Hi all,

I present you my project that is still in progress, but I hope you will find interesting enough.

The car is quite custom - from the engine to the suspension.

This is the second body - we swapped all the goodies couple of years ago, because my original body was rusty.

The car started out as a 1993 Polo Fox with 1100 cc engine and 45 bhp, 5 speed manual.

It had electric windows and a sunroof , both installed as an extra somewhere in Italy.

The glass roof was broken when I bought it, after I knew it was not OEM fitment I had no chance finding a replacement , so I put an aluminium 1.5mm thick sheet with rivets covered in carbon foil.

The idea of that car was to be a track day fun car, that is why I started out with the lightest possible VW.

Plus my custom builder happen to have the same Polo Fox for which he already had built a lot of custom things including the Frankenstein engine.

The engine is 1.6 ABU engine block from Golf mk.3 rated 75 bhp, the head is 1.4-16v DOHC AFH from 6N Polo rated 100 bhp. As far as we know - noone ever did and is doing such Frankenstein, but as you will see - I own it and it works like a charm.

The compression ratio my builder never actually measured, which is a miss , but after calculations it is arround 11.5:1.

Because neither I nor my custom builder is good with electrics, the original plan was to go with a set of Honda CBR 900 RR carburators, igniter block and vacuum distributor from mk.2 Golf carburated models.

My builder produced a custom intake adapter plate for the carbs with the correct lenght of travel to the intake valves, a custom and again calculated on a specialized software 4-2-1 exhaust manifold from stainless steel , the whole exhaust he had already produced on his car again precalculated fot this engine from stainless steel.

We dynoed the car and it put a 100 whp and 130 bhp on open carbs and on a mustang dyno-you will see the graph later.

My builder later build an airbox for those carbs, which is currently on my car. We had to modify the accelerator pedal in order to have the correct travel to fit the short travel of the carbs.

At some point I decided I want to run on LPG, but in order not to kill the carbs I needed to feed the LPG after the the carbs, not like a normal carb application before them.

So I upgraded to Mega Squirt. I started out with version 1 extra and it was operating the spark advance when I was running on gas, on LPG it ran both the LPG nozzles and spark advance.

I used the version 1 extra only for a few days, cause it was really on my nervs with some stupid bugs that couldn't be cured. For example the spark advance while starting the engine was set to a certain number , but the Mega 1 did all kinds of degrees and this was killing my starter - couldn't rotate the engine because it was to compressed.

So quickly I upgraded to Mega Squirt 2 which is some 15 years more modern electrics and you can really tell it by just listening how the engine works.

With Mega 1 we tried to finish our street tune to a mustang dyno, but it all went wrong and I called it a day. We had a figure of 106 whp on LPG few times before we quit.

Now the car is using the Mega 2 for only a 3 days now , we tuned on the road and the car runs like never before but will change the whole intake manifold again because I have problem with a bouncy idle and I really prefer something more reliable since the car will not go to a track , I plan to use it daily.

The plan is to install the stock AFH intake manifold , I will use BMW M50 throttle body ( just happen to have such and plan to use it). The idea is to have a more normal car for daily driving.

The car has a custom frame and A-shaped control arms with all kinds of adjustings - my custom builder had this done for his car a long time ago. The car is on 4 wheel disk brakes - 256mm vented discs in front, 235mm I think on the back. Custom hand brake so I can use the two hand brake ropes that come inside.

The engine has an additional engine mount in front to the frame made out of a Ford Transit rubber bushing for lower control arm.

Inside the car I use deep Recaro seats from anniversary mk.3 Golf eddition - they also needed custom work to fit. I have VDO gauges from Audi 90 coupe reading oil temp, oil pressure and volt meter.

My second and current body is an GT one, was originally 3F engine. It is the same colour as the first one, but has no rust. I threw away the proportion brake valve on the GT for the rear brakes, because I use bigger master cylinder and I just connect front and back lines to there. I had to get rid of the steering damper of the GT mounted on the rack because it was interfeering with the steering.

The car is on coil overs, the front ones are Skunk 2 for Honda Civic and have Koni shocks for some old Renault 18 I think - my buider bought them cheap from an old warehouse brand new and made them work. The back ones are from BMW I think. The ride is really really harsh, so for future I will look at something more streetable.

I run 195/50-15 tyres on an Audi A3 5x100 Dial wheels 6J wide - these are very light. I plan on polishing them at some point. Just recently we installed a gearbox from G40 with longer gear ratios, because I was sick of constantly changing gears. This one is almost normal - it does 110km/h on 3000 revs and 5th gear.

I probably forget lots of things, since this car took us a long time to build, hope you find it interesting.

Now the fun part - pictures:

I realize I do not have good pictures, these are all old - please excuse the dirty interior and engine bay, that car is still a working project

Here is the first dyno graph:

Engine bay with Mega 1 extra, before LPG intall:

Picture of the 5x100 wheels:

Picture of a dirty interior.Interesting is that the new shell has a black roof lining and a metal sunroof(this time original):

I have more pictures of the whole car on this link, where you can see the production of the custom exhaust manifold and others:

http://s66.photobucket.com/user/ivogiev/library/VW%20Polo%20Mk2F

I have few track day sessions on the original carb-igniter-coil set-up here( the tyres were touching like a pita, but who cares? :)) :

https://www.youtube.com/user/ivogiev/videos

You will find some other things there, but you will figure it out.

If anybody has interest in the airbox and carbs + custom intake flange for them, let me know because pretty soon I will not need them.

Sorry for the long post, but I should have started this thread a long time ago - had no chance to type it short after so many things to say.

Edited 17 January, 201511 yr by ivogiev

Will post some up to date pictures of the whole subframe infront and the engine bay,plus a dyno video from last week.

Frame:

Engine bay:

Here is a video of a dyno run from last week , when the car was running Mega 1 extra and we quit the session in order to upgrade to Mega 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFSO-aYx5DI

That's awesome, looks like you've done well with all the modifications.

Did you have any problems putting the 16v head on the ABU?

Thanks , Fungus.

The car is far from nice to be honest :)

I guess we took it a bit too far with modifications, but will try to work issues out in time.

The engine was built by my builder, he used to drive it in his Polo for an year, before I also bought a Polo and we swapped everything to my new toy.

The reason was he again wanted to do build something that was never built before. He is an old Alfa Romeo guy and has 1.7-16valve boxer with horisontal carbs which he planned on putting behind driver seat.

So he sold me what he had already made for his car so he can start clean.He never did it, he still uses his Polo with mildly modified ABU and is about to throw away his car soon.

The engine as far as I know was a challenge mostly for the modification of the water pump which on ABU was a belt tensioner also. So he made a custom blocking plate and installed a fixxed water pump. Now the engine has a belt tensioner from Ford or Peugeot ( not sure myself ). The oil and water passages had to be modified also for the head to work with the block.

It turned out very nice. For such light car it is perfect.