well the old girl continues to soldier on... day in day out and doing upwards of 800 trouble free miles a week.
Recently i noticed she felt down on power during the recent heatwave... a quick scan was showing an intermittent fault on one bank with the MAF.
A pair was duly ordered and arrived.
One free weekend i thought i'd whip the air box covers off and quickly change them.... how wrong was i... the bumper and wheel arch liners have to come off to access the bottom of the air boxes...
So with some looming free time i put the job off and lived with the occasional limp mode.
Free time arrived last week, and she was also due an MOT, this being the first in my ownership, she was thrown in at a local station and all good except the front, inner CV boot having perished.
Parts ordered and strip down commenced...

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the tops of the air boxes are a breeze to get to.

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but once inside them it is physically impossible to get to the lower screw on the sensor, so the whole box has to come out.

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which means a total strip down....

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just to get to that bloody jubilee clip....

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old and new and then repeat for the other side.... I bought Denso sensors as having used them in the past and they weren't stupid money....

Then onto the MOT failure....

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one driveshaft extracted..... to replace the inner boot you have to remove the outer CV joint, so that means both boots require replacing. A local motor factors had each in stock for the princely sum of £12 each....

and rebuilt

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i had originally bought a FEBI item off of eBay but when that arrived the quality was awful, it was more plastic than rubber and wouldn't have last 5 minutes.... the locally sourced ones were exactly as an OE quality rubber, very happy....

Whilst in there i noticed a small oil leak.... which looks like it'll be fun to address, can't see yet where from, there are no signs of any oil leak from above.... time will tell....

I am pretty sure inner CV boot should not be MOT failure, only outer unless something has changed in recent years. I remember my once failed on CV boot and I asked if it's inner or outer and tester told me inners are not part of MOT.

They refused a pass on the fact the boot was deteriorated….

It may have changed, or maybe my MOT tester was wrong, my reasoning was that when outer fails grease can get on brakes so it's a safety issue but inner does not affect safety.

Both joints are covered by the MOT (6.1.7 in the tester's manual) - if it's got a boot on it, it needs to be either not severely deteriorated (minor) or not missing, split, insecure or no longer prevents the ingress of dirt (major defect)

Pretty sure that's always been the case, although given the quality of some MOTs I've had, that's no certainty!

whether he was wrong or not, he still didn't issue a ticket and i'd rather know as would want to sort it regardless.... in my head it makes sense for them to be a failure whether inner of outer.

and to close off the recent round of works....

MOT all passed for another 12 months

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she needs a bloody wash though....

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still need to find a front main grill, after the recent bird strike i had glued it up, only to bit hit by 2 bloody pigeons a couple of days later in the same spot.... thankfully that was the only damage...