I’m December 2022, and I got round to fitting my new wheels, upon fitting I found that they rears tyres were actually rubbing slightly on the rear beam but some 10mm spacers sorted that out. During December I also wrote Santa a letter asking for a new back box as the one on the car had been painted grey and was heavily corroded. Santas elves found a back box on facebook market place and I fitted it early January. Made the back of the car look much smarter.
More jobs in the new year included some new brake lines. I bought some pre-bent ones for the front and used some line which was pre cut and flanged to make the rear. Unfortunately the rear line was a little bit long but a couple of neat loops sorted it out. Looking back I wish I had just cut it and bought a flange tool. But that will be a job for another day. Up until this point the back of my headliner had been held up by tape but i eventually had enough of it falling down and cut the back off. After asking some questions on the Facebook group I decided to get the grey headliner from headliner world. A week later a massive box arrived at my grandparents house. I removed all of the interior trim and ripped out the old headliner. Then with the help of a mate we got the new one it and started fixing all the trim back. Unfortunately during this process my heavy handedness broke the passenger side seatbelt adjuster. So that’s been added to the list of repairs. The new headliner fitted perfect as and all the holes were pre cut apart from the sunroof. I trimmed down the extra material around the sunroof panel and glued it the material around the sunroof panel down using fabric glue.
Spring came round quick and I enjoyed the car as it was taking lots of pretty pictures I went on my first few cruises and the car did about 2000 miles of problem free motoring.
One thing which had been letting my car down was the rusty front valance, as I was storing the car outside it had got considerably worse. To rectify this I bought a new front panel from heritage parts. I sprayed this in some high build primer to try and recreate the texture of the original panel. I also bought some oak green and clear coat from eBay. the reproduction panel fitted surprisingly well, and made a vast improvement.
nice work, i always liked the 1 in 10's. my preference would be the original wheels, but that is own my preference, i have never really liked the Ronals or dark wheels. good to see a car being used and steady improvements fighting off the effects of aging! my own car has become a labour of love which i miss driving!
After investigating so much time and money into the car it’s definitely become a labour of love, I too like the original wheels, and if they made a 15 or 16 inch set I’d be all over them! as you will see my wheel Sarga is about to continue (lol)
After a couple of months of going to shows I got a little bit board of the ronals, and started looking for another set of wheels. Originally I had a budget of around £500 to get something cool which I could run some lower profile tyres on to achieve a lower ride hight. However the £500 budget went out the window pretty quickly and after a couple of weeks of looking I found myself driving to wales to pick up these…. -yes they have been rattle canned purple -yes they are stupidly wide -yes they have the most hideous spiked bolts -no they were not £500 however I had a vision, I mean how hard could it really be to rebuild 30yr old split rims?
well it’s funny you say that… When I bought them they were staggered 8.5j and 9j, and the bloke had them on his mk2 with the wider g60 arches. I knew I needed to rebuild them but thought I would throw them on the car anyway for shits and gigs. Long story short they looked ridiculous. I don’t think the purple helped either.
[The car sat on the drive for a couple of weeks as I couldn’t drive it on the stupid wide arms and I had sold the ronal wheels to help fund the BBS rebuild. After some strategical complaining to my mate Barnaby he let me borrow his spare set of BBS RAs to get me around while I rebuilt the RMs. After the mk2 golf caffeine and machine meet up (^) I found some motivation to split the wheels. To my surprise the wheels came apart fairly easily. And the next week I took the barrels and centres to my local wheel shop for a refurb in silver. They were away for 2 weeks! Apparently they had a lot of issues getting the layers and layers of different rattle can off! while the wheels were away I ordered some new bolts, I went for gold (a bold choice I am not sure I would repeat). I also ordered a new pair of 2” lips these would replace the 3” lips on the 9j rear wheels. And then the 8.5j wheels could be moved to the rear and the new lips would make the old rears 8j which would go on the front. (Hope that makes sense) I spent a couple of nights after work putting the wheels back together, unfortunately they did not go back together as simple as I had hoped! I wasn’t sure if during the stripping process some of the threads had damaged or if I was being heavy handed with the torque wrench but a lot of the threads ended up stripping. Over all I ended up helicoiling 35 bolts over the 4 wheels. But eventually I got there and used some OB1 general sealant to seal between the lip and barrel. Once the centre caps were in with the new badges I was sold! very chuffed with the transformation. For a 19yr old with not a lot of know how was quite proud of myself!
Lovely car. I'm partial to an oak green myself. Great job on the wheels and fair play for just getting stuck in.
