The Person
Hi, I'm Phil from Sunny Scunny in North Lincolnshire. I have lived in Scunthorpe all of the 24 years is have been on this planet, which some may think is a bit crazy but so am I.  I've recently bought my first house and planning a large garage so I can fully restore my mk1. I work for the French company TOTAL which is Britain's largest oil refinery, with a processing capacity of up to 10 million tonnes per annum processes 222,000 barrels per day and ever increasing. It's my job as a technician to carry out first line maintenance, fault finding, minor modifications and commissioning of critical systems employed at the refinery covering; Various Process Control systems, temperature/level/pressure/flow and analyser field equipment.

The Purchase
Having bought my first house and promising myself to save some money and stop wasting it on cars, I thought it would be a good idea to buy a sensible daily car and have a 'toy' that I could work on to keep me busy. I sold my gorgeous mk5 Golf R32 and bought a 2004 Polo GTTDI (PD130), so now all I needed was a 'toy'. Having my heart set on a mk1 Caddy I set about finding one, which was hard as all I could find were overpriced pieces of rust which were not what I wanted. I was flicking through the forums and came across this mk1 which was getting tons of interest, so I had a better look and arranged a viewing. A week later I was the owner of 'Allan' a VW Mk1 Golf 'C' 1.1 4 speed.

The Project
Once I got the car home I decided that when the tax and MOT run out (December 2012) I would take the mk1 off the road for a full overhaul. I bought a mk3 16v GTi (20. 16v ABF engine) as I thought this was the best option and then make some money back from stripping the car down, I decided against this as I have no experience with cars and it seemed like too much hard work. So this got me thinking, what can I do which isn't really that common in mk1's, this ruled out petrol so I thought 1.6D from a caddy.. I asked about to see if anyone local had a spare I could have and an old friend from Skegness said he had a 1.6 GTD engine, but it was in pieces. Upon arrival I inspected the masses of parts I was buying and half of it was brand new. So I loaded up the polo, which was full to the brim with mk1 parts and headed back to my girlfriends dads house to show him my new engine, unimpressed with the amount of 'junk' now in his garage we set about sorting out what we actually need.
So I took the mk1 off the road, removed the old engine and set about rebuilding the new one. Some parts were a nightmare to get hold of like the gudgion pins circlips which VW Heritage helped me out with. So after about 3 weeks I had a brand new GTD engine built up, the K14 turbo and fuel pump were original but they were overhauled. The fitting of the engine and 5 speed gearbox went surprisingly well only delayed by parts which we couldn't get hold of. Whilst the car was in the garage I changed to vented GTi brakes, fitted a new set of KW V1 INOX coilovers using ColeTech Classic 2.5" raised top mounts. Refurbished a set of OZ Turbo 15" 7j Alloys with 165/50/15 tyres for a bit of shiny for the upcoming show seasons. This is the stage that Allan is at and how he will stay until the end of the year when I plan on taking him off the road for a few years to fully strip down and respray so he is completely awesome.