January, the problem month

As i would have hoped the Pasta wagon has been pretty un-newsworthy during my ownership really. It will be 10 years old in March though so the problems are going to come, and this always appears to happen in January.
The last bit of maintenance i did was topping up the oil and changing a headlight bulb. The manual helpfully states that i should contact a trained technician at a VW garage to change a said bulb, erm yeah right. Having a puny 1.6 engine probably helps me a bit as it doesn't take up much room in the engine bay but it really wasn't more than a 5 minute job.

One problem is that it has always run slightly cold but when the really cold -20 weather came the car just wasn't getting hot at all, this is not good for the engine for a number of reasons so i needed to change the likely culprit - the thermostat, which was probably stuck open.
Now being a newer car this was obviously a real pig of a job.

The Pasta Wagon sneaks in beside the Austin.

 

See that, right way down there, one bolt of the thermostat housing removed, it took a lot of swearing to get it out too. The other bolt undone and the contents of the cooling system deposited on the workshop floor i could whip out the old thermostat.

 

 

the nice shiny new one and all important gasket ready for service.

 

So a 1.5. hour job done and the temperature gauge shows a perfect 90 degrees. Result.

Anyway that was job no.1 in January 2011 next up it's time to get the MOT done. Book an early 7:30 appointment and 30 mins later no bother, sails straight through. Whizz back home to collect the nutsters and take them to nursery and waddaya know - 100 meters from nursery it starts firing on 3 cylinders. Pah, bumhats. So my immediate thoughts are that the MOT man has done something but after limping it to work and home again i connect the computer to read the fault code, which gave me an unhelpful (but confirming) misfire on no 1 cylinder.

So to cut a long story short i eventually diagnose a duff coil unit, a simple job you may think but alas no, the inlet manifold and 10 hundred zillion other things need to be removed to change it so not having time to faff around with that i book it into the garage, something i really hate doing but i had no choice. As it was it took them 2 days to finish so that means it probably would have taken me a week with no guarantee either. thankfully i had diagnosed correctly and all is well again apart from the 700 quid bill. :-(