Sausage

Yay! Dumped spare ecu eeprom today. Hint: you need ftdi chipset kkl cable. my blue ch340 chipset cable would not do it. Immo off for now, will clone mine sometime soon.

Laura what were the other two cylinders like? If they are all similar then yes i agree it is timing and your mechanic is feeling embarrassed and covering his ass because the cambelt slipped. if the other two are not similar but up around 200 then it isnt timing that is the problem. You'd really struggle to start it if they are all that low btw....

Why not? Carbon build up or any other reason that would cause poor seating then that is the thin edge of the wedge to a burnt valve as the edge gets eaten away by the hot gases.

Well if they work (i've never tried them) then try that as long as it's sensible price. For him to be changing leads and coils then it was probably misfire codes. just a guess. It could be a burnt valve and the oil is being sucked down the valve guide. The water might be a red herring.

If it's running on two cylinders reasonably I'd be inclined to sell it on with a misfire. You get more for it running rough than in bits in the boot. We dont know if i has zero compression on one cylinder or if he read 80 and said i had no compression. Given your coolant and oil losses in the period before this then it's reasonable to think about head gasket, but that is best case scenario. So it is a can of worms to start taking it apart to find out tbh. I doubt any of those solutions work for head gaskets tbh, The Bars heavy duty leak seal tablets work well on radiators I'd probably bung 2 of them in and see what happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating

If by red light you meant the key fobs then yes check them out, sometimes the remote is dead. If so, and i'm not sure on the VWs but you might be able to get 2nd hand key with working remote and swap the remote parts of the keys over and then use vcds to adapt the remote to the car.

Use a multimeter to test the switches on the fobs and that the battery is actually delivering power on the keys. Get a cheap kkl vcds cable (£5 - £10 on ebay) as they are so damn useful and see how many keys are coded to the car, it might be worth trying to re adapt one or both of the remotes you have. http://www.ross-tech.com/vag-com/cars/vw-remote-matching.html Not sure if this is how it's done on a Lupo though....

If that was there for ages with no tax and mot I would imagine the council left a notice on the window for a week or two then removed it. Possibly at the request of the car park management / owners. If you havent physically seen it in the last few weeks and you already have had agro about it being there then it's highly likely the council have it in their pound. If the address on the V5 isnt current you will have missed any of the notices arriving about it.

Probably be used to ring a crashed one. If you keep your eyes out for any 3L for sale especially in the same colour then it might be worth going to see it. I'd also make a list of all the garages and crash repair centres in the area and go and have a look around the yards, it's probably sat in a workshop within 10 miles of the car park. Why did you leave it for weeks / months in that car park btw? Where was the other one taken from?

How low was the coolant when you topped it up? If you look at the levels now what are they? It's probably a head off job to see what the problem is tbh.

Laura has this engine got hot at all? Any change in the temp gauge over normal? Has the heater blown cold or luke warm air instead of hot? Get your mechanic to confirm the cambelt and timing is all ok, then tell us what cylinders are low compression and their readings please. Did he scan for any fault codes?

Head gaskets can fail in about 6 or 7 different ways, bore to water, bore to oil, oil to water, bore to bore, water to air, and combinations of those depending on the gallery layout of the block / head.. etc etc etc. HGF usually gives warning but only if you know what you are looking at. She's had conflicting info from her mechanic and the recovery guys, I'm assuming her mechanic has a better handle on this than the recovery guy and that she does indeed have poor compression on two cylinders. If those two are next to each other my spidey senses tingle for head gasket. It does depend somewhat on the compression readings and if they hold or not. I'd get the compression tested again and see how it holds the pressure for several minutes in each cylinder. I would also assume any mechanic worth his salt would have checked the cambelt condition and timing when checking out the engine and would have picked up any problem there. Assumptions though can be very misleading

Needs to be lower with wider motorsport wheels like minilites or compomotive cx to make those arch extensions have a purpose I reckon.

Wrong fuel or water in the fuel (a garage near me once killed lots of cars many years ago with contaminated fuel) would take a while to reach the engine internals, usually several hundred meters or more depending on how little fuel you had left when filling up. So it's more likely cruel coincidence. If you have poor compression and a recent oil addiction then it's mechanical. It is fixable, but if you have to pay someone to do all the work for you then yes it will add up. External checks: look at the water / coolant. Any oil in the water? Is the level correct? pull out the dip stick, does the oil look smell and feel right? Oil level correct very low or too high? pull out the plugs and read their condition. (oil fouling etc). It could be head gasket, cracked head, worn / broken piston rings. You often wont know for sure until the engine starts being taken apart. You'll have to work out the least costly route, doing nothing and selling it as is or spending a bit of money to find out what needs doing.

i wouldnt put too much trust in what ebay sellers say, many items get listed as being for lupo / polo and they are not always the same, some are some not and it's definately the right thing to double check. i dont know about your wheel boss though sorry.

M8 bolts on the 085 box, not sure of thread pitch but probably 1.25mm. Make sure threads and holes are oil free and use some thread locking compound if they are undoing on you, also use a torque wrench to get the desired tightness. Try the dodgy hole 1st, the hole threads are hardened pretty good so more likely to shag a bolt thread tbh. Grind a small 45 degree bevel on the end of the dodgy bolt to assist entry. Or use a tap and die set to clean it up.

Jeepers, remind me too fit a tracker to any 3L i ever own! Must have been a lorry or spec lift, any cctv in that area, even if it's up or down the road might have spotted it.

Nope, can be done without desoldering anything on edc15p from everything i have read and seen. I think vag commander doesnt like my kkl cable, i will buy another one for vag commander and see.

I'm still trying to clone my ecu on the tdi before messing about with maps etc. I'm trying to dump the eeprom. This is all new to me not done this sort of thing before. I've made a bench harness. I have my blue kkl cable taking to my spare ecu in vcds, I have my Mpps able to dump the spare ecu flash. I can boot the ecu in boot mode too. I have vag commander 2.5 able to ID the ecu using the blue kkl cable, but it cant do anything else with it, it's the same in the car via obd port. It just wont communicate beyond ecu ID. I have a galletto clone and cant get that to work at all. Now I've read about putting the cable into dumb (non intelligent) mode in vcds before using it on vag commander, but i guess they are talking about a rosstech cable and full vcds as there is not that option when i look at vcds lite. There are cheap vag commander cables on ebay, but i have a hunch they are the same as the kkl cable i already have. Are they different does any one know? Any ideas on dumping my eeproms with what i have or do i need yet another cable?

Well my tdi user manual says if it's flashing while driving it is a warning light for the diesel management system and to get it checked asap.

EML light on the diesels is flashing glow plug light isnt it?

Take the plugs out after a run and compare. is the water pressurising as it could be head gasket? other things it could be are valve seats, inlet manifold leak. And just as a precaution you might want to check the cambelt tension as the tensioners seem to be made of chocolate.

Just a guess, but it probably goes in cycles, so if you had been unable to start it (because of the fault) for long enough it would trigger the eml, that fact that you did start it would then basically clear the log of it after a certain time or distance without it recurring. Rinse and repeat.

You could buy an old laptop running windows XP for £20 or less. It doesnt have to be fancy but get a common one like a dell, HP, etc. The codes will more or less tell you what is wrong and you can spend less time and money repairing it that way.