Keeping the faith alive!

About time for an update me'thinks!

Well, I haven't touched the car since roughly the end of October 2010!
I took her down to RE Performance in Bury to have the weber carb fitted and inlet manifold in a hope that it'd get her running spot on and reliable.
Put it in on the saturday morning, he rang me back to tell me he'd fitted the carb and manifold however that it was still basically not drivable due to a misfire and also mentioned that the brakes needed sorting too (at this point I took it that he thought they were a bit spongy and needed new pads/discs)
I left it with him for another week and got a call from him to tell me that it had been sorted and was now running fine.

With this news, I headed down the following saturday to pick the car up with a big smile on my face!
I picked it up, it started up first time and sounded better. I drove it off the garage lot and pressed the brake pedal, to which my surprise, was like pressing a brick and didn't move at all!

I drove it home with these brakes hardly even doing anything, went to start the car the next morning as normal with choke out at my girlfriends house and to my surprise it started and died instantly! I tried it again and same thing! I ended up having to start it with the choke out but also giving it some revs to keep it running until it warmed up and just about turned over on it's own!

So I took it to my girlfriends - mum's business partner to have a look at (haha confusing eh?) He builds and sets up racing mini's as a hobby and said he'd try figure out what was up with it. I mentioned to him that on the way over it had died at most sets of traffic lights when slowing down so he decided to check the timing out of curiosity and we made a pretty interesting discovery!

The timing had in fact been set to - wait for it…

Nearly 20 degrees!

Not even race cars are set at that!
So he turned it down and it started to idle a little better but was still running rough on idle and the mixture isn't right.

So after a chat with him, I proceeded to drive home upon which my radiator fan switch also decided to give up on me so the car was starting to get near over-heating.
 
This was the last straw for me as my insurance ended in october and I got to the point where I saw no point in continuously pouring money into her and not getting anywhere with her running reliably!

And so there she sat for nearly 6 months on the pavement at the top of my mum's drive!

Until late march, when the police decided to pay my mum a visit whilst I was in work. They told her they were taking it due to it sitting sorned on the public highway. She rang me at work, cut a long story short I got a taxi home that cost me £30 and got my mate with a garage and a low-loader to come take her for a short while so she was off the public highway until he could come back and drop her back off straight onto my mums drive. Admittedly I did leave her on the public highway, however it's a quiet cul-de-sac and wasn't in the way of anyone. Anyway, I'd rather pay my mate the money to recover it for a week then drop it straight onto my mum's drive than the police impound it then crush it!

I'd of put it on the drive sooner myself however it's too low to go over the minor peak in the drive as my mum's house is on a hill backing down it.
The next few weeks it sat there until I ended up getting back in touch with an old mate of mine who drives a lovely mark 4 R32    and I told him about the golf situation and he came round to have a look at it and one saturday, he gave me a kick up the backside to get on with getting it back on the road again as I had a pile of bits to replace and put on it but hadn't bothered to as I had lost the bug!

Over the next few days I got on with stripping the rear properly and tidying it up, replaced the exterior window scraper seals (hockey stick seals) on both sides as mine had rotted, fitted a new speedo cable, fitted new wiper blades all round, fitted a new rear boot strut as my old one nearly threw the bootlid over the top of the car when it went up haha!

My mate then proceeded to polish a small section of the bonnet as I had never bothered to due to the quality of the respray! Well, that just kick started it off then didn't it! I had to then go round and polish the whole thing so it didn't look daft.

The guy i'd bought the car off said it had a respray, however due to the quality of it, he didn't pay the guy who sprayed it! That's why i've never polished it, only washed it a couple of times!

But i'm glad all of this happened as i've now very much caught the bug again!
Next on the to do list is change the new front wishbones and bushes that i've already got, identify if it's actually a 1.3 not a 1.1 and jet the weber accordingly (currently jetted to a 1.1 and i'm convinced it's a 1.3) get it running properly and mot it, tax it, insure it and drive the thing!

Anyway, for those of you that have read all of my blabbering on - if any of you, here are some pics of the polished results for now!

Will take pictures of the other little bits i've done next time I go up to my mums to do some more work!

Any advice/info/tips/criticism welcome!

Be nice guys

Cheers,

Josh.







My personal favourite shot at the moment  


Definitely needs MOAR LOWS!  





In this shot you can see the cream waistline trims that are gonna be going on to go with the Red/Cream/Wood theme.


The plans are, put a wood vinyl strip down the centre of my waistline trims, fit my banded steelis with the wood vinyl centre caps to add to the colour theme hehe ;]





The Banded Steelies to go on This is the 8 1/2 inch wide rear to go on - Got Dish?


This is the 7 1/2 inch front to go on (Sorry rubbish iPhone picture quality!)


And finally one of my favourite ideas so far that I think is quite "unique" in the sense that I haven't seen anyone else do it yet - my one offside rear dish vinyl'd/stickered up! Tell me what you think!










Anyway guys and girls, thanks a lot for looking and enjoy what you will!

All comments welcome!

Cheers,

Josh.

loving the new wheels cant wait to see them on

Nice story, cracked me up the random clock in the photo of the exhaust. What's the engine code in the boot? Thst will give a clue as to whether it's a 1.1 or not. Unless you think it's been changed?