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Been horsing about with Volkswagen Lupos for most of the summer We even bought one for Tom to race next year with VWDRC. I really like them, they remind me of the Beetle, in that they are cheap, fun, easy to play about with, but keep thinking they are a bit too new for a build thread though, even though Tom’s is a ‘99. I have been writing a thread on my phone as I quite like keeping a record of what we’ve been doing. But they seem to have a following, and are well liked, so after recent comments and threads, I’ll don my flameproof suit, and start writing a bit of a thread on what we’ve done. It sort of starts back in 2020 with Rhys’s yellow 1ltr  Rhys bought it off his sister, and has been modifying it, it got lowered, alloys, changed interior trim etc. Then earlier this year he helped me swap the engine in the van, which I think sowed a seed. So back in July he bought a 1.4 sport for the running gear  Was a thought that he’d move the yellow one on and keep this instead, but it was actually fairly rough underneath, so instead it got stripped, he sold a load of bits off and has made a profit on the asking price. In doing so, Rhys kept the engine, gearbox, loom, ecu etc We kept the sport alloys, rear beam (with arb and disc brakes) the coilovers and a few other bits, as pretty much knew we’d get one for Tom at some point. Once the sport was stripped, it went for scrap  Sorry, it all sort of segues into one another, so will be a bit of jumping about, but Coming up is the engine swap Tom’s green lupo Another sport Some motorsport as a 1ltr And drag racing    |
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dikkehemaworst
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 1,636
Club RR Member Number: 16
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Love lupi :-)
The only car I ever bought New and loved every driven mile... ours was a 1.7 sdi
Felt pretty quick
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When we drove the blue sport home it had a couple of issues. It kept surging on constant throttle, and the gearbox was really noisy and whiny and it started jumping out of 5th I’d had an Inca van (caddy bubble one) a few years back that jumped 5th, so pretty much knew what that was. On some 085 boxes they use plastic cages in the bearings so when they run low on oil they overheat and damage the bearings. If you catch it in time it’s not a huge job by all accounts, someone who knows what they are doing can sort in a couple of hours. The throttle issue we were told that it needed adaptation using Vagcom. So over the next few weeks we slowly parted out the blue one, at first taking bits off as they were sold and then eventually stripping it completely P        The petrol sport also has a centre exit exhaust, so we spot drilled the different panels from the boot floor and kept them too    We also took a cut of the wheel arch to repair a janky mot patch from a couple of years earlier Then brought the engine and box home for a service before we fitted into the yellow car |
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Ian
Part of things
Posts: 977
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I'm in for updates, I think Lupos are great!
Its really funny as to sit in as they feel like a big car, until you turn around and can almost touch the rear window!
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LuPro ET in the house!!!  2022 is the year of the Lupo in the VWDRC  I'm loving the subtle changes on the yellow car... drove by the other day and spotted the VWDRC sticker and the newly affixed '16v' badge |
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We ran a 1.4 petrol for a few years and really enjoyed it. Very nimble and quite quick! Looking forward to updates
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Should have fixed the sport, 1.0s are common, 1.4 sport are rare.
Anyhoo, I love my Lupos. I have a 99 T plate 1.4 (non sport) awaiting a 20V when one turns up worth pursuing.
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Should have fixed the sport, 1.0s are common, 1.4 sport are rare. Anyhoo, I love my Lupos. I have a 99 T plate 1.4 (non sport) awaiting a 20V when one turns up worth pursuing. Rhys picked the sport up back in July, and we did nothing for about a month trying to decide whether to keep the sport, but the sills were really rough all the way down, problem is rough sports are £6-700 and at that money no one is going to throw the money at them to make them last. I think the best this one would have got was some mot patches and ran for another 12-24 months and probably scrapped at whichever MOT. For them to be worth saving they need to shoot up in value like the GTIs, but then we’ll all be complaining that they are too expensive etc etc they seem to rot at the bottom of the A-post.. as it’s all hidden behind plastic you can’t see, but shonky wing replacement where the seam sealant hadn’t been sorted had helped the rot along on this, but can see similar on the green one where o/s wing has been swapped The bottom flange of the sill gets badly abused, I guess from bad trolley jacking etc, these ones were like a curly wurly! I think thin steel and the inexperience of the owners seems to be mostly the problem Rear of the sills in the wheel arch trap muck, to be fair, it wasn’t any worse than the yellow one here, but needed fixing The sport shell is the same I think, except for the boot floor and some smaller bits. Everything else is just bolt on… beam, disc rear brakes, bigger front brakes and the engine. So not really worth trying to get this one straight over using the yellow one, the only thing that would be different is the logbook would say ‘sport’ Possibly not worth as much as a sport replica, but then as the prices are so low, probably not much of an issue. |
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So with the sport engine and box back home, where we have electric and tea  The engine got a service, was a leak from the cam cover… except it’s not really a cover, the cams are contained within the cover, and so whilst we were swapping the cambelt we cleaned the mating surface and reapplied rtv So it got both cambelts, water pump, filters, oil, plugs leads, and except for looking at the throttle body was ready to go.  And since time was on our side, we thought we should be a little more proactive than I was with the gearbox in the Inca… In my defence, I have 2 very young kids and not much time so I used to top the gearbox oil up and just hold it in 5th with my knee when on the motorway. Then I swapped the van for a doblo and regretted not fixing it for ever more Anyway, we took the plate off of 5th and cleaned out the lumpy crunchy oil  Oh  That’s mostly the teeth off of 5th   The rest of the box wasn’t too bad, there was a lot of swarf floating about, and the diff bearings showed a fair bit of wear, but it would be fixable, just it was a fair way outside of our comfort zones    |
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They are diy-able just about. I rebuilt one for our SDI Arosa and that turned out ok. Changed all the big bearing, the planet wheels and the reverse idler.
The bearing on the end of the output shaft was the most shot. Looked like it had been getting the missing bits of reverse gear fired at it by the CROWN wheel. Getting its outer race out of the blind hole in the casing was a challenge. The planet gears in the diff were horribly pitted too.
Regular oil changes would probably help them last better ….. and using the clutch before going looking for reverse!
Nick
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1967 Triumph Vitesse convertible (old friend)
1996 Audi A6 2.5 TDI Avant (still durability testing)
1972 GT6 Mk3 (Restored after loong rest & getting the hang of being a car again)
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We went looking for a sport gearbox, but nothing turned up at sensible money, the 1ltr box shares the same ratios with the sport, but the final drive ratio is different. So decided we’d have a look in the 1ltr box when we started the swap. If it was something we could change easily we’d have a go, but if not we’d fit the 1ltr box and worry about it later (the box can be dropped from underneath anyway) Next we looked at the wiring in advance of the swap. Managed to download the electrics drawings for the 1ltr and sport. We had the full sport loom, but to integrate the wiring we’d need to remove dash and unwrap the loom from the engine bay to the coloured connectors under the fuse ox on the drivers side when the grommet through the bulkhead is in the passenger side. We’ve found out we did it wrong, and it’s a 20 minute job to remove the dash and swap the engine looks…. So ignore this The sport has a 121 pin ecu and the 1ltr had a 80 pin one, but the wires going into the car are basically the same (the colours are pretty much the same but there was some difference in wire thickness, normally either 0.5 or 0.35) So we disconnected the engine loom from main harness which left about 30 wires that needed integrating back into the car loom.  And that was about as far as we could go until the engine came out. Lucy was going away for a weekend with her friends, so that was chosen to be boys weekend. So the last thing to sort was to get an MOT, so on the Wednesday before the weekend Rhys took it in…… and it failed. Luckily by nothing too major; A track rod end but that must have been left loose when he had the tracking done, A cv boot that was loose And a hole in the sill!! We’d taken a cut from the blue car to sort a previous MOT patch from a couple of years back. But like all good MOT patches it’s carried on rotting out behind the patch Was the first time I’d used the RTech mig in anger, and after I’d played about with settings we added another patch for now   Got it back and retested before the end of the day… So after work Friday we got the yellow one in position and pulled the engine out, the drive was a bit busy…  But engine came out, a bit easier than other stuff I’ve done as the front all I bolts so you don’t have to lift the engine out, just forward     With that we decided to have a look in the 1ltr box and call it a night. Opened up the box, it all looked ok in there, and there wasn’t an easy way to swap the diffs so we put it back together, had a beer and went to bed… but we messed up a bit and made extra work for ourselves at that point |
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On the Saturday we sorted the wiring, which took us pretty much all day. We were working slowly and methodically so as not to make any mistakes because we decided getting it wrong and trying to then fault find would be a nightmare too.     Other than wiring we swapped a power steering pipe, on the 1ltr there is a sensor in the p/s line that raises the revs if you turn the steering at tickover. The bigger engines don’t need this. The pipe in there had a bit of rust on it so we swapped it as it was alot easier in the empty engine bay. Sunday was spent getting the engine off the stand, fitting the flywheel and clutch, fitting the gearbox and getting it all back in the car. Towards the end of the day we had it all ready to test but with no cooling and the front end missing.  But it wouldn’t run |
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The lupo has a seperate immobiliser unit under the dash. The one in the yellow car was coded to the key and worked with the car. We sort of assumed this would work with the new ecu…. In hindsight it’s obvious it won’t otherwise you’d just need a immobiliser module to go and steal cars, but on Sunday evening that took a little while to sort out. We tried (I say we, I’m a Neanderthal and Rhys works in IT) to sort it by changing the ecu to match the immobiliser but couldn’t. So had to wait until Monday and go and find the blue cars immobiliser module… which was in a rubble sack with some other bits, somewhere in the shed.. which now has the Fug back in it  After climbing over everything because it was bound to be right at the back, it was found just inside the door A few minutes of hand contortions under the dash to get the one in the car unplugged and then the connectors out near the fuseboxes and the other plugged in and it fired up woohoo imgur.com/a/PY2XaCE |
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Not sure where you are, but I still have what I think is a 1.0L box with the big block bell housing that came in our SDI. It worked ok but gearing was hopeless for the diesel - on the governor @ 68 mph in 5th.....
Box is in Yeovil and very cheap..... maybe be useful for parts. I have a feeling that the output shafts have the output gear formed as part of them, so changing the ratio of the diff means changing the shaft too. Could be wrong as it been several years since I did it.
Nick
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1967 Triumph Vitesse convertible (old friend)
1996 Audi A6 2.5 TDI Avant (still durability testing)
1972 GT6 Mk3 (Restored after loong rest & getting the hang of being a car again)
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Not sure where you are, but I still have what I think is a 1.0L box with the big block bell housing that came in our SDI. It worked ok but gearing was hopeless for the diesel - on the governor @ 68 mph in 5th..... Box is in Yeovil and very cheap..... maybe be useful for parts. I have a feeling that the output shafts have the output gear formed as part of them, so changing the ratio of the diff means changing the shaft too. Could be wrong as it been several years since I did it. Nick Yeah, that’s where we got to. To change the diff we’d have had to strip the whole box and strip the shaft. If there hadn’t been so much swarf and rubbish floating about in there we might have swapped the whole cluster in, or just changed the diff bearings and used 5th off of the 1ltr. The 1ltr box is too short really for the sport engine, it’s not terrible in terms of ratios (think it’s about 5mph difference to the top end) but he gets lots of wheel spin I’ll let him know anyway, thanks |
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mat88
Yorkshire and The Humber
Posts: 1,542
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Bookmarked for the adventure.. ex had one of these years ago (was a 1.0 poverty spec thing not even sure if it had power steering, had keep fit windows too 😂).. but handled like a little go kart and could be driven in anger on the back lanes all while keeping your licence haha
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Not made any comment on your or Dez Lupo posts but another car, like the original Renault Twingo that just looks right to me. It is great that you guys share all your experiences and knowledge so many of us can avoid pitfalls and know what to look for. Oh, and I love the insulation on the drive, very clever. |
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Last Edit: Nov 3, 2021 8:13:51 GMT by grizz
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I knew I shouldn't have looked at your thread  it may just start me thinking about an old mad idea I had !!! I'll be along for this ride |
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Not made any comment on your or Dez Lupo posts but another car, like the original Renault Twingo that just looks right to me. It is great that you guys share all your experiences and knowledge so many of us can avoid pitfalls and know what to look for. Oh, and I love the insulation on the drive, very clever. Thanks, I’m not sure there’s too much knowledge, certainly wasn’t before we started But it’s best to tell the whole story, that way others can learn from our mistakes… such as having to take the gearbox back out! The insulation stuff was to try and keep some of the mess from the block paving as well as making lying on the floor a little more bearable |
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I knew I shouldn't have looked at your thread it may just start me thinking about an old mad idea I had !!! I'll be along for this ride It gets worse before it gets better  |
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That’s mostly the teeth off of 5th
