We Support Universal Health Care for Clunkers Aug 17, 2009
With 165,000 miles on the clock, our Golf is long overdue for some basic service. We're going to be replacing the ignition wear items (plugs, wires, cap, rotor) as well as the timing belt, serpentine belt and coolant temperature sensor. We found the best deals on replacement parts from Mike Potter at Parts4VWs.com. Mike is a longtime friend and autocrosser.
The coolant hoses are also starting to age out, so we'll be replacing them with new silicone hoses from Samco Sport. The Samco Sport package is a cost effective way to replace all of our aging hoses at once—with higher performance.
This past week, we visited the junkyard and happened upon a 1996 Golf GTI that had a decent grille as well as a Techtonics Tuning exhaust—complete with a Borla muffler! The exhaust set us back just $14.90. How's that for bargain shopping?
While we were performing all of this maintenance, we also replaced the engine mounts with new polyurethane version from Black Forest Industries (www.blackforestindustries.com) The Stealth series mounts are soft enough to keep the engine from vibrating our fillings loose, but stiff enough to keep the engine from rocking around during acceleration.
Golf Suspension Makeover Aug 21, 2009
We got in some quality shop time yesterday with our Golf project—and after six hours, we had completely revitalized the handling of the car. H&R RS coil-overs with Ground Control bolt-in camber plates replaced our MacPherson strut (Ground Control now makes bolt-in camber plates for the Volkswagen that don't require any cutting or drilling).
The anti-roll bars were were swapped out for Neuspeed units, while the control arms and bushings were from Black Forest Industries.
We set the ride height using H&R's specified reference points, but we'll need to fine-tune the final settings.
We topped off the transformation with some reinforcements from Eurosport Accessories and brakes from Powerslot and StopTech.
The car is simply a different animal now. We're waiting to cornerweight and align it before doing on-track testing, but it looks like this was a straightforward, if not cheap, install.
Stance, Shifting and Sucking Sounds Sep 8, 2009
This past week, we've completed a bunch of small projects on our Golf. Now that the car has a new suspension, the first thing we accomplished was getting an alignment. The combination of fat wheels, fat tires and coil-overs meant that we had to be careful about how much negative camber we were getting from the two-slotted bolt holes on the lower strut mount. If we dialed in too much here, the inside of the tire would hit the coil-over.
We used the Ground Control camber plate to get as much negative camber as we could at the top of the strut and from the slotted lower ball joint holes at the bottom. The result was 2 degrees of negative camber and no rubbing issues.
Next on our list was addressing the bushings in the shift linkage. Some were missing, and the ones that remained were aging. We replaced them with new pieces from Eurosport Accessories. We also added one of Eurosport's short shift kits—it has a choice of 30- or 50-percent reduction in throw. The larger reduction was a little notchy for our tastes, so we chose the smaller amount.
While we were under the hood, we replaced the restrictive factory airbox and air filter with Eurosport's Coolflo intake system. It has a built-in heatshield to keep warm engine compartment air from entering the intake stream.
We have a sneaking suspicion that our catalytic converter's internal matrix is plugged and loose in its housing, as we have been getting weird surges in power levels that are accompanied by a rattling sound from the cat. After that's fixed, we'll strap the car to a dyno to see how we're doing and how we can improve from here.
Golf Goes Racing Sep 28, 2009
This weekend we brought our Golf to an SCCA autocross, where we competed as the lone F Street Prepared entrant. While we didn't have any direct competition, we gauged our performance against some other classes—the car and driver did quite well for an opening effort, finishing 12th on index.
Thanks to the well-developed suspension, the car handled quite nicely but was down on power. We found ourselves flat-footing in sections where other cars were lifting. We'll have to fix that—not by worsening the handling, but by working on horsepower changes.
During our second run, the plastic fitting for the heater hoses at the firewall cracked off, causing out coolant to dump out. We fixed this temporarily by bypassing the heater system—and we didn't miss a single run.
Credit for the photos goes to Matt Skowronski.
Golf Exhaust Makeover Oct 2, 2009
We had a sneaking suspicion that our exhaust was extra-restrictive. The catalytic converter was rattling and the car felt pretty asthmatic at higher rpm. Turns out the converter was broken, and almost all of the internal matrix was actually stuffed inside the downstream muffler.
After we found a Techtonics exhaust system in the junkyard for $14.99, we went on the hunt for a header to match. We sourced a Techtonics race header and a new mid-pipe to complete the exhaust system from stem to stern.
The installation was pretty straightforward, taking about six hours total. The header, with its long primary branches, actually comes apart so you can install it from the top of the engine compartment. Wiggling it down from the top took some doing, but we got the job done.
Now that the exhaust is done, we'll be scheduling some dyno time to compare aftermarket chips for the fuel injection system.