dr_mat

The small solar chargers are only effective in direct, bright sunlight. I.e. for a few hours a day during the summer. They make no difference whatsoever to the discharge time on your battery between about september and april.. FWIW the Maplins ones won't drain the battery if they're unable to charge it, they just close their circuit off if there's not enough light. Just to let you know - don't expect miracles (or much at all, really)!

Adjusting the handbrake cable is a pain, you have to take the surrounds off. The adjusters are at the rear of the handle itself. You can guarantee you'll never get it back on *quite* the same way it came off.. And the rear calipers may be fine .. I needed to adjust my cables after the calipers were replaced. Obviously the new ones had the handbrake operation lever at a slightly different angle.

And if it's a rear wheel bearing it can be adjusted...

ok ok next time royal mail looses an important letter or supercharger dont post on here its gone missing !! :D Wasn't me guvnor. Never had anything go missing with Royal Mail. Or anyone else, for that matter. Not that you're biased.. ;) :)

I love the term "great rates". It's the current legally acceptable way of saying "we think our prices are competitive", without actually making any claim about whether they're better than anyone else's prices .. Nowt wrong with using Royal Mail. We've paid for their existence for so long from taxes in this country that we should support them where possible. They have been shafted by the government - currently they are the only end-to-end delivery service in the country and must deliver all the unprofitable postcards and letters, but they're not allowed to compete fairly on the profitable industrial bulk-shipping contracts. Seems unfair? Yep, no wonder they're in immense amounts of trouble. Once again the partial privatisation just means that a bunch of private courier firms can cream off all the profitable business and leave the taxpayer funding an organisation that does the hard stuff. Sorry, bit OT ...

At which point they'll give you £1000 to turn it back into a cube of metal..

It was mistaken for a reliable car once. And then there was the laughable day when someone said "they're quite cheap to run those old VWs"..

Turns out one of the damping springs in the clutch had snapped. Clutch is now replaced and good as new. Cheers all..!

For me it had to be the VR. I've never driven a G60 or a 16v or an 8v Corrado, and I probably never will. But they don't have a V6, hence I wasn't interested ... I like the ultra-smooth potter-along-in-traffic in 3rd gear at 700 rpm aspect of the V6 just as much as the sheer, effortless, constrained fury when you open the throttle wide at 60mph in 3rd to overtake something .. It's not the best car ever, what is? And what, pray, would the "best car ever" be doing selling for an average of £2k anyway? Don't be ridiculous. It's 14 years old and it shows. But it'll do. IMHO it still represents one of the best combinations of practicality, performance, handling, comfort, style and rarity value .. FOR THE MONEY. If I wanted to spend more money on a car I'd buy a better car..

I doubt it, it's too old.. the newer cars do though. She's dropped it in the garage this morning, he immediately said "clutch release bearing", but I doubt he'll be able to do anything with it before the weekend, so no point in dragging it's sorry arse around Berkshire any longer. -she'll leave it there.

Yeah, I wondered about that. It doesn't feel unbalanced, but it could well be the flywheel come loose. Which is a little more worrying .. ! "Rattling.." well that's about the only way I can describe it tbh. A quite loud, clattery noise that goes away when you take your foot off the clutch. Even at idle, when the car is stationary, it's rattling away. Much louder than timing chains.

The missus' Pug 206 just decided that when the clutch is open it's going to rattle like a good 'un. I'm guessing the clutch release bearing is gone, because it seems to drive ok when the clutch is engaged, but just wonder if anyone else has any pointers on this sort of thing and whether it's likely to do anything catastrophic if we carry on driving it around.. We'll get it looked at asap, but she relies on the car to go to work and it's unlikely the garage will be able to fix anything tomorrow so...

Maybe so but the government won't give them their £1k until they scrap the vehicle and submit the forms, along with the proof that they scrapped it.

No-one pays £500 for a bumper, which is why VW stopped bothering stocking any parts for the Corrado years back .. no money in it..

They do, VR6s get very rattly.. What do you think all that sound deadening material under the bonnet is for.. :)

Or a leak and then an air lock.. It's quite likely that you'll not be able to fill it properly from the expansion tank so often there's air bubbles that work their way around during a short drive.

Big advantage of 205s on the VR is it's much harder to kerb the wheels. And the contact patch is 1cm wider (5%). Does it make much difference? Probably not. But TBH why screw with running non-standard tyres for the sake of saving a few quid? 205/50/15s Toyo Proxes are about £60 each (if you can find them).

I think this is normal. It switches based on the temperature of the water in the rad, remember, and the rad water is the part that's directly receiving the cooling effect, so unless your fans are pathetic they'd be able to cool the litre or two that's in there.

The cutting out could also be the immobiliser if you have a late VR. Not sure what you're doing driving in the 200-400 rpm range though, so I'm going to assume you really mean 2000-4000 rpm .. ;) So. Check the basics. Plugs, leads, coil pack/distributor. Get the error codes read from the ECU, see if that's throwing anything up.

Yes, it's more likely to be the cam trigger wheel or the sensor itself. The thing with stuff that "suddenly goes wrong" is it's ALWAYS caused by the thing you took apart and put back together last.. I doubt the ECU relay would have anything to do with a rev-related failure.

Wheel bearings helped significantly, yes, but not as much as the column itself. There must have been play under load in the top UJ which I just couldn't really detect when playing around, but it dulled the steering feel immensely and left me feeling totally disconnected from the road and wheels. I suspect this is one of the reasons so many people are fitting the non-adjustable-column onto ageing Corrados.

Well .. if you reckon you have play in the steering you can tell by getting out the car and watching the front wheel while you turn the steering wheel slightly. You shouldn't be able to move the steering wheel by more than a few mm before the road wheel starts moving. Get a mate to help by watching the other side. If there's no play there then you're probably having trouble with wishbones/ball joints/wheel bearings.. but it's not really possible to say which without getting it on ramps and having a bloody good shove at each, independently. TBH any play as bad as you seem to be describing ought to be picked up at the MOT.

Wrong. Rad fans come on at 92 degrees, then second speed comes on at ~102 degrees. The "high speed" comes on at 110+. If you EVER get to 110 degrees then something is VERY wrong. We're not living in Dubai here.. The low speed fans are controlled by a sensor on the radiator itself, so either a) the sensor has failed or b) the radiator isn't getting warm because the thermostat has failed. The high speed fan is controlled by a separate sensor and is really for emergencies only. In 7 years of ownership I've NEVER had the 110 degree fan setting come on in my VR, and I've sat in traffic for hours and hours on sunny days.

Next step will be consumption quotas. You must spend a certain % of your income every month or you are not a "good citizen" and you're not taking your part in supporting our fragile economy .. ;) (Hmm, sounds like a story featured in a book I read a while back..) So far I've not seen any real data on what is supposed to happen to the scrapped cars. Can parts be sold? Can body panels be sold? Or does it all have to be simply crushed and the materials recycled? Recycling is one of the great environmental myths of this century.. Re-use is far more efficient, which is something we've sadly forgotten. FWIW, I read that the micro-particulates from the modern diesels are thought to be more harmful than the macro-particulates from the old ones. The sooty stuff that comes out of your 205 can be easily filtered, while the micro-particles can't, but they are easily absorbed into your bloodstream to help form clots ...

Exactly. It's taking cheap reliable cars off the road and replacing them with expensive new cars. You could even consider it as a drain on the poorest motorists being used to subsidise the purchase of new cars.. Is this "New" labour then? I guess so.