Transporter

Braking bad to braking good With an MOT rapidly approaching I decided to clean up the lip on my brake discs. However on measuring I noticed that my rear discs were beyond their minimum limit and the fronts weren't far off either. Pretty frustrating when the pads are virtually new! I opted for Apec Discs  and Pads  as a cost effective but high quality replacement. The linked items are for the rears that I bought through eBay. The fronts I managed to get from Halfords. The new front discs came unprepared so I picked up a tin of heat resistant paint and sprayed the outside edge and hub to make them look a bit smarter and hopefully protect them over the long run. Any over run onto the disc surface isn't a problem as it will rub off anyway so there was no need for masking. The rear discs came prepainted and so I left them as they were for now. As the rear discs are smaller the mismatch in colour between front and rear doesn't really matter. I hope to...

Intro During my window fixing escapades I was sat, with a cup of tea, reading what other people had done with a similar problem. Well this didn't take long as it happened as most peoples experience was subtly different from the last. So I just kept digging to see if I could find anything relevant else where. As the windows on my 2007 van are controlled by the comfort and convenience unit (CCU), I was also playing particular attention to anything else that went through the same box. So here I was reading a central locking blog. For once everyone was unified in agreement. It was caused by one crimp on a wire coming out of the module and it went wrong ALL THE TIME! "Interesting" I thought to myself. As it happened I had my CCU on my desk so already had access to the offending part of the loom and was quite frankly out of ideas with the windows before I had to start buying parts. So what harm could a little win do? Symptom The usual reason for you to start this on...

Hand cranking your windows open and closed  is a massive pain in the bum and is surprisingly distracting, something you only really notice when you go back to them after years of button podging. Well I'm missing that little hand crank now as my windows remain stubbornly closed. It all started when I went out to my van to try and add a new key remote to my van as the range was terrible at best. I started the procedure and realized I needed the window open but when I tried to open it they wouldn't budge. Neither window wanted to move in fact so I had a poke about at the fuses which were fine. There was no relay click either which got me thinking that I might be missing a hidden fuse or some such malarkey but no joy. My next port of call was to hit everything with WD40 to push out any water ingress and clean the contacts on plugs. Again though I was greeted by silence from my window motors. I read my Haynes manual which wasn't very helpful and the forums were the us...

Intro I don't remember having an issue with the remote central locking. I didn't really take any note of it whatsoever. There was however only one genuine key so I bought another off of eBay. I tried to add it to the vans memory by using the one key in the ignition and the other in the door technique that is shown on many youtube videos. Around here I gained my window not working fault mentioned later in this blog and I was unsuccessful in adding the keys remote to the system for a nice double fail. Key? As time wore on the remote range became noticeably worse, only working with the remote close to the vehicle. I swapped the battery and internals between the keys as I didn't have the VCDS at the time to program a new immobilizer but the range did not improve with this swap.  Are you hearing me? With the transmitter side seemingly okay, I next looked into the receiver side.  From what I could tell, all central locking was dealt with the Comfort Control ...

There isn't much to say about this job as it is very easy. Prep wise I did take the time to touch up and repaint some areas of the roof that had paint damage that the rail base plates would cover up. As you can see on the right I had one of the soft ally fasteners round off on me . My work around was to carefully cut a slot into it with a junior hacksaw blade then use a large flat bladed screwdriver to remove it. Pretty standard stuff but it is nice to get the chance to illustrate it actually working.

Cruising Intro My first car, an Audi A4 1.8t SE B6, and a year spent living in the states had got me rather used to having cruise control. When trying to maintain speed on long drives with rolling hills or variable speed limits, make it almost invaluable and at a few quid short of £100 it seemed almost rude not to get cruise control for my T5. Comatibility To fit cruise control you need to get the correct kit for your year of van (T5 and T5.1 are slightly different), LH/RH drive and whether you have a MFD or not.  Other limitations are that you must have electric windows which means your J519 BCM Body control ECU will be of the correct spec. A quick check for this is to either check the part number is compatable (eg. my BCM '7H0 937 049 T' is compatible) or simply check the 'F plug' socket has pins in it. Finally it is rarely mentioned but you need to have a rear wiper and washer as most of the control modules are for vehicles with a rear wiper. If not ...