the gladersiete arb bushes do indeed move the front wheels slighty , helps correct the geometry on a lowered car and gives it a bit more castor

Details, details, details, thats all that count! Love it mate!

I dont know, seems to of melted or something lol

Hello everyone, if there's anyone still there?? Right were do I start? Well I will start with a huge apology the Polo has taken somewhat of a back seat of late as such time for updates also fell by the wayside but I am pleased to say that some progress has been made over the last few months and my plans for the car are changing, well in my mind anyway. The reason for my lack of updates was a very unexpected change in employment as I mentioned at the start of this thread I took time away from my business to learn abit about ATEX engineering but a random phone call that offered me a posistion at a local Motorsport company changed everything. I loved my old job and it was very hard to leave but this new one offered me more money plus it was walking distance from my home so I could slow down and spend more time getting the Polo just how I want it. Anyway enough of all this useless banter and on with the resto!

I will start were I left off, After the welding around the filler neck was completed it was time to have a clean down of the rear arches and rear floor pan section of this rusty Polo. Here are some of the worse affected areas.

Here are some more areas above the petrol tank and around the rear seat mounting points.

I have ground out these areas untill there is no sign of rust in any of the pitted spots (if that makes any sence to anyone?) then treated the areas with a liquid rust killer plus in hard to reach areas I've burnt the metal with a blow torch to remove any moisture, this will at least make sure any rust I just cant get at will be dead before the final layer of sealer/stonechip goes on.

Sorry its been so long and that this is such a short entry but I will be back with more very soon. Many thanks for reading Alex

Edited 20 May, 201214 yr by dirtydubs

This is awesome

Mine wasnt this bad and i gave up and scrapped it

This is awesome

Mine wasnt this bad and i gave up and scrapped it

cheers dude, and Nooooooooooooooooo lol.

Right I dont want to bore people to much with loads of pics of rust spots "Before" and "After" lets just say there's been a few mainly around the rear boot floor section/overhang particually the seam that joins the extra boot section onto the standard Polo floorpan this had to be worked quite alot. All this said this afternoon I've discovered that all the pictures I have taken of the car are on my old ladtop which is totally fucked so I've ripped the hard drive out of it to try and recover what I can so untill then thanks for all your patience and please bear with me, I will be back very soon.

Edited 21 May, 201214 yr by dirtydubs

After much searching on the laptops old hard drive I can confirm that I have indeed lost alot of pics so once I finish the sill I'm working on now I will revisit the rear floorpan and take some new pics till then take care everyone.

Gutted mate about the Lappy, definatly put up before and after pics please of the repairs, I'm having to do the same on my polo's and it's nice to see work in progress as it makes the task seem a lot more daunting :)

Awesome work. And i wish i could get cars as cheap as you did. Love that Red polo coupe, it looked mint. That MK2 Golf was an unbelievable transformation in less than a week

Good work dude

loving how anal you are with small details.. thats how it should be :-D

Cheers guys its really good to have all the nice comments its a bit of a booster to be honest as I've struggled to get the time or the enthusiasm

of late. I'm at that "why the hell did I start this?" point in the project every project gets to this point were you've spent hours and hours of your life grinding, cutting and making good only to stand back and realise that it doesnt really look any different than when you started, you know it is and you know that the rust is gone and the repairs are going to be good for at least the next twenty years but somehow it feels like you haven't really got alot of bang for your buck and to top it all off you still have a shit load more to do!!! . All that said every project I've ever done has this stage whether its your own or whether its a customers car its the stage my business partner and me call "the wall" :-D the best part of this stage is that its all down hill from here. The good news is that changing my job (god i miss my old one) has meant that I have been able to spend soooooo much more time on getting the repairs just the way I want them and I'm really happy with how they've turned out. I said to myself that I wanted all the repairs on this car to last way, way into the future because I believe that cars like these will be the next Beetles of the vag scene.

I'm sorry for the lack of pics at the mo as I'm still sorting through the buggered files from are old laptop but I've managed to get alot of the repair work done so there will be a picture explosion on its way soon.

Cheers guys its really good to have all the nice comments its a bit of a booster to be honest as I've struggled to get the time or the enthusiasm

of late. I'm at that "why the hell did I start this?" point in the project every project gets to this point were you've spent hours and hours of your life grinding, cutting and making good only to stand back and realise that it doesnt really look any different than when you started, you know it is and you know that the rust is gone and the repairs are going to be good for at least the next twenty years but somehow it feels like you haven't really got alot of bang for your buck and to top it all off you still have a shit load more to do!!! .

Tell me about it... after all the effort/time that I have put into mine I sill look at it and think it doesn't look any different to how it was before!! :)

I've made a massive move forward today so its starting to feel good again :biggrin: cant wait to get this floorpan finally finished.

Well, where do I start? Firstly I owe an apology to all that were following the build on this car and for the lack of any updates for what seems to be an age. So sorry guys, I hope you have all had fun with your own cars since I last posted on here. I hope you all have the same Polo's you had back in 2012 and that none have gone to the big scrapyard in the sky.

Right my polo, well your be glad to know I still have it and no its not been scrapped or broken for parts but is it finished? Hell no!. Sooooooo were am I at with it? well that's a good question, if I remember rightly I left you all looking at boring rusty bits so I'm afraid that's were I'm going to have to start.

I will warn you now this is going to get picture heavy and I'm going to let the pics do the talking as this will allow me to try and catch you guys up to were I'm at now. Due to a hole load of changes to my work commitments the need for the car to be my penny pinching daily had changed so I decided to throw a lot more time at the car, don't get me wrong this isn't going to be some trailer queen and it will be driven in all weathers but that just meant I had a bigger challenge on my hands, how to make it last.

Well I will start with were I left off, the floor. As I mentioned before the floor was fairly solid but due to age and the fact its been mistreated for nearly a decade means if has issues. My aim as I think I've mentioned before was to make this car last at the very least another 20 years so grinding, patching or filling just wasn't going to cut it and now I could spend a bit more time on the car, I could get a bit more obsessed lol.

After the the repair work around the fuel tank neck I turned my attention to the rear floorpan and the extended over hang that's plonked on the back to make this a Derby. At first glace it wasn't to bad with only surface rust.

To be honest the worse part was the flap that's left when they join the boot floor extension on, the seam here was poorly stone chipped/sealed from the factory and although it didn't look that bad It swallowed about 12 hours metal work to get every last sign of corrosion out. This is how innocent it looked before I started.

Right my mission with all rust issues is the same no matter how hard to get to!

STEP ONE. Work the area affected by carefully grinding/polishing back to remove all pitting or any dark black pin heads left in the steal. I do this using mainly air powered grinders/cutters or pencil grinders and by using sanding disc's then scotch brite pads. In extreme cases I use heat to burn the moister out of the metal.

STEP TWO. If this makes the steal to thin and soft then its time to cut out and replace with new. I will always try to make this a last resort as every weld you put in a car is a future rust trap if not treatable from both sides (not just the one you can see)

STEP THREE. If its a hole already then there is no choice back to step two but again I will make every last effort to seal every newly applied surface.

So with this in mind I started the long long road to total rust removal this included cleaning the floor by hand with GT85 and cut down paint brushes then going over it again and again with thinners then using heavy grade green scotch brite and thinners (I used a lot of thinners lol)

Rear exhaust mount

N,S,R Jacking point

Where the inner rear wheel arch meets the floorpan

All these shots are at various stages of repair but you get the idea.

Under the rear seat/above the tank

Inner rear wheel arches

After a good clean and key up

As each area was worked I sealed the bear metal with acid etch primer and then sealed with MS Polymer sealer this would insure that I had the best chance of beating the rot for good.

Once larger areas were complete such as the rear offside inner wheel arch I could spray on the stone chip like so.

Under the rear seats/above the tank.

The rear floor started to look so much healthier, In these two pics you get to see the three stages of sealing. The light grey acid etch primer, the black MS Polymer sealer and then the darker grey of the stone chip.

Another point here is I didn't want to lose originality and I wanted every repair I made to look stock to do this I dipped a cut down paint brush in water and ran it over the MS and the stone chip to give it a factory look.

The next step was the sills and the front jacking points but I'll have to leave that till the next update as I've got to sort the pictures out.

As always thanks for reading and I hope it hasn't been to boring. Again sorry for my absence and I will return shortly.

Edited 16 January, 201511 yr by dirtydubs

Outstanding!! Thank you for coming back, especially with great pics and details of how you carry out the repairs. Educational and entertaining!

Thanks for the thread revival! This is great information for me as I'm currently doing a restoration on my '89 saloon. Keep up the good work, I'll be watching with interest.

Cheers guys thanks for the nice comments,

I will try to explain what I do in "layman's terms" so that people get what I'm going on about lol. I wanted to prove to people that these cars can be, should be and need to be saved and although a lot of this car looked way to far gone I wanted to show that it can be done if you have the time and space to do it. Proper restoration is not for the elite it can be learnt by anyone and as long as you take your time and are prepared to push yourself at times, anyone can build a timeless project. I would never expect everyone to go to lengths that I have but all I hope is that by explaining what I'm doing along the way helps others.

Looks really good, I've just done something similar on mine (there's a project thread on here).

Have you had any problems with paint reactions? I was actually really surprised when doing mine, it all went really smoothly. I used UPOL Gravitex and epoxy primer, so it's pretty similar to yours.

Looking forward to more progress :)

Looks really good, I've just done something similar on mine (there's a project thread on here).

Have you had any problems with paint reactions? I was actually really surprised when doing mine, it all went really smoothly. I used UPOL Gravitex and epoxy primer, so it's pretty similar to yours.

Looking forward to more progress :)

Thanks chap. The same here everything went very well but its all in the prep and quality of materials. I learnt years ago that if you buy unbranded stuff off the net you end up ripping it all back off again. I used soudal anti gravel as my spray on stone chip I find its well priced and although its not as easy to use as 3M stuff, if you put in the prep time the finish can be just as good and last as long. My primer is UPOL Acid etch and my MS Polymer sealer is Trade supplies one of the best sealers on the mark imo its bomb proof and lasts for years, sooooo much better than PU dry's quicker with no shrinkage. As for paint well you'll have to wait and see

Right onwards and upwards, I will try not to slouch on this thread so I will just get on with it. The next port of call was the front jacking points these had to be in tip top condition not only for the future MOT inspections but also for my use as I would be making regular service inspections once the vehicle had been recommissioned.

This is how they looked to start with, Driver side.

Passenger side.

On closer inspection.

Passenger side.

I started with the drivers side by grinding back the surface then cutting out the worse affected area to see if the damage had spread to the floor.

Which of course it had .

Que the fingers again lol.

After a quick chop and seal.

looking a bit more healthy already. Time for a bit of welding.

Now to prime and seal it.

Now some stone chip.

Now time to sort out the jacking point. I started buy dropping in a triangular piece but before welding it in I primed and stone chipped on the inside (the bit you wont see when its welded in). Its worth noting here that you don't want to use the MS Polymer here as the heat of the weld will lift it off.

Welded in.

Now a fill in piece was needed so I knocked this up.

I've drilled some weld holes down the edge so I can weld it in place like the original. It was primed and sealed like the last piece before butt welding in.

Then Acid etch straight away.

Then some MS on all the seams to fill any gaps.

And finally a very, very thick coat of stone chip....well about four coats lol.

As these areas are right in the firing line I thought I would also use a cavity pipe and fill the inner areas up as well (sorry about the quality of the pictures as my camera really struggled to focus on the areas inside the jacking point.

I didn't think of taking a picture of my home made cavity pipe but its basically the same as the Waxoil pipe you get with your cavity/stone chip gun but bigger internal diameter so the thicker stone chip fluid can get through. Mines a section of fuel injector hose about 4 inch long, 7mm ID with a M8 bolt wedged in the end and four 2.5/3mm ish holes drilled in the end so it sprays out a full 360 degrees. I need to build a new one as I forgot to clean it out afterwards so if anyone wants to know what it look like just let me know and I'll take pics when I build it.

Its really really important to seal up every surface even the ones you cant see or get to and even if it looks impossible because if there is any bare metal anywhere it will corrode and fast so you will be doing it again and soon.

Till the next time thanks for your time and patience.

great work, some nice invisible repairs there! :)

I love that you are posting pics of each job in it's deconstructed form - how you are fabricating replacement pieces and the reconstruction process in full. Brilliant and a great read.

If possible, please could you list where you buy your materials and perhaps some photos of the tools used. Many thanks indeed!!

Very nice work.

great work, some nice invisible repairs there! :)

Very nice work.

Cheers guys, I'm trying my best to make every repair look as stock as possible.