bazz54

The difference between the most zealous tester and a reasonable one can be enormous! Some will create an advisory out of surface rust on heavy-section metal which would be good for another decade... or two.

Can you give some me background on using those sites to trace a car? I only use Facebook a little bit. I want to track down a car I owned for 40 years.... then sold it then really regretted it. The guy I sold it to sold it on and and hasn't been helpful. It's listed as SORN. I've posted pictures on the Owners Club Facebook page but no response. Whereabouts on isnta and X would you place a post looking for a particular car? Thanks B

The question for me is whether or not "conformal" coatings are intended for use on steels and I suspect the answer is no. The sort of corrosion you get on circuit boards is usually on tin, zinc and aluminium. Problems in electronics can be caused by corrosion which is truly microscopic ( the growth of whiskers which are much finer that a human hair). Conformal coatings are just thin coatings to minimise access of moisture on to electronic hardware where there probably is not going to be much moisture anyway, a bit like thin varnish. I'm not a fan of what I call "gooey black stuff", typically, the tar-like stuff that's been flogged as "underseal" since the 1960's. I'm not a fan of Waxoyl. I prefer paints which include corrosion inhibitors in them; I'm thinking mainly of zinc phosphate, though there are others. It's the complicated electrochemical reactions of the inhibitors that do the business in helping prevent corrosion. Preventing corrosion is a huge multi-billion dollar business and there's some tremendous science that has gone in to it over the last 70-80 years.

I appreciate that you are trying to protect the car, but that being the case, I think it is very early to take if off the road prior to winter. Cars like to be used and non-use leads to failure, like brakes rusting and seizing. If you leave the battery connected, it will discharge and eventually damage the battery. Re-charging a fully discharged battery never recovers the original capacity and reduces the life of the battery a lot. I think my view is that if you cannot get it inside a building, you are best keeping it running; just don't take it out when there is snow/ice/salt around, and in recent winters, that has been a very few days. Apart from my Gen7, my other car has a set of winter tyres and so that is the workhorse in winter, but I never actually take the 7 off the road for more than a week or two as I have don't have a dry place to store it.

I've not previously heard that you can clean a cat with soap and water. Of course there are very many kinds of soap, some of which have all kind of additives in and you want to be sure that nothing gets left of the catalyst that could affect the performance. I think a really simple basic soap would be best. I'd make a point of doing the washing then immediately rinse so nothing ever dries out. I wonder if the final rinse might be best done with deionised water. I don't think you'd want to leave and calcium on the cat. For cleaning a cat on car, somebody once told me that there's an American product made by "Justice Bros" which is very good , but never needed to use it. B

Well, if you are talking about which brand is best, a friend of mine was a PhD chemist working for an oil company. When asked which oil he used his reply was "Whichever big-name brand is on special offer in the supermarket". If we're taking viscosity, I go with Slybunda. Looking at Toyota Data, generally, over a period of years, they've moved to recommending thinner oils than they used to for a given engine. We still have relatively mild (warm) winters in the UK. It all goes back to the old oil advert which claimed that more engine wear was done starting up and reversing off the drive on a cold morning than in the next 100 miles. Whatever happened to oil adverts?

I guess that has a "de-sulfator" on it? I bought a de-sulfator (as a separate item) many years ago, pretty much out of curiosity. It was a kit supplied by a small firm in Scotland. I very quickly decided that it really did work, and helped recover some old batteries. Batteries die through various causes and the de-sulfators only work on those suffering largely from sulfation, so they don't work on all batteries. I've only used the CTEK on good batteries so far, so have no feel for whether or not it is effective on sulfation. I've put my kit one on an oscilloscope to look at it's output waveform; must try that on the CTEK.

With low-mileage cars, rust on the discs can be an issue, and so too the problem of sticking calipers. I occasionally do a trip on a road with very little traffic and quite a steep and long hill. On the way down, if no one is behind, I take the chance to "exercise the brakes" in the hope that it will have some restorative effects . Always good when the car slows well and show no pulling to either side.

I am retired now, and have two cars, so neither car gets a great deal of use in mid-winter. This is not good for the batteries, and in particular, the Gen7 (security system?) seems to drain the battery. Also, the "other car" has a set of winter tyres, so is used in preference if the weather is bad. My old battery charger needed "manual" disconnection when the batteries were fully charged, and there have been times when I've appreciably overcharged batteries, which are mightily expensive these days. Last autumn I bought myself one of the all-singing, bells and whistle CTEK chargers, and this has been the first winter I've had it. It's been a very good experience, knowing I could just connect it up and pretty much forget about it. I really didn't like the price, but I'm glad I bought it . I know people who have bought cheap smart-chargers on-line and have quickly come to regret it. I have no connection with CTEK and other prestige makes are available.

I have no faith in the colour coding system any more. I suspect that garages might use some (claimed) "Universal" formula. As above, only use the Toyota stuff in my Gen7.

Interesting, certainly looks like it works but hard to know how well the sealant will work.

All problems solved... I think. The outcome is a surprise, but makes everything understandable, which is good. The issue lies with the precise shape of the sensor; it has a shoulder on the section that goes in to the hub and I had not noticed that the shoulder has a slight taper and so it sits in the hub a bit like a cork in a bottle. The "shim" was 21 years of rust and muck. I've tried to do a reasonable drawing as attached. Put it back with no shim (it's a long story getting to that point) and all is good and the ABS rumbling at low speed appears to be gone. Changed the oil and filter while I had it on stands. Many thanks for you contributions - always good to be able to bounce ideas off people when you're struggling gen7 abs sensor.pdf

Thanks for the comments. No Playdoh, but got some Bluetack.

What was it that Sherlock Holmes said about ruling the possible things out? I hadn't thought of it but you'd have to think it's possible that something odd with the casting happened. I've just found out that the part number on the sensor is the right Toyota part. One thing's for sure; that sensor and that hub cannot be used together without some "restorative" addition. I never intended to take the sensor out at this stage, but noticed that the 10mm hex head mounting screws were very rusty and thought I'd try change them before they got worse. The sensor just came out with the screw. The road to hell... good intentions .

Inserting the sensor as far as it will go in to the hub (presumably the point at which the sensor is touching the ring) then there is a gap of ~1.5mm between the underside of the sensor shoulder and the hub. So to give a clearance to the ring of say 0.5mm, the 'shim' would need to be 2mm thick.