Not much to report really... not had time to do much other than drive the car during the snowy weather (winter tyres + AWD rocks)...
The car behaved impeccably for the whole week until the Friday when after leaving the works car park STFT's were taking over 25% fuel out... brilliant... pulled over and shut the engine off... restarted and all was good again... jeez... getting tiring now but I do believe I have sticking injectors... with that in mind I have a set of Bosch 550's ready to try complete with some slightly non OEM looking unspacers
I also believe my VVT tensioner to be on its last legs... I get a rattle on cold start from time to time and occasionally under low speeds the part throttle repsonse feels a bit jerky... this could be due to a number of reasons but considering the VVT is the only thing I haven't replaced in the head I thought I may as well do this too...
Genuine VVT units are around £350+vat trade... not a cheap part... I have had a copy unit in the past but that was just rubbish so I have been running my original unit ever since... found what looked to be bargain of the century on eBay...
£110 for a VAG unit... seemed too good to be true... sadly it turned out to be a forgery... in the listing its pictured next to a VAG box and had 4 rings cast onto the unit... however the unit turned up in a polystyrene container with a 'vag box' flat packed in the jiffy bag with it...
Here is a genuine unit...
Signs that the unit I had was a fake...
4 rings logo looks like it was cast on afterwards to an existing copy unit as there is a 'tide' mark visible...
'DE' logo had the 'E' the wrong way round... it also had HVT cast on the unit rather than HYT...
..compared to a genuine unit...
The tensioner tool supplied with genuine units carry a 4 rings logo, this doesn't have any...
The barcode on the box wasn't an actual barcode... I work with barcodes and nothing I had available could read it...
The box itself has a shiny finish where all the VAG boxes I have ever handled are a matt finish... the VAG logos looked almost photocopied onto the box..
When I came to return the unit I tried to fit it into the box...
That kinda seals it really...
Be careful people... if it looks too good to be true, it probably is...
For reference here is a pic of the copy unit I bought... I bought this knowing it was a cheap copy unit but all it did was cause a 'setpoint not reached' fault code...
I need to new tensioner of some description so next on the list will be a unit from GSF as I have seen these come in VAG boxes which suggests they are genuine... failing that its bite the bullet and buy a genuine one from TPS
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