After numerous calls and emails to my supplier I haven’t yet gotten my EuroSpec G60 flywheel and now I’m being told it is back ordered, can you believe this crap? I really don’t think these guys had my flywheel in stock in the first place, as they tried to explain to me that they are all sold out and reordering. Now you first send me the incorrect item, them held my flywheel at ransom so that I send back the part I don’t need. I complied and they got it back, now once more being made to wait this is crazy!

Another week and still no dub, well I finally managed to send off the Sachs clutch kit to the supplier and sit back and wait. In the mean time I have been trying to resolve the problem I have not of the engine not starting, after following a number of leads on www.vwvortex.com, it was pretty clear that there is no communication to the engine control module (ECM). My business partner got the Ross-Tech serial cable and we did a scan and posted, so now we have another set of things to check. The fuses, relays and wires needs to be checked, so far I think I successfully checked the fuses related to the ECM and the relays, well didn’t quiet find the relays mentioned in the forum.

The way things are looking I may have to leave this one to the pros, so when the flywheel gets here I’m going to have Bulla take a took in to resolving my issue, but not before another attempt at it.

Oh yeah! I sat down to do a quick write up on my now parked dub, check it out on KGN Tuning

After contacting the supplier of my clutch kit, well two clutch kits, they offered me two solutions to correcting their packaging mistake. Either I purchase the EuroSpec G60 flywheel again and they would ship it out to me that day or send back the Sachs clutch kit, which I didn’t order in the first place, and they will send out the correct part.

So now I am made to wait even longer for my item and I don’t even know if customs will require me to pay the duty on the item again as it was already paid on the initial package. I wrote them a letter expressing how dissatisfied I am with the packaging error and options they have given me. Given my current position I am not able to send it back until the 15th of this month, as I have other items coming in and don’t want to get stuck with storage charges.

Well this wasn’t the best experience with this new supplier, and hopefully there is nothing further that I would need to purchase from them.

God must be angry, last week I experienced a domino effect of things going all wrong, stemming from work to my project build on this VW. This morning things started to look up though, but let me give you the drama of my week. After a long anticipated wait for my new Spec clutch kit and Eurospec G60 flywheel, I planned to get my car down to the garage on Friday in the day then collect my items from Global Courier by 4PM and deliver it and start working on replacing the clutch, sound easy? On Wednesday I went to turn my car over, because I missed the sound of my engine and thought to give her a quick clean up. Turned the key and nothing, hmmm… tried a couple more times and realized the battery was drained, found that strange, because I started it on Monday and all was well.

I then tried to get it jump started, but apparently the battery was totally dead, so I took it back the the dealer to get it recharged going there with the though that there is definitely something wrong with the battery after it also failed to start or charge in another car. Got it back the next day, took the battery home dropped it in and turned my key, still nothing the car turned over but would not ignite. Why have thou forsaken me! Grrr… After doing some further checked with VAG-COM I had two recurring fault codes 01314 and 01177 I know them by memory now. Which indicates that there is an issue communicating with the ECM (Engine Control Module for those who don’t know). So now I’m worried that I may have killed my ECM during a jump start. Stupid!

So now with that being a possibility, I started search the forums for anyone selling an AWW ECM and by luck I found someone selling one, and with a plus to my luck it also had the APR chip for 90 octane. So I’m I’m exchanging IMs with this person, who has guaranteed me that the unit works, just was changed to go back to stock and was also warned by the APR representative about purchasing bad ECMs online. I’m going to show a bit of good faith on this as well as protect myself by using PayPal. After getting this unit I will have to pay for transfer and a immobilizer clone to get it working on my car, but the upside is that I now can use the correct cluster in my car.

There is more, the other thing is now that my car can’t be moved, the way I had planned to, which is by driving it on the slipping clutch. I got the delivery of my Spec clutch kit as scheduled on Friday, good stuff… well no. I checked my packaged when I got home with it, granted my car is not going anywhere with it being towed to the garage, I found there are two clutch kits in my package, the Spec stage 1 clutch kit and a Sachs clutch kit. Initially thinking that in that Sachs box was a lighten flywheel, but I didn’t order a Sachs, I ordered Eurospec. What’s the ….

Calm down, I took some pics of the items on my camera phone and wrote an email to the supplier about the packaging error, and tried to call all of Saturday, but they were not in office. This morning I got a called from them regarding the issue and I sent them the pictures I took. Hopefully I can get this all resolved quickly.

This morning I started working on a few more features that I need on my Ubuntu install one of which is TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt recently released version 5, which is available for download on their website. I downloaded the .deb file for Ubunutu, there are a few How-Tos that would instruct you to use the tar.gz to compile the application, however I just went ahead with the .deb file and installed it using the dpkg command.

TrueCrypt now has a GUI under Linux similar to the that of Windows, that was a plus, but no menu launcher. I was able to find one on Daily Gyan website.

How-To Add the TrueCrypt launcher to your menu? Well first download the .png file from Daily Gyan or save this one to your ~/.icons direcotory. Then right click on the Ubuntu icon on the taskbar, mine is located at the top, and select ‘Edit Menu‘. This will launch your ‘Main Menu‘ editor, I decided to place my application launch in the Accessories directory. Click on the ‘New Item‘ button located on the right of to launch the ‘Create Launcher’. The name I entered was obviously ‘TrueCrypt‘ and the command ‘truecrypt‘ for me the TrueCrypt icon I saved in the ~/.icons directory came up automatically, if that did not happen for you then use the browse icon to look for it in the ~/.icons directory. After that hit OK and Close the Main Menu editor and you will see TrueCrypt under the Accessories on the menu