Model: 1993 Polo Coupe Genesis

Engine: (WAS) AAV with an ABD Head (032Q Cam) on CBR600 F3 Carbs (Currently collecting parts to build a hybrid between a GK,HK and 2F GT lump, to run on Mikuni RS38 carbs)

Suspension: GAZ Insert Shock Absorbers on the front, AP 60/50 Spring kit, H&R dampers on the back (for now)

Brakes: VW11 Calipers, Braided Lines, new pipes front to back, Mintex M1144 Pads

Wheels and Tyres: RG Erregi 14X6J ET33 wheels on Rotalla Setula RH01 tires in 185/50/14

Exterior Styling: Morette headlights and grille, Mattig DTM Cup Mirrors, Double stacked spoiler mod

Interior Styling: Recaro Monza LS-C driver's seat, Genesis for the rest of the interior, GReddy 60MM peak warn water temp gauge, VDO 5 bar oil pressure gauge, 300 ish mm unknown japan import steering wheel,
ICE and Security: Kenwood Z929 Head unit, 4" Alpine speakers in dash
 

After years of lurking I decided to get on here and make a build thread of my journey with an annoying, but fantastic alpine white pile of cack.

It all started a few years back when I needed to get a first car. A mate of my brother in law's had a MK2 breadvan at the time on P-slots, and immediately after seeing it in person one day, I caught the bug for Polos, and knew what I wanted as a first car.

So when the time came, I set about trying to find a "good one" (I had no idea what I was getting into lol) and a MK2F Polo Genesis Coupe popped up on ebay of all places. It was alpine white, a bit rusty, but it was something I could learn on how to wrench on cars and stuff.

A few messages back and forth with the seller, and a called in favour from my Dad's old workmate who now ran a recovery business later, and here it was!

A little bit crispier than expected when it came to rust, battery tray was bodged together with some correx board and tiger seal, but not bad looking at it with my completely untrained eyes at the time. It even still had the charcoal canister on there!

 

A few months passed, and I finally passed my test, but the problem was it was lowered at the time, so I had to call in said brother in law's friend who had the MK2 for help to change over the springs for standard ones, as I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. He arrived in an absolutely awesome lime green MK2 Arosa on Ronal Teddies! Anyways, long story short, we couldn't get the struts out, so he ended up calling his brother in aswell, and we managed to get the fronts done. It was quite hilarious seeing the polo sitting very high at the front but low at the back. The rears would be up to me to try sort out, as I wanted to give it a go anyways. Little did I know meeting these guys for the first time would lead me down the path of building this thing into something pretty cool! (More on that further on)

 

After I got the rears sorted with ALOT of learning as I went, it still sat low at the back, but I managed to get the thing insured. The MOT was due, the first MOT I'd ever take a car to. I had no idea what to expect so I took it to a local garage to see whats what. The MOT tester was not pleased with the way it sat to say the least lol. All the steering arms, lower control arms were shot, the ball joints were knackered and the bushes were all donezo. The shock absorbers were also completely gone on the back. I had to sort this thing out, pretty quick..

I had just learned about AutoDoc being a thing, so I hopped straight on and went to town! New control arms, steering arms ordered, discs and pads. Now that leaves the shock absorber situation.. I had a look on here for the first time ever, to see what it took to replace them, and stumbled upon the best lowering kits thread! There I learned about the H&R kit, so to make the insurance slightly happier (thats at least what I thought at the time lol), I opted for the 35mm H&R kit instead of the 60/40 kit.

A few weeks later and... everything arrived! I knew it was gonna be a big task for me to do this myself at that time, but it had to be done!

And so the work began! I took my time trying to remember how things went back together, and aligned the new steering arms with the old ones, and they went on with ease, in comparison to the old ones!



My old cat Diego really enjoyed the autodoc box


Somehow, some way I had done it, I managed to do what was once a daunting task, but now being more familiar with the quickest way to take the struts out (keeping the steering arms on the struts and unbolting them from the steering rack, instead of trying to get them off the struts), I thought it wasnt so bad!

A first test drive was in order, and all that hard work paid off! It drove fantastic!

 

Ordered a few service bits (and the wrong fuel filter lol, which would come back to bite me much later on) and gave it the first oil change. It was so great to have the Polo on the road finally and MOT'ed

 

Ordered some MIM 1300 wheels for it, went to get some new tires fitted and they looked great!

Now, fast forward a few months to that summer, I really enjoyed driving the thing
 

But, I wanted to dive even deeper. I knew it hadn't been looked after well engine wise, as I had to change a stuck thermostat before, and the coolant that came out was baby poo brown! So I set about doing lots of research on here again, and started gathering bits together to do the head gasket and just generally go through the engine and learn even more about how things work and go together. I even got a steal on a G40 rocker cover, so I was definitely gonna paint that up and put it on.

Now... very shortly after, I had discovered the art of bike carb conversions, so I started doing even more research. How they work, how to convert a Polo to bike carbs, how to set them up, what parts I need etc.. I was HOOKED on the idea of it being on bike carbs, and making that fantastic intake noise! I wanted it all!

After a bit of looking on marketplace, I found a set of CBR600 F3 carbs for pretty cheap, the guy had them on a AFH powered MK2F Breadvan, so I boshed him an offer over, and before I knew it, these showed up.

 

Edited 5 November, 20241 yr by Yak

And so I set about starting all the work to give the Polo a bit of a refresh. Took the head off for the first time, did the timing belt, water pump, replaced the extremely crusty radiator. I had also found a ABD 1.4 head from a Golf/Vento with the 032Q cam that had just had a fresh skim and rebuild, so might aswell throw it on there anyways, as I had learned from here that the 032Q cam is a pretty decent oem contender for bike carbs.




After doing the research on bike carbs, and failing to get the thing running on the SPI due to forgetting to tighten down the ground that bolts to the head (something I didn't know was the cause at the time lol), I pulled the trigger and ordered a bike carb manifold, couplers, malpassi fuel pressure regulator to still use the standard fuel pump, and a throttle cable kit to get the thing to run on bike carbs instead. If there was a time to swap it over to bike carbs, it was now!

And so a week and a bit went by, and all the bits came. I put it all together and put it on the car as a mock up, to see what I was getting into.
 

Also got that G40 rocker cover painted up in high temp silver.

 

And so after the mock up, I plumbed everything in and gave it a go priming the system. Immediately I could smell fuel! As it turns out, the T piece o-rings that connect each pair of float bowls together were completely rotted and split, so I had to go through the ordeal of splitting the carbs apart, and what a faff it was! I bet they were never apart before, as it took me hours to get them to come apart, but eventually they gave in and let me win!

After splitting them apart and putting them back together with new o-rings, they went straight on and all seemed good.

I tried starting it, but it cranked, and cranked, and cranked, and cranked....

Hmm, something doesnt seem quite right. The carbs were spitting some blue debris out of them. Interesting...

As it turns out, the night before I had put blue roll down the intake runners to stop cack getting into the engine, but I forgot I put 2 sheets instead of 1 into 2 of the cylinders for whatever reason, and forgot to take them back out! I had to then pull the carbs and manifold off the car again, and basically with a pair of very long and pointy tweezers, grab all the blue roll out the sparkplug hole and intake runners and get it out. It had somehow wrapped itself around the valve of cylinder no.4! But I was very lucky, no damage was done, and once I put everything back together, the thing came right to life!
 

 

Was so chuffed I had managed to do it! And it sounded mint. Got a set of ramair filters for the carbs to stop stuff going in, and fitted up the throttle cable. Had to drill the throttle pedal pivot to get it mounted up, but managed to get it sorted.

After ALOT of woes trying to set the carbs up, I managed to get them to behave fairly well, I had 140 main jets and from what I remember I was still messing around with the idle mixture screws, so I had them at the base setting of 2.5 turns out.

 

 

A friend of mine over in Germany was able to ship something pretty awesome over. A still in the original box set of Mattig DTM Cup mirrors, with the tuv paperwork and even the original bill of sale! Ever since I saw that these existed, I knew I had to have them on the polo, and managed to find these on German ebay, transferred my mate the moolah for them and the shipping costs, and fast forward a few weeks later:

 

I instantly set about fitting them, and they looked ace! They transformed how the polo looked by quite a bit! Ateeny bit hard to see out of but ehh, who needs good mirrors when they look this good!

I didnt like how the car sat on the 35mm H&R kit, so instead I bought a AP 60/50 spring kit to use with the shortened H&R dampers, and so, for the 3rd time, the suspension was coming apart!

 

What a difference it had made, even if I had only got the fronts done so far! At the same time, I ordered a ARB block kit from Maxrpm, and on of my mates who first helped me do the suspension on the Polo gave me a ARB brace to go with the ARB blocks, as he had upgraded to a stage 2 subframe. So I quickly sanded it down and gave it a lick of that silver paint I used for the G40 rocker cover.

 

After the car was sitting nice and low on that 60/50 kit all around, I thought it was missing something, so I did the double stacked spoiler thing on the back. I cut the entire plastic bracing out of a spare spoiler I got, and tiger sealed both together. Not a pretty job, but this was my first time using the stuff, so not mega bad in hindsight.

 

And so after this, I fettled about with the carbs over the next few months, got them to run a bit better but the Polo always seemed choked, I didn't really know what to look for at the time, so I tried to make it as good as I could with what I had, as money was a bit tight and I was still limited in knowledge in comparison with what I know today. I drove the thing on bike carbs without touching any fuelling settings over winter as-well, and it was really good fun. It was my first and only car, so there was no way I had another choice but to run it! It did still run a little rich and would go through fuel very quick, not ideal for a self employed 19 year old with not a huge amount of work on at that point! But oh well, I kept it going. I even took it down to Retro Rides Gathering that year, my first proper car show
 

 

Winter and my lack of washing the polo down frequently wasn't so kind to it. The rust was definitely getting worse bit by bit, so I really tried to keep on top of it from that point on.
 

 

But it was too late.... One thing I had noticed when I bought the car was a little gap in the carpet in the corner of the driver side rear footwell in the corner. Through that gap, you could see there was some rust going on. I was always scared to check it out properly, but one cold day in the middle of January I had a proper look... Not good, not good at all... There was a hole in the floor, and underneath where the seat rail was welded on. I knew I could either leave it, or find out how bad it really was. I chose the latter which may've not been such a good idea. I started chipping away the sound deadening on the floor with a hammer and big flat head, and then I started poking at the rust, it got worse.

And worse...

And even worse...

 

BALLS!

 

I thought, what am I gonna do with this thing now! I wouldn't want to see the Polo go to the scrappy. My mates offered to help patch it back up somehow. After I got a big sheet of roughly the correct thickness of steel, I packed it into the Polo and drove straight down to the shed, where ALOT of cutting had to be done in order to get rid of the rust. It had spread all the way down the sill but had been kept quiet thanks to the filler skimmed over the top of the rust, and a spray of black underseal along both sills.

 

A weekend later, the Polo was more solid than ever before! I couldn't thank my mates enough for helping get the thing welded up and ready to go again.

 

After the Polo was back from its major surgery, I accidentally came across something pretty awesome for it, to continue adding to the Kanjo Racer look I always was going for but never quite nailed down.

A pair of RHD specific Morette headlights popped up on Ebay, and cheap at that! I stuck it on my watchlist, and kinda forgot about them until I got the email halfway through watching Jackie Chan's Who Am I one evening, that the auction was gonna end soon!

So I threw a few bids in, and a few mins later, I now had the headlights.

Where am I gonna get the grille though? Well.. as my mate pointed out, Morette had one in stock! They still had their last one they produced in stock, sitting on the shelf since the late 90's

 

The headlights also came with the trimming templates to fit them, including the whole loom, parts number list, the relays and everything else needed to get them on the car.
 

I also had recently got a VW2 setup, with braided lines, Mintex M1144 pads, and Mintex vented but not drilled or grooved discs, alongside a few misc bits that needed replacing, and a whole strut for the right hand side. I couldn't wait to piece it all together!

 

 

I also had another go in getting the car running better on the carbs, but didnt make much of a difference. I played about with the needle height circlip setting, idle mixture screws, changed the main jets. It did run a tad bit better but still a little on the too rich side.

 

 

Very nice mods.👍

So much more to come!

Have you got the morette lights fitted yet? Don't believe I've seen them fitted to a 2f

I do! Life got in the way of updating this thread lol.... I'll have to get this thread up to date someday soon when the Polo goes back on the road! Here's a pic of what the front end looked like before it went off the road last summer.

Mate, what a stunner!

my compliments, great job!