I'm going to call this one done for now, I still have a couple of jobs to attend to but with the weather not being conducive to working out on the drive they will have to wait a while.
The biggest job got done yesterday - namely the cam belt, tensioner and idler pulleys, I bottled out of doing it myself, a local garage took the job on and did it for an incredibly good mate's rate.
while they were at it they put a new tyre pressure monitor in the front off side but unfortunately that did not solve my ongoing tpms error messages. The sensor needed changing anyway and at just 20 quid it was not a big deal, I paid the guy 15 quid to fit it for me. What finally solved that major annoyance though was changing the control module, which appears to somehow have fried itself. It was a really weird fault, I'm assuming there is a novram chip in there that was playing up as no matter what I did I could not change the serial numbers of the sensors, the values were not being over written. Anyway, I couldn't care less, it's all working now and at last I can drive the car without error messages popping up all the time.
I still have a problem with the MOST bus -- the optical loop that the infotainment system uses. It is causing the system to do random resets, which is incredibly annoying. I thought I had fixed it but as is common with intermittent problems, it has come back although this time it has given me a clue. I am pretty certain it's the phone module as that has now stopped working but the rest of the system is fine. I don't like speaking to people anyway so it can wait until a reasonably priced module comes up - they seem to fail quite often though so that may be a while.
I keep getting asked the question as to whether this has been a sensible buy or not and whether I would do it again. Well, the car cost 1551 on an ebay auction, I knew more or less what it's problems were, I had set my max bid at 1750 to allow room for some fairly expensive fixes and unexpected problems. I valued the car at about 3800 if everything was hunky dorey so my spend on fixing the busted bits would have to be 2250 before I was upside down on the deal.
The biggest expense was the cam belt kit and fitting, which came in at 275, a very reasonable price given the size of the job - it helps to know people. The new battery stung a bit but with my Halford's discount card that came in at 96 quid. There were plenty of other smaller bits eg, sub woofer at 34, mot at 45, oil and filters at 50 quid, aux belt 15, MOST bypass cables 10 and some new brake pad wear sensors at 20. There were a couple of bits I bought out of choice a pair of key cases as the ones I had were scruffy and some new wood trim in a lighter colour, I thought the ones in there let the interior down a bit. Those two items came to just under 50 quid. I got a good used TPMS module for 35 quid, the sensor was 20 quid, I spent another 16 quid on some Chemical Guys new leather scent, the car smells like new again now. All in all the total bill comes to 2084, including purchasing the car. To save you working it out, that leaves me quids in to the tune of about 1716 of yer finest British pounds. I would call that a pretty good result.
Would I do it again? while the answer to that is yes, I would put a caveat on that. I would say I have been very lucky, I was particularly lucky that the 14 year old 148k mile cam belt didn't let go - that would have been game over. The gearbox had been serviced 30k miles ago, that saved a big expense as the ZF 6hp26 unit fitted to these cars is known to get grumpy when running older fluid. I have fixed nearly everything myself, some of the faults would have been so expensive for a main dealer to sort that the car would technically have been a write off. I can live with a few marks and scrapes that are typical of an older car but if something is there I like it to work -this attitude has cost time and money over just having a car that drives. As things are today with everything being hunkey dorey and the car being an absolute delight to be in I would say absolutely, I would do it again in a flash. If, however, some of those intermittent faults rear their ugly head again I might change my mind fairly quickly.
just a quick ps - cam belts have a date code on them, the Dayco ones have an 8 digit code, it's only the first 5 that are important. The first 2 digits are the year, the next two the week and the 5th the day of the week. My belt was 09491065. That says the belt was made on the first day of week 49 of 2009, the last 3 digits are a mould number or some shit like that.
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