Search results

I find myself with a left CV shaft for a 1996 B4V. Bought the pair of left and right, nearly killed myself replacing the right side and found that fixed all the bizarre noises years ago, so I still have the left side shaft, sealed in the box. Probably a CarQuest part, since it's got a UPC and...

After nineteen years, I have to give up my farm, so in addition to all the other stuff I've needed to find homes for, my first TDI needs a new home, better than what I can give it. It's a 1996 B4V, black, cloth interior (see below) with something north of 320,000 miles. It's on its third...

I wanted to post this. Put several thousand into many small and large jobs the B4V needed, and one in particular stuck out. Some of you may remember that I had a problem with a failing factory power steering pump a year or two ago, and that the only reasonably-priced pump I could find had a...

Folks: just in the last few days I noticed the translucent box atop the relays above the brake booster has gone bubbly and cloudy, like it overheated and distorted the plastic. What IS this thing? One red heavy-ish gauge wire going in from the driver's side. The thing's back to its trick of...

Had a hard time with my PS pump last year, it finally failed and I replaced it with the most reasonable alternative, and even after all this time, the thing is still leaking fluid around the {cheap plastic wibbly} connection. I'd mostly become resigned to the idea I'd just be feeding it CHF...

My B4V has been great since its fuel pump rebuild last year. All its life, except for when the IP was leaking, it started from less than one second of cranking. Hit the key, it fires. Suddenly, the last week or so, it's been acting like it has to pump fuel up from the tank, as if it ran out of...

Where my girlfriend lives, there's a local listserv for the neighborhood, and somebody posted last week looking for someone with a VAG-COM cable. As it turned out, mine (KII-USB) won't work on his 2005 Jetta, which apparently wants a HEX, but we got talking about what he needed it for (I didn't...

Having fixed the air conditioner, I'm now setting about repairing the broken exhaust. It's been hanging down and banging for quite a while, and there appears to be no catalytic comb (that black stuff that looks like a fine honeycomb) left inside, meaning whatever catalytic action it might have...

How big a butt-pain is replacing a clutch master cylinder? This thing's latest stunt is, when I first fire it up after sitting overnight or for a few days, I'll put the clutch on the floor, and... it stays there. I have to physically stick my toe under the pedal and PULL it back up. Until...

UPDATE: see further down this thread. It seems to have "fixed itself," which worries me even more. I'm going to ignore the electric locks now. I fired the diesel up to move it to another parking space, and about a minute after start, after moving it maybe 100 feet, the thing starts to...

The other day I left stuff running and came back to a dead battery. Jumper box was marginal due to cold, and somewhere in there, the locks decided to stop working. No response to key fob, no flashing LED, and even manually pulling up or pushing down the driver's button gets ignored. As a...

Another crap repair done by some previous owner has come back to haunt me... the outlet pipe on the catalytic appears to have been re-welded at some time in history, and the welds broke off the other day, right where the tapering part of the butt-end of the cat meets the outlet pipe, so I have a...

I have a pair of black leather front seats for a B4V. PO replaced the cloth (which I like) with these seats (which I hate). Fortunately, he still had the cloth seats, so I've put them back where they belong and am quite happy on cloth. These seats are in generally excellent shape, but I can't...

I've got (somewhere) the Bentley 1996-1997 Passat TDI CD: it came with the car. Stupidly, it will not work on any OS *newer* than Windows 98. Since basically nothing I own runs Windows 98 any longer, I contacted Bentley and asked them why their thing can't run on Windows 7 or XP or at least...

Tell me if this has ever happened before in recorded history so I can send in the papers to Guinness: I was on a trip this last weekend, we jam-packed the B4V with giant wabbits and all their appurtenances, and the right-rear door, which had been acting edgy for a few months, like it was going...

This car is getting to be a whiner very rapidly. Power steering pump seized about a mile from the house, so I turned around and went home. Of course, VW didn't make this ostensibly-easy repair any easier... several of the mounting bolts are classic VW "can't take this off till that's off, and...

My older TDI. Just fired it up after charging the battery at 2a for a day. Before putting it on the charger, I had tried starting on the low battery, got the usual rattle and zeroing of the trip odometer and the clock. No big deal, we've all seen it. Once it was charged up, it fired up...

Well, I identified the cause of the low power on the B4V: I can no longer hear the turbo spinning up, or feel it kicking in. The previous owner put in a rebuilt which I haven't yet had out to identify, but he gave me the old unit he'd replaced, which is a KKK and the shaft is seized. I'm...

Well, sure enough, the nastiest day of the year so far, so of course today is the day I replace the AC compressor and drier. Comparing the hub resistance of the new versus the old compressor is educational... the hub on the old one spins almost as freely as the outer pulley, just one finger...

I have a 1996 B4V that has had a definite pull to the LEFT for some time now, but I went out and looked today, and it's the outside shoulder of the RIGHT front tire that's been rubbing. In the past, when you have a pull like that, and you shove the wheel back to the right, and no unusual wear...