Stonejag

Do you still need the cover fitted at all, when the rain tray is going to be fitted over the top? Wondering if it could just be removed rather than having to cut it up.

What water temp should the rad fans kick in at? My temperature gauge has always read a little on the low side but since replacing all my hoses yesterday (thanks again, Stu!) the needle rests at approx 85º when cruising at 50mph and rises to approx 110º when sitting in traffic. However I don't think my fans are kicking in at all :( Shorting the two pins inside the connector for the yellow temperature sender does make both fans come on at high speed - does this imply my fan controller is working OK? Is there a more thorough way to test it? I had the radiator thermoswitch replaced with a new one 2-3 months ago but I suppose it could be dead, can one do the same pin-shorting trick to test them? I really want to make sure they are working OK since I am now using an oil-to-air gearbox cooler - I don't want it to roast itself sitting in traffic if the fans aren't coming on when the coolant temp rises. Stone

'Fitting kit' is a pretty grand description for an 50mm long, 83mm-inner-diameter silicone coupler, two jubilee clips and a steel strip with some holes punched in it! Overpriced if it cost you more than £10, imho...

Come off it, that's pretty lazy http://www.vwspares.co.uk/corrado_cooling.php Price seems to have gone up slightly to £62.94 inc VAT, still a bargain though! Stone

I've just measured mine for you, it's 14" (~355mm). Weird since it's German and they're usually metric but it's definitely closer to 14" than 350mm or 360mm!

Mine is a Meyle replacement - cost £55 from vwspares.co.uk.

How does it work for non-stand people? My C's totally not show-worthy (yet...!) so I didn't want to take a club stand space away from a nicer one... I can just park in a random line somewhere ;)

Short answer is, I don't know. I would guess something to do with getting the tooling out again after curing though? On the bright side, the joining piece is translucent so you can tell if your aux pump is working by watching the coolant pulse past ;) Aaaaanyway, after a series of bloody enormous dramas I've now got my hoses fitted! Short version: It was a massive pain, I was an idiot and it nearly took all night. Long version: StueyB was kind enough to offer me a hand and use of his workshop for fitting them (because he's a legend :thumbleft:) so I got to his unit after work yesterday at about 7pm. We jacked the car up onto some ramps, drained all the (boiling hot :() coolant out over my arm and spent about three hours getting the OEM hoses off. Some of them were stuck fast, some we couldn't get the constant-tension clips off, some had jubilee clips on that had rusted into a solid lump...ended up having to remove engine plastics, leads, coilpack, battery, grille, expansion tank, aux pump, ISV etc etc and it turned into a bit of a mission. side mission starts here: Then my side mission started - because my car's an auto, and the hose kit we've got made is for a manual, the two extra hose branches that run to the auto gearbox cooler weren't there. The gearbox cooler is a really weird bit of German design: here's a pic: Basically the two hoses on the ends are connected into the coolant system, and the cooler is held onto the top of the auto box with a pair of banjo bolts - automatic transmission fluid (ATF) is pumped out of the gearbox up one banjo bolt, goes through the cooler and back into the gearbox through the other bolt. Because it was designed on a Friday afternoon there are all sorts of problems with this - not only are they fragile and tend to break internally (which contaminates your ATF with coolant and then ruins your gearbox) but the basic design doesn't work: ATF has a maximum working temperature of 85ºC before it breaks down, and the coolant system operates at up to 110ºC when working normally, so the ATF is really being heated by the coolant instead of cooled! This is one reason why auto Corrados are rare (and usually buggered) - the 'lifetime' ATF is heated by the stock cooler until it doesn't work any more, the fluid level drops which messes up the shifting and then the gearbox breaks. Since a new one from VW costs about £3k that usually means the car gets scrapped which is why there are none left! So, anyway, I needed to replace the stock cooler because it's crap and there is nowhere to hook it up with a manual hose kit. Just to detail it for posterity, my replacement gearbox cooling system is made up of the following bits: 2x M12 to AN-8 adapters to fit into the banjo bolt holes in the top of the gearbox: (you also need two 13mmx2.5mm O-rings for the top of the gearbox, VW part #089409069) 2x 90º curved AN-8 to hose barb adapters: A Mocal oilstat (opens to flow ATF through the external cooler when it's reached 80ºC): A 16-row, half-width Mocal oil cooler: and some oil-rated 0.5" Aeroquip hose to hook it all up. I'd already mounted the cooler in front of the radiator near the nearside headlight, so it should have been a reasonably easy job to cut the hoses to length and hook it all together. Unfortunately I had a lapse in concentration at around midnight while Stu had nipped out to the loo - I torqued the thread adapters into the gearbox and threaded the hose barb adapters onto them by hand, but totally forgot to tighten them, because I'm a massive idiot. More on this later! We cut a small section out of the flat plastic guide between headlight and radiator so the hoses could pass neatly into the middle section of the slam panel, prefilled the cooler with ATF and hooked up the hoses. side mission ends here Then we started hooking up the hoses from Roose. Luckily we had another VR6 in the workshop so we could refer to it when we were confused as to which end went where - it was about 01:30 by this point so it didn't take much to confuse us :lol: Fitting them was an absolute joy - every single hose fit perfectly! The silicone is slightly slippery, and the inner diameters are perfectly matched to the OEM hoses so they glide straight onto the flanges and grip them firmly because of the increase wall thickness. All the clips were perfectly sized bar one (approx 1mm too small in diameter - possibly a packing error) but I had a spare that fit so it wasn't an issue. They are also really shiny which brightens up the bay and makes it look a lot more attractive. We took our time and made sure we lined up the hose clips so they could be removed again in future if necessary, and were all done by about 3am so we slowly filled it up with coolant, put everything back in the bay and started warming up the engine to get the air bubbles out of the system. The hoses are such a good fit not a single drop of coolant escaped :D Unfortunately after a few minutes of running the engine there was suddenly a massive waterfall of ATF off the top of the gearbox and a lot of panicking ensued! It didn't take long to realise what had happened...where I hadn't tightened up the ATF hose adapters the gearbox had merrily pumped all the ATF out of its top and the waterfall was where it had all collected on top of the box and eventually overflowed :oops: :epicfail: After that we had to take out the battery, disconnect the starter motor and remove the coilpack, the nearside headlight and the lower radiator hose just to get access to get a spanner onto the adapters I hadn't tightened :nono: :censored: It ended up taking around three hours of constant apologising for being a massive berk (from me) and saintly tolerance (from Stu) to get them tightened up, we lost a couple more litres of coolant and made a three-foot wide puddle of ATF on the floor which then needed mopping up. When we finally got everything back together and tidied up, we dropped the car back down and I started reversing out when Stu noticed only one of the headlights worked...I cut the engine while he plugged it back in and then couldn't get it restarted because the battery was flat :bad-words: We finally finished up at around 04:30. I didn't get home until 05:00, so I spent 90 minutes in bed, got back up again and drove to work... Now I'm absolutely knackered, but I do have an incredibly shiny engine bay :D Before: After (apologies for crap pic, it was dark...): Massive props to Stu for being a) kind enough to offer help in the first place, knowing it might take ages b) kind enough not to kick me out at midnight so he could go to bed c) kind enough not to brain me with a torque wrench after my massive fcukup caused us three hours of aggro d) and he's still talking to me! :notworthy: I owe him a lot of beer. Time for bed now! :sleeping:

Yes, really hard to take photos of though! (even their website ones are a bit off) This one is closer but still a little too light -the real thing is a bit more saturated: (18V Mk4 Golf before anyone thinks this is a Corrado kit!) They have a range of stainless joining pieces on their website so I don't see why not. You could always uncrimp them and fit your own, they feel pretty indestructible though. Sure thing, hoping to get them done tomorrow eve :) Incidentally, I think they've sent me too many OEM hoses back - I have an S-bend one which is 021 103 493A (some kind of breather for the AAA engine?) if that rings any bells. If not I'll send it back to them!

Sorry, would have responded if I had any idea!

It's worth checking your fluid levels often - mine was underreading for ages and then I found a (very) slow hose leak that only seeped a bit when it was under pressure. Now of course it's spraying the lot all over the floor at the end of every trip! While my temporary repair was still holding (it's in quite an awkward spot to get to...) it pressurised a lot faster and I saw more realistic temperatures on the gauge. As long as you keep an eye on the oil temp in the MFA you shouldn't get caught out. The 'coolant low' light doesn't flash until the expansion tank is completely empty (plus a bit) so it doesn't give you a lot of warning. Oh, and some of the hoses have gone obsolete now, so look after them! Stone

Are you sure it's not normal? Mine leans forward as well, I assumed it was so you had a little more clearance to take the cap off...

I'm told you can do it without getting the bumper off but it's a pain regardless. I was quoted a couple of hours for a fully-equipped shop but given the mess they made by doing it in a hurry I'd rather have given it a go myself! Stone

Yep, mine opens all the way too...if you give it a bit of a run-up, anyway! Only takes two pushes of the button to get it open (sticks in the middle) but then I can only inch it shut. Pretty sure one of the slides is sticking but I'm going to swap for a moonroof at some point so I can't really be arsed to fix it - there's always the allen key... Stone

I have hoses :dance: Here's how they compare to the OEM ones laid out in approximately the same positions: First impressions are good - they're very flexible, all have four reinforcing plies of polyester and all have a wall thickness of 5mm - even the tiny hoses like the return to the expansion tank on the top hose. A couple are made in more than one piece but are crimped together onto plastic joining pieces with permanent hose clips (the kind with 'ears' you compress) - they're incredibly solid and I can't get them to budge at all. As a bonus to Rob the expansion tank return is made like this so you can ask for it to be made longer if you have a mk4 tank ;) And as an added bonus, they're orange! :D The hose marked 'block to heater matrix' has a slightly different angle on the centre hose to the originals but I'll see if it's an issue when I fit them - the ends can twist apart from each other a fair way so it shouldn't be a problem. Anyway, very happy and looking forward to getting them on! Stone

Where were all these CDAs when I wanted one?! Nobody was selling so I ended up buying new :bonk:

I meant the long holiday drive but I might just write you something anyway

Half price for a Meyle one from VWspares: 62.94 inc VAT. OEM fit but they've put the price up since I got one ;) Daves16v: didn't you make your own metal rad neck? Would definitely be interested if you wanted to do another! Stone

If your door cards have ever been off before (aftermarket speakers?) you may find some of the awkward screws have been left out when they reassembled it. Mine only have about half of them present and the door cards are still pretty solid :lol: For the record, Dave is almost entirely right about the wiring - there is a microswitch in the handle fed out to the cable, but it only operates the hold-key-to-roll-up-windows feature. I cut the cable off one of my handles (idiot garage didn't clip it into the door properly and the first time I rolled down my window it mangled it!) and the central locking to both doors and tailgate still worked fine - the air is triggered totally mechanically. The only bit that stopped working was holding the key in to shut the sunroof etc. Come to think of it I'd love to hold the key in the unlock position to open both windows and the sunroof, anyone modified theirs? Would be really neat once everything actually works! Stone

Really enjoyed reading it, good job Might be up for the next one if it isn't quite so far away! Stone

I'll have it if V-Dubstar doesn't.

Ah, fair enough, it will match your OE suspension and wheels ;)

Looking good - reminds me I need to get some more black trim tape for mine, it keeps falling off :lol: Today I got fed up that nobody had bought my billet crackpipe so I cleaned it up :) Always looked a bit sad (wasn't a gruvenparts one, was the Mason Tech one Voodoo missold me) as it was covered in storage dings and still had all the CNC ridges on that hadn't been milled out. Managed to get the drain plug out with an imperial allen key and a hammer (!) and was pleased to find it was on a standard 1/4" thread so I could stick a gas stopcock from the plumbing shop in it :) Then polished it with wet-and-dry: went through 80-120-180-320grit alternating directions and it came out quite nicely! The trick is to keep the paper and workpiece wet and use a small amount of Fairy liquid to keep the paper from clogging. Took four or five hours on and off, my hands look like prunes now :lol: Stone

Orange :twisted: If you're going to Elsecar you're welcome to the rest of my tin, there's easily enough left for another 6-8 calipers...

Consensus seems to be that much more than 16 rows at the full matrix width of 235mm is wasted as it will overcool the oil. Oilstats are failsafe and readily available (I bought Mocal own-brand, others are available) - for £15 it's well worth fitting one for peace of mind. If the wax element fails they default to running oil through the cooler rather than bypassing it. Default is 80ºC but I think they do others as well. Stone