I've had my '90 Polo for just over a year now and i'm finally giving it all the work it needs. I ran it as a daily up until last year with a fairly tuned 1400cc and a short-ratio 5 speed, but it was never as nice as a knew it could be. I'm at uni now, so all of my time back at home is spent on the Polo! I sold the engine and gearbox to a mate of mine the day before i left for uni, as I've got another one to build up. Most of the pics are from my phone so they're not great.

So anyway, i got home on the 19th of December and set to work (almost) straight away. The front panel was a mess from my mate trying to top the car when the alternator died, as the towing eye ripped out and ruined the panel (it was rusty anyway so there were no hard feelings). I heard rumors that Father Christmas was bringing me a new front-panel from VW Heritage, i i got the old one off fairly quickly;

The new panel was offered up and it actually fit really well

No pics of the welding yet but i was really pleased with how it came out.

The next week was spent clearing out an old unit on my friends farm, which is where the car now lives. It actually made for a pretty nice workshop, although it was a tad cold!

Once the car was in the 'workshop', i began stripping the suspension;

As well as getting the inner arches stripped

Meanwhile, a mate of mine took care of the only rust on the car, which was at the end of the passenger sill/inner wheelarch

We decided to leave a lip sticking out to roll over with a hammer, to match the rest of the arch panel.

After the edge was rolled, i gave it a few coats of epoxy primer;

All 4 arches were eventually stripped and prepped, and then sprayed with 2 coats of UPOL Gravitex (Excellent stuff)

I also did the boot floor later on (after realising i had just enough time) but i don't have any pictures of that.

When the Gravitex was cured, i put on 3 coats of Tornado Red (ignore the rattle can in the photo, would've taken an eternity to do it with those things)

I love the finish left by the Gravitex

I had also been prepping all the suspension parts, which were dropped off at a local bodyshop for Etch primer and Gloss Black

The parts came out absolutely great, and were swiftly assembled, bushed and installed;

The rear beam was built up with Mk2 Golf GTI stub axles, discs and wheel bearings ready for the calipers when i can afford them

TCA's came out especially nice;

My new (to me) VW2 calipers were rebuilt and painted, ready to go on the front along with vented discs and HEL braided lines;

And finally here's a picture of everything bolted up!

That's it for now! I'm back at uni now so progress will halt for a little while. Sorry again for the quality and quantity of photos; by the time the workshop was ready for the car, i had 6 days to do all the work! All 6 days at the workshop were about 16 hours long. All i can say is thank god for good mates a local specialists.

Hope you enjoyed the read.

Edited 12 January, 201511 yr by mk2coupe

With the piddly 239mm brakes up front, your front and rear brakes are now going to be of a very similar size. Are you fitting a bias valve to the rear brakes? If not you may find the back twitchy under hard braking

With the piddly 239mm brakes up front, your front and rear brakes are now going to be of a very similar size. Are you fitting a bias valve to the rear brakes? If not you may find the back twitchy under hard braking

Bias valve will be going in the engine bay, I'll have plenty of room after relocating the washer bottle and removing the expansion tank.

Good stuff. did you not consider the 256mm front brake upgrade? Have you changed the master cylinder?

Good stuff. did you not consider the 256mm front brake upgrade? Have you changed the master cylinder?

If I find some 14's I like I'll probably go for 256mm's, but to be honest the 239mm's are fine for now. I've never had a problem locking all 4 wheels up, and that's with 175 wide Yokohamas.

The car already has a mk2 GTI master cylinder

Lovely work!

Fine work chap, were did you get the front panel from and what was the fit like it looks great.

Oh and what suspension kit are you running?

Cheers dude keep up the good work.

Lovely work!

Thanks :)

Fine work chap, were did you get the front panel from and what was the fit like it looks great.

Oh and what suspension kit are you running?

Cheers dude keep up the good work.

Thanks mate :) The panel is from VW Heritige and was a really good fit. I used m8 bolts to attach through the bumper mounts, so it was easy to adjust all the gaps before welding.

The suspension is an Apex kit that came with the car (Unused). The springs cleaned up fairly well and the rear shocks were painted gloss black.

cheers mate thank for that.

just been on there website and I cant find it lol could you post a link for me? cheers in advance

just been on there website and I cant find it lol could you post a link for me? cheers in advance

The front panel isn't listed, find Andy on here (in the Heritite section) and PM him. He'll get it sorted.

Haha ok thats cool as Andy's one of my best mates.

looking forward to seeing this fully built up mate

Been in touch with Andy and its all sorted thanks for the heads up

Little update!

So the car is in Essex and I'm in Plymouth until June. Still though, i can do a few bits and bobs, right?

I've got the Cylinder head for the new engine down here to play with. I've just got it back from having a 1.5mm skim and recut valve seats, so i started prepping it up for paint;

Someone had painted it red (very badly, but i bet the power gains were phenomenal) but it was pretty well stuck on there and i didn't want to blast the head or do anything too messy (i don't want loads of old paint/aluminium/sand inside the head). So, the whole lot was thoroughly flatted with p240 and masked up;

This also got smoothed off;

And then it was time for Etch-primer in the booth;

And then in the oven to bake on for an hour. It's safe to say the primer has adhered well after this! looks pretty decent too.

Here's the Distributor flange/cam bearing after smoothing

So that's it for now as i'm waiting for my Scotchbrite pads and VHT paint to arrive. The engine and box (and most of the things under the bonnet) are going dark grey to match the centres of my wheels, should look cool in a red bay.

Oh, and i started cleaning up the valves rear for a quick lap-in when the head is done.

That's it for now. Hopefully the supplies will arrive early next week and i can get the head built. I know it's boring stuff but it's all i can get away with at Uni! Stripping down the cylinder head in my flat was interesting...

Time for an update! Still nothing too exciting as i don't get too much time with the car itself.

So, after the head was primer'd (which turned out awesome, stuck really well and cured nicely) i had a change of plans. At first i was just going to lap the valves in and be done with it, but the seats turned out to be pretty bad and didn't seal properly. So, the head was sent back to the engineers where the seats were re-cut (3-angle) and the valves re-ground and lapped in. This all looked very pretty indeed;

I decided I would build the head before painting it, to avoid and damage to fresh paint.

It went together really easily, thanks to my new spring compressors. The head was then masked and the primer keyed with scotchbrite

The paint I have chosen for basically all the engine parts, and a load of other stuff in the bay, is this stuff;

It's not cheap (for a rattle can) at about £16, but there's a good reason i chose it- I love the combination of dark grey and red on this car, hence the colour of the Revolutions (see the fist few pics). The wheels were painted very recently, so I wanted some VHT paint to match.

I probably could've used regular aerosol but i didn't want to take the chance given the amount of prep-work gone into the head.

So anyway, the paint went on really nicely thanks to a small oven in the Uni's paint workshop, which the head fits in. So before painting it, it sat for 45 minutes on low-temp to thouroughly warm it through. I've always found this makes a huge difference when painting.

The head was then put back in the oven to cure for an hour at 100 degrees, as per the instructions on the paint can.

So that's the cylinder head finished. I'll get a decent picture of it completely de-masked and fitted with all its new fixings.

The head was done in Plymouth (at uni), but for the last few weeks I've been back at home (where the car is). I've managed to get a few bits done on it, i'll update when the pictures have uploaded.

Thanks for looking,

Fungus

Great project fair play to you.

So for the last few weeks I've been back home fiddling with the car. The underside is all done (see the previous posts) so now i'm working on the interior and engine bay. Paint will be last.

Here's a recent shot of the rear inner arch, all the paint is now cured properly and was given a polish and wax

Anyway, back to the new progress. I started with the engine bay.

I finally made my mind up and decided the engine bay divider-panel was coming out. I wanted to remove it in the neatest way possible, so that the panel would be complete when removed. There was no real reason for this other than i wanted to see if i could do it (most people chop it up with a grinder to get it out.)

I started off by sanding all the edges with 180 grit to expose the spot welds

Will all the spotwelds unearthed it was time to get drilling. I used a Wurth spot weld drill-bit, which is probably one of the best tools I've bought recently.

The welds at the back of the suspension turrets were only accessible with a 90-degree drill

It slowly started to come apart, with the help of gentle chiseling where it was stuck together with seam sealer

Nearly there!

Out

As planned it came out in one piece, with no major damaged. I can now run Bike carbs of Webers and a bigger master cylinder without the usual clearance issues.

Edited 16 April, 201511 yr by Fungus

Last update for now;

With some decent progress made on the engine bay, i decided to try some mods that were more fun and less aggro (in my opinion)

I've never really liked the Gauge cluster in the car, even though it was the 'S' version with a Tachometer. I started looking for some gauges that would suit the 80's look i'm going for and settled on Porsche 924. There was a Tachometer going cheap on ebay, so it was time to commit!

Here's the Gauge, i think it looks awesome

I removed the original cluster and surround and offered it up. At first i wanted to modify the gauge to be vertical-drop, but i think i'll keep it how it is.

I drew up a mounting panel on SolidWorks and printed it out onto card. It wasnt the neatest of cutting-out but all the dimensions seemed good

I'm using the mounting point for the old cluster, which should be plenty strong enough

The surround panel needed some trimming as the new panel sits further forward than the cluster, due the the Porsche gauges being quite deep.

I cut it on my bandsaw, it was pretty neat but not perfect. The biggest issue was the sharp corner/change in direction where the new cut met the original curve

So this was blended in using a dremel (with a cutting disc) and then the entire rear edge wet-sanded

After all this the surround fits perfectly, with a nice even gap against the new gauge panel. The gauges are actually bigger than the opening in the surround, but due to the viewing angle when in the drivers seat this isn't really noticeable

This pic shows the surround panel cutting off the top of the gauge, but again, it's not really noticeable when seated.

That's it for now. I'm hoping to get the gauge panel cut on Monday (laser cut from texture black ABS sheet). When i have bought a matching speedometer, i'll be modifying both gauges to have flat-faces instead of standard conical ones. Pics soon.

Thanks for reading,

Fungus

nice work

can i ask where you got the head done? any plans to rebuild the bottom end?

Thanks mate.

Head was done by Paul Inch in Plymouth, i highly recommend him. I have all the parts needed to rebuild the bottom end, i just need to clean and paint the block :)

is it apart yet mate , be intrested to talk to you about the oil pump chain tension if you get a min

The AEE? Yeah it's all in bits mate

Update time.

I managed to source a 924 Speedometer that matches the Tach, I think it's a 1985 as the font is different to others I've seen.

I wanted to convert the gauges to flat-faces rather than the standard, so I laser cut some 3mm clear acrylic (96mm diameter if you're curious for some obscure reason).

After that it was just a case of careful prising up the bezel, removing the old face and putting in the new one. After that the bezels were replaced and it was all done.

Bezels were scotchbrite'd, etch primed and painted matte black.

I had completely overlooked the trip-meter reset pin/peg on the speedometer, so I had to drill a hole for it. It was a nice clean job using the Uni's high speed PCB drills.

Ready for the bezel:

I don't have any pics of the bezel-installing but it was just a case of making sure the paint had hardened and slowly bending over the edge with a piece of steel rod. The whole process was the same for the Tach minus the hole-drilling.

My previous post shows the card template I was using to mount the Tach in the car. This was actually drawn on Solidworks and printed (and cut out) so I already had the part drawn up. So, while I was laser cutting the gauge faces, I also cut the mounting panel out of some 3mm Textured ABS.

As you can see I also cut out a Head unit blank with three 52mm gauge holes, more on that later.

So here's the Tach mounted

And with the Speedometer in too (awful pic, lighting in my room is terrible)

Overall I'm pretty pleased with this mod, it doesn't look too out of place (80's, VDO) but, in my opinion, is miles better than the standard cluster.

That's it for now!

Thanks,

Fungus

Just a little update;

I've decided to keep an Italvolanti steering wheel from my collection, so it'll be going on the Polo.

It's dated 16/03/1987 and was showing some very faint signs of age. The leather was dry and the colour had faded slightly.

I had a quick look on eBay for some conditioner/restorer and found this;

At £4.99 delivered I thought it was worth a shot. Turns out it's pretty good! Here are some before-and-afters;

I'm really pleased with how it came out. I'm still not completely sure it'll suit the car but it's worth a go.

I'm home in a few weeks so I'll be able to post some big updates of the being being done on the car. For now, I'm making an inlet manifold so at least there's something interesting to write about in the meantime. More on the shortly.

Fungus

very cool!