: 1.5W @ 17.5V Testing condition: AM=1.5,100mW/cm² That "testing condition" is 100mW/cm² - this is about the peak sunlight intensity at noon, near the equator, in summer.. Unfortunately electrical power generation from photovoltaics is really not that efficient yet. Give it ten years and maybe that'll change (by which time you'll have had a number of unrecoverable batteries..). For me, there is no "good" solution that doesn't involve wires. The portable jump starters are convenient (plug it in the cigarette lighter for fifteen minutes to charge your battery then go), but unless you're going to drive the car for an hour or two you'll just leave the battery low and you'll need to jump start it again next time. No good leaving the battery low because that's how sulphation happens. So personally I just wind up taking the battery out of the car and charging it overnight every couple of months in the winter. Not the best, but probably more likely to keep the battery working longer than any of the alternatives. And I should say that I do have a solar trickle charger and I'd guess it does help a little in the summer, but there's generally less drain on the electrics in the summer anyway, so I can't really say for sure either way tbh.