Lufbramatt

lol thats my favourite bit! :lol: much better than the mk4 polo grille they grafted on to the B4.

i theory if the spacer and adaptor are both hubcentric then it should be fine to run both, personally i wouldnt though, any tolerances are gonna add up and unless theyre top quality then id imagine youd end up with wobbly wheels. I managed to find a set of 35mm H+R adaptors for £70 a little while (on ED38 i hate to say) boxed complete with all the bolts+nuts so they are out there just got to be patient.

yea i bet! although a b3 passat is only about 40kg heavier than a corrado!

Hi again Roger, glad I could be of help. Get yourself over to http://www.ukpassats.co.uk, we've got a whole section dedicated to b3/b4 owners and theres a fair few of us over there! Funny you should say you have the ABF engine- I cannibalised a B4 ABF and fitted all the running gear and engine to my B3- it all bolted straight on (including subframe and crossmembers) and really opened my eyes to how similar the B3 and B4 are underneath. but it did take me quite a wjile to find a donor car, and I've only ever seen 2 other B4 16v's on the road (felt a bit guilty ripping it to bits bit the shell was a bit rusty so o well, at least it saved another passat from the scrapheap!) have a look here: http://www.ukpassats.co.uk/phpbb/viewto ... f=5&t=7316 I really enjoy driving mine and although the gearbox is a bit long, I dont find it an issue, although I do have a few performance mods (fully ported and polished head, decat, modified airbox and TB) which probably increase the midrange torque a bit. but boy does it come alive after 3500rpm! :D

yep as above, any spring will be fine. later b4 cars sit noticably higher than the early cars (they also switched to vr6 type front top mounts and the cars sit higher, similar to how late corrados sit higher) so the heavy duty springs will be fine. from a fitting point of view all the rear mounting components are the same (im actually running B4 lowering springs on my b3). only thing is really to make sure you get estate specific ones if you have an estate as they run a slightly stiffer spring at the back. incidentally ive seen recently a guy on ebay selling eibach 35mm lowering springs for these cars for £30 a set buy it now! while its in bits its worth replacing the upper spring buffer part number 333512149B as theyre rubber and compress over time. if you can, get hold of a set of sachs advantage rising-rate shock absorbers for the back, according to the blurb they get stiffer as they compress so theyre ideal for estates that can carry lots in the back. i got mine from http://www.vwspares.co.uk

cheers for that :) didnt need to go that far in the end, ive just had it apart and after taking the base off i found two cracked welds where the legs join to the sheetmetal "bucket" that you sit in :? so i only had to swap the lower seat frame. glad i found that. The guy i bought them off got them from a VW breakers in kent, that ages ago were breaking a B3 passat VR6 (with black leather) that had had a heavy side impact. quite worrying really! guess these were the leathers out of that car! all sorted now tho with my nice solid frame from my original drivers seat.

the PD130 would be the one to go for i think, lots of guys over on ukpassats have had them remapped to a happy 185bhp and silly torque as they have slightly bigger injectors and intercooler than the lower powered PD lumps. just gotta watch the clutch- think some of the better remaps limit the torque in lower gears to save the clutch from getting eaten.

my new leather drivers seat has a squaek/creak which no amount of tightening/lubricating/fiddling seems to be able to stop, so I've decided to swap the covers and foams from the new leather seat to the frame of my old (non creaky) cloth drivers seat. I know how to get the base apart after swapping the foam, but im not sure how the backrest comes to bits. can the backrest cover be taken off without undoing some of the stitching? im a bit confused. any pointers?

might be worth pulling all your dash switches out and giving them a shake. i had a really annoying rattle at certain rpm's on mine, turned out the transparent plastic light carrier in one of the dash switches had fallen to bits and was rattling around in the switch, making it sound like it was coming from the vents.

no it wont hurt them at all- audio signals are effectively an AC current and are pretty much symetrical around 0 volts- ie you get a positive and negative voltage accross the speaker alternately. Wiring them "backwards" jsut means they move the opposite way when the audio signal is applied. What GLIDN is doing is reversing the phase of the tweeters in relation to the woofers in order to take into account the difference in distance the sound wave travels from each speaker to your ears. Crossovers are designed so that the two drivers (woofer and tweeter) are in phase with each other for a few hundred hertz either side of the crossover frequency, so that the sound waves from each driver dont cancel each other out (which would give a big dip in sound output around the crossover frequency). Analogue crossovers only roll the output off gradually (usually around -6DB per octave) so a woofer will still be outputting a small amount of treble in a 2-way system. If this is out of phase with the tweeter it can interfere with the stereo image and often gives rise to the "boom and tizz" sound of a lot of car stereo installs. Mainly a case of experiment to see what sounds best as it also depends on the type of crossover slope used as well as to wether it will make a difference.

i gave up faffing with a thin screwdriver and just took the whole ignition housing off, you need a gear puller to get the spline adaptor off, but once thats off you can get to the switch in minutes, just a case of putting the key in the barrel to disengage the steering lock and one 6mm allen key to undo, then slide the ingition housing off the column and swap the switch out without any lying in the footwell with a torch nonsense. put a polo 6n one in mine, bout £17 from the dealers.

think the ET is quite high on these rims something like -52, so scope for using adaptors 5x100 > 5x112

i replaced the dash loom on my B3 passat with one from a B4, and apart from one or two plugs being slightly different (ie for the little ashtray lights etc) it was a straight swap. However there are some useful differences to the late looms that that make it a worthwhile mod- the stereo power plug has a permanent and switched live, dash lighting feed and the GALA feed (speed pulse signal) which is useful if you have the "get louder when you go faster" function on your headunit. I'd assume these same differences were also present on the early/late rado dash looms, as teh rado and passat dashboards are very similar.

i junked this on mine, have been running like that since september and it makes no difference at all to the time taken for the engine to warm up and the MPG hasnt suffered either tbh. If you take it off, unscrew the valve from the airbox and blank off the opening, the valve obstructs the airflow through to the filter quite a lot.

furniture clinic ultra cleam and protection cream is what i use, brings them up really nice, and shine can be adjusted depending on how generous you are with the protection cream. I do find that shiny leather in cars makes them look old though, if you look at the leather you get in enw cars its all matt finish. I re-laquered mine with matt finish leather sealant from furniture clinic and it looks like new-car leather now :D sorry bout teh crap fone pics, but gives you the idea:

check out Riley's build thread, apperently this is a common problem, he solved it with a "gasket" made from an industrial carpet tile.

jsut a heads up, i found this on vortex, scroll down a little bit: http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=3957691 :D

did you need the amp outputs? 14.99? :camp: n it yep amp output lead :roll: although that was one of the reasons i chose that headunit, as the space in the dash isnt deep enough for phono plugs in the back of the headunit, the blower ducting gets in teh way and you cant push the headunit back far enough.

when i first got the passat, it had been standing on someones drive for 3 montsh and wa a bit crusty, the very first time i went to get out of it, it wouldnt let me out, kept sucking the pin down as you describe, had to open the window and put the key in the door and managed to fight it long enough to open the door. i doused the lock mech in wd40 and never had the problem again . . . so yours should be ok now id imagine :)

so far in 2009 . . . leather interior + a few bits of missing trim: £320 furniture clinic stuff to refurb above leather interior: £45 new blaupunkt headunit and wiring harness: £145 set of bridgestone 16" tyres and refurb of porsche 928 alloys: £490 pair of handbrake cables: £30 set of genuine VR6 tail lights, 2xspare front wings and front mask (ready for respray in summer): £90 genuine *rare* Votex tailgate spoiler (couldnt let that go): £41 so thats £1161 in 2009 alone :shock: but that did include some big stuff (wheels and leather), and im sooo close to getting it finished . . . it had a complete suspension, engine and exhaust overhall in 2008 . .

this looks like it should be a really good build, looking forward to see the finished results. Im doing a similar build in my passat- i have heavily modified the stock door speaker pods and added a 12mm plywood bafflethat is braced against the door frame, and layered up the door cards with GRP on the back to stiffen them up. Its all about separating the back wave of the driver from the front, otherwise the bass frequencies, which are not directional, diffract around the other side of the driver and cancel out the sound wave, as the front and back waves are 180 degrees out of phase. Thats the key to getting bass out of a smallish speaker. I've put rear speakers in mine as in an estate the rear passengers are a long way away from the fronts! but have them faded down a lot so they dont interfere with teh front soundstage. Stereo recordings are mixed as if they are being played by a band on a stage in front of you, hence why you want to make the music sound as if the band are on the bonnet of the car :) Occasionally you can get "supra-aural" recordings which are recorded with two microphones inside a fake head, which reproduces the interactions of the sound wave with the shape of your head, but these are rare and should only be listened to with headphones, but thats getting off the subject a bit. To accuratley reproduce a stereo soundstage, ideally you want all the sound coming from two point sources, with all the frequencies being produced by the same driver so there is no phase shift that you ALWAYS introduce into the system by adding crossovers. But in reality this is not possible due to the mechanics of making a driver that can reproduce all audible frequencies at a decent level. The good news is that sound waves under about 120hz are non-directional (ie human ears cant hear what direction theyre coming from) which means a sub in the boot wont upset the soundstage. For frequencies above this, you want the tweeters and mids to be as close together as possible, and ideally with the tweeters at ear level- the rado dash is pretty good for this as the tweeters can go in the top of the dash. this is why you dont want rear speakers, as the directional high frequencies will muddle the sound heard by your ears and introduce all sorts of cancellation effects caused by the waves from the front and rear speakers cancelling each other out. imagine the two speakers in that pic are front and rear speakers on one side of teh car. in that pic you can see that the bit in the middle is sufferening from wave cancellation effects which will destroy the stereo effect.

front track on the 4-stud b3 passats is given as 1479mm, but with an ET38 wheel. so the track is effectively the same. When i compared them, the plus axle passat wishbones were longer again than the 4-stud ones, but not sure how much by. Also the plus axle passat wishbones use the early I-bolt style ARB mount rather than the bolt through drop links the rado has.

ta daaa

think its redline MTL you want in an O2O box as its a slightly thinner oil than the MT90.

theres an american spec VR6 wheel that has the same 4 spokes but is "dished" so the rim is closer to the driver, they look nice, would have to get on american ebay or vwvortex though i guess.