Yandards

Agreed.

I agree completely, a flyer in the tax reminder would have been easy and they shove enough offer crud in there. As for the DVLA having no responsibility I beg to differ, they are responsible for blank V5s, they are also responsible for ensuring the destruction of the ones that 'didn't print properly' so through their negligance you are out of pocket. How long before they get sued?

Aside from a lack of situational awareness..

Cheers folks. Right been fiddling again today. After a trawl of the Gates catalogue yesterday evening I popped into Halfords to see if they had a suitable size belt, unfortunately not. So I tried Partco today and no luck with them either. So it was off to VW and I should have a 6PK1263 belt as used on a MK 4 R32 without aircon on Tuesday evening. My previous belt length was 1285mm so at 22m shorter this should give me the right belt length. Did some invest into pulleys and noises (torque checks etc) and thanks to the joys of aftermarket parts my BBM crank ribbed belt pulley has been rubbing on the lower cam cover, this has worn as much of the pulley as it has the cam cover :roll: No real damage done though so I have had the cover off and re-profiled it with a dremmel. After having a quick poke around in the engine bay I spotted a couple of pools of coolant, some furthur investigation revealed that the 2 x bolts on the side of the cylinder head holding the Blue temp sender and gauge temp sender housing were very loose. These have now been re-torqued but I am going to keep an eye on them as they are stainless and may be losing torque through heat cycles.

Good news on the pass! As for front end airflow, I still am undecided as to if the bottom grill and top grill don't end up creating less airflow at speed as they are being force into the radiator area. I still think a complete undertray from the bottom of the splitter back to the bulkhead will give a much better passage of airflow through the engine bay resulting in more air over the intercooler and radiator. Not tried that yet though :)

It's a depth thing and the curve on the front of the lense. If you consider that the black plastic housing doesn't change and nor does the rubber seal that the lens sits on in the housing then late lenses will fit an early unit. The problem is that as part of the facelift process the front wings are tweaked to accomodate the profile change in the bonnet, this means the headlight glass has to be re-profiled so you keep and even gap around the headlights to keep it looking nice. Now you can fit late lenses and most people won't even notice (I used to know someone who had a late wing on one side and an early on the other, although it was noticeable and bugged the crap out of him) but it would get on my nerves no end.

After a day in the garage I finally started the car again about 40 minutes ago, no leaks and the rev counter works now so I now know the idle was bit low before (adjusted up to about 850rpm now). Bit of tappet noise but it has been a year since it was last run so that's only to be expected and it cleared straight away. Unfortunately I need a slightly shorter belt as the alt is banging on the bottom of the charger oil return bolt, this is reverberating around the whole engine so it's impossible to listen for any other running problems. I also ended up playing with the pulleys again as I had ordered a later style flat pulley that the 8v use for the water pump. I am not sure if running this and the V-belt drive is causing some issues but again I will have a fiddle tomorrow with different bits fitted and see what happens. Priortity now is to get the belt length right so I can confirm that there are no other things I need to look at, the aim is to get it ready for tax and MOT for April.

For post facelift headlights only though.. :)

Nice to see some progress Drew, not suprised the rear dampers are shot though they tend to be a bit of a weak link although you can't really complain at 18+ year old dampers having leaked.

It's all on fuel tank sizes, if the 16v donor car has the later 70 litre tank then yes it will.

It's actually used to dampen noise from the ISV not the intake. There is no issue in by-passing it at all as it's just a sound suppressor, unless the extra noise starts to annoy you :)

There was a new Mk 5 Golf GTi in bright orange vinyl at couple of years ago at E38, you don't notice until you get close to it. As for paint finish being good, I guess it depends how sticky the stuff is and how you remove it.

That's the plan although the microphone on the camera is pretty crud, I have had it running before although 1st time the head gasket didn't seal (copper one) and 2nd time one of the idlers was rubbing on the water pump pulley making an awful chirping sound. Drew, the charge cooler is on the nugget and is working well, although it didn't get the oil temps down as I hoped. As for the charger rebuild, the replacement one I had to source from fleabay was not as good as I would have hoped for so I decided against spending the extra on the BBM work. The one I damaged is only on the scroll and as these are available from BAR-Tek. I intend to get a replacement and then get the BBM work done on the casing, although that is a very long term plan :)

and no soul either. Maybe it's an age barrier but I hate the Mk 3s. I did run both a rado and mk 2 for a while, the difference between the 2 is night and day in terms of ride and build, although the mk 2 was good fun to drive.

8v G60 or G60 limited, I know which one I'd have :D Yep, only snag with the later one is that after chatting to a mate of my mine who used to own one (the RHD conversion one) he said he was always a little worried about driving it as they are so rare and didn't want to get it taken out by some muppet not paying attention.

Charger trial fitted to establish a good belt length, luckily the slighlty shorter version I bought fits nicely so my final belt length is 1285mm and is the one used on a V5 Golf. I can get a 1275mm belt if this one is slipping but without cranking the engine to set the belt tension it seems pretty good. Waiting on a new G60 idler pulley from VW to replace the one I have used in the mock-up as that's bust, need to paint the charger bracket as it looks nasty compared to the rebuilt charger. Then it's tidy up the electric spaghetti, refit the various parts and fire it back up!

Mk 2 Golfs are more expensive to buy than Corrados right now, so another vote to get another C.

You could consider charge cooling instead, have a look at my nugget thread for some pics.

Just got this delivered.. :cheers:

Realised late last night that my new belt routing plan was an :epicfail: I was going to end up running the water pump in reverse :scratch: :wave: So it was back out into the garage this morning armed with an aircon water pump pulley and time to check the clearances. As you can see in the image below (in crayon) this is the new plot for pulleys. Only the coloured circles are where pulleys are going to be yellow = ribbed belt, green = v-belt), it's just so I know where to stick them that I used the image. The red line is the 6PK ribbed belt that drives the charger and the blue line is the V-belt that powers the PAS and water pump. Thanks to the offset behind the water pump V-belt pulley the ribbed belt passes underneath/behind with plenty of space (strange almost like it was designed that way..). This setup will also remove some of the loading from the ribbed belt which will hopefully reduce the chance of slip and give me some redundancy if the ribbed belt breaks. I am hoping that with upsizing the idler from 78mm to 90mm and the slight tweaks that the shorter belt I currently have will fit, just waiting on the charger in the post to find out...

Although the set-up technique for tapered rears is a little open to error 'shove a screwdriver and do it up until you can't move the thrust washer with one finger..' :)

Right quick update. Charger is due from G-werks tomorrow. As my charger bracket was starting to look a little minging left as bare ally I decided to remove it and paint it. This has resulted in my 4th revision to the pulleys and belt tensioner but it's an improvement and I might actually be happy with it this time! Ordered some new pulleys from VW, only downside is the belt length needs to be measured again :( Spent the last 6 hours hunched over the engine bay mucking around with the wiring loom, I needed to remove pin 24 from the ECU plug as the rev counter was not working (early cars use terminal 1 on the coil, later models use a signal from the ECU at pin 24) so as I ended up pulling half the loom out to do so I though I would pull the rest out and re-arrange some bits I wasn't happy with. Still need to re-wrap the wiring loom, refit the ECU plug etc, then refit the charger and work out a belt length. With a bit of luck and the correct size belt I should be back to a running condition next weekend.

No issue here, 20:30 start tonight then..

Drove it, first time since the 18th December. Damn it was good :)

To be fair to the gritter drivers they have had a hell of a time the last month and have done a good job with the very limited resources they have. I am not too sure (no doubt Toady will correct me) but I think they are suppost to switch it off for passing cars.. I was following one home from work the other night (not in my C thankfully), the amount of different size bits of crud that were flying out was unreal, no wonder there is some damage going on.