Fringfordjohn

Hi Malcolm, The total cost including fitting, new valves, balancing and old tyre disposal was £50. This also included picking the car up from my house and delivering it back in the evening, although this was no big deal as the man only lives 200 yards from my house, so he just used my car to get to work (six miles) instead of his own. Well pleased with the result, and as I have also just had the cam belt replaced and a new water pump fitted by Lexus Milton Keynes, (rather more than £50) and as the car has only done 41000 miles from new, I'm now looking forward to several more years of trouble free motoring. Cheers John.

Hello again, just to let you know the conclusion of this, I followed the link given to me by Ambermarine, and on that site I found Falken ZIEX ZE310 ECORUN 225/60 R16 98W tyres available at £88.40 each including VAT and delivery. Bearing in mind the very valid comments above about the age of obsolete tyres, I emailed the seller and asked if they could tell me the what the date stamp was on the sidewall of these tyres. Not surprisingly I didn't get a direct answer, but I did receive a reply stating that all their new tyres were less than two years old, so I took a chance and ordered four. When they arrived I was pleased to see that the sidewall date stamp was 0319 which I assume means that the tyres were manufactured in January 2019. If this is correct then the tyres were only three months old when I bought them. My local garage fitted them for me, and I'm happy to say that smoothness and quietness of the ride is much improved over that provided by the previous Goodyear tyres, so a win win situation for me. Once again, thank you all for your help and advice. Kind regards, John. PS. As an aside, the proprietor of my local garage, who collected the car from my house in the morning and returned it in the evening commented how much quieter and smoother the car was on the return journey with the new tyres fitted. So unsolicited testimonial.

Wow, Thank you all for your comprehensive replies, I'm staggered by the response. Thank you also to ambermarine for the link to a most useful site. I will now email both the original site, and the site recommended by ambermarine and ask if they can tell me the date of manufacture of their Falken tyres, and if I don't like the answer that I get I will choose an alternative from the ones recommended here. Many thanks again for all your help.

Hello everyone, As an avid reader but only an occasional contributor to this forum could I ask for some advice. I need some new tyres for my 1999 LS400 with the standard 16 inch wheels, and the recommendation on this site has recently been for Falkens, although from what I read on here they seem to be getting hard to find. I have found a firm on the internet with the unlikely name of Tyres-guru, and they claim to have stocks of Falken ZIEX ZE310 ECORUN 225/60 R16 98W, which are available now. Is this the tyre that you have all been using? As I have to change the tyres anyway, I was hoping for an improvement in the tyre noise level in the car, the Goodyear tyres that I have now always seem to me to be a bit noisy, certainly tyre noise is the dominant sound when driving, but this may only be because the rest of the car is so quiet. These particular Falkens claim a noise level of only 67 dB which is quite low compared with other makes that I have looked at. So shall I go ahead and buy these Falkens, or does anyone have any better recommendations. Any advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks, John Reader.

Hi Brian and Phil, is this the CTS sensor that I am looking for? As you can see its just underneath the throttle mechanism. Also I thought that the plastic part of the sensor should have been green, but without taking it out my one looks black. The top of my engine also looks quite different to the one in Phil's photo, presumably because mine is a later model. I have taken the wire off so you can see it more clearly. Just in passing, I thought that one of the differences that came in with the Mk4 was that the throttle was changed from cable to"fly by wire" but as you can see mine is definitely cable operated. I'm very happy with that, as its less to go wrong.

Hi Stuart and Phil, I normally run the air-con for the first ten minutes of any journey and then turn it off for the rest of the day. I understand that I have to do this to circulate the oil and to keep the seals wet, otherwise the gas will leak out. It must be doing the job as the air-con still blows very cold when you want it to. I used to have it on all the time when I first had the car, but I was continually suffering from flu like symptoms after any reasonable length journey. I believe that this is caused by mold build up in the system whilst it is standing, which then blows tiny spores out into the car which you inhale when the blower comes on. At least that's what I have been told. Certainly since I have stopped running the air-con I have had no further trouble. I think that the trouble is due to my only using the car on a very occasional basis, if I used it every day I sure the problem wouldn't occur. I did try an aerosol of air-con cleaner which cured the problem for a short while, but it soon came back again. Its not the fault of the Lexus, I think I must be allergic to it as I have the same problem in other air conditioned cars. As my garage floor is flat I normally leave the transmission in park and the handbrake off. I hope this is the right thing to do. Being old school this used to be to prevent the brake shoes from rusting onto the drums, but I know that this is completely irrelevant today but old habits die hard.

Again, thank you all for your help. I can buy one of these sensors on line manufactured either by Contitech or Lemark or SMP. or should I drive over to Oxford and see if I can get one from the Lexus dealer? Is there any preference here. Thank you Phil and Brian for your picture and advice, when I've finished the office work this morning I'll go out and see if I can find it. Thanks again.

Thank you all once again for your replies. Phil, your description of the problems with your wife's Vauxhall are exactly what I have happening here. I looked on eBay, just to get an idea of what the temperature sensor looked like, there seem to be two types one with a plastic plug on it and one with a single spade. I assume the one with the single spade is for the temperature gauge in the dash, and the one with the plug is connected to the engine ECU. However when I looked under the bonnet of the car, after removing the plastic cover on the top of the engine, I couldn't see anything that looked like either of them. Can anyone tell me where the one that is connected to the ECU would be situated? Many thanks in anticipation.

Hi David and thank you for your reply. I tried it with the air-con full on yesterday but unfortunately it made no difference, It was certainly worth a try though, as I normally run with the air-con turned off. What happens is that the car starts and runs normally until the temperature gauge reaches a point just below normal operating temperature, at which point the engine starts misfiring and eventually it will stop. It will then not start again. Once things have cooled down and the engine is cold once more it will start up again immediately and run normally until the same temperature is reached when the misfiring starts again. It must be one of the temperature controlled sensors, but which one and how it has malfunctioned just by standing in the garage is a mystery. Luckily I do not have to rely on this car as I have another, but it would be nice to get it fixed. I'm afraid that the legendary Lexus reliability seems to have deserted me, at least for the moment.

Thank you all for your suggestions, I'll talk to OVE but realistically I suppose I'll have to try and get the AA to transport the car to Lexus Oxford and bite the bullet on the cost. I will ask them if they will take it to Japex for me but its three times as far so I doubt that they will do so. Many thanks again.

Hi Steve, Many thanks for your suggestion but I'm afraid that it made no difference. I left the battery disconnected for a couple of hours and when I started the car up again it ran perfectly normally for about ten minutes before it cut out on its own and then refused to restart. I left it until it got cold again at which point it fired up normally once more. Its still a mystery Anyway thanks again for your suggestion, it was certainly worth a try.

Many thanks Steve and no, I haven't tried that. I'll give it a go tomorrow and see what happens, I'll let you know the result. Kind regards, John.

This is a follow on from my previous thread. Basically the problem is that my 1999 Mk4 starts up and runs perfectly from cold, but as soon as the engine gets warm it miss-fires like mad and eventually the engine stops. It will not start again until the engine has got cold, at which point it will start up and run normally again until it gets warm once more when the same thing happens. In the previous thread we were discussing OBD codes, in the hope that they might help me to diagnose the problem. Thank you Brian (Titch LS) for your advice. My problem now is that the normal method of accessing these codes is to link the E1 and the TE1 terminals in the diagnostic socket under the bonnet, and then to read the codes from the flashing lights on the dash. Unfortunately the diagnostic socket on my car does not have an electrical connection in the TE1 position, although it does have the E1 connector. In fact out of the possible twenty pins on my socket, only five have any connectors in them. These are E1, B+, AB, Tc, and Ts. There is also a jumper between pins WA & WB. I have attached a photo, and you can see the five connectors. So my question this time is can I in any way access the OBD1 error codes without having the proper scanner, in the hope that I might be able to solve the problem with the car myself, or should I just give it up and get the car transported to the local Lexus dealer. Many thanks for any advice.

Thank you all for your replies. As we are now a long way from the original thread, I'll start a new one on OBD sockets.

OK, visitors now gone so I've been out to check the LS. The diagnostic socket under the bonnet has lots of holes where connectors should be, but only five of them have any metal connectors in them, and unfortunately the TE1 socket is one of the ones with no connector. The socket in the car is a completely different shape from the one under the bonnet, being much smaller. Again there are lots of spaces where connectors should be but again only five have any metal connectors in them This socket has OBD2 molded into its lid. I assume this means that I need an OBD2 scanner. There seem to be many available on eBay and other places at prices from £20 to £200, but they all say that they are only suitable for cars made after 2002. My car was registered in March 1999. It would seem from reading the sales information from the firms selling these scanners that you need to know what the car's protocol is. Does anyone know anything about this. I would be quite happy to buy one of the less expensive scanners if it would enable me to track down the problem, but I don't want to mistakenly buy one that's incompatible with the car. Once again, any advice would be much appreciated. John, thank you for your reply, I will try running the car with the petrol cap removed to see if it makes any difference.