davidwort

not really, front wings have a bit of movement but the doors are basically fixed position, most of the poor fitting doors I've seen are due to damage. Corrado doors seem to twist out of shape easily around the glass frame and that leads to sealing problems. I've not needed to change the hinge pins or adjust the doors even on my 21 yr old Corrado, but then I don't lean on the doors when they are open. You may be able to shim the doors back a bit towards the B pillars on the hinges but I reckon your problems are still down to out of shape door frames and not the door position.

long time ago now but I remember messing with roll bars on a mk1 chassis, I had a jetta which came from VW with no front ARB but a rear one, this was presumably for comfort up front (less transmission of bumps from left to right suspension) but as the car had a long boot it needed a rear arb to control the rear end weight better, especially if loaded up. I then bought a mk1 GTI for breaking and fitted the front ARB to the jetta (drilling the wishbones to fit the links :lol: ), I now had a thick ARB up front and the original thin rear one, hardly surprising but the car then understeered more, finally fitting the rear GTI ARB (thicker than the jetta one) and with the rear tightened the understeer was reduced. Now the mk1 had a pretty poor front subframe design compared to the mk2 and corrado (same chassis scirocco 16v got an extra brace on it) but it was interesting to see how different cars with the same basic chassis were tuned for comfort and handling with different bars (or lack of them), although on the mk1 chassis at least, fitting the front arb seemed to have little effect on reducing comfort and not surprisingly kept it much more level on corners. I'd imagine looking at the basic Corrado front suspension design that having no arb would result in much more lean through corners even with hard suspension as there would be no link to counter the weight shift, even worse would be the response when shifting from one direction to another. Never looked into it, but it would be interesting to see the setup on cars like the lotus 7/westfield and the like, I don't recall seeing left/right links on their fully independent suspension, but pretty much every modern car has left/right links on both front and rear, some of them hideously complex, prone to failure and don't seem to make the cars hadle that well either :lol:

Hi dan, might see you around, I'm about Kingston and the Open University most days in my standard dark red 8v, there's a few c's still around the area. Put a pic of your mk2 up and I might spot it :)

bet the engine bangs on the early bonnet too :)

I used a 2nd hand passat one on mine, golf one should fit, the golf uses the same engine blocks, engine mountings, racks and basically the same subframe so they should be the same length, the guy that does replacements on e-bay had an entry in the suppliers forum, said he'd give a 10% discount for forum users.

There's a few weak spots on the corrado, like the rear panels behind the bumper at the seams and the front bottom edge of the rear arches where they join the sills, front radiator support panel can get grotty too, apart from that most rust is the result of damage and poor repairs, I was very impressed with how sound the underneath of a superficially tatty 8v I bought was, it really depends on like the others have said, who has owned it and how they looked after it, any car used in a coastal town for any length of time usually rots quicker too as the air as well as the roads are constantly salty. Corrados had a lot of underseal from the factory and seem to last a lot better than mk3 golfs and similar age polos, Karmann made them pretty well :)

Depends on the type I think, the original vag one is probably full of precious metals, maybe worth a little scrap, the Ecp one is made from cheese I reckon, still its working spot on.

well the CAT was shot, ECP came up with a new cat for 47 quid trade :lol: it did the job, put it on this morning and it flew through the retest, 9 quid abs sensor and I'm sorted, at least I've got another 12 months ticket on it :) The old cat was good for a chuckle, was the original VAG one and had managed 17 years which I doubt the new pattern one will, but it was well clogged, could see no daylight through it at all, should help with power and economy a little now I reckon. [ATTACH=CONFIG]47249[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]47246[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]47247[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]47248[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]47250[/ATTACH]

They can break in a pretty disasterous way apparently, look for golf or seat 1.4 and 1.6 cars or 1.6 octavias for a similar box, polos, ibizas and lupos may also have similar boxes on the similar engines, important thing is this is a rod change box unlike the 1.8 and above mk4 era cars

I doubt it, if you look at the first graph the gearbox is geared to allow the peak engine power at roughly 120-130mph road speed, with the ASD box you may find to reach maximum speed you need to be in 4th! 5th will be more of an 'overdrive', quiet and economical but best for lazy flat-ish road cruising.

so I wonder if it was new thick pads and full width new discs pushing the pistons back to where they hadn't been for a long time :) glad you got it sorted always nice to hear one going back onto the road

or new from VW for about 30 quid, see here: http://the-corrado.net/showthread.php?52187-OEM-VW-Parts-Price-Enquiries/page9

a slightly different point of view, nothing wrong with whacking a bit of hammerite on surface rust on brake pipes, most 15 year old pipes have some corrosion on them and a bit of extra protection won't harm them, depends if it's deep corrosion or not of course. If you need to replace them most garages will make up lines for you, or you could buy a flaring tool and make them up yourself, copper replacement pipe is easy to bend as required.

8v MOT ran out 2 weeks ago :lol: To be fair I was on holiday and it's the first time I've needed to put one on this car (can't believe I've had it for nearly a year) Friday is D-day, front right abs sensor needed, fault scan pointed to that and a quick test spinning the wheel with a multimeter across it showed it is indeed dead. More seriously I'm pretty sure it will fail on emissions, think a new CAT is going to be required, ironically it's set to fail on the two items the 16v doesn't have, ABS and a CAT.

could the disks/pads be contaminated with oil from the replacement?, just another possibility. I'm assuming they were bedded in after the new parts were fitted, although I doubt one side would be so far out because of just that.

the parts are designed to allow free movement (turning) of the cable end bush on the shift mounting arm, diagram and a pic of the cable end removed from part (54) below: [ATTACH=CONFIG]47193[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]47194[/ATTACH] are we talking about the same parts, not the selector lever or at the other end the connections to the actual gearlever?

there's only one bolt holding the rear shocks to the rear beam so not much will be saved if you had the rear suspension rubber mounts and spring seat (at the top) replaced while the beam bushes were done. It used to be the case (factory system anyway) that the VR rear exhaust was one complete item going over the rear beam, in which case the beam would need to be dropped, but I'm pretty sure the replacement ones are two sections and can be done without touching the beam, worth checking though. You would need an alignment check after rear beam bushes and rear suspension rubber mounts are done, but a basic 4 wheel alignment is probably only around 30 quid.

1.9TDI 1.8T 2.8 24v ideally a VR6 subframe is needed although it can be done without on the 1.9 and 1.8T, it's worth mentionning that it's a lot cheaper to buy a car already converted than do it yourself though, also, a 1.8 16v is probably not the best base to start with either, both mechanicals and electrics of later cars can be a better match for alternative engines and looms etc.

not a great plan, a 1.8 with the 2L injection and emission controls will be pretty grim, but it will physically all bolt together.

just been looking at abs parts myself this morning (duff front left sensor), ETKA only lists two, with and without the electronic differential lock, I'm pretty sure if it's a VR then it will be the version with EDL (1H0 907 379E), which is at least a fairly common part as it's used on mk3 golfs and passats from 1994 to 1997.

apparently wedging credit cards in the throttle stop is the 'official' one-man procedure :lol:

You can check the temp sensor to a certain extent by doing the timing check procedure, run the car to temp, stop, start car with temp sensor disconnected, hold the throttle open so it revs at about 2000rpm, connect the temp sensor and revs should jump to about 3000 as the ecu advances the timing a fair bit. If it doesn't do that then it's getting no reading from the sensor. You could also connect a multimeter to it in resistance setting and see if you get a nice smooth variation as the engine warms up. But if you are getting sensible variations from cold in water temp on the gauge then I doubt the sensor is a fault anyway unless only the ECU side wiring/pins are faulty.

it stinks basically, more than the normal start up smells as it starts to operate, then whacking it on the MOT gas sniffer confirmed it, the cat is working but probably not well enough to pass the emissions test, I've tried the 'Italian tune-up' (several miles at the red line) to get it really hot, sometimes this burns off some of the contaminants in the cat (the MOT guys often try this on cars that are borderline lol ), but I think this one is past it.

Excellent, hope mine does the same although I think I'm going to need a new cat :(

well the usual thing with insurance companies is an argument about what you can currently obtain an equivalent vehicle for, usually involving sample adverts to prove what is out there for the money versus any book prices they have, very difficult as yours is such low mileage, so I'd roughly guess-timate around the 4-5 grand mark. ---------- Post added at 01:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:57 PM ---------- eh?! how does that work?