Not much to look at at the minute, but I've a few bits due to arrive next week, so will have something better for you to look at then.

Here's an intentionally crap picture of her, loaded to the gills when I was moving house earlier this year (yes, that's a table and a computer chair tied to the roof):

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It's got a 2.5 TDi (AEL) Audi engine, on which the vacuum pump is powered by the camshaft.

A while ago, I could hear a distinct ticking out of the engine, which I thought was just the tappets, but it turned out to be the vacuum pump being filled up with crud, sticking, and making it very hard for the camshaft to operate. Resulting in this:

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I sent the head away to get redone, and it's been an expensive and time consuming fix, but I eventually got everything fixed and back together, however when I went to put the injectors back in, it seemed like there was something missing, from the injector clamping system, because the clamps weren't holding the injectors in place properly, and the injectors were blowing out.

After much (MUCH) head scratching I realised that there are supposed to be little cups for the clamps to lever on, but they were missing from my engine. Here's a picture of a similar engine, indicating the little nodes that were missing from my head.

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After more head scratching, I realised that they must have got knocked off the head when I sent it to get redone!

I was realising all of this whilst trying to get the car running in order to take her to the MOT later that day. Getting the nodes back from the head guy wasn't an option at the time, so I made my own:

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Here's the general idea:
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I rounded the end of the bolt so that it would sit into the little holes in my engine head, and then lock-tighted nuts onto the other end, in order to create a depression for the injector clamp to sit into as well. No pictures unfortunately, as space in the bay is too tight to get a good pic, but they worked absolutely perfectly!

Also, here's a crank locking tool I made out of a bit of pipe and the pulley off my old water pump:

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The car's driving, but the pump timing's not 100%, so going out to try and sort that now.

Now that I've got all of the un-fun work done, I've got a few goodies arriving next week and it's time to move onto the performance stuff.