Roll cage update. I received a call from TSR that the car was ready but they wanted me to pop down to have a look so went down early one Saturday. All looked great, apart from half of the dash, steering column, shuttle, engine missing. I didn't think how much they needed to remove to fit the cage. I had removed as much as i could, or so i thought lol Here are some pictures from the Saturday. We collected it on the following Monday but it was raining, hence the bubble wrap at the windows. Oh yeah, they were missing too! lol International spec cage with a few extra bits added. I didn't need it going through the bulkhead to the front struts so that saved a bit. Custom gear shift tower added also. I thought i might as well put a pretty good cage in seeing as i have come this far with the shell. It also adds to it's value but will limit it from some race series. I don't intend on selling it any time soon though Back at my workshop it was time to mock a few things up before the inside was painted. Last thing i would want to do is ruin fresh paint on the inside. Let's start with the hand brake. Oh dear, that doesn't work. Let's move on lol I loosely assembled the dash bar and column back together so we could start fitting the dashboard. This needed lots of cutting to fit around the two uprights. It doesn't help that the dash falls right on the bend also. I wanted to keep the front of the dash intact so no cut's through the vents. I have seen some shocking jobs of these done so it took a good half a day to get this fitted. I had to cut into the dash more than i wanted to get it into position so once it's in there is quite a gap. I can cover this with a plate at a later date but it's the lesser of the two evils. The front stand intact and i might be able to get the vents working still. Fixed the hand brake. Had to make up some brackets to move it towards the driver. It's in the middle of the car now so i don't chop my fingers off. To be honest i could do away with the whole thing but it creates more problems than it's worth.
I thought i would leave this stuff in as i know what a ***** it was to remove on the MK2. However i spilt petrol on it removing the tank and it reacted a little so had to remove it or it would show in the paint and bug me. I wish i had done it before the cage was installed though It's actually a lot easier to remove than the MK2 stuff but i suppose it's only been there 10 years, not 20+ I originally purchased Cobra Suzuka's for this car. I had them in the MK2 in GT width and they were very comfortable but we did slop around in them. I knew at the time if i did another car that i would get the same seats in standard width, so that's what i did. When they arrived i got one out to test it and i couldn't actually get my bum into the seat . I never knew how much difference 30mm could make as i have a standard width Evolution pro on another project and that is the perfect width. I had no option but to send them back and swap them for two Evolution pro's instead. I had to test fit the harness as it seems a little short. I'm looping around the rear roll cage bar which is between the rear struts. It's further back than most that i see but they have much more webbing left on their straps so i think it's a combination of the bar being that far back and the harness being shorter than most. I think it will be fine but will check it again once everything is bolted in tight and i can pull the straps in nice and tight. The door side lap belts fall right into the standard seat belt captive nuts, much like the MK2. The inner ones require welding in so i let my old man do that while i worked on the gear shift tower. There was a little side to side movement in the tower so it needed changing. Now is the perfect time to do that so i set about beefing it up. I removed the two bars holding the actual shifter and welded in a flat plate to hold it properly. I can also mount the factory ABS and TC switches in front of the gear stick. I wont need them when it's mapped but have to switch them off manually currently. I will have to see if i can reach them once strapped in or might have to put them on a riser plate facing the driver. I also changed the length of the side bars, making them shorter and bolted under the shifter means this is now very strong. There is no movement it in at all. A date was booked for the painting so worked a few late nights on it. The rear struts had some spot weld drill marks on from the removal of rear brackets so i wanted to so something about this. I welded them up and smoothed it over. I gave it a spray of primer to make sure it was OK. Just had to mask up the rest of the parts i didn't want painting then. It was easier to paint with the gearstick in place than remove it again so i covered this over. Also i wrapped the cables up to the pedals and put a big bag over them. Gave the cage a rubdown to remove the sharp edges and welding blobs. Pushed it outside and gave it a couple of coats of etch primer. All done ready for painting!
looks great. got the same cage in my car. how are you doing with the rain wipers the pipes to the front towers are inte the way on my car. so im doing some custom work there but havent finished it yet. my car is from dubai so i guess rain hasent bin a problem
Thanks. I did put this in the post above when i wrote it first but lost a bit of it so forgot to add that again. It was a case of time, cost and hassle to be honest. I would have liked to get the car out for the end of the season but now i see that was unrealistic due to the amount of work i had planned. Cost wise it would have been a fair bit more work to add them and then there is the hassle of making it good and relocating other parts. I don't have the bracing to the front towers for the reason above. If the wipers are an issue i'm glad i didnt go for it lol
On to the paint then. We had a few choices for the inside and cage. White, which i did the MK2 in, was not very practical. It gets dirty & dusty quickly and these things aren't easy to climb in to hoover it out once the seats and cage is installed so that was out. A couple of friends of mine just painted the inside of their MK1 in a dark grey. Although it looks great and very practical for a car like this, i wanted mine to give a professional look like it was factory built so there was only one choice, red! lol I wanted a hard wearing colour as the white on my MK2 was just a colour, no clear coat or anything so you had to be careful. As we were trying to match the outside for colour it made sense to treat it like the exterior and follow the same products that were used. My friend managed to get me some LY3D hard coat base colour and also the other materials needed. He paints professionally for a living so i just left it up to him as i had no idea what i needed lol A plan was hatched to use one of those paint booths that you can rent and they also have an oven. However, once the car came back from TSR and the state it was in currently, i think it would have been too much hassle getting it there and then getting it back without damaging the paint so we needed a plan B. We decided to do it in my unit as i had a good air supply, but a lot of planning was needed to stop the over-spray from covering everything. Firstly, I purchased a 3m x 6m one of these http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/121465515...49&var=420405119128&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT It was cheap enough and i can use it in the garden one day maybe, Apart from it looks like someone has now died it in lol Me and a work colleague put it up one Friday afternoon with the plan to paint it early Saturday. I was busy as work during the week so the unit was a little tight for space sadly. Once we masked the car up outside of the "booth" to give us more space, we masked the inside also to try and protect the booth so it could have been used as a later date. I'm glad we actually gave it extra protection as it wasn't exactly sealed so every little helped on stopping the over-spray from getting out. The windows were so thin, I think a sandwich bag has thicker gauge material, but i suppose you get what you pay for Although i had given the cage a coat with etch primer, guy wanted to go over it again with a light "mist" coat of normal grey primer. From this point on, it all seemed to get a little messy! lol The booth did have a door on it but we removed it at the end. This is after 2 coats of colour and also one coat of lacquer. The floor covering did get a little damaged as the paint stuck to Guy's shoes and ripped the material. He started sticking to the floor in the end! I think it looks amazing This was the day after. I popped down to the workshop to peel off the covering and the colour just started to blend into the exterior colour. It looked a little dark in the previous pictures but it needed time to cure. As you can see from the next set of photos, the colour match is great. I slotted together the R32 rear bumper and just hung it on the car to see what it looked like. There was a slight colour difference. The bottom part was practically orange! More paint needed I want to thank Guy for the painting and all the advice he has given to get to this stage. I'm very happy with the end result! I also want to thank his partner Charlotte for the support and biscuits while we watched Guy paint lol
Awesome looking. Painting the interior of a caged car is horrible. I did mine a few weeks ago, I actually used grey! I tinted vw Caddy / Transporter grey with a bit of white to lighten it. Still a pain to do though. Sent from my D5803 using Tapatalk
I have been so busy with this car and work since Christmas that I have had no time to write any updates. We have lots of catching up to do for the past 3 months so I will try and type the updates up over the next few weeks. I have uploaded over 100 photos just for the past 3 months of work! Firstly, Im not one to sit around in the winter months so several weekends were spent in the unit building different components and mocking things up in prep for the final assembly. A nice easy one to do was assemble the refurbished rear axle and put in the new Superpro bushes. Its a satisfying job to do, putting a new bush into the hole (no pun intended) but that silicone grease they supply gets everywhere! You cant really wear gloves with it because its sort of sticky and if you dont wear gloves you have to wash your hands 10 times before everything stops slipping out of your hands! Still, got there in the end and it looks great! Thanks to Henry and Jamie at Jtech Automotive for the superpro kit and also the advice on fitting. Handy to have a workbench to do it on. I had to dust this off it had been sitting around for so long. All the bushes ready to go. I used a laptop with the Superpro website on so i could see where each part number went. Some already done, Working out the others. All done! New bolts, washers and nuts used everywhere apart from the one on the top trailing arm as i forgot to order that one. I have since changed it for a new bolt.
A couple more odd jobs that needed doing. Removing the AC system and wrapping the new down pipe. The AC system was pretty easy, wrapping the down pipe not so much but much easier than the 6-branch manifold on the MK2!. I hate working with this stuff. It turns out i wrapped way too much of the middle pipe, i only needed a few inches of it in the end lol
There were a few engine bay jobs that needed doing so planned as many as I could I one day/weekend. It was mainly the gearbox & clutch/flywheel install and new revo engine mounts but after some thinking about how to drop the gearbox out it was just as easy to whip the engine out and do what we needed to. I had a couple of stripped studs on the turbo manifold that needed sorting and took advantage of the engine being out to install the new front ARB. Using the crane to lower the engine on the gearbox side didn't really work. I'm glad we gave up on that one now. It's out! To be honest most of it was already disconnected. I think the only pipe we had to take off was the water and fuel but they were both empty anyway. I couldn't see a way to disconnect the cables running to the engine from the passenger side so left them connected. It was going back in on the same day anyway. Gearbox off, quite a small engine to be honest! Install the new clutchmasters "stage 6" clutch and single mass flywheel. Good for 500bhp+ they say! New hotgolf gearbox on. Also fitted is a forge quick shift on top The new superpro ARB installed along with nearly new Revo engine mounts. These are meant to be harsh for a thousand miles or so, hopefully not too bad. Oh and also installed there is a braided AKS clutch line removing the VW hard line and plastic valve thing. I also modified the slave cylinder on the gearbox, removing the pin hole restrictor which they recommend on upgraded clutches. All back together! Took pretty much all weekend in the end but i don't like to rush these things. I had to drill a few holes in the tunnel to allow for the cables to run through. This has since been blocked up so no fumes can get through. I made that mistake on the MK2!
Excellent progress Mat. Time consuming these things. Judging from the excellent build quality on your old MK2, I see you have only got better!
Err, none lol I really don't have the time or money to be racing. Let me track day this for a couple of years and sell it on maybe. Might need the money for something else. Very time consuming! It's nearly done to be honest, Just need to update the thread. Thanks for the nice comment, i would say the build quality on this one is on par, if not better than the MK2
Working late into the night, lots of wiring to sort out. Firstly the battery cables to the cut-off switch. I went for a small Braille battery so i can keep it in the front but this means i had to run two cables from the battery to the switch, a feed and return cable. I managed to poke these through the firewall where the rest of the cables go through on the passenger side. I also had to run the cables for the gauges which came through the drivers side. I bought myself a proper hydraulic crimp tool from eBay, it does the job well and looks factory after some heat shrink. Dashboard back in! I had to cut the plastics around the cage but it worked out well in the end. I would have left them off but some are key to the structure of the dash and some hold switches, for example the headlight switch so it just made sense to put it back in with a few bit's cut off. All in the name of saving weight, right? You can see the gap i have on the top of the dash for the bar, it's huge but was required to actually get the dash into that position. A small cover plate will be made to hide that later.
This is an update I have not been looking forward to writing as I know its going to be a long one and I took a fair few pictures as I know a lot of people in this position. Im very lucky to have a car lift and a forklift, I pretty sure we couldnt have done this without either of them so good luck to those attempting this on your drive way on axle stands! Replacing the rear end Taking all the weight out of the rear end and putting the car up on a single post lift is a bit sketchy. Because of this we decided to tie the car down to a heavy pallet of scrap metal on the back end so it wouldnt be so nose heavy. It wasnt actually that bad in the end as the car is shifted back as much as we can get it so the nose weight is nearer the lift upright. Time to remove the suspension. Being a separate shock/spring on the MK5's makes this job easy. The only pain is limited room to compress the spring enough. In the end we took a bolt out of the lower arm and just let it hang down so the spring fell out. Lowering the old beam down One of the bushes on the old beam. Look past the flaking paint, that happens to most but the actual rubber part was really loose and floppy. Old & new. It was good to put them next to each other to compare. We had to swap over a couple of small brackets for ABS sensors etc but it was 95% there. The new one bolted up like a dream, no issues at all. Lets chuck some new suspension on it. Time to crack open the fancy stuff! KW clubsports which are dampening adjustable via a little purple knob on the bottom of the strut, you can just see it in the picture. Brand new hub's for the rear. Now we are talking! Fitting the S3 rear calipers and also fitted the fuel tank, don't have any pictures of that. It was actually quite easy so we had done it before i could take and pictures. Before we put it on the ground we fitted the new downpipe. However it didn't quite match up with the subframe bracket so left it for another day. I suspected that the bracket was welded on at the wrong angle so would need either bending or cutting and re-welding. Put it on the floor for the first time and its a bit low at the back. Actually it was too low to get it off the lift! We had to take it back up in the air and adjust the ride height. It's still tight now but just about manageable. Once it's running and we can drive onto the lift it will be much easier.
My ed30 subframe is just as rusty. They don't make them like they used to. Great job so far. What downpipe are you using. I know mine was put on upside down until Alex at Aks Tuning put it right.
Yeah, I sold the old one easy as someone else wanted to do what I have done. It seems they are all naff from factory like you say. The downpipe was an eBay job, good quality apart from that. The rest of it is a BCS system which is great.
