Well, had the NCT last night, and she passed just fine, but there're a couple of things I'm curious about...
First out, the staff were very competent, and I can't fault them their service (even though it was a quarter past nine in the p.m.)! The inspecter was efficient, and appeared very thorough... He also seemed quite familiar with the Stilos quirks (for instance, I was dreading him opening and closing the boot - see one of my other threads as to why - but he seemed to expect the run-away closing action, and closed it nice and gently)!
My concerns are around some of the results that I got.
Emissions were excellent - low idle CO of 0.01% (spec of <0.5%), high idle CO of <0.02% (spec of 0.3%), high idle HC (hydrocarbons?) of 5ppm (spec <200ppm).
Head Light aim - all passed.
General inspection was fine.
Suspension - front axle imbalance of 3% (I'm ok with that!) but rear axle imbalance of
18% (spec of <30%). While still acceptable, I'm worried about this - the offside rear suspension has 27mm of travel, whereas nearside is giving me 33mm (incidently, offside is where I tend to hear most suspension "creaking" - should I get this checked out?)
Side-Slip / Alignment - another hmmm
for the rear axle - its giving me a result of -10m/km (spec is +18 to -18 m/km). Front axle was dead on at 0m/km.
Brakes - (this was upsetting!) - while the imbalance results were very good for front & rear axles, and parking brake (5%, 7% and 4% respectively, against specs of <30%, <30% and <50%), the overall brake effort was rather poor (in my opinion) at 66% Brake Effort, and 25% Parking (anything under 55% and 16%, respectively, fails) based on car weight (1301kg). This has me thinking - I always thought the brake performance was quite good in my Stilo, and as far as I know the pads are still in good nick, so could this be down to how the test was performed, or am I clutching at straws?!
Either way, I hope this was informative. If you want more info, you can actually view the tester manual at
www.nct.ie (although I'd warn you that it might be too much information - all I saw was how many different ways they could fail the car)!!!
If anyone has any suggestions as to whether I need to have the above looked at by a professional, I'd appreciate it (the inspector seemed to think the results were ok, and if it's good enough for the government to endorse it, it can't be bad, can it???
)
Later...
