I have the shell stripped and cleaned now, ready to start prepping for paint, I spent the whole weekend inside the empty engine bay scrubbing oily crap off the firewall and inner wings. I also disassembled the front subframe, wishbones, ant-roll bar, steering rack etc etc, cleaned, de-scaled, primed and painted them in 2 pack VW "harvest moon beige" or "cream" to you and me! It's a New Beetle colour. this is not an indication of the final colour of the car, I just want it all looking nice when you look below the surface.
I've been avoiding this for a while because of the obvious safety issues involved with welding a petrol tank. The flange around the perimeter of the tank had completely delaminated due to rust and was flaking away to nothing. Luckily the welded seam holding the top and bottom halves together was still intact so I trimmed away all the rot from the seam outward. Using the roof skin from the Passat I used the hole in the boot floor to make a template of the new flange for the tank and proceeded to weld the new flange to the tank. the welding is now all done on the tank so I'll use some petseal/polyester resin to seal the tank from the inside and it'll be good as new I also have the engine/transmission/subframe dropped out and the engine bay stripped of all fixtures and fittings to clean it up, prep and then paint. Since the colour will be changed from green I want the engine bay to be as nice as the outside!
fitted the DIY coilovers today, first with the assister springs in, I didn't realise it but all they appear to do is keep the spring seated when the suspension is unloaded. They're too soft and bind up under the static weight of the car. so they were only restricting the amount of drop I could get so I binned them! resulting in approximately 3" of ground clearance at the subframe and another inch of drop available on the coilovers. this is the donor 80 but it's at stock height in the picture, check out the arch gap and compare it to the following picture I'll also be running tyres that are approx 1" undersize in terms of overall diameter, so they'll give another half inch of drop.
so today was spent pissing about with various springs trying to lose a little altitude. There are NO aftermarket suspension options for this car, either lowering springs, uprated shocks, coilovers, nothing. I picked up a set of mk1 Golf Koni lowering springs, they were said to be 40mm lower than stock springs. I took the stock springs out of the struts to compare them, unloaded. I also had a set of B4 Passat stock front springs for comparison: Koni Golf 1 springs top, B1 Audi 80 middle, B4 Passat bottom stock height (obviously no panels fitted ) and Golf springs fitted with the B4 Passat top caps it's down a good bit over stock, as you can see beside the donor 80 but you know what, it's just not low enough! So I spent the rest of the day/evening/night making my own coilovers. Here's the first one in comparison to the stock strut. I lowered the steering arm to match the drop and retain the stock bump-steer setting, shortened the overall length of the tube to allow extra damper stroke and so they'll fit standard Mk1 Golf shock inserts. Shocks aren't too easily got for the B1 so being able to use mk1 Golf ones makes life easier. I fitted new gas charged golf shocks I had on the shelf for another project. Pics tomorrow of how it looks fitted with coilovers. I'm hoping for a healthy drop!
the original engine in the Audi is a 1300 8V "big block" motor, a long since discontinued engine. It puts out about 50BHP in standard trim and has about 80k miles on it. Nothing wrong with it as such, I just happened across a more powerful engine for free from a Passat I broke and figured it would be a nice upgrade. So I set about swapping the ancillaries onto the 1.8 8V engine, I was astounded to find that EVERYTHING swapped straight over, a true factory made conversion. even the cam to drive the mechanical fuel pump was present, despite the 1.8 having an electric fuel pump for its fuel injection system, it was just hiding behind a blanking plate: all the engine mounts bolted up, the water pump, oil pump, sump, distributor etc etc all just bolted up. Simple! the only issue to sort out was a hole in the head of the newer engine as a return for the water heating of the inlet manifold. The Audi manages this heating differently so the hole had to be plugged. I tapped it for M12 and wound a long bolt covered in sealant into it so with all the conversion work done, the engine bolted right back in place and started up nicely after static timing it. Once running on that base setting I timed it properly with the strobe light. It now runs like you would expect it to from the factory. The best thing about the conversion though is that it will look 99% factory correct once finished, there is only one visible detail that will set the engines apart. I'll let the trainspotters figure that one out! the engine will be removed again to paint the engine bay, the colour is being changed so it wouldn't look right with a green engine bay!
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