I was looking at the arch trims on my mk3 and i really want to remove the upper rub strip on the sides, but leave the plastic arches and lower trim.

I was about to get to work when i realised that the front arch is attached to the front upper section. Will a set of rear arch trims fit on the front?

Or if not, will it be an expensive/difficult job to get the rub strip removed from the arch?

Am i wasting my time pissing in the wind?

yeah rears fit with a bit of cutting & modifying,

the arch trims from a mk2 coupe s fit aswell...

I'm in the middle of doing it myself man so ill let you know how i get on...

Yeah please do mate!

Could you PM me your number please? I've lost my phone and all the numbers in it. I need to swap the cylinder head in the next couple of weeks, and if you're free i'd really appreciate a hand. Vick and Dubdan have provisionally agreed too - i don't have a clue myself! Obviously i'll make it worth your while matey.

Seen much of mr cochrane lately?

mk2 and mk3 arch trims have different textures on them.

its not that hard to fill them, just feather the edges where you;ve cut the trim off, use some duck tape over the gap, apply a coat of glassfibre paste over the duck tape, when its dry, remove the duck tape and and put a layer of glassfibre paste where the duck tape was (filling on both sides if the arch trim will stop it from cracking out)

I've heard that the golf mk2 arches are a good alternative as well.

Not sure of textures though.

How do you texture the filler to match the trims though? Surely that would only work if you were wanting smoothed arches. Which isnt what i want.

you can buy textured paint in aerosols, its finer than the standard texture though, so needs bumpers doing to match too.

mk2 arches are also a totally different shape to mk3 ones. I mean the line they take around the arch is the same but the look of them is totally different.

This is how they looked on my old coupe

They are mk2 sill trims aswell. They are bigger than the mk3 ones. The mk3 ones are just like a lip that goes over the edge of the sill where as the mk2 ones cover the whole thing. Mk3 ones are better as they are less likely to trap water in them.

Put it this way, the mk2 that I got them trims off, I didn't have to do anything other than put a screw driver through the rivet and all the metal around it collapsed it was that rotten. Made it that bit easier to get off

I just cleaned up any rust on the sills and then used some tigerseal to put the trim on. Didn't really want to drill the sills because of what had happened to the mk2 I got them off!