johnatg

Hmm....'MDF' and 'Lexus' doesn't quite gel, does it? My little piece of plastic pipe does much the same job. But Lexus could have made the cover clips a bit less flimsy!

Mine had a broken clip when I bought the car - I made up a bit of reinforcement with a very short piece of plastic pipe and glued it all back together with Araldite. It's lasted 5 years so far! I think the front clips get broken when people try and remove the cover by lifting the front. Always lift the rear of the cover first then lift the front. To engage, locate on the front clips first - use the oil filler hole as a guide - then push down at the back. The workshop manual warns about the risk of breaking the cover if you do it incorrectly!

Apologies for being pedantic - but it's 'silicone' - 'silicon' is completely different stuff!

I think this from the ACEA specs web site is relevant. All mainstream oil available these days is catalyst compatible, so A and C below are pretty much interchangeable and indeed most eg A3 oil is also C3. I've added some emphases! There are ACEA specifications for passenges car motor oils (the A/B class), for catalyst compatible motor oils (the C class) and for heavy duty diesel engine oils (the E class). The classes are further divided into categories to meet the requirements of different engines. The A/B class's A5/B5 oils have lower HTHS viscosities, which means that they provide better fuel economy but they may not provide adequate protection in engines that are not designed for them. ACEA A3/B3 and A3/B4 on the other hand require oils with higher HTHS viscosities that may not provide as good fuel economy as an A5/B5 oil but may offer better engine protection in certain engine designs. The categories within the C class are divided along SAPS limits and along HTHS viscosities. C1 and C4 are low-SAPS oils, while C2 and C3 are mid-SAPS oils. On the other hand C1 and C2 oils have lower HTHS viscosities, while C3 and C4 oils have higher HTHS viscosities. The C5 category that has been newly introduced in the ACEA 2016 sequences has even lower limit for HTHS vicsosity. In order for an oil to meet this specification it must be a mid-SAPS oil and its HTHS viscosity has to be between 2.6 and 2.9 mPa*s. Depends on your priorities - fuel economy or engine protection. But I think any differences are very marginal.

AFAIK, nowhere do Lexus specify an ACEA grade for oil. The IS250 oil spec on the relevant (2005-2011) Service Data Sheet is 'SAE 5W-30, API grade SM “Energy-Conserving” or ILSAC, multi grade engine oil'. They have subsequently approved 0W-20 and say it is suitable for all IS250 (and more) engines. Incidentally, quite a few 'oil finder' type web sites from oil suppliers actually recommend oils to ACEA C3 for IS250. Your Edge 5W-30 will be fine - I use GM Dexos2 in all my cars and it is ACEA C3.

You don't need to dismantle anything to get to the belt (except the top and front covers and the air intake thing). You just turn the tensioner slightly with a spanner - there's a hole into which you can insert a 5mm drill bit or similar to lock it. The belt just slips off. (Make a note of its routing before you remove it - take a pic!) You could run the engine for a few seconds without the belt - be careful because it will quickly overheat without the water pump running. If that cures it, it's the belt or one of the units driven - check each pulley for free running or roughness. New belts are a bit stiff and unwieldy but they just slip on, then remove the drill bit and release the tensioner. If you put the old belt back, put it on the same way round that it was (mark with a snopake arrow?) New belts available on eBay for about £16.

Fuel grades in USA are only a little less ours. The numbers appear different because they don't use RON - they use the average of MON and RON (MON = Motor Octane number, RON = Research ON). MON is measured under more stringent conditions and comes out about 10 points lower than RON in the range we are talking about. So US octane ratings are about 4-5 points lower than ours and Europe's. Usual grades offered are 89 and 91 - equivalent to 93/94 and 95/96. But it's unlikely that Octane rating has any effect on carbon build up - octane rating describes one characteristic of petrol and one only - and that is knock resistance. Knock is the propensity of the mixture to detonate in the cylinder rather than burn smoothly. You hear it (if it is very prevalent) as pinking - a tinkling sound from the engine, usually when in too low a gear with the engine under load. But you don't hear it any more in modern cars because they all have knock sensors which retard the ignition to stop the knock (and incidentally reduce power/performance). A proportion of the cylinderfuls of mixture detonate anyway - the knock sensor and ecu work to maintain it at acceptable levels, along with the fact that you should use at least the fuel grade specified as that too is selected to reduce knock to acceptable levels. Higher grade fuel allows the engine to get more power is it spends less time being retarded. In practice of course engines are designed to the fuel available rather than the other way round as might be inferred from the sentence above. So why do US Direct Injection engines suffer more from carbon build up than in UK? That is one of the mysteries of the modern world - but it may have more to do with purity of the fuel and might have something to do with oil. After all, the carbon build up occurs in the inlet valve area and the fuel never gets near the inlet valve in DI engines - the valve only admits air. There may be some blow by as the valve opens and closes but I think it's more likely down to oil - but why should that be any different? Who knows?

Just to go back to Tim's post - sounds to me as if the problem is deposits on the screen - maybe wax polish, silicone, old Rain-X or oil. I would go in for a deep clean of the screen before changing blades, but be aware that the blades may be contaminated too now. Try vinegar and newspaper, purpose made screen cleaner or even an aggressive glass polish.

Nothing wrong with SE - the toys on SE-Ls etc are often discussed here - they seem to be a constant source of irritation when they go wrong! 8-year old plus cars with lots of gizmos can be very problematic, even with a Lexus badge! And you won't need to spend a fortune on updating very inadequate sat-nav! Just fit HIDs and adjust the beams - the lights are fine then. And we had a recent discussion here about headlight washers - often people don't use them, or set them as anti-cyclist devices - (very non-politically correct!). And IS250 headlights have a magical ability to stay pretty clean anyway.

And BTW - most of the VIN decoding mentioned on the internet refers to USA VIN numbers and they are different from UK/Europe numbers - completely different format and code meanings (except they both have 17 digits). UK VINs are to ISO 3779 (standard) apparently.

Indeed. VIN shows manufacturer, model, some but not all aspects of options and trim - only major things such as engine and type of transmission, plant where it was made, year it was made and a serial number (last 6 digits. It doesn't show the actual build date- that needs a database.

Yep - you have no easy way of knowing date of manufacture - but dealers can find out - most manufacturers show date of manufacture in the dealer version of the workshop manual or other documentation. (Or supply a database linking build date to VIN number. Er...cars get manufactured - built - once! Most car companies build lots of cars every day! Cars are first registered on the day the dealer registers them - that might be towards the end of the month if they are trying to meet their 'sales' targets, then they register them to themselves and sell it later as a 'pre-reg'. Or if properly new, it's registered on the day of (planned) delivery to the first owner. Cars can quite easily sit around for months or years before being registered - fields and parking lots full of them around the country!

When the car changes direction by less than you expect from your steering input (front wheels lose grip) - that's understeer. When the car changes direction by more than you expect (rear wheels lose grip) (see Tim's original post!) - that's oversteer. Re these cheap(ish) tyres of far eastern origin (mostly Chinese, but also Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese etc) - I think that what happens is that the outer layers of the tyre - the first few mm of tread - are made of reasonably up-to-date tyre technology rubber etc, - so you think the tyres are quite good and a great bargain - but when this has worn away you reach a base layer of much harder basic (cheaper) rubber. Then you find they are rather less of a bargain! Stick to well known brands - or at least tyres manufactured in western Europe (inc UK).

That's called oversteer!

Largely rubbish tyres IMHO. Evergreen EU72 tyres get good reviews when new, but a lot of reviewers say that they last a long time (eg one reviewer claims 75K miles for a set). That points to hard rubber - and as I've said before, hard rubber tyres get to be lethal in the wet especially when they wear down to 3mm or so. Avon ZV7 are an excellent choice - I have them all round. Doesn't stop the occasional kicking in of TC though when it's wet or icy. All the electronic gizmos in the world can't beat the laws of physics!

See p135 of the owner's manual (section on rain-sensing windshield wipers). It describes operation in each of 7 switch positions. It should be available on line somewhere if you don't have one.

First change at 10 years then every 5 years (if you use proper Toyota pink long life coolant) Mileage is irrelevant (in this context) Sent from my MotoE2(4G-LTE) using Tapatalk

There's a brand new one (with several available) on eBay for just over £300. Any decent aircon place should be able to fit it and give your aircon a general service. Can't help with a place 'cos I'm miles away. You could probably find one cheaper from a breaker, but make sure that the ports have been plugged if you do - you mustn't let air/moisture into the unit.

Tyres that last well that you've never heard of are often made of hard rubber which has minimal grip, especially when the tyres are getting a bit worn.

And plenty of similar items! That isn't a recon - just an engine pulled from a breaker - in fact it's still in the original car in the pic! With a broken auxiliary belt and a fancy air intake - wonder how much they want for that? Re recon engines - I suspect that the bottom has fallen out of the engine recon business. Gone are the days when most cars needed a rebore and head job at 40K miles. Most engines nowadays will reach 100K miles and more with only a modicum of maintenance. For most that will be 8-10 years by which time the car will be worth buttons and due to be thrown away anyway. Quality cars such as IS250 will reach way more than 100K - probably 200K or more with proper maintenance and especially if they are motorway cruisers. So there's a steady supply of good(ish) engines (for all cars) from write offs - as I said before, it doesn't take much damage to write off a car more than just a few years old, and almost no demand, except the rare case where something catastrophic has happened.

PS - Ask them to record the engine number - pretty much invisible once fitted, and you are supposed, at least in theory, to notify DVSA.

I haven't used them, but that sounds like a good deal to me. Fitting cost element shouldn't be too horrendous - should only take a day or so. They will be glad to get some return on an IS250 engine - demand for them must be only slightly higher than zero. Make sure the warranty is in writing!

Toss up between the first and the last. One you can see (and hear!) running might be safest, but the first would probably be a good bet too. IMHO

It's DVSA rules. not the garage. Sent from my MotoE2(4G-LTE) using Tapatalk

I can understand that emotional attachment but you have to be realistic. You could probably buy a near-identical car for less than £5K or a newer one for maybe a bit more. And once a car has let you down big time you never feel quite the same about it afterwards.