Cars

Time Bomb

I havn’t said much about it, but a while ago I ended up buying two T5 Transporters* The idea is to have a vehicle that’s higher up than the Golf, to better see the edibles when we go to Kruger or Bakubung or Addo or whatever.

How I ended up with two is that I bought the first one, sight unseen**, from a camel trader in Brits, flew up, and drove down. Didn’t quite make it. While that was being sorted out, I found a second one in apparently really good nick. It too had… issues.

Anyways, shortly before driving up to Pilanesberg, I investigated a slight brake noise. Found this:

Took off the caliper, turned it one turn anti clockwise, that straightened the hose right out. Except…

Yarrr. I drove this thing from Brits to Mossel Bay and a friend drove it from Mossel Bay to Cape Town. And it was sold to me with a Road Worthy Certificate. Shows you how much those are worth.

So I had to drive all the way out to Mandalay to get a spare from a bus some other dude is stripping, because I have no idea what I did with the hoses from the bus I stripped (maybe they were buggered too? No idea).

All good (I think the noise was caused by the complete absence of the spring to the right of the hub which pulls the moving part of the caliber towards the centre of the hub. That thing that looks a bit like a Manta ray. Had one from the spare bus).

* And most of another one for spares.
** I did have a FOAF look at it, I was told he knows cars. Turned out maybe not so much ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2026-10-05 by wrm A Plague of T5s Cars Fscking Idiots Why Do It Right When You Can Do It Wrong? 0

Fun Fact*

The safety belt hardware on a Volkswagen T5 kombi is threaded 7/16 x 20TPI.

The socket heads are 10mm triple-square, a.k.a. XZN.

There has to be a rational explanation for this, but I don’t have it.

* Actual Fun Might Vary

2026-10-01 by wrm A Plague of T5s Cars Geek 2

More horrors

If you buy a car that has had many previous owners (and both the Kombis* qualify) you will find some horrors just below the surface (cue Jaws music).

Like the ABS light “fix” I blogged about earlier.

Or this one:

Just wrap the wire nice and tight, it’ll hold…
…then cut them off and abandon them when we don’t need it no more.
At least this dude had a soldering iron.

All of this much better when covered with various layers of insulation tape of varying quality.

This guy did a slightly better job, he used the back half of a crimp connector to connect his repurposed household twin (i.e. mains) wire to the white/lilac (being lights) wire to the cluster.

And of course I am in here because I am doing my own thing. Hopefully the next owner doesn’t curse me :-) (For the record, solder and heatshrink tubing works for me).

* Ah yes I bought two** Kombis. That’s another story.
** Or three, depends on how you count.

2025-12-09 by wrm A Plague of T5s Cars Why Do It Right When You Can Do It Wrong? 0

VW T5: Testing 7H0 927 803 / 7H0 927 804

The days of passive sensors in cars are over. Have been over for a long time, because this is the ABS wheel speed sensor used in 2004+ T5 VW transporters, and it has a bunch of electronics inside (I’m guessing similar to this device).

It’s a two-pin device, and if you try to measure the resistance, you will get ~4.5 megohm. A component tester will tell you it’s two back-to-back diodes, one with Vf = 0.7V the other around 3V.

So, connect 12V to pin 1 (the flat side of the connector) via a 1 kohm resistor, and 0V to pin 2. Multimeter to pins 1 and 2. You will see the output voltage (i.e. the current through the resistor) change when you wave a magnet around the business end of the sensor.

In my case, the sensor was not the problem.

This was the problem. This “fix” (being a stiff wire rammed down into the connector to make contact with the sensor pin, all wrapped up in insulation tape) didn’t last long, I guess, so they resorted to Plan B.

This… was their Plan B. Remove the cluster, disassemble the cluster, cover the warning lights (ABS and Traction Control) with funny putty, and re-assemble*. A two-hour job, rather than the half hour it took me to replace the connector end with a good one from the spare, with good solder joints and heat shrink tubing. Doing the job right. What a novel concept.

And of course it took me more than two hours to sort out the cluster. Getting the funny putty out is much more work than putting it in.

* My brother tells the story of the fellow who took his car in because fifth gear did not work. Guy fixed it for R100 in parts and half an hour labour — he replaced the gear shift knob with one from a four-speed.

2025-11-02 by wrm A Plague of T5s Cars Why Do It Right When You Can Do It Wrong? 0

Down at the stern

On our recent Kruger trip, the Golf was decidedly down at the stern. The teardrop does not put a lot of weight on the tongue, on this same trip we got stuck up a dead end “road” and I had to unhitch, pick it up and turn it… I’d say about 30 kilos or so. But there’s a case of beer and a case of wine and a fridge in the back of the Golf, and the springs are getting old…

OK, so there are many options for springs for the Golf 4s, but the Estates already have the strongest ones fitted. Fortunately there’s a cheap and easy fix.

That’s the Golf (five green) at the top, and a Tiguan spring at the bottom.

And it’s easy to change, and it works.

Before and after.

Important! (I did not realise) Loosen the rear axle bushes, drive the car a bit, and re-tighten. If you don’t, the bushes are permanently stressed and this might be why mine went (OK, having 580 000km on the clock, maybe I should expect some wear & tear).

2025-09-05 by wrm Cars 0

P0322 and OBD

So the other day, we were driving to Hout Bay in Tanya’s Golf and the engine quit. This was downhill, with the car in gear, but the rev counter dropped to zero and the display moaned about oil pressure. Strange, and maybe not related to:

And then on the last day of 2024 the engine died again. Uphill this time, so no coasting.

Chaos ensued.

Pushed the car to the side of the road, managed to get it started. About a kilometer further, same thing. Waited a bit, it started again. By now I had a flashing glowplug light and an “Engine Workshop” message on the display.

Managed to get home though. (It was a warm day and it quit in stop-start traffic, so maybe temperature related).

Figured it would be a good idea to read the ECU error code. I have an ELM327 which used to work but no longer does, another ELM327 from Communica which plain sucks (only works with a specific App, for a limited time, then you need to buy the App) and a scanner from Temu which never worked (not a big surprise).

So I cut the plug off the Temu scanner and built a K-line interface* (Golf 4 TDi, 2004 — it has CAN, but the OBD interface is still K-line). Used VCDS Lite to read the codes. Works well, faster than the bluetooth solution, recommended.

P3105 “Valve for Intake Manifold Flap” — yea, no surprise there, I removed the EGR years ago.

P0322 “Engine Speed Sensor (G28) — Hmmm yea that sounds feasible.

Then I had to figure out how to remove the damn thing. Turns out you need a 9mm 12-point socket, my six-pointer obviously does not cut it.

Bought a socket, returned the incorrect part Goldwagen had supplied me, got the correct part, fitted it and all seems well again.

It’s only done 540 000km, dunno why these sensors fail so quickly… :-)

Figured I should maybe fix the P3105 code while I’m at it.

* R4 is not needed.

2025-01-05 by wrm Cars Electronics 0

Hey! I know these people!

Back in 1998, I worked my arse off to get the yellow Rand-Lover ready for the 50th Anniversary Tour. Made it, mostly. Some bits got bolted on later.

I recently found the video they put together, was planning to rip it to digital, turns out I don’t need to, Alan did it for us.

2023-03-28 by wrm Cars 0

Always Fun with a 101!

Twenty years ago, Tanya and I had been together for a short while and it was a good time to go on holiday.

So we went to France.

Gads. We were so much younger then :-/

It was a bit of a whirlwind tour (Tanya will claim they all are) — fly into Paris, find a place to stay (place we supposedly had booked via a friend in France knew nothing). Take the underground (? can’t remember) around the back of Montmarte, check out the Sacré Coeur (270 steps), walk down via Pigalle and the Pompidou. Day 2, Louvre, walk up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, Musée de l’Homme, the queue was too long at the Eiffel, by complete coincidence found the bust of Antoine de Saint-Exupery on Square Santiago du Chili on our way to the Rodin Museum, and by yet another complete coincidence ran into Alison April, a friend from Stellenbosch, at the D’Orsay. What else, o yes, Cluny, then check out the stained glass windows and the gargoyles at the Notre Dame (which was being refurbished, scaffolding all over the place). Supper somewhere in the Latin Quarter.

Did I mention we were younger then?

Day 3, train to Epernay (Moët) and from there to Strasbourg, where we hired a car.

And by complete coincidence (no, really) friends Pim and Thandie were at close to Strasbourg with their Land Rover 101 Forward Control (OK, the coincidence was the time and the place, I had planned the route to meet up with them there).

(Rest of the trip? Drove all the way down to Marseilles sampling wine all over the place, hung out at Domaine des Anges where a friend was the winemaker and my brother was helping in the cellar, and flew out of Marseilles in time to beat the kids back home at the end of the school holiday).

2022-10-05 by wrm Cars Travelography 0

I blinked

Sometime yesterday. I only noticed when I reset the odo when I filled up. Yea, the price of fuel is going up again :-/

Next target, the second light-second.

2022-02-01 by wrm Cars 0

2 Strikes, no more.

Back in December 2017 I had Tanya’s Golf’s turbo overhauled at Turbo Repair Master in Ndabeni. All good, car went well, things were good for almost a year, and then Tanya phoned from Paradise Motors — oil all over the place, chrismas lights on the dash (fortunately the Golf tells you when things go wrong, soon enough to prevent expensive damage).

Had the Golf flatbedded to Alan Edwards, they said it was the turbo feed pipe, had the car flatbedded to Turbo Repair Master, I bought a new pipe (R1098) and they fitted it, R850 labour. Chalked it up to wear and tear.

Except not that long afterwards, Tanya phones me from work, oil all over the place, christmas lights on the dash… so I scheme maybe Turbo Repair Master stuffed it up when they replaced the pipe, lemme do it myself. Bought another new pipe (R1121, inflation), fitted it.

And not that long afterwards… yea, same story, different place. This time it was on Hospital Bend. By now I had figured out that these pipes can be brazed for a lot less than the cost of a new one (Hosefit are the people to speak to) so that’s what I did — had the one from the previous time brazed, fitted it, took the other one out, had that brazed and kept it for a spare.

But by now of course I was asking questions. The answer: the turbo oil line bracket in the picture above is rather important. And somewhere along the way the guys at Turbo Repair Master had not bothered to refit it. That leads to strain on the banjo, which causes a crack, oil all over the place, christmas lights…

OK, live and learn.

So here we are in November 2021 and I figure it’s time to overhaul the turbo in my Golf. Go on over to Turbo Repair Master, offer to do the R&R myself, ask for a quote on the turbo work only. Fellow there makes me a good price (2k less than in 2017) for the whole job. I tell him about the saga with Tanya’s car, point out the bracket to him… get the car back… check… not only is the bracket missing in action, the feed pipe is bent way out of line.

Something is wrong here.

As far as I can tell the fellow didn’t have the patience to wiggle the pipe into place. no, he applied brute force. The pipe is wrecked. Fscking butcher.

Fortunately I still had the spare.

So after trekking back out to Ndabeni to give the owner a heads-up on this fuck-wittery (and to get my bracket back) I fitted the old pipe and both brackets (there’s also one behind the engine) and all is well.

But I shall not allow Turbo Repair Master to wrench on a car of mine again.

2021-12-07 by wrm Cars Fscking Idiots 0