So thought id start up a build thread after being inspired by a few others on here... since I was about 15 I knew what car I wanted for my first car, a mercato blue 3 door VW Polo 6n2 with electric windows and that all important sunroof I knew trying to find a decent example with all the specifications I was after was going to be a challenge but I was in no rush still being 15... after about a year of on and off searching and saving finally something caught my eye, this little 1.4 mpi with everything I was after, so a quick trip up to Milton keys and brought my new baby home

Edited 26 April, 201511 yr by JoshyDubs

Sounds like the beginning of something interesting! Looking forward to see what's next.

With the car home I couldnt wait to get started on the repairs and ofcorse mods that were to come first things on my list were recaros, TT pedals, black headliner and retrim pillers, smoothed boot and repair and smooth front bumper, basically copying what everyone else does to there polo's :,D

Over the next few months I started to get a bit more creative, adding in my own little inventions and ideas, here are some of them... even made a start on making the engine bay look a bit better basically getting it ready for the road as my driving test date loomed up...

So after almost a year of just messing around with the polo outside the front of my house I finally got my licence and saved enough for the dreaded insurance... even found some uber rare heated colour concepts :) ... This was great, it was just after the Christmas period and some of my friends had just got on the road aswell, so we decided to start going to cruises and shows all over, any excuse to drive the cars! you know what it's like at 17 :') here are some pics of how the polo looked back then, little did I know what was to come...

23rd April 2014 was the day my heart broke, heard shouts from outside the garage where I work, so ran out to find my car in flames... In a blur with my head spinning I remembered I always kept a fire extinguisher in the car (though I never intended on having to use it) I tried opening the bonnet but the latch/cable had melted, the only option was trying to spray it through the grill or under the car but as the fire got bigger it became to dangerous and I was dragged away from my burning motor, luckily someone had already called the fire brigade and a truck pulled up minutes later and put the fire out before it reached the fuel line... but this was the damage that had been done...

So unlucky :(

Do you know what caused it? Hopefully your insurance will cover it.

this happened a year ago mate I'm just putting up a build thread now, don't worry the car lived on :)

So after the car had finished burning I thought about what to do with it, most people would have scrapped it but as I said I searched a year for this car and honestly couldn't see myself in anything else! id been working in the motor trade a year then and decided to put my skills to the test and attempt my first engine swap :) so one cheeky call to the AA later and the car was towed to my college, it was the end of april and id passed all my exams on my motor vehicle course so some of the teachers were happy for me to do it even though none of them thought I should, the head guy gave me a real hard time over the next few weeks because he didn't know me back then and thought I was just gonna piss about, but I soon earned his respect when he saw the progress that was being made, here are some pics of the engine coming out

Damn I'm liking how this thread is coming along, will definitely be following it.

The blue gear gaiter and handbrake, what was used to colour these?

And RIP that engine, what caused it?

cheers :) and there genuine leather colour concept ones mate they came with the seats I bought, and uncertain tbh but I think possibly an electrical fire, something to do with the fuse box that sits on the battery as that's where it started...

So once the engine was out and the car was stripped it was time to get a doner car, I wasn't keen on doing all this work to end up with the same gutless 60HP 1.4 8v so a more powerfull engine was a must! with my budget not very high and wanting to get back on the road as soon as possible I decided the best option was a 1.6 16v 125HP swap from a GTI, after a couple weeks of searching something popped up within budget, for a mere £750 I got this 87k silver GTI :) so off it went to college to get stripped down and swapped bit for bit into my little polo... we also upgraded the brakes and done a major service on the engine before it went in, the GTI even had smoothed tailgate, smoothed bonnet and a very unique vented wing which I've never seen on any polo before which later all got painted and put onto mine aswell

After a few weeks of hard work the car started taking shape fairly quickly, obviously I still had work to go to and some lessons at college to attend so I wasn't on it 24/7 but progress was fast :) it wasn't to long till will we had got to the stage where the engine was in, the loom was plugged up, and the car was ready to fire up, it was a late Wednesday and I wanted to go home smiling so I gave it a go but no joy.. it was that disappointing noise of cranking and cranking but no Broom! I came in a couple days later and was messing around with the wires an fuse box checking to see what was wrong... as I squeezed this bunch of wires I heard the fuel pump begin to buzz so thinking to myself "surely not" I gave it a go and it fired up straight away! you should've heard it without an exhaust it shook the entire workshop

After that It was full steam ahead! got the dash back in, front end on, and exhaust up in one day and drove home a happy guy, felt weird being back behind the wheel, the car felt different... it felt sharper, more aggressive, more responsive, more like a GTI got it all the way home repping my silver panels from the doner car getting all sorts of looks from people and planned on driving it to work the next morning but it wouldn't have it :/ just started cranking and cranking like before... I thought about it all day and that afternoon decided to squeeze and giggle the fuse box again an what do you know it started up? I soon got into the habbit of it cutting out on me, then starting it by giggling the fuse box :') but no matter how hard I looked there were no loose or kinked wires to suggest why it was doing this, someone told me to take the fuses out 1 by 1 which I thought was pointless seeing as though id tested them with a circuit tester 100 times but I did it anyway and I couldn't believe what I was seeing, the fuse had blown but in such a way that a connection could ark across causing it to be live when checking with a tester but every now and then loose the ark causing the car to cut out in disbelief that all my problems were because of one stupid fuse I changed it and since then I've never had a wiring issue again...

P.S I also have a separate thread for the GTI conversion for anyone who needs to know anything

Woop woop its back on the roadddd

Sorry for the lack of posts for the last few weeks just been so busy... just got back from a wicked weekend at modified nationals! defiantly will be going back next year :) anyway where was I

Oh yeah so the car was back on the road!! believe it was about june that it was back so still had a bit of summer left to enjoy :p went to see lots of shows all over just wanted to drive the car to make the most out of all my hard work, my love for the car defiantly grew more, theres something so satisfactory about driving something you've built it's like a reflection of what you can achieve when you put your mind to it, especially when driving it past the kids standing at the bus stop who told you to give up and just scrap it after it caught light... so middle figure up to them

Anyway after knocking around with the GTI polo for a while it was time to do something about the silver panels which stood out like a sour thumb so I booked it in for some fresh paint and was delighted with the results, here are some pics of it fresh out the body shop: debaged GTI boot, vented wing and de-notched bonnet were all sprayed mercato blue, had big plans for the winter ahead which ill show in my next post :)

Edited 26 May, 201511 yr by JoshyDubs

Old engine set on fire because of the fuse box. New engine wouldn't start because of the fuse box. Illiminati confirmed.

Nice to see it's all working and one colour now. How long before you want more power?

yeah exactly... and cheers bud, as I said before though these are all pictures from last year and I'm writing in the past tense, big power is happening right now but I'm trying to create a build thread from the start of where I bought the car up to where I am at the moment if that makes sense?

So the winter was coming and I had planed a little holiday for just before Christmas to drive up to north wales to see a good mate of mine who I hadn't seen for a while ... this was about 3 months away as it was the end of september and I remember him telling me how ill love the driving roads up there with the more powerfull polo :) I was also planning track days for the next summer aswell so after a little think I decided the winter plan for the polo was to improve the brakes and handling!! especially if I wanted to stand a chance of competing in track days... I aimed for the trip to wales to be my sort of tester of what the car can do, to see what improvements my modifications had made and what more tweaks need to be done for the coming track days after that.

my first idea/project was a rear anti-roll bar conversion... I had seen a couple done before but didn't really get any more knowledge from them on exactly what to do/buy... after some research decided on using a mk2 golf rear anti-roll bar, I chose this as it was similar length to the polo rear beam, I found a second hand H&R one soon later which looked good, it came with some fitting brackets that were of some use but most of it I had to make... I've listed some pictures of the RARB conversion below but if you want to see the details I've done a separate build thread on my content :)

Another good point for buying the GTI doner car is that I got all the GTI brakes with it aswell, also GTI's have a 21mm front anti-roll bar and a integrated rear anti roll bar in the rear beam which all helped, so as I had the Front GTI hubs and brakes, after a bit of research I found a common conversion is a 280mm G60 front brake setup which only requires the carriers and discs to do, so I found a full set powder coated in BBS Gold and even got some blue HEL braided brake lines to go with them! I decided green stuff pads and drilled/grooved disc would be on order once id got the use out of my old discs an pads... here are some more pics of the rear anti-roll bar conversion which I missed out and the bigger brakes :)

Next up were some strut braces! could've gone for the cheap shiny ones, but since I was actually going for function over looks I went for a well known brand :) found these 2 upper and lower OMP braces just needed a touch up of paint and they were on, looked good too...

Last thing on my list before my trip to wales was an exhaust system, couldn't afford to take it to powerflow or miltek or anything like that so just made my own... more satisfying that way anyway and you can make any changes to tone yourself along the way :) got a 4-2-1 manifold, personal built decat section using a 2" flexi pipe, sportex centre straight pipe and a DTM twin outlet back box... Hopefully I can upload videos here because it sounded the absolute nuts! popped and banged when I wanted it to aswell

Wicked build mate! So glad it lived on! I've got a 1.4 16v 100bhp as my first car in the same colour and I'm 15:) Inspiring man

Edited 23 June, 201511 yr by danielbloor

Loving that set up, what did you do? By a load of ally/mild steel pieces and bends and weld em together?

cheers guys :) and apertures you talking about the exhaust or the rear anti-roll bar?

Right where was I with the build thread! so I'd pretty much finished with the mods before the trip to wales, had some trouble fitting the rear braided brake hose though as the connections weren't right :( after emailing with the company all they told me was that there made by HEL and all they can do is offer a refund... great help they were... so the other option was just to make them fit! I found that to fit them id need a special 12mm bore M10X1 concave female end banjo adapter, trouble is I couldn't find the one i needed anywhere :/ but i'm not one to give up easily so i started emailing and calling various companies, most of them were pretty useless but a company called Rally nuts helped go that extra mile :) we found the banjo adapters needed were sold by a firm out in Germany who don't even deal with public! so rally nuts had to set up all sorts of accounts, hand out references and try to get round the language barrier to be able to get these adapters for me, I was extremely impressed with the effort made although I think mainly they were so keen to help as they also wanted to have these adapters as a listing on there website, anyway after months of headache I finally got the adapters I needed to fit my rear braided brake lines! not giving up and perusing something till the end can go a long way, you feel like you've won a battle :) here's some pics of the adapters, these will be needed if you ever want to fit rear braided brake hoses on a rear disc setup 6n2, here's a link to the listing - http://www.rallynuts.com/fuel-hose-adaptors/atec-aluminium-banjo-with-m10x1-female-outlet.html