dr_mat

It's a bit much to claim that a VSR/VGI is "probably no cheaper than F/I" .. the cheapest supercharger setup will set you back a fair amount more than the VSR/VGI setup (which on some cars is a straight fit-and-forget). Add £250 for a remap and you're laughing. Of course, if you're up for doing your own fitting on a supercharger then yes, you'll get a lot more oomph for a little more cash, but you'll still have sluggish response below 3500 rpm .. If you have to pay someone to fit it, it'll cost ya a whole lot more. As for fuel economy, the reason it can actually be improved is simple: if the car pulls hard from lower revs you're less likely to go to higher revs .. and it's revs that cost you fuel, not engine torque output. (6000 rpm times six cylinders is 50% more fuel than 4000 rpm times six cylinders isn't it!) The science bit. As for the science bit .. well when they're talking about resonance, consider that the air moving through the inlet manifold has *inertia*. Once it starts moving, it wants to carry on moving, and if it stops moving, it wants to stay stopped. Imagine waves of pressure bouncing around inside the inlet. Moving air hits a closed inlet valve, it will bounce back slightly. The VSR is tuned to bounce these waves around for just the right amount of time so that the next wave arrives back at the inlet valve *just* as the valve opens, so the increased pressure causes the air to move into the cylinder more efficiently at that moment. The standard manifold does not, so it allows these waves to dissipate, so when the valve opens it just has normal atmospheric pressure behind it, which doesn't assist with filling the cylinder very much at all - you're relying on the -ve pressure caused by the piston dropping away to encourage it - but again, the air has inertia, it's stopped and it takes time before it starts to flow again. The standard inlet works well at high revs because the higher air flow at high revs means that there is always enough inertia in the air to keep the pressure up at the inlet valve - resonance is not required.

When you say "smokes when the temp gets to 90 degrees .. " would that be white smoke? Sounds like your head gasket is toast to me. One litre of oil every 1k miles is a bit much, too.

You have no legal comeback if it's a private sale. There is nothing, anywhere, in law that says you have 14 days or 7 days or 10 minutes! You made a personal agreement with someone with no witnesses.. Your only hope is if you can prove that the seller mis-described the car, but if he never said anything about it, there's nothing you can do (other than maybe hope he'll come clean and offer some compensation for the faults). As no doubt Sonicriot13 and his mate already knows ...

Try replacing the oil pump and/or the water pump. Any rattles in those can be transmitted up the block and sound like they're coming from the head.

PS is the standardised form of brake horse power. bhp was always an imperial measure, so PS was introduced as a metric equivalent. No doubt wikipedia has more information about this than you would really give a shit about ..

I have heard of this too. Am hoping I never have to have the same conversation with my mechanic. £1400+VAT does sound a lot, but not unreasonable for a mainstream place. Stealth (or apparently stokevwspares) would probably get the whole job in under a grand (chains, intermediate shaft, oil pump etc etc). Replacing the timing chains is listed in the factory manuals as an 8+ hours task, so you have to figure these places will ask 1 full day of labour. The specialists can do it much more quickly, so can charge less.

Ah, you didn't say it was refusing to restart before .. Also look at the ignition switch.

It may well be that in the run-out VW were using the same bits for all three models (they would surely have been churning out probably 10 VRs for every four-cylinder car by then), but those cars are unusual - by design the VR was the only car that had gas-over-oil dampers fitted at the factory. As for the springs themselves, although mostly the same, I think there were numerous slightly different types fitted to all types of cars. For aftermarket use, however, they're all pretty much interchangeable, with the exception of early car -> late car - the front spring top plates were different sizes... Though even this is not insurmountable - just fit the right type of top plate and away you go ..

Zero alcohol limit is unworkable. Too many things result in alcohol in your bloodstream that are beyond your control .. A very low limit is fine, however ... I can see where they're coming from with the "no passengers" thing, but it is a bit unreasonable. I also think that anything as complex as a tiered system is just not going to work, too much admin, not enough facts. And as has also been pointed out, bhp doesn't really relate to a safer car... I do support the idea of regular testing though. I don't see why people should expect to pass once and never be tested again. Every 10 years would do, but on the proviso that they are not necessarily testing for the *details*, but rather looking at car control, adherance to the law, safe driving, rather than whether your hands are in the right place on the steering wheel.. As usual, what's likely to happen is going to be some watered-down version of these "shock headlines". They soften you up first by leaking totalitarian bullshit, and then you don't object so much when they inflict only 50% of it ..

VW are good about honouring warranty in these case, but BAD about cocking up the install in the first bloody place .. !

Actually the VSR was designed to run on a dizzy VR. It ceased production long before the CP cars came out. The VSR was originally shipped with a chip that could be plugged straight into the older car's ECUs - this gave the correct fuelling and ignition mapping for use with the VSR and also enabled the correct ECU output line to trigger the close/open of the control flap. As stated above though, pretty much all the Schrick VGI parts can do the same job, and whether you need a chip produced very much depends on the specifics of your engine, it's impossible to say in advance. Suffice it to say that to get the best from it you'll probably need a chip, but even without you should get some significant benefit.

Diagrams will be tricky to come by, but there are places who will refurb them for you. Don't know where *they* get the diagrams though ...

Might be another component on the belt. Water pump? Odd that it only happens when you turn the steering wheel though ..

You need 5.5 litres for the VR6, annoyingly ...

The "No signal" shows up any time when the engine is not turning on a ..CP ECU, trust me, mine did even when the crank sensor was faulty, and had caused the stall. (But to be fair mine wasn't failing due to a short - which is what water ingress might cause). But reality is there's a long list of reasons why VRs stall, and it's very rarely caused by the crank sensor. ECU relay 109 is a common cause though, so I'd agree it's worth swapping that. It's also worth using the search and looking for the "my VR stalls" threads. There's hundreds of 'em ...

GSF or Costco do Bosch Silvers at good prices. I don't remember the part number, but look for the ones around 64 Ah. If you're going to be regularly leaving the car sat you might like to consider either getting a trickle charger to help out or spending some extra quids on the battery and getting a combined starter+deep cycle battery. Standard car batteries are "starter" type and will degrade very quickly if you allow them to stay discharged for any long period of time. They do, however, deliver the required 200 amps at -5 degrees C in the winter for a fast engine start ..

Get a standard chip burned. Stealth Racing ought to be able to help you out with that.

If the crank speed sensor is going, the engine most likely wouldn't restart. And it would most likely only happen when the engine is hot, too. More likely one of the myriad other engine sensors has failed / gone funny, or even you have an air leak letting unmetered air into the engine. It's not common for crank sensors to die, and they're £140 so you don't change them for a laugh, so best to rule out everything else first. Sounds to me more likely you have water ingress. Start with the coil pack/plugs/leads and move on from there. Note that your crank sensor will show an error "no signal" on an ABV engine at ANY TIME when the engine is not running. So if the car stalls .. bingo - crank sensor error. This does NOT mean the crank sensor is faulty. The only time you will get genuine crank sensor errors is if the car stutters and carries on - that way the real error is not overwritten by the bogus one.

Check here: http://www.knfilters.com/search/dealersearch.aspx Some Halfords stores are registered as suppliers.

If those brand new indicators are for a late car, and are genuine VW parts, I'll take 'em ...

That's the sensor that detects if the ABS pump has primed to the correct pressure I believe. Could be a voltage drop due to dodgy wiring or the pump itself is just a bit shagged. How did the failure happen? Has it always been like this since you had the car, or did it progressively get worse? The pump/valve block units are cheap and plentiful second hand due to almost zero demand, and replacing it doesn't cost the earth either, so it might be worth just doing that anyway, tbh.

There is a proper procedure for changing the battery. It involves amongst many other things, making a note of the current adapted values from the ECU before disconnecting the battery, and re-setting them afterwards. Though as pointed out, after a cold reset, the ECU goes into fast-learning mode anyway, so it should get back to pretty close to the correct figures pretty quickly. Some cars seem to require doing the basic settings stuff, others don't. I have heard of some VRs that get really rough running for weeks after an ECU reset, and I've heard the opposite too - the car runs slightly rich for a while and runs a bit sweeter than normal till it goes back to the default slightly-lean ..

That's worth looking at, because any vibration from the water pump pulley (or the oil pump, for that matter), will come straight back up the block and if your (real) head is in the right place it'll sound like it's coming from the (cylinder) head...

Or your battery might be fecked. Check the voltage across the battery when the engine is running. It should be a nice stable number, somewhere between 13.6 and 14.2 volts.

"Most aerodynamic"? somehow I doubt it. More like "least aerodynamically bad, cheapest and easiest to fit"!