Croma Scottish Newbie - Indy Garages?

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Croma Scottish Newbie - Indy Garages?

Hi bzam the inlet manifold was one of the jobs I tackled not long after buying ours fhe part was £170 common to vectras,it was for me a whole after noon job 4to5 hours that was 50,000 since There is no need to upset the cam belt as there are two 8mm holes and tapped threads alighned by rotating the engine,this permits removal of the fuel pump.The new manifold is modified and will not jam as the old one and looks like it should cost a great deal more than £170! a nod i think to the error in the desighn of the earlier effort.I am affraid it means a gulp wallet wise but if I can do the job in four hours it should be no more than £300 to £400 max and well worth doing!. It must be born in mind that BMW used metal swirl vales that fall apart and are consumed by the engine and cause huge damage to the WALLET the JTD is by contrast Bullet proof!.Our croma has just flew through the mot with104,000miles
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What does cleaning out the turbo involve?

Mine went through its MoT last month and failed on a misaligned headlight. Turns out my attempt at lining it up after I changed it last winter wasn't quite good enough :)

Easily fixed though and that's it for another year. Not bad for 95k.
 
A strip down and clean / de coke, along with check and clean of all the pipe work and connections. As the EGR valve gets gummed up, so does much of the whole circuit.
 
Mine went through its MoT last month and failed on a misaligned headlight. Turns out my attempt at lining it up after I changed it last winter wasn't quite good enough :).

My MOT test station (council) won't fail a car for misaligned headlight UNLESS they can't adjust it or the light unit is otherwise faulty. (y)
 
They adjusted it there and then and then retested it so it wasn't really a problem. When I put it in I'd set it too high.
 
Hi Brian, thanks for the links to the flexi options. Not sure what the recommendation from CM will be as I have not yet received the priority list and pricing for the identified jobs. Either of these look good, and depending on access, one option may be better than the other.

As I mentioned, I don't have any tools or facilities in Scotland to do this work. Once we buy a house and get settled etc, I'll be able to do more of this work myself, but until then, I'm happy to have CM in East Kilbride do it for me, and to later tackle the bigger jobs that I can't do.

I'll report back once the work has been done. Winter tyres on next week.
 
Here is a reply to Telegraph's post. Got quotes back for the various jobs that need doing and none of them a surprise except for the inlet manifold. Oh my... 750.00 quid, based on the part and 5 hours labour.

So, nothing I am going to be able to afford until we get over the Christmas festivities, and have an opportunity to catch our breath financially. The question is how much of a danger is this, and how urgently does it need to be attended to? I don't know how the car drove before this problem, but it seems to be OK now other than a slightly unstable idle. Not hunting, just randomly unstable.

Power delivery much smoother after the service, and EGR valve clean, and it should be better again after the turbo has been stripped and cleaned along with all the associated pipework.

Bottom line question is how soon do I need to get this fixed, and what do I risk happening if it's not fixed?
 
[FONT=&quot]Hi Bzam yes that's quite a gulp!:confused: (A nice earner!) There is an ebay listing for a new manifold for £129.99 so if your car runs ok and you intend to get tooled up I think it would be ok to put this job off till spring and DIY, well worth the effort for £620! .[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] If I could earn£620 a day I would be quite happy to do five of these a week![/FONT]
 
Hi again I saw this some time ago but if slowed down might help anyone wishing to change the inlet manifold
on the Croma no need to take the bumper off and better I think to do just the manifold one day and the belt the next .watch carefully and see the chap line up and fit two slave bolts to hold the pump pulley in place, there is a woodruff key on that pump shaft which is a devil for falling off so super glue the thing in place on refit and blank everything off as you go along(unlike this gent!)Masking tape would do. There are a lot of nuts and bolts and it will take all day but there is nothing I can see that is too technical. Aldi have a tool set for£40 which would have all needed for this job. Fiat/gm spent millions developing this engine it was designed to work with the flaps working so worth doing.
 
Hi Telegraph. Very good input and video. I think a DIY job is going to have to be the way to go, or I need to go and negotiate...
 
Just a quick note to mention Greenlaw garage in Paisley. They fitted winter tyres to a new set of wheels for me, so I now have a summer set and a winter set, and dealt with the whole thing very well from the initial contact to the final job. They also fixed an exhaust heat shield that had come loose quickly and all at a reasonable price.

I have not used them for anything else but know they carry out general servicing and repairs. Highly recommended.
 
Hi Brian, I understand you just had a chat with my wife after looking at our Croma. Our respective boys taking their driving theory test. She says you gave her a list of things we need to do to keep the car running well. Many thanks for that. I have already gone through most of the list I suspect plus a lot more. The car has cost a small fortune. Currently it randomly loses power, then randomly comes back again. It's been serviced, and tested in two separate garages and no cause found. I'm beginning to think it's an intermittent electrical problem. Each time it happens it brings up the check engine light. The pad lock symbol on the dash is also on most , but not all of the time, and I know that could be related to a battery with not enough capacity. It also goes between difficulty in starting, to really difficulty in starting and then running rough for a couple of minutes before settling down. Since owning, there have been very few periods where the car is running completely fine. It's been a long list of issues. I'm at the point where I have invested too much into it to give up now, but balancing that with my wife not being happy driving it due to potential break down. I saw recently that someone on the forum was scrapping theirs as they couldn't get this intermittent power loss problem resolved.

Hope your boy passed his test. Ours didn't unfortunately. One question wrong ... All the best. Baz
 
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