I want to extend gratitude to you Nate from myself and all the people who will do a search for this in years to come, for you going to the bother of posting all the details.
No worries! Might as well do something useful with it, especially considering how much info I've got off here! He's on instagram, I can see if I can get an e-mail if you like? artemiyyakov He does various bits, that cover, and OEM style rain tray, the leaf catcher and a Votex style parcel shelf box. He also sourced the pollen filter for me which was handy. If there are a few people interested as I say we can set up a group buy to save on postage
Rear Suspension I've already covered part of this but to recap, fetched the rear beam out last year... Original bushes and brake lines. Previous owner has "painted" the beam, fitted new brake dust shields and calipers. They're from BiggRed and one of them is really nice, looks new. The other(I'll add pictures) has been painted with what I can only assume is rust accelerating paint. Its on various parts of the car is terrible. Some closer shots of the beam, bushes and destroyed brake pipes... The beam, cross member and rad support where sent to a local coating company who blasted with garnet to SA 2.5, Zinc thermal sprayed, epoxy sealed and then coated with two coats of polyurethane gloss @ 50µm. This is the same coating process used for bridges and oil rigs, albeit with far less coats. In its current form its rated for 20 years before failure, so a little bit better than the wisp of black paint VW apply The result.. In these pictures you can also see the new copper nickel brake lines that run in factory routing (anyone know what the big pointless looking bend is for?) and new lemforder bushes. Only thing missing from the brake pipes is the factory green look like @GG. achieved The brake pipe clips are OEM and sourced from Mecatechnic in France. The whole beam has also had a coat of Dynax UB with Dynax S50 sprayed into the ARB. A new Borgeshung bush was also fitted to the ARB. Next was the beam mounts which looked like this... A Deox-C bath and some wire brush action later There were sprayed with 2 coats of Electrox primer and then enamel paint. I would have had these done with the beam but I didn't think ahead. It will be a good comparison of the coatings The finished article with new Geomet coated 10.9 bolts. I'm using XCP rust blocker on all fasteners a torquing lubricant and additional rust inhibitor
Great progress there! That rear beam is going to outlive the human race! I am going to be sending mine off along with all the subframe parts for blast and powder coating this weekend but would rather some more heavy duty like that. The problem is I dont know anywhere in Cornwall that offers this service.
I hope so! I'm very to lucky that I have that place local to me and the owner is into cars and bikes so he takes on little projects like that! There's a place called "Blastclean" that do thermal spraying and powder coat/wet paint. There website sort of implies they take on smaller jobs so might be worth a look? And anything will be better than the whisper thin layer of black paint that's put on from the factory!
And if you think about it, as they’re always on stands, they never get driven it, it’ll never wear off
Exactly, infinite lifetime, especially with the small brush and black enamel self healing properties when it gets a little storage nick
More work over the last view day, actually got some decent weather for once. Also going to steal the @cupracraig style satisfying list Suspension and Brakes Rear beam mounted Rear stub axles Elextrox'd and painted Rear Discs fitted Rear Callipers fitted + Brake pipe furniture Brake bias valve hydraulics Brake bias valve mechanics Duralac all fasteners near stainless/aluminium Fit heat shields Fit exhausts Stone chip sills Assemble rear suspension struts + fit (Bilstein debarcle) Assemble drive-shafts Assemble front suspension, loose, Check bearing function Fit front calipers and new flexi's Clean up brake pipe routing using factory clips Final paint on brake booster, fit using new nuts Fit 22 mm master cylinder, new nuts Fill and bleed brake system Electrical New ignition switch OEM+ Headlight loom drawings Make OEM+ Headlight loom Re-terminate oil and water temperature sender connections De-bodge immobiliser Source 1 inner spot, and side-light bulb holders Source stainless hardware for fog light mounting Mount fog lights Fit horns Re-fit ECU Other Paint interior of rear turret after rust repair Re-fit boot trim Install OEM first kit Source warning triangle and strap Fit boot lip protection Source new boot carpet Source new rear window scraper trim Fit pollen filter and new Mahle LA19 element Change Oil + Filter + Air filter Re-install interior panels Refurbish my own instruments and fit those Make new shift linkage relay shaft bush from Nylon/UHMW Assemble and setup gear shift linkage Re-connect clutch with refurbish brackets Get new PAS hoses manufactured Flush PAS system with CHF and fill Cam belt New V belts New crank bolts and V-belt pulley bolts Source lower airbox section Clean scuttle and source new tray Pictures to come
Yeah moving onto advanced listing now, should get an annual ClubGTi most creative/impressive list award going
Back to the front axle, the original drive shafts were very grotty, started wire wheeling, thought sod that and got them blasted and powder coated instead The CV's both inner and outer were fine, no discolouration and just some polishing which you couldn't feel, so I decided to clean them up Someone has clearly got very angry with this inner CV, many times They were then painted with Electrox and silver top coat, the original inner boots were actually in great condition, but the outer ones were shot so new GKN boots were in order. Re-assembling outer CV I don't have a picture of the full shaft, but I'll get some of them on the car! Also have brand new bolts and re-plated spreader plates to go along with them
What enamel paint did you use? Did you not fancy a 1k Epoxy spray can like PJ1, or VHT epoxy paint or similar? And what is XCP rust blocker? is it instead of copper grease/slip?
I'm using copper slip on some and XCP and everything else. Its like ACF-50 but better. Kind of forms a light waxy film, a bit like Dynax UC but not as heavy. To be honest just fancied something different, was order a can of colour matched paint from Closterman and I saw that so I thought I'd give it a go. Overall the finish was pretty good, but I'd not use it again. It goes on very thin and takes several days to dry. Although now its fully cured it is pretty tough.
So the car is actually driving now so I thought I better update! (links also fixed in the early posts) Back on the rear of the car... No idea what paint the previous owner used on the calipers hangers but it destroyed them After a heavy wire wheeling and couple of days in Deox-C I got to this After a week of picking in Deox-C and some more wire wheel action you get this result Which was then sprayed with some zinc spray and lacquer to protect it Same process for the stub axels. The car came with new dust shields and I bought new fixing bolts and Bellville washers Old discs were reused as they were new Pagid items when I got the car, as you can see by the rust, they were sat outside for some time and the bearing were shot. I fitted new bearing and decided to try this Polyurea Grease I got the gear selector, seems to work well! Seal pushed in and packed Outer bearing a new hardware, managed to throw away the washer and nut from one side which was a fairly expensive trip to the dealers to replace Disc on and bearing play set
Carrying on with the rear suspension, we have the shocks and springs. I decided to go with a Bilstein B12 kit. This consists of Eibach Springs (40 mm lower ish) and B8 shock absorbers. It also comes in a rather fetching shade of yellow: In order to fit this to the car, a small selection of accompanying parts is needed: The hardware comes with shocks, although I've painted the spacer tubes. I'm using Meyle top caps and Lemforder bushes. The silver plates at the top were in good condition from my car so were just cleaned up and given a coat of clear. The black "cup" washers are new genuine parts and have been given a coat of satin black paint. You also need a set of bump stops and for this a Febi stop and cover was chosen. After much deliberation I decided to go against the TUV approval and cut my bump stops. I chose to do this mainly because I wanted a slightly softer ride. These aren't really bump stops in the classic sense, they're "Jounce Bumpers" which are actually designed to act as springs when the car is heavily loaded or under high compression. The ways I've seen of cutting these before is a bit hacky so I decided to take a neater approach Bump stop choppin' how to I wasn't sure how much to shorten my bump stops by, initially I chose around 20 mm (the middle section) which is where these pictures are from. I then re-did it for the final ones at only around 15mm (bottom section) you could remove both if you wanted them really short, or even add more sections with this method. Anyway, first cut the bump stop, hacksaw works well for this: I've discarded the middle section here, you should try and get the cuts as neat at possible but if its not perfect then thats okay! Give the surfaces a quick clean and wet one of them with tap water. To the dry surface, apply Gorilla glue, just enough so it squeezes out, get them as even as possible and clamp them up. Not crazy, just enough so they're held nice and straight. You can keep wiping off the excess for the first 30 mins with a wet cloth, and then just leave it for 24 hours to fully cure, giving you the finished product: This works so well because orange Gorilla glue forms a Polyurethane foam, the same material as the bump stop. It also lets you retain the bottom mount for the dust cover and the necked down area at the top to hold the stop in place on the piston. The bond is very strong as I didn't break or damage the joint at all when installing the dust boot, which anyone who's done it will know requires substantial force.
The completed strut ready to be installed This should have been simple but was a huge pain. Bilstein had supplied a mixture of stainless and mild steel flat nuts. I was not happy with this because A4 stainless and shock loads in suspension don't go well. I alerted them to this and was told "You don't have stainless that isn't possible we don't use it". So very helpful there. Anyway, I binned the supplied parts and went to get the correct hardware from VW. When installing them I noticed they were really really tight, and after some investigation it turned out the pitch was wrong Bilstein use 1.5 mm pitch and VAG/Everyone else use 1.25 mm pitch (or the other way round). Luckily the piston is hardened and it just destroyed the threads in the nuts and not the piston itself. Quickly bought the correct grade of Zinc plated nuts from Accu and installation from smooth from there! New bottom bolts and nut were fitted too, using the original nut "retained" that had been replated. Everything was left loose at this stage until the car was on the floor for the final torques
