The short drive home brought up a few problems. Poor brakes, LHM spraying all over the engine compartment, sporadic overheating, erratic heater and a rock-hard front end just for starters. Shockingly it has 11 months MOT. On the plus side, it had a new exhaust and some new spheres, a new hydraulic pump and bright green, fresh LHM and NO leaks from the Activa rams or anywhere else for that matter
The LHM spraying across the engine bay was due to some bad maintenance when the LHM was last changed. The big tank springy clip was missing which secures the top section to the tank itself. I made a temporary one and have been frustrated in getting one from breakers because they chop out the LHM tanks on scrappers to dispose of the LHM and then throw the tanks and clips away as rubbish. If anyone has one, I'd be grateful for it.
Poor brakes were a combination of a flat accumulator sphere and air in the brake lines. The hard front end was a bit more involved. the spheres were OK but the Hydractive electrovalve was not switching properly and keeping the front in hard mode constantly. Many thanks to Simon (Mandrake) for his posts on HA electrovalves and the diode mod. It worked a treat!
Overheating was a bad rad, now replaced. That was fun
The erratic heateing was caused by the little temperature sensor being detatched from the dash trim and measuring the temperature under the dash rather than the cabin. How and why it was detatched revealed something of the cars past life. It looks as if it was an ex-government car of some sort as further investigation revealed it was once full of radio equipment and once had something large and heavy bolted to the boot floor. I pulled a lot of additional wiring out of the dash, including a microphone
Was it an undercover police car I wonder? Whatever, they were not careful when they stripped out all the kit that was in it.In doing all this I discovered some more horrors. The passenger side footwell was soaked due to the old favourite Xantia Winscreen seal problem. The interior had to come out as it was saturated. In pulling out the carpets I found another horror. The drivers footwell was swimming in LHM
It was all black and horrible and had started to melt the rubber sound deadening. It was a task and a half to clean it up. I suspected the brake doseur but there is no sign of a leak from that, either from the diaphragm or its return pipes so why so much LHM ended up there remains a mystry. It had soaked into the carpet and it needed a good scrub to clean it up.I'm now just left with niggly problems and these will be the subject of later posts
It has been "fun" but well worth it. It is a supurb car that seems to make bends disappear completely. It is fast and stable and a very fine high speed cruiser. Because it is so stable around bends it is not fun hustling it fast along a B road in the same way that the 205GTi is. It is effortless to drive quickly. I'm not keen on the 26MPG fuel consumption nor the rather wolly ML5 cable-operated gearbox. I do like the heating system, auto wipers and the CD Changer though!
So, I have an Activa now and I must say the wait and the baptism of fire has been worth it. I feel I know the Activa pretty well after all I've already done to it and I've only had it 10 days or so
I still have my old SX TD (or rather SWMBO has it now) and there is no way the Activa Engine is going in the GTi you'll be pleased to hear
Pleased you got it all fixed though - or most of it.