tony_ack

I had been lurking on the forum for about 12 months, umming and aahing about getting a Corrado. My first memory of wanting a Corrado was when I used to look through the new/used cars section in old top gear magazines and I loved the shape, and the fact it was a VW. My dad had a MK2 Golf GTI at the time, which must be responsible for my VW-lust in later life! My first VW (well actually it wasn't mine - it was my parents' second car for a while) was a 1989 Tornado Red MK2 Golf CL. It was a tidy car, not rapid, but it felt so smooth to drive compared to my previous cars. I drove it over the summer before going back to uni and loved it, and I was gutted when my dad sold it. Fast forward to 2009 and I could finally afford to get another MK2 Golf - this time a GTI. I got a lovely 5-door 8v J-reg in Pearl Grey (underrated colour...), and spent a lot of time getting it standard and making it shine. Then last April some twonk pulled out of a blind junction in front of me leaving me nowhere to go, and in a flash the car was written off. I seriously contemplated getting a Corrado then, but I decided to get another MK2 instead, this time a Royal Blue 3 door 16v. It was a bit of a mess when I bought it but again I spent a lot of time fixing it up again, and it's looking a lot better now. I got the itch for a Corrado again in the summer, and scanned the classifieds. I made a few enquiries but didn't seem to get anywhere. There was a VR6 which had been for sale originally at £2500, but reduced to £1250 over a period of a couple of months. I took a look at it on the way back from London - it looked pretty good for the money. Apparently I was only the second person to have seen it - the first left a deposit and never came to collect the car! I was finally the owner of a Corrado! History I've done a bit of digging into the history of the car. It seems to have spent a lot of time in the London area, and has a full VW service history until about 175000 miles. It has had 5 owners before me - the first appeared to be the VW dealership, so I suspect it was a demo car for the first 12 months. The next two owners serviced it meticulously at VW, and then it looks like it was sold to the 4th owner in 2008. They put on about 20000 miles in a year, but also got the chains and clutch chained in that time, before selling it to the 5th owner that I bought the car off. He stripped out the grey cloth interior and swapped it for beige heated leather and changed the heater matrix. Unfortunately someone also attempted to break into it under his ownership, so there was some damage around the tops of the doors. Even so, I landed myself with a Classic Green VR6 with a beige leather interior, with a super-smooth (even if high-mileage) engine.

Another one in Sheffield, seems to be becoming a bit of a Corrado hotspot now! Planning to do Elsecar this year in the C and the MK2.

I have a spare sunroof mech and panel that I've been trying to refurb, to replace the broken one in the car. The mech is all aligned and built up, cranks okay, and I have managed somehow to acquire 3 spare motors. Ideally I want to test the motors on the mech, before I install the mech in the car, just in case I need more/better grease or in case the alignment is out (I don't want to install the roof, and have to remove it again to re-clean...) I have a homemade electrical tester made from a car battery, switch and fuse, so I can hook it up to test it, however I don't know which wire does what! Any ideas? I've look in the Bently manual, and worked out some of them: 1 2 3 4 Total closure signal wire 5 Switch illumination (not sure why this goes to the motor - maybe the light is a diagnostic for the motor?) 6 Earth Any idea what 1, 2 and 3 do? I guess they're all live, and as the relay is in the motor housing, I guess the feeds to these may form some sort of Reverse-Stop-Forward switch?

Salvageable - maybe with a new arch and sill (providing there is no more damage which it sounds like there is), viable - no, not when you have a decent shell lying around. Is this the one advertised on here last summer? I enquired about it, so looks like I dodged a bullet... Going to get mine checked over and repaired if needed in the summer as there is a tiny rust spot in the same area on the opposite side..

I've seen a few Corrados (including my own) which seem to rust from around the number plate light area in the middle of the tailgate. I got a replacement yesterday which looks fine on the outside, but again there is some surface rust on the inside around this area. We thought it was the screws for the plinth, but I've had a closer look now, and I think there is something else that causes this. The number plate light bulbs are bare inside the tailgate (i.e. they're not enclosed seperately) and are very close to the inside of the panel. The rust looks like it started from immediately behind the bulbs, so I wonder if the heat from the bulbs has either melted the paint, of repeated expansion/contraction of the metal has caused the paint to crack, exposing the bare metal? If this is the case it may be worth getting some high-temp paint down there on the inside of the tailgate after clearing the rust. If your Corrado is fine in that area, it may still be worth a look as there may be some rust on the inside you can't see.

Haha no know, Im not after them any more going to get black center tunnle and bits so it fits more in with the door cards What colour centre tunnel trim have you got in at the moment? Mine's all black but I need beige

The passenger rub strip was missing on mine when I got it, but the driver's side was on. The driver's door was near-perfect along the swage line, with only a few dents, visible at certain angles. The passenger side is so bad that from 2 metres away, it looks like someone has put a big scratch along the length of the swage line as all the dents merge into one. I stuck the missing rub strip down with some double sided adhesive waterproof foam tape from the local motor factors. Make sure you clean and degrease the door where it is going to be stuck on and also clean and degrease the back of the rub strip. Also, these tapes usually take 24 hours to set properly before they are truly waterproof - don't get them wet before then.

Interesting... I'm about to get some new tyres - I'm looking mid range (max £75 a corner fitted), and the T1-Rs would have been one of the ones I was considering. I have them on the Golf, but to be honest I was never blown away by them. They seemed like an okay-ish tyre but didn't exactly offer massive grip. That leaves the Kumho KU31s and Uniroyal Rainsport 2s.

I attempted to fix my later style heater controls a couple of weeks ago as they're stuck on demist (so it could be worse..). I had a replacement set of controls and new direction cables from VW, but I snapped the control arms on the heaterbox - both the central flap arm and the windscreeen flap arm - trying to get the cables on and off while twisting my arms around into impossible positions. I had to break my old MK2 last year and I still had the heaterbox from that, so I checked Vagcat to see if the part numbers were the same for the MK2 and late Corrados - they were. But now I've actually got the MK2 heaterbox in front of me, it is a different part number to the one on Vagcat. Vagcat suggests: 192819353A for both the Golf and Corrado (rhd) The one I have (from a '92 MK2) is 192819355A I entered my part no and there were no results found. Any geeks know what the part number on the Corrado should be? Anyone tried putting a MK2 heater box in a late Corrado? I would try just swapping the control arms over, but it looks like the windscreen one is part of the flap itself, and can't be removed without dismantling the heater box anyway :(

MPG usually, but a cheeky look at the oil temp when warming up if I'm feeling playful

This is the stupidest fiddliest job ever. Both the door pin rod and the black plastic tab are still available from VW, and cost no more than a few quid for both a couple of months ago. I took off the door catch on the side of the door to improve access but it was still a nightmare. I fit the door pin rod to the tab out of the door, fed it into the door, then attempted to double join my fingers to get the c/locking rod attached. Once both rods are on it's not too bad to slide the tab onto the latch. The door pin on the driver's side sits a little higher than the passenger side on mine, but I don't care because it works now. I've got to do the same sodding job on the Golf as well

I got both directional cables new from VW for the later controls about 3 weeks ago. One was in UK stock, one had to go on back order, but it arrived pretty quickly. Found out the problem on mine was the arms on the heaterbox (with the cogs) had snapped. I'm currently building up the courage to replace it or the cogs. FYI the heaterbox is the same as the one in the MK2 Golf (luckily I have a spare from my old Golf :-) ) so don't be suckered into paying over the odds either for the whole box or the cogs.

May have been me, I'm up that way quite a bit to work on the Golf which is in one of the lockups in the flats near your house. I always have a good peek at your Rado when I go past if it's parked up!

A guy came over yesterday while I was working on the project Golf (the Corrado was parked in the garage while I worked on the Golf outside). Apparently he used to work as a salesman in a VW dealer back in the mid '90s and said he used to sell a fair few Corrados. He used to drive a Storm as a company car, and agreed they're a fantastic drive. When I mentioned that perhaps they would have sold more if they were more competitively priced, he said that may be, but at the time they sold as soon as they came in, and there was a waiting list for Storms. He also reckoned that the reason VW stopped making the Corrado when they did was because the chassis could not accommodate a driver's airbag without significant modicifation, so they would no longer have been able to sell it in the UK and across Europe (not sure how true this is, as I'm sure that some European models have airbags?).

Really annoyed that the media have now suddenly realised that snow tyres are a 'good thing' and everyone has rushed out to buy them... I won a set of cheap speedlines on ebay a few weeks back to use as winter wheels with winter tyres, but only managed to collect them last weekend, ironically due to the snow. In the meantime, the media have sensationalised winter tyres and everyone has sold out. Grrr at the media!

Well yeah, of course the roads are dirty! I just wondered why it was so much worse than most other cars on the road. I'm not really aggressive and keep a good distance, more so in this weather. Are corrados particularly notorious for attracting dirt (like the back of the mk2 golf for example)? It seemed that even when the weather was okay the bottom of the doors got filthy within a couple of days of being washed

Okay, I know the roads are a bit of a mess at the moment... but I've noticed the Corrado is absolutely filthy, compared to a lot of other cars on the road which are just dirty. The doors under the rub strips seem to get the worst of it but the whole car is a dirt magnet at the moment. Looking forward to the temperatures going up a little at the weekend so I can finally give it a bath.

The 16v revs higher, so the rev counter is different (should still work though)

I've been looking at getting a moonroof replacement, and there's someone breaking an Octavia Estate locally, but it's a 2001 model. I have looked on vag cat and there appear to be two different sunroof designs, swapping in 1999/2000. Does anyone know whether both types are compatible, or whether there is only one I can use? And if so, which one? For those who are using an Octavia moonroof, what year was the donor car?

I compared a Corrado switch to a later (post 87) MK2 switch the other day and the pins on the back are EXACTLY the same. All that VW did with the Corrado was redesign the switch face and turn it sideways :-) The MK2 switches seem smoother and sturdier to me, though failures with the dash dimmer switch (and leaving with you with no dash lights) are common.

I had my first chufty today, and it included the word 'Scirocco'. Is my initiation now complete?

Very good guide here (scroll down for Corrado VR6): http://www.golfgtiforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=44637.0 D9 was a good shout - the D plug is the ususal place for 'luxury' electrics in CE2. It does seem to share the pin with a lot of other stuff though, so some splicing may be required. Alternatively, there may be some other unused ignition lives on the plug. To get the plug out of the fusebox, if it's anything like the MK2 Golf CE2, there is a plastic guard that runs along the centre of the rear of the fusebox (left to right, between the top and bottom rows of plugs). Slide this across slightly, and you will be able to remove the plugs without resistence

You can, when you say you're sorting out a lift, do you mean just for you or your car as well? If you need to take the kit away I would need a £100 deposit (fully refunded when it is brought back), plus your name and address - it may sound harsh, but it's a pricey piece of kit and I need to get it back! Alternatively, if you know anyone on here who is a regular poster and who can vouch for you, that would make me feel a lot better.

I'm in Intake, but the lockup is in the Endcliffe Park area

I've got a fuel-pressure test kit that will fit a K-jet, but am in Sheffield... Have you tried checking that fuel is coming out of the line going into the metering head from the pump, with the ignition on and fuel relay bridged (yeah, make sure you have something to catch the fuel to hand and disconnect the coil just in case) If it is coming through okay it indicates the main fuel pump is working okay.