Henny

I agree... She's looking sweet as she is at the moment... Any more red and (IMHO) she'll start looking a bit odd... :? I've always thought that the In-pro clear top lights REALLY do suit the red 'rados very well...

I tend to base the name of my cars on female names based around the letters on the number plate. J-DUB (My current G60, pretty bleeding obvious what the letters are! :lol: ) KC (my MKI 16V Golf) FKC###Y Willow (named by the previous owner of my old MKI golf auto BEFORE Buffy the Vampire Slayer became a series! :roll: ) WLO ##X I've named all of my cars like this apart from 3... Hughie, my beetle, which was puke yellow and UEA ## M (say the first 3 letters loudly with an accent like Billy Connely! :lol: ) Ralph (my Porsche engined, wheely'ing camper van :? ) YRA181L And my 1.4 Astra Merit which was known as "the blue bag o' sh!te" :roll: :lol: Yeah, it's kind of sad, but I spend more on my cars than I've ever spent on my women, and they've got names!*, and I know that a lot more people name their PCs, which I've never done, other than "Server", "Games", "Music" etc... (* which could explain why I'm single!) :roll: :lol:

Well, I finally got a phone call today to let me know that my blades and arms are now in stock and waiting for me... I've lost count of how many weeks I've been waiting for them :shock: :? What's the betting they're wrong when I get them tomorrow?!? :roll: :lol:

Anyone know for certain if these brakes will fit inside a set of Borbet C 7.5x16 ET 30? (4 stud on a G60) While my car's in bits I may well do this conversion before fitting the 2 litre engine and new pulley/intercooler/other odds and sods! :D

That's ONE of the problems... :roll: The mechanism can become a little bit fragile and bits can snap off. Usually one of 3 (IIRC) parts snaps. The cable, part of the cable guide, or a lever inside the mechanism that pulls/locks the roof down properly... None are particularly expensive to fix, just most of them are a PITA to do... :? And yes, I've had to do these fixes on my 'rado! :lol:

I've got supersport coilovers on my G60 and I'd reccomend them whole heartedly... and I often do here! :roll: :lol: They're about £400 from Venom and the ride quality is very good... I bought mine so that I could firstly dump the suspension that was on the car when I first got it that was nasty, and secondly so I could get it corner weighted and get the handling absolutely spot on... It worked on both counts! :D 8)

Sorry Andy, I know that my bonnet needs a bit of a touch up on a couple of small stone chips, but with the engine work I'm doing, I can't justify having the whole bonnet re-sprayed just to put on an earlier one... Thanks for the offer though... 8)

It's normally done with a mirror backed plastic. The only thing is that you have to make sure that it's heat resistant! :lol: I've also seen it done with polished stainless steel, but that guy was a nutter and loved trying to keep shiney bits clean! :? :lol: The foam is mainly for sound deadening...

What colour? I quite fancy putting an earlier bonnet on my G60, and seeing as I've got to take it off anyway to get the engine out, seems as good a time as any! :roll: :lol:

Jimbob1970 Sorry to tell you that your car has almost certainly had it's bonnet replaced at some point... :( VW didn't start making the bulged bonnets that early, and I'm pretty certain that no 1.8 16V left the factory with a bulge bonnet...

Originally came to 'Rados from a Lhasa Green MkI 1500 Auto Golf and a Black MkI GTI 16V I built myself.... Wrote the Corrado 16V off on some diesel and have now come back with my G60 from the same 16V MKI golf (although now in bits!) and a 1.4 Astra Merit.... which I never did find any merit to... :roll: :lol:

Get your engineering degree... You'll find it a hell of a lot of use if you decide to persue this line of career you're thinking of... Either that, or swap courses to an automotive engineering one. The only way I know to get into the restoration trade is to start at the bottom and work up... Lots of time and effort to do.... Good luck. Henny (B-Eng(Hons.) :D :lol: )

That doesn't suprise me at all... I used to work on Beetles (the original ones, not these new re-bodied golfs! :lol: ) and you'd find that hardly any of them left the factory the same as an update approached... Whenever they ran low on bits near to an update, the left them off, used something similar, or used a new bit instead! :shock: :lol: There were plenty of bits that were one year only bits, even complete doors changed from year to year sometimes! :roll:

Yup, my preference too... 8) GRINGOG60 I've bought some lighting gell film that should make a pretty similar blue glow... When we get the dials I'll do a comparison and see what it looks like, then I may use my plotter to cut out the shapes needed to swap the original filters on the switches and heater controls and supply 'em as a kit... The awkward switches are the early window and sunroof ones as these use a green LED to illuminate rather than a bulb and filter... :roll:

Wrong... It all depended on when they were built. You're right that the reason for the change was the VR6 engine needing extra height under the lid. All 1.8 16V 'rados should have the recessed bonnet, all 2.0L(both 8V and 16V) and VR6 'rados should have the bulged bonnet, G60s got a mix depending on build date. My G60 is one of the last run of G60s and I've got the later headlamps, grill, bumpers, indicators, foglamps and the bulged bonnet. (although I actually prefer the earlier recessed bonnet... :roll: :( ) VW stopped making the recessed bonnet when they released the VR6 'rado as it made economic sense to only make one part for all models rather than having to have the tooling for both recessed and bulged bonnet up and running at the same time... 8) Oh, and there was a change on the door handles too. The later ones have a lip around the key barrel... No idea why, they just do... :? :lol:

YAY! 500 posts!!! :D 8) :lol: Sorry, just had to do that... :roll: :wink: :lol: I remember swearing lots about the metal water pipe that runs along the top of the gearbox/front of the engine getting in the way, and getting the bolts back in afterwards was a bit of a swine 'cos they screw into part of the engine mount... IIRC I had to undo the big bolt in the top of the front engine mount so that it'd move, and then jack the gearbox up a bit to get the bolts to bite into the threads... It's a bit blurry on how I did it 'cos it was a while ago, and I've had the engine in LOTS of bits LOTS of times since then and can never remember which bit was hard to do... :roll: :lol: I think that my memory is going with age... It's probably a safety measure so I don't add up the amount I've spent on the car and have a heart attack! :? :lol: I'll have a look at the car when I get home to jog my memory and put up a quick how to if I can remember how to do it... 8)

I did mine on a set of trolley jacks and axle stands on my parents drive in just over an hour... 2 hours for a proper garage with ramps seems a touch excessive to me... :?

The 16V KR engine IS an interference engine... This means that without the cambelt set properly (or a snapped one when the engine was running) you WILL bend valves. :? On a 1.8 16V the cambelt change is easier than on a G60 as there isn't a charger belt tensioner to deal with, just the P/S and alternator belts. :) Whenever I do a cambelt now, I change the tensioner as a matter of course. The parts shouldn't cost you more than £40 from Euro for genuine bits and should only take a reasonable mechanic about an hour to fit. It may be worth changing both the other belts while you are at it, they are practically pence and have to be taken off anyway... 8)

If that part number for all models with and without AC, cos i cant check cos i havn't got my CD here today. thanks It should be a standard bolt as the only thing it does is hold the Cam belt pulley/gear onto the crank. This pulley/gear is standard on all of the VW 8V (and possibly 16 and 20V engines), so I can't see why the bolt would be different... 8)

I hear ya there matey! :lol: Not a cheap or particularly pleasant job! :?

Brakes + ANY Problem = serious EVERY time... Don't mess with the brakes, they're the most important part of the car... It don't matter how fast your car goes, if it won't stop when it needs to, then you're in deep $#!t! :( As has been said, take it back ASAP and take it steady on the way there... It's far better to feel a bit of a prat if you've just mis-understood how it fits together than being splattered against a tree (or worse, innocent by-standers) when the brakes do something unexpected... :shock:

The problem tends to be that when the valve impacts onto the piston you can't always tell if there's any damage to the bottom end. If you think about it, to bend a valve with the piston you've exerted one hell of a force on a small surface area of the piston which it was never designed to take. I've seen pistons that looked perfect until you took 'em out and looked at the sides... The grooves for the piston rings had been nearly totally closed meaning that the piston rings were squashed... If it had been run then the cylinders would have been knackered almost instantly resulting in needing a new block... :shock: I've gone through all of this myself recently, so I know how Ant feels and how brave a face he's putting on it... It sucks in a big way that a £2 bolt can cause £1000s of damage, especially when you've never touched the bolt! :roll: Ant Looks like I may be waiting for your car to bed in at my first Pod session then! :lol: :roll: Sounds like you've got some interesting plans for the car and new engine... Just make sure that the details are correct with your new setup and we'll see what happens, if you're up for it, next year at the Pod... :D 8)

You don't have to take the bumper completely off, just slide it forwards an inch or so... Make sure you have someone to help as it just suddenly falls off it's guides and onto the floor... (yup, I dropped mine while cleaning the intercooler... :oops: :lol: ) There's a thread here somewhere about removing the bumper that also tells you how to take out the intercooler... It's where I got the info to do mine! :lol:

Is that a '92 Golf G60, or Corrado G60? :roll: Your avatar shows a golf which reminded me about my mate's Golf G60 with a similar sounding box... I'll ask him if what it is... :)

Ant, before stripping the head off, you can pretty much tell if any valves have been hit and bent by following these steps... 1) remove plugs and insert a long screwdriver into each cylinder No. 1&2 so that you can guage the depth of the pistons in the bores. 2) with the car in gear, and the cambelt off, rock the car so that both pistons are at the same level in their cylinders. Make sure that none of the pistons go up past the other! Ideally you want to lower the upper piston to meet the lower one. IE Do not let any of the pistons reach TDC as you may end up bending more valves! It doesn't matter at this stage if you turn the engine backwards. 3) remove rocker cover 4) turn cam over by hand (use a spanner! :lol: ) and see if the tappets are all going all the way down and coming smoothly all the way back up again following the cam all the way on the lobes. If there's any of them that look like they're not returning all the way back up properly, you've definately bent a valve. If they all go up and down fully, then you may well have been lucky and not bent anything. After you get the sheared bolt out (good luck, this is why I'm rebuilding mine! :roll: ) put it all back together and do a compression test to finally confirm if anything got bent or not... If you're changing the bolt, it's worth getting one from a MKI golf 1800 (DX engine code) which is a hex headed bolt, not a 12 sided one. This was the original 1800 bolt and WASN'T a stretch bolt. You'll need to thread lock it into place, and check it for torque every now and then, but you'll know that it'll never shear off again... :? I hope that you've not bent anything and, as you know, I know how you feel... :( It's a real bummer...