1993 Golf clipper cabrio. The car I didnt know I wanted.

Looking good. I spotted your ad on eBay for it the other day. Possibly not the best time of year to sell! Looks lovely all the same.

I am going to start this post with an example of my stupidity.

Sunday morning I rushed out and bought my Mum some flowers for mothers day.

On the way home I stopped for petrol and as the sun was splitting the sky I decided to put the roof down.......Pity I had forgotten about the flowers on the back parcel shelf!

Heres what I saw when I turned round to reverse into my space



What a tit!

At least the outside still looks good, even in the scarier parts of Glasgow.

derelict 3 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Dave.

MOT results are in. One leaky front shock. Think I can deal with that :thumbs:

Job done, re-test tomorrow;

Shocking job by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Dave

Finally I have a substantial update to the thread.

Parts arrived today to fix the fuel filler pipe rust so first part of the job was to get fuel out of the tank, especially as I filled it on Sunday before finding the rust;

Using this wee pump syphon I managed to get 30 litres out;


With the rear offside wheel off I could get a proper look up into the wheel arch. From here you can see why I missed the rust.



Still looks OK from here but on closer inspection the breather pipe is no longer connected to the filler pipe as the union has rusted through;



So its time to remove the steel filler pipe.

Step one, remove the sticker covering the three screws around the filler and then remove the screws;



Step 2, further down the pipe is a 10mm bolt holding the pipe to the inner wing;



Step 3, remove the jubilee clip holding the rubber pipe to the metal filler neck. The clamps here will probably be seized so have new clamps ready and if the rubber hose is damaged or perished, now is a good time to change it (I had a new one from VWHeritage but it wasnt long enough so re used the rubber pipe that was there).



With the filler neck off the true extent of the rust can be seen;



What was also obvious was the reason for it rusting out. The area around the top of the pipe was absolutely caked in dirt, most of which went up my sleves and in my hair but some made it to the ground;



The filler neck I ordered was for a saloon as it was less than half the price of the cabrio version.

With the old and new side by side you can see the difference;



The way to modify the saloon pipe to fit the cabrio is to mark the length of the old on the new then cut off whats not needed;



(there are some sellers on ebay charging over £100 for cabrio pipes that are sold as "genuine modified saloon filler pipes to fit clipper". Avoid these unless you want to pay over £60 for somebody to cut the end off a pipe).

When refitting, you will need to bend this bracket slightly to make it fit;



New jubilee clip on the breather hose;



If I had the time I would have given the pipe a coat of paint but as I needed the car mobile again I chose to fit it and coat it with wax and I will keep an eye on its condition;



All that was left to do is check everything was done up tight, re-fit the wheel and get the 30 litres of fuel back in the tank.

So far I can report that the job is a good one, I just hope there is not a lot of water at the bottom of my tank.

I need to be more careful about what I say. Less than a week after saying "finally, a substantial update to this thread" and posting the process of fixing the rusty filler neck I have another pipe to fix on the car.

Monday night at 10pm I was on my way back from dropping off the engine for the Beetle at Ed's when my car went from sounding normal to having a rasp. Then it had a rumble followed by a growl and ended up at full on roar within 5 miles on the M77.

I made it home and woke up the neighbour hood with the noise and left it to check what the problem was on Tuesday.

I had expected to see the joint at the cat hanging down but these were intact. It wasnt until I got right underneath that I found the problem, the down pipe was in 2 parts;



So I set about taking the exhaust off. The nuts at the front of the cat were really rusty and rounded off so I undid the nuts after the cat.



I then removed the heat shields and guards;



This gave me the access to cut the studs and remove the cat but wiith the pipes out the way I had to deal with the dreaded C clamps that were holding on the downpipe flange.



Leverage and struggle got the C clamps removed but this turned out to be the easy part of dealing with the clamps. More to follow on that subject.....

Pipe and flange in hand (snigger) I could see what went wrong. Amazingly the pipe had split cleanly around the weld line;



Normally I would expect to be replacing an exhaust pipe that had split but because the metal was in good order I decided to fix what I had.

You can see here the 2 parts sit together perfectly;



So I cleaned up the surface at the join;



Dug out my welder;



And with a zap and a grind it was one piece again;



While I had the welder plugged in I quickly added a couple of washers to the hanger bracket as the holes were rusting through;



By this point it was 5pm on Tuesday evening and I had visions of glory that the pipe would be back on and re-assembled before dinner........ How wrong was I? An hour of fighting with, swearing at and losing skin on the C clamps it was getting dark and I was thinking of setting the car on fire to stay warm and avoid ever having to deal with the bloody things ever again. I would like to meet the designer of the C clamp down pipe fitting and take a poo in his coco-pops.

In a huff and in the house I came across the solution on the Mk1 Golf forum so Wednesday lunchtime I was back under the car and using this solution (I know there is a proper tool but I didnt have one).

The C clamp which needs opened out to go over the flange (snigger);



The solution, an exhaust clamp;



Remove nuts, remove slider, replace nuts and replace the slider upside down and you get this;



Insert the high tech C clamp tool inside the C clamp and wind out the nuts to apply pressure to the inside of the clamp;



Now the clamp can be fed over the flange (snigger) before releasing pressure on the nuts and the clamp will hold the down pipe. The last sentence sounded simple but in reality with the limited access and the amount of tension on the clamps I think I spent a full hour faffing about with my arms in the air applying skin strips to my engine block.



The rest of the exhaust was re-assembled with new nuts and after a test drive I can confirm the car no longer sounds like a WW1 Bi-plane.

I will keep an eye on it for a few weeks and if it split once it may well split again but its working for now and didnt cost me anything so jobs a good one.

Dave

I have let this thread go without updates now for over 2 months for one good reason.......... The trusty wee Golf has been performing its duties without drama through the winter (famous last words).

I did however take this amusing picture last week;

Odometer palindrome. by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

All the while I have been puting the miles on going up and down to the workshop where I am restoring SWMBO's Beetle (which will be getting MOT'd on Wednesday)

seats in 6 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

seats in 7 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Golf at night by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Dave

From Memory all later Cabs have pressure regulators. The sportline i used to work on defiantly did and my 'rocco does.

edit .


ahhh there you go.


clubgti.com/showthread.php?246424-brake-pressure-regulator

Does your car have these pressure valves like the ones pictured directly under the master cylinder, instead of just in front of the axle where the exhaust loops over.



Picture Borrowed from here, which kind of explains the oddities of the different regulators used on Mk1's...

vwgolfmk1.org.uk/forum/index.php?page=topicview&id=technical%2Frunning-gear_2%2Frear-brake-regulator