If the resolve is about cost, then your right, you could likely get a new pair for similar to a resole.  If it’s about not wasting a perfectly good upper and ending up with a shoe that will last another x years, then resole.

Ive not sent them yet, but have had very good chat with cheshiresoles.co.uk who seem to be able to resole anything and have the vibrant ‘dotty’ sticky sole available which would likely be a good 5:10 match? Lancashire Sport Repairs is the other one that most often gets recommended and is the main repairer for a lot of manufacturers.

In a diesel, or in a direct injection petrol engine, there is usually way more oxygen than is needed to burn the fuel. There’s always a full cylinder’s worth (at least), the injector just squirts in however much fuel you’ve asked for via the pedal. That burns in the air around the injector and the rest of the air in the cylinder just gets hotter and the nitrogen and oxygen in it react to form NOx. The only time you need all the air in there is when you are at full power. That’s why you have an EGR valve – to vary the amount of exhaust gas that goes in according to the engine load. There won’t be any EGR at full power, when it’s cold or when you start it.

Not completely accurate…

A diesel is fuel quantity driven, whereas a petrol is fuel quality driven. As you rightly say, a diesel will generally have air far in excess of what is required for combustion – you just fill the cylinder up and then inject as much fuel as you need for the power you want. If EGR fills some of that air space in the cylinder then, unless the ratio of egr to air is REALLY high, you still inject the same amount of fuel as you still have more air than is required. At full load on a diesel you will still have an excess of air, but not much and so it can’t really tolerate much EGR. Modern diesels run EGR as far up the load range as possible though.

In a petrol, you are always targeting lambda 1 which is 14.7 times more air than fuel. This is why you have a throttle for a gasoline as you limit the amount of air going in to the cylinder and then inject the correct quantity of fuel to match that amount of air. As you require more power you allow more e air in and so more fuel. As such a petrol engine power is governed more by the amount of air you can get in whereas on a diesel it is the quantity of fuel.

Whilst petrol engines produced NOx and can use EGR to reduce it, in reality NOx emissions are very small compared to a diesel.  EGR is more used in petrols to aid fuel economy. As mentioned above, you use the throttle to limit the amount of air in the cylinder, but closing the throttle introduced large pumping losses which make the engine less efficient. Ideally you want to run the throttle as open as possible. So, if you can fill up some of the cylinder with I ert exhaust gas, you can open the throttle more and still have the same level of fresh air in the cylinder. As a side note, this was the same reason for the shift to smaller, turbocharged petrol engines – at low loads you have the throttle open much more and then use the turbo at high loads to provide the air you need. EGR is also used in petrols to lower combustion temperatures at high loads where you would normally inject more fuel to cool the exhaust gas – clearly this is a waste of fuel so much better to use EGR and run at lambda 1 at full load.

Cicar are excellent – ‘local’ Canary Islands company and have always had really good service and prices generally cheapest as well.

It’s a fudge to pass NOx levels in towns. As I do near zero urban driving my deleted system has limited impact on the environment.

Just to correct this – SCR is most effective outside urban driving as it needs exhaust temperature to work – so you are definitely emitting WAY more NOx without an SCR.

SCR systems are categorically not inherently unreliable – I engineer these things as a day job and have never seen a whole system fail to the point it was impossible to know the cause. They are relatively simple systems. The main things that can go wrong are deposit buildup – can be cleaned off or just disappear during a DPF regen – or NOx sensor failure (most common failure I’d say).

Removing an SCR also won’t increase performance in any way – there is nothing they do that reduces performance in the first place and -as mentioned- allow much less EGR to be used = better mpg = lower CO2 = less soot = less DPF regens = less chance of DPF blocking.

They aren’t perfect, but they are very very good – near 100% conversion efficiency in extra-urban and highway conditions.

That Honda mentioned above uses an LNT – this stores Nox and then purges it by running rich for a while. I cannot make this as an absolute statement, but it’s likely over a witch the LNT won’t need to purge frequently with the result of great NOx and low CO2. On the road at high nox conditions, that might be a very different story. LNTs have basically been ditched by the industry even though they are a lot cheaper than SCRs because they are nowhere near as effective in real world conditions.

Should we also expect slightly better MPG with higher octane then if the timing can be advanced?

Yeah, there will be some improvement as you are making better use of the air/fuel charge.

Octane ratings only prevents pre ignition at high compression. High compression only occurs at wide open throttle because at part throttle you have a manifold vacuum which translates to the compressed charge in the engine being nowhere near the ~10x atmospheric pressure the compresion ratio implies.

This is incorrect; knock (pre-ignition is different to knock) can happen at any engine load if the ignition is advanced too far, or if there are hot-spots in the cylinder, etc. Yes, it is more likely at higher loads and if the engine has a higher compression ratio or is at high boost (giving a functionally higher CR) but can happen anywhere.

Obviously if the calibrator has done their job properly then knock at low-loads isn’t going to happen, but there will still be advantages in mid-load regions with a higher octane fuel to advance the ignition.

Most modern engines – even smaller, non-performance ones – will be mapped at 99RON to form the base ignition maps and then will have corrections applied based on the knock levels seen by the EMS. Running < 99RON will see some knock increases and the EMS will learn a global offset required to ensure knock seen is below a given threshold across the entire engine map or, for some EMS, the offset is applied separately in a grid across the engine map (so more knock susceptible areas will have a higher retard offset than those that don’t see much knock).

On an engine mapped as above (which is any I have done – engine calibrator by profession for 15 years) there is an absolute difference in how the ECU runs on different octane fuels. HOWEVER, whether that gives any appreciable difference in end result is down to the engine. A small, non-performance engine it will be negligble, more powerful ones it will become noticeable. Ignition advance is proportional to engine torque for a given engine speed and load (air mass) by way of an efficiency curve. Advance moves you up the efficiency curve, retarding down it. The curve is flatter at the most advanced end and steeper at the most retarded end. So the advance you get from increased octane moves you from high efficiency to higher effiency and might be 1-3% on the efficiency curve, depending on the speed/load you are running. Obviously that then translates to if your engine is making more torque than another then 1-3% is going to be more or less noticeable.

So it was getting more power from the same amount of air, that’s possibly even more impressive than a magic gearbox unless it was a turbo’d version.

Absolutely possible, in fact, the whole point of higher RON fuel – if you can advance the ignition more before knock then you will get more power for a given AFR. This is literally the reason for calibrations being able to react to higher RON fuel. Doesn’t have to be turbo-charged, it is all down to the ignition mapping and whether the EMS can detect and correct for higher/lower RON fuel.

Yeah, Guardian is my recommendation as well. Yes, it definitely has a left bias, but also will generally have good articles from both sides for major stories so has some good balance. No awful tabloidism that the BBC seems to have now gone for. Journalists generally have a good sense of humour as well.

Could high oil level not cause emissions issues though?

It’s a good question – whilst it could, yes, I don’t believe it is OBD MIL relevant. I have to admit I might be wrong on that though (although I do some OBD calibration, it’s not my core area of work so I’m not a specialist on every monitor). The regs are very much about whether something is monitorable to give a quantifiable fault – although electronic level gauges are now much more common today, if the vehicle is a few years old it likely wouldn’t have one and so you have no way of properly knowing an overfill (oil pressure wouldn’t give an accurate indication) that would cause emissions to increase. Emissions also have to increase above a certain level to need to monitor it. The CO and HC levels – which an overfill may affect – are quite high and if you have a working oxidising catalyst you wouldn’t likely see a significant increase in tailpipe emissions.

BTW, is your name TVR related?

Haha, it is, but I don’t work for them :) It’s a username I’ve had since I was at school and have just kept it.

As these threads come up reasonably often, I thought i’d offer a bit more insight in to the ‘engine light’ to those interested (my credentials being I calibrate the logic in the ECU that determines whether the light comes on as part of my job).

The Malfunction Indicator Lamp (MIL) comes on – as noted in one of the posts above – when a fault has been detected that will degrade the vehicle emissions. The types of fault this could be are legislated as to at what fault level (how much more emissions than normal) the fault should come on and how often the ECU must check for a fault.

To set the MIL active, the ECU must detect the fault on 3 consecutive drive cycles (usually, sometimes some faults are 1 or 5 depending on severity) – a drive cycle being engine start to ignition off a d having passed some other parameters such as length of drive, average speed, etc. The logic uses a system of a pair of defect and healing counters. If a fault is detected the fault counter counts from 3 down to 1. If a fault isn’t detected it counts back up again, but at a slower rate; so for example it may need 3 drive cycles to set, but 5 to heal. If a fault is seen at least once then a code is stored in the ECU indicating what the detected fault was (but crucially NOT what the cause of the fault is) and this is what is seen when you use a scan tool.

There are fault codes that don’t set the MIL and these are for faults where the fault wouldn’t lead to an increase in emissions. These are there to help when you take your car in to the garage with an issue.

There are well over 100 different fault codes that could be set and some are legislated that they have to be there and others manufacturers add in to help diagnose issues – this is why sometimes a scan tool won’t show all fault codes; a generic one will just show the legislated codes whereas a manufacturer tool will show everything else as well.

So in answer to your question, it could be anything and should be taken to a garage (or checked yourself) to see what code has caused the MIL. Oil level is very unlikely as low oil level is not an emissions relevant fault – that’s why you have an oil pressure light as well. HOWEVER the fact there is low oil may be the cause of an emissions fault in some way so not to say they aren’t linked, but that you can’t draw conclusions from seeing the MIL and a symptom. And again, to reiterate, the fault codes only tell you the fault that was detected (e.g. a deviation between the expected and actual amount of air mass entering the engine) but not the cause of the issue (for that example it could be a stick EGR valve, or an air leak, or other issues) so be careful just looking at codes if you aren’t familiar with what might be the cause of a given fault.

That was long.

In my experience, the CEng itself doesn’t really count for much – although it’s a chartership, it’s nowhere near as meaningful as it is for other professions. Mainly just means you have to pay the IMechE £400 a year for the privilege….

As such, I would say that go the route that will most interest you and give you most benefit in terms of learning. The CEng is a little bonus at the end, but the main goal should be doing something interesting that will benefit you whilst getting your employer to pay for it :)

I did get a fancy cast iron affair once, filled it with salt, brought the temperature right up to ‘season’ it but found after all that it did still stick. Thought I’d done it wrong and repeated putting it in the oven at maximum but still the same sticking problem.

That’s not how you season cast iron….

It needs to have multiple layers of fat – a neutral oil like rapeseed or vegetable is best – applied and heated to high temperature. After just a few coats it will be pretty good, but if you just keep using it and occasionally do some specific seasoning it will soon build up a super-slick layer of polymer that is far more robust than non-stick and only slightly less slippery.

Cheap and chips supermarket brand and replace it often.

Without wanting to get preachy – this is fine for the convenience factor but is environmentally horiffic. Not only is it a load of wastage (even if the pan can be recycled), but all that teflon being created and then disposed off is very very bad for the environment

It comes down to a trade-off between a small amount of additional effort, or replacing a non-stick pan every year or two and all the enviornmental downsides which come with that.

Cooking with stainless-ply or carbon steel is not difficult, it just requires a bit of a change in approach. The absolute key is pre-heating the pan properly before adding any fat (and don’t expect to not use any fat at all with stainless or carbon) and then actually letting the food cook before trying to move it. Proteins will release themselves from the pan when they are cooked – it is the act of trying to move them round the pan too much before they area cooked that causes sticking. Even so, it will still leave some traces of ‘stuck’ food, but this is actually the bit that gives a lot of great flavour and is released incredibly easily by just adding a fluid (water, vinegar, wine – it just needs a little bit) to the hot pan, scrape up the stuck bits, let the fluid evaporate and then just add it to the dish. Carbon steel once it has built up a seasoning – which does take time – will become pretty much non-stick anyway but will last forever.

A proper non-stick pan is still very useful for things like eggs which will still stick to stainless/carbon-steel (although as above, a well used, seasoned, and looked after carbon steel is 90% as good as non-stick and clean-up is not difficult), but the benefit is that it is not used much so lasts for ages.

Cleanup of stainless and carbon-steel is easy but don’t expect to just chuck it in the dishwasher. Easiest way to clean is to add a small amount of water to the pan (just coating the bottom), bring it to a boil (which will take seconds) then scrape the bottom of the pan as the water is boiling and that is pretty much clean. For carbon steel just run a non-soapy cloth round it to get the worst off then heat it back up to get rid of any mositure. For stainless just got at it with a metal scourer if needs be and it will clean right up.

If it turns out the rear sensor line is clogged, it’s worth checking the rear DPF face as well – the exhaust coming out should be clean of soot (the whole point of the DPF) and so there shouldnt really be anything to clog the sensor line up with… If the line is clogged with soot it would indicate a cracked DPF which should be checkable by seeing if there are any soot deposits on the rear face and surrounding exhaust. If there is that suggests a crack and would need a new DPF.

Clogged EGR wouldn’t (shouldn’t) cause a false flag for the DPF, but a clogged delta-pressure sensor could. There will be a pressure sensor either side of the DPF that is used to detect when it is too-full (and also when it’s not there at all). If for some strange reason the rear one is clogged up, it would be reporting a high delta pressure across the DPF and so think that the can is full. They are usually easy to access and it’s just an air line to a sensor so I’d say first thing is pop those off and clean them out then go from there.

it’s an air temp/pressure/flow sensor – helps the air con development teams get data independent of the vehicle sensors.

Temp sensor was my first thought – we usually mount external temp sensors on the roof in a white plastic tube, but they wouldn’t have a lens on…. (it’s literally just a bit of PVC pipe with a thermocouple inside).

I’m not a chassis engineer, but mounting cameras to help with development of chassis/suspension is pretty common so could have been that as well.

For a great, scientific, view on a lot of what has been suggested, this is a very worthwhile read:

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-pan-seared-steaks

And an accompanying article:
https://www.seriouseats.com/old-wives-tales-about-cooking-steak

(Edited for 2nd link)

As above – I had it at about 17 and knocked me out for about a week with rash pretty much all over, but other than that recovered quickly after that and no lasting problems. It’s just a week of feeling grotty and you kind of just have to deal with it…

Another vote for SPI belts – might be a bit small for what you want/need, but for a phone and a set of keys (or similar) they are superb and you forget you are even wearing it within a couple of minutes.

I have one and really like it – battery life is surprisingly good; as mentioned it on iously drains faster when listening to music and/or using GPS, but even then it’s really good. From a full charge, a 2.5hr run listening to music will still have maybe 25-30% left at the end?

It’s really convenient to have music/podcasts without having to carry or operate it from your phone.

Lots of opinions in the above thread but long story short is go to nisbets.co.uk and get a set of Vogue tri-wall pans and job done.

If there weren’t these emission limits, how bad (environmentally) would the engines be and how much cheaper would cars be to buy?

Emissions would be catastrophically bad – project I am currently working on, the engine out NOx emissions (so before any catalysts) are 700% higher than what comes out of the exhaust tailpipe (which is well below legal required). And that is with EGR active so if you removed that it would be probably s factor of 1000 higher than tailpipe if not more.

They’ll all be at it in one way or another

(Sorry, last one…)

As someone who works in the industry and has worked with a lot of different manufacturers calibrating engines I can really assure you they aren’t.

The amount of stress I’ve had and the amount of being shouted at by very stressed customers when it is proving difficult to got emissions targets in the emissions tests AND MUCH more, in real world conditions and the resulting very long working weeks, product launch delays, last minute hardware changes at massive cost to the manufacturer and all sorts of other things to make sure they are NOT cheating and emissions are as good as can be tells me I can be certain of this.

They’ll all be at it in one way or another.

A well known motor manufacturer in the NE UK, was making cylinder heads for Mercedes (Smart cars). They had an injector in the exhaust port, that was built into it during the casting process. The purpose of this was to inject fresh air into the exhaust fumes, thus diluting what came out of the pipe at the end – but not actually making the fuel burn any cleaner. As it was cast into the head, and not a bolt on thing, it was within the “rules” . Production of these stopped abruptly when the VW thing kicked off.

The Fiat Air engines are a similar idea, I believe

Can you provide a link to where you saw this?

I would 99.99999999% (in fact, I’m going to say 100%) confident this is a secondary air system which a) have been around for decades, b) make emissions BETTER because they are used to activate the catalysts faster and c) even if it was for cheating it would make the tailpipe emissions and fuel consumption absolutely horrifically bad as the engine would be massively overfilling as the lambda sensors would be seeing this fresh air as the engine running lean; driveability would be appalling; the whole thing would be an absolute mess

So where’s the cheating in Europe? NO levels aren’t part of the testing, so I can’t see how these leeches can reasonably expect to get any money back; how can you cheat a non-existent engine test?

NO isn’t legislated in any market – NOx (which is what the VW suit was about) is legislated in US, Europe, and every other market and is the number 1 pollutant for diesels that manufacturers will calibrate their eninges to reduce.

CO2 is not legislated in any market – there is no limit for it over the test cycle. However – certainly in the US – there are penalties if the overall aggregated CO2 of the vehicle s you sell are above a certain limit.

CO2 and NOx on a diesel are on a pretty much direct trade-off curve so the more you have of one the less of the other. This is what the VW cheat was – in real world it was reading off NOx for lower CO2.

As a side note to this…. Although there are certainly ways manufacturers ‘push’ the limits of what’s allowed in testing to make CO2 (and hence fuel consumption) lower over the test cycle, it is a little unfair to call out manufacturers for advertising a certain fuel consumption that can’t be met in real world – manufacturers legally MUST advertise the fuel consumption from the test cycle and can ONLY advertise the fuel consumption from the test cycle. This is exactly to stop cheating as it means fuel consumption is comparable across multiple manufacturers. Clearly the cycle isn’t perfect and does t properly reflect real world,but it is not strictly the manufacturers fault for this…

As above, you really need a small mixer. Something like this would do:

The keyboard would go in to the ‘line’ channel and you have a volume for that. TV would go in the ‘track’ channel which doesn’t have a volume level on the mixer but easy enough to just set it on the TV and then set the keys to match. Then output to your speakers goes from ‘main’ and has a volume level on the mixer which is the combined TV + keys.

Even has a USB port to bring in audio from a PC if you so want, plus a mic channel so you could sing along as well!

Might need some jack to phono adapters but they are cheap as chips.

Don’t like the idea of a rechargeable headtorch. If it runs out then I’d be fecked. Always have 3 AAA in the rucksack.

The alpkit quark has a rechargeable battery that if it runs out you can use 3xAAA with instead; best of both worlds – no unecessary battery waste but you can still keep some emergency batteries on hand if needs be.

Also good are Paramo.

League table from Ethical Consumer here for those interested (which again, you all should be):

https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/fashion-clothing/shopping-guide/waterproof-insulated-jackets

If it makes any difference (which it definitely should), Patagonia are head and shoulders more ethically sourced/run than any other outdoor kit manufacturers (except Alpkit who are also excellent). They have proper B-Corp certification so aren’t just claiming they are good, they actually are.

Yes, it makes the price slightly higher but if the kit is also good – which it is – then you at least know a lot of the extra cost is going to the right places.

Mandalorian has been my favourite Star Wars related viewing along with Rouge one.

Absolutely – which for me is why the sequel trilogy fell flat; why did it all have to be joined back to the original trilogy (yes I know the irony of what happened in the last few minutes of the Mandalorian….. ignore that….) rather than just doing a new story in the same universe.

I think I was one of the minority who thought The Last Jedi was the best of the sequels (not without major flaws though) as it seemed to be aiming for the third installment to go in a different direction (rebels basically gone, ‘broom kid’, etc). But then Abrams went and decided to just do the same bloody thing again.

Oh well, the Disney+ series all seem like they could be great based on Mandalorian so here’s hoping! (and Taika Waititi film upcoming am definitely looking forward to)

Edit: Minority, not majority!

Essentially repeating what everyone else has said, but a cheap carbon steel wok is about as good as you’ll get, no need to spend more than that – I love Netherton stuff and have several of their other pans, but that one is way overkill.

You want a wok to be thin so that it doesn’t store heat that well, the idea being that the heat is controllable. Only the very base is designed to be heated so you can push food to the cooler aides and then back to the hot middle. I’ve always seen that more expensive woks – including the Netherton one – are far too thick/heavy and would hold too much heat.

A decent seasoning takes a little while, but once on there it is just on another planet to non-stick. What you find is that food will still stick, but it will stick properly in that when food sticks that is where you get flavour from. It doesn’t stick to the point you are chipping it off, but will gently stick until the sugars in the food caramelise and then release itself easily. The result is all the flavour and none of the mess. You then get to use proper deglazing – which never works in non-stick – to release any slightly more stubborn stuck on bits which are then incorporated into the dish (or a separate sauce or whatever) for even more flavour!

Only thing to be aware of to start with is highly acidic food – until the seasoning is built up this will remove some of it. But once you have a good layer it’s fine. I read somewhere that seasoning is like a bank account – seasoning it or cooling with fatty food is like your salary going in, cooking with acidic foods is like your bills going out; as long as the two are in balance and your salary is > bills then all good!

tl;dr – get a cheap steel wok and cook great good!

Lived there for 6 months and absolutely agree with all of the above.

As others have said, the language barrier is enormous, but (also as others have said), the Japanese are genuinely the loveliest most helpful people and even if between you can’t understand a thing each other are saying you will generally end up where you need to be/with what you want/whatever as they will just keep trying until you are happy!

Tokyo is amazing and you could easily spend a whole holiday there but travelling around is where the real interest is – Tokyo, whilst still being utterly Japanese, does still feel like a big western city. As you go out from Tokyo that fades off significantly and you get much more of a feel for Japanese-ness.

Food wise you can literally just go wherever you decide and it will be incredible. Makes it both easier and harder to find somewhere to eat!

Travel is dead easy – the trains really are as good as they say. I had about an hour commute on a train and a bus and over 6 months got to my desk at exactly the same time +/- a minute max. As mentioned, book a JR pass beforehand and it makes travel really easy. Shinkansen (bullet train) is superb but quite expensive compared to air travel – but we’ll worth it both from the experience and environmental perspectives. Local trains by far the easiest way to get around although taxis are also great (more like being chauffered than a taxi – all’s drivers in suits etc).

So yes. Go there. You will not regret it.

So, based on my understanding then, with Midi Out only I can use a sequencer to store something I play on the Yamaha and replay/ mess around with it. I can also use the Yamaha to control other devices, and record that on the sequencer if I want to.

Remember MIDI only sends data, not audio – so yes you absolutely can send MIDI to a sequencer but it’s only storing the notes and not any sound. The sequencer needs to send that MIDI to something else (a plugin if in a DAW, or external hardware) for it to actually make a sound. As you’ve now found that Yamaha has MIDI in over USB then this is all good but just wanted to clarify! (I think you probably already knew this, but just wanted to make sure!)

If the future goal is to use the keyboard keys to play some external synths then midi out is fine. Midi in to your keyboard is only needed if you want to play it’s sounds from another device OR it has patch our sound change functionality; that way another device could tell your keyboard to switch to a certain sound.

I think you can get USB to DIN converters so you could use that midi connection to control external stuff

What is the keyboard you are looking at?

Surely people have to buy something at some point to get feedback? So if you block everyone who has no feedback, they can’t get feedback, and so the whole of eBay collapses?

Just because someone has just signed up doesn’t automatically mean they are dodgy – everyone has to start somewhere!

As mentioned (although not personally used myself); probably using them with an M series mirrorless will be a bit unbalanced. But at the same time will also work perfectly well and for the small primes would probably be fine.

An R series mirrorless with them would work much better and would be a great combination of camera and lenses – but the R series are pretty spendy.

Are any of the lenses L series (they will have a red stripe on them, or will be grey/white if they are longer zooms)? If they are then they are great lenses and so either going for an R-series, or something like a 7D would be brilliant. If you are keen on photography and happy to spend a bit more on a body then a good combo. If they aren’t, then if you are keen and would at some point get more lenses or upgrade the ones you have, then again these bodies are a good shout.

If you just want to use them for snaps etc and they aren’t ‘L’ lenses (or even if they are to be honest) then just go with one of the lower end SLRs; will still be a brilliant camera but if you aren’t going to use it too much there isn’t much point in investing in an R series body or one of the higher-end SLR bodies. Lenses will always last longer than bodies so if you aren’t going to use it much then my advice would be save some money now and maybe wait until a few years down the line when the R series has some lower end models that you can buy.

The VAG small engines are great – either would be great in an Octavia. As others have said, you essentially just have to ignore cylinder capacity – the point of a downsized 1.0 turbo engine (for example) is that you have the fuel consumption of a 1 litre at part load and the power of a 1.5-1.8ish litre (NA) at full load. Fuel consumption will be pretty much identical to the larger capacity engine at full load, but significantly better at part load. Being ‘on boost’ more often is a non-issue as it’s still delivering the same amount of air as a larger,NA, engine and robustness all good as well.

I popped mine about 6 or 7 years ago and if I put a lot of pressure on it now – a good example being opening a stubborn jar – it still aches a bit.

Took a good 6 months-year after doing it to get full strength back without pain. I had a couple of NHS physio appointments and they gave me what is basically silly putty to squeeze and mould in different ways as an exercise. I was a bit crap at keeping to doing it daily but I think it helped.

I remember the physio saying that the tendon there gets very little blood flow so takes ages to heal.

Generic OBD2 readers only read the engine ECU I think, and then only some stuff. VCDS or the dealer stuff should give you loads more info.

Yeah, OBD is made up of the the stuff that you legally have to output – both data and some faults – and which must be available on any tool, and then manufacturer specific stuff – again, both data and faults – that can be made only visible to the manufacturer specific scan tools or the higher end units/software.

This is an absolutely terrible idea

What he said. Gearbox calibration takes the best part of a year or two depending on how ‘carryover’ the model and transmission are and is a specific role for a manufacturer’s engineering team – just because you can change it doesn’t mean you should or would actually know how to!

Yeah, if it has seen the issue there would normally be a ‘pending’ code. When faults are flagged it’s not usually an instant ‘fault’ but instead the engine management system has to see a certain number of fault events in a row to trigger a real fault; until that happens it is pending. However, the faults also ‘heal’ within the management system if a number of drive cycles occur without the fault… This is usually higher than the number of drive cycles needed to set the fault (e.g. if it’s 3 detections to set a fault, it’s 5 non-detections to clear the pending). So ideally get it to a garage within a drive cycle (ignition on to ignition off with driving in between) of feeling the issue in the car. That will give the best chance of catching the fault on the scan tool.