Heisennberg

[heisennberg]

Hi Guys,

I am Heisennberg, and currently live in Brisbane. I've inherited a year ago a 2004 Astra with 240,xxx km (my friend sold it to me for 200$) that I am desperately trying to keep alive :)
The air-con no longer works (I've read things about it potentially being as simple as a thermal fuse in the clutch coil), I suspect it needs a timing belt soon (last record of the timing belt was done at 120,000km :D) and it recently developed a whining noise (think bearing going bad, proportional to engine RPMs, so I am thinking maybe alternator bearing?) in the engine bay that I need to track down. It also seems to be leaking oil from the head gasket (externally, the coolant has no trace of oil, and the oil no trace of coolant) , as well as some coolant (maybe at the water pump) :) But other than that it still runs.

I've been trying to get a copy of Global TIS (I like having clear instructions and torque values when I work on cars, and I am not too impressed with the Haynes manual), but I've been having issues with the activation process. If anything has experience with that, I'll love to hear from you :)

All the best, Heisennberg

[chris_r]

Hi Guys,

I am Heisennberg, and currently live in Brisbane. I've inherited a year ago a 2004 Astra with 240,xxx km (my friend sold it to me for 200$) that I am desperately trying to keep alive :)
The air-con no longer works (I've read things about it potentially being as simple as a thermal fuse in the clutch coil), I suspect it needs a timing belt soon (last record of the timing belt was done at 120,000km :D) and it recently developed a whining noise (think bearing going bad, proportional to engine RPMs, so I am thinking maybe alternator bearing?) in the engine bay that I need to track down. It also seems to be leaking oil from the head gasket (externally, the coolant has no trace of oil, and the oil no trace of coolant) , as well as some coolant (maybe at the water pump) :) But other than that it still runs.

I've been trying to get a copy of Global TIS (I like having clear instructions and torque values when I work on cars, and I am not too impressed with the Haynes manual), but I've been having issues with the activation process. If anything has experience with that, I'll love to hear from you :)

All the best, Heisennberg

Hi and welcome,

A bit late to the party, I know. That bearing noise, if it's proportional to RPMs, could also be the timing belt pulleys and/or the water pump. I'd recommend Gates or genuine parts where possible for the timing kit (Gates belts are OEM spec for these engines). These engines are fairly easy to work on if you're patient and are generally very solid if looked after.

Personally, I found TIS 2000 works fine for me. It may need to be run on XP or in a virtual machine running XP (Oracle VM Virtualbox is a good platform to run VMs from), but has pretty much everything that GlobalTIS would have for this particular car. And yes, Haynes manuals suck.