dr_mat

Faulty ECU, yep, could be. ISTR making some comments about it, but essentially the ECU uses the road speed (as sent from the gearbox sender unit) and the injector timings (well it knows that cos it tells 'em what to do). So chances are it either thinks it's putting no fuel in, or it thinks you're doing 1000 mph everywhere all the time. I guess it could be the dashboard unit too, but tbh I don't know much more detail than that, and I suspect you're just going to have to swap bits till it starts working. At the very least you should get VAGCOM on it and go over the measuring blocks with a fine toothed comb and make sure they're all sensible values.

Didn't we go round this loop before? Pretty sure the VR's MFA mpg reading comes from the ECU, not the vacuum line. As for working out the real mpg, better get a calculator out!

A battery that goes flat when it's not connected is probably faulty. You can get it checked for free at most battery sales places, they use a big wire that measures voltage and current drop under load. And I'm assuming that when you say you "charged the battery fully" I guess you mean you had the battery off the car and left it overnight. If you just mean "went for a drive" that's something different..!

I like the matt black finish concept, you should use it more widely .. it would save a hell of a lot of polishing .. ! :)

It really doesn't matter how much you spend on a battery for your corrado. If you leave it alarmed and leaking current it will most likely be flat in a fortnight. Best case scenario with a fully charge battery will give you two weeks sitting time. Also note that it takes a good hour and a half or more of driving to fully charge your battery (and that's assuming that your alternator is working 100% and you don't run any major electricals while you're doing it). If you don't use the car frequently chances are the battery is pretty low charged all the time, so you really can't expect it to last long. Talk to Mr VW about this, they just leak power. It's a badly designed electrical system, or some flunky control box that's sucking too much juice when idle or something. It's funny how the missus' Peugeot can be left for 6 weeks without being touched and it's still got enough juice left (in it's 45 Ah battery) to start both it's own engine AND jump start my flat VR6 too.. !

There's two control circuits and two fuses - one that operates with the ignition on, one that operates with it off. The ignition-off stuff is in the little black box under the bonnet, the ignition-on fuses are in the fusebox. I don't recall which fuse it is ..

If you want quiet, there's only one choice: VW.

"in"? You mean INSIDE the engine? Where are you talking about?

They're the names of the two people who designed the interior.

If you're in doubt, the answer is almost certainly "no"! Unless your friend is a mechanic who accepts bookings I'd say you don't quite fulfil that requirement. Either tow it or get your friend to come to you? And no tax either? I'd say your insurance is probably invalid if you tried to claim .. !!

Great if you have the car garaged all the time - trickle chargers will keep the battery spot on, but for the rest of us we'll just have to keep jump starting the bleedin things. Also note that trickle chargers aren't suitable for recovering a totally flat battery. Read the spec - they'll do "maintenance charge" on larger batteries only, full recharge can only be done for smaller batteries up to about 30 Ah. TBH you can't really go wrong with the £30 "Challenge Extreme" chargers from Argos either. Made-in-china of course, but what isn't these days?

You should be able to buy a ready-refurbed Bosch alternator from GSF and they'll give you some money back for your old one.

I've never heard that before - where did you see it? Not saying I know everything there is to know about batteries but I can't think of a physical mechanism for that to happen, so I'd like to find out more ...

A 20 minute drive won't fully charge a car battery, no hope mate. You need a good hour's run to come even close to a full charge, particularly from totally flat. The alternator will deliver at most 70 amps to the battery, which means just over an hour required to fully charge. Your battery might well be dead, but so far I think it's just flat. I've written out in various other threads how to test all that, so go do some searches ...

Sounds more like top end to me. You can take the head off without removing the gearbox, yes.

Yes. Any time you disconnect the shocks from the hub you will have to a) readjust the camber and b) readjust the tracking afterwards. No shortcuts, do it right. Lowering it shouldn't alter the tracking, but it will alter the *camber* again slightly so you should get it all finally adjusted when it's in it's final config ..

Most likely passenger side outer CV..

Bit poor if your suppliers can't find any Corrado rear shocks, they are common as muck.

And not only that but you're assuming that they actually shoot it in HD .. !

Inlet AND cams alters the torque curve again, and in fact what you get from that combination is closer to the torque curve of the standard car (albeit with higher output across the range) than when using the inlet with standard cams where there is a noticeable peak in the middle of the range. You are more likely to be able to get inlet+cams to work properly without a remap than with just the inlet alone..

The ECU will adapt the curve up or down slightly to suit the minor differences between all engines - that's true - but the basic torque curve's *shape* is fixed, it'll only really adapt up and down a little bit. Adding something like the VSR/VGI results in a BIG change to the shape of the torque curve, and although many cars can actually run it without a remap you will find it's running rather lean where the VSR is making most impact and it'll likely be pinking and therefore pulling the ignition timing right back to compensate - i.e. you just won't get the best out of it. The only way to adjust the shape of torque curve that the ECU is designed for is to remap it.

Ok, that's different, that's not really remapping, that's just switching to another pre-written map. Actually the point of remapping is to have a map written specifically for YOUR car, which means a one-off custom job, and therefore should be tuned to your engine in it's final form. Some modifications you can get away with without bothering to change the map, such as exhausts and induction kits, but a significant change to the engine's airflow like adding a VSR/VGI tends to require a proper ECU remap to work at it's best.

Wait. The whole point of a remap is to make the ECU more closely match the character of the engine, so it seems a bit pointless to map it to your standard engine then go change the entire midrange airflow by slapping a VSR on it! That's rather like painting your walls when you haven't decided what colour curtains to buy yet ...

Yep, it's mounted somewhere near the middle of the rear of the head, but in my experience it's really tough to tell where water is coming from since it tends to piss out everywhere when it's under pressure ... £35 will be plus VAT, iirc..!

There is a hose under the cable tidy that runs to the heater matrix in the cabin, from the cylinder head. That's most commonly the first hose to fail on a VR6..