[Franko180]

*** All the photos that this build thread is supposed to display are broken as of 30/06/2017. Photobucket changed their terms and conditions and have now prevented users from linking uploaded photos to Forums. I know lots of old forum guides and threads have broken links, this is usually due to users moving or renaming folders on their host service. In this case the broken image links are out of my control and the work required to move all the photos to a new host and edit all the posts with new links seems hardly worth the effort, so for the moment all the photos are broken in this build thread. You can thank Photobucket for this ****

If you use Google Chrome, you can install the "Photobucket Embeded Fix" that allows you to see most of the photos that people have linked from Photobucket to their forum posts, go to the following link to install it to - https://tinyurl.com/yaly67gq

This works on my PC, I've not tried it on a phone or tablet.

So after been on this forum since the very early days and back in the day getting a lot of help, ideas and parts through it, I thought it was fair to put something back, so this is my first build thread on here.

This build is for my R32 "rescue" daily driver and is a look back on when I built it and will go up to the present day and I still have some plans and stuff to add to the car, my parts stash is evidence of that

So I've been driving MK4s for a long time, I started with a (at the time) 3 year old "R" reg 1.8T AGU, but I don't think I have any photos of it, if I do I'll add them later.

I then had a brand new "W" reg 2000 MY 1.8T AGU, which I got rid of 3 years later with 98,000 miles on the clock, I had this car before the days of digital / phone cameras (yes that long ago!) so the pic I've added is a scan.



Then I had my third mk4, a brand new 2003 1.8T AUQ (same running gear/engine/brakes/gearbox as a 1.8T Anniversary), this car had a bit of extra spec, cruise control, dash 6 CD changer, winter pack and was a great daily car to rack up a hell of a lot of miles in. This car deserves a build thread of it's own as I did quite a lot of mods to it over the years, so I might do a retrospective thread on it eventually.



Whilst keeping the 1.8T I also decided I should finally own a V6, but to be different (as I already had a Golf) I went for a Bora V6 4-Motion, which I still have today. This has been a great car and I might pop a thread on here eventually for it:

 

[Franko180]

So in 2013 I was still driving the AUQ 1.8T and I had put over 200,000 miles on it, original clutch, original gearbox, original engine and I decided that I'd had a very good run in it but for a daily it might be wiser to move on to another car with less mileage on it. I was wondering what to get and would probably have gone for something like an Audi S3 8P and keep the Bora V6 for weekends and messing about in, but then I stumbled across a project that I couldn't resist.

A relatively low mileage (but heavily stripped) MK4 R32 that was right on the edge of being scrapped/crushed, that I knew could be a cool project car to turn back into a daily driver:



So at this time, the car's condition was this - no front bumper/grill, no headlights, no seats, no wheels, no engine, no gearbox, some dents, very rough rear bumper, standard exhaust still attached, rear running gear all attached, brakes still attached (luckily really nice conditon OEM front brakes with no lip at all), all the interior still present (minus the seats). The car was looking very sorry for itself but it was easy see that it just needed stuff bolting back onto it, there was no body damage, it hadn't been crashed or stolen and even had both keys.



So I agreed a price and bought it and booked it to be recovered home, had to throw my spare 17" TT Ronal wheels on to it to get it back into a rolling chassis:



And then helped get it onto a recovery truck to bring it home to and have a look in the cold light of day and work out what's what:

 

[Franko180]

So as a starting point I thought best to clean it out and then assess how much trouble I was in

The car had some parts thrown in it from when they ripped the R32 engine out, some of which were pretty useful, including 6 coil packs which I kept as spares and some other pipe work, alternator, air conditioning compressor, standard airbox and other bits and pieces that I've now ebay'd off:

Immediately worked out that this car had been used to ferry a dog around in the boot a lot as both panels in the boot compartment were covered in dog hairs and were a bit worse for wear they'd also half been pulled off by some tool who removed the rear light clusters. Also this car seemed to have had spent a lot of time in the countryside as there were lots of stones and muck on the carpet and in the boot, also the boot carpet was missing:

 

[Rob136]

This looks very interesting. Have you any idea what the end goal is?

Is it remaining v6?

 

[MK4_S]

looks like there is more info on the r32oc forum here

 

[Franko180]

No need to exit this forum and lose site traffic for it Updates continue below.

 

[danpalmer1993]

Photobucket and then copy and paste the IMG code :Y:

Great selection of cars and a hell of a read so far!

 

[Franko180]

Cheers Dan, having a look at Photobucket.

 

[Franko180]

Right, the bucket sorted, let's have a look then.

Suprisingly the car didn't smell badly in this condition, but after thinking about it for about 1 second I realised the next thing to do was just strip it right out and clean everything properly as I couldn't know if that dog had "left his mark" anywhere in that car or not.





So I removed the carpet and the sound deadening, so I could clean the floor properly with some nice scented cleaner (and also to see if there were any hidden surprises under the carpet/sound proofing).





Once the carpet was out I decided again that I couldn't trust what the previous owner and his doggy had done to the car (maybe the dog had 'scented' the car, who knows, maybe the owner also did?), so I hired a Rug Doctor and gave the carpet a thorough clean up:





I decided to ditch the sound deadening and replace it with new, again didn't want to risk them stinking like Grimsby docks when summer comes. I also took the instrument cluster out as it would need pairing to whatever ECU I ended up with, but also after having full FIS clocks in my 1.8T and Bora V6, I wasn't going to live with gash looking 1990s style half FIS clocks for long.

 

[Franko180]

Engine bay clean up:

"That's what your problem is!" - no engine. So the engine bay was filthy, I want to give it a basic clean up, but also remove some junk out of it that wouldn't be needed. I didn't photograph it, but I also eventually replaced the scuttle panel later in the build. I bagged the end of the downpipe and removed some of the wiring and put it to one side to stop things from getting wet during the clean up.

 

[Trev69]

Nice project and respect for taking it on. Dogs definitely leave their mark in a car. Had a merc clk for sale in work and it stank no matter what we done. Sat for months, people came, looked in it, smelt it then left. Then a guy came to see it in a ropey old discovery with a big slobbery dog in. Took it for a test drive, came back and bought it, never even mentioned the smell.
Good work so far, best of luck with the rest of it.

 

[Franko180]

Nice project and respect for taking it on. Dogs definitely leave their mark in a car. Had a merc clk for sale in work and it stank no matter what we done. Sat for months, people came, looked in it, smelt it then left. Then a guy came to see it in a ropey old discovery with a big slobbery dog in. Took it for a test drive, came back and bought it, never even mentioned the smell.
Good work so far, best of luck with the rest of it.

Cheers Trevo, this car didn't actually stink, but I wasn't messing about and decided to make sure of it.

So whilst working on the car I noticed another nice surprise. The headlining was sagging in the middle on the passenger side over the rear window.





Only one thing for it, strip it all off and see what's up:

I didn't photo all of the stages of this (common theme on my builds, when I get stuck in and forget the camera), but basically some of the sun roof drain pipes had either perished slightly or the VW boys in Bratislava had a "friday afternoon" when fitting the hoses during the original car build in 2003. Either way, I realised there was only one way - rip out and replace the hoses and do something about the sagged headlining.

On this photo below you can clearly see water collected on the inside of the rear passenger window, this had to be sorted. Also on the next photo a wet patch on the headlining.





So bottom line is that I removed all of the headlining, A/B/C pillars, and sun roof drain hoses so I could clean behind everything, check for any surprises and work out what to replace.

 

[Franko180]

So during the strip down and clean up of the car, I had to start sourcing some of the parts needed to build it back up. This isn't everything as other parts came later and there's stuff I forgot about or didn't photo.

Seats, these were temporary (yes not R32 Konigs) but they were all I could find at the time and they were a bargain. A3 leather sports seats, the fronts are very similar to MK4 leather recaros but with some extra features. Rears I think look crap compared to Golf ones, but they weren't staying long term. Pictures here are when they were fitted to my AUQ 1.8T just to get them home, they didn't get fitted to the R32 for a while as I Was still doing work on the interior.






Boot panels to replace the "hairy" (dog loved) panels. Also a bonus, noticed the replacement driver side boot panel also had a +12v power socket, the dogged panel didn't. These photos are rough and its hard to see the difference between the dogged panels and the replacements, but they cleaned up well and look fine.





Sun roof drain hoses:







Front bumper (OEM and with open grills, to make up for the earlier seats)

 

[GregP]

Respect for taking this one on.. there's a fair bit of work to do! Interested to see how it turns out!

 

[Franko180]

Respect for taking this one on.. there's a fair bit of work to do! Interested to see how it turns out!

Thanks Greg, seems a lot of R32s get broken and the vultures glue bits of them into other mk4 models, makes a change to see R32 parts going back onto an R32

 

[bl1tz]

I wish I could find a r32 shell like that, good work though!!

 

[Franko180]

All these nice shiney shiney cars on here and I keep posting pictures of my messed up R32
It will get more shiney eventually, but it's a long way off that, more nasty bits need fixing first.

So time to look at that leaky sun roof which had ruined the headlining.I wondered if the old hoses had any blockage from a build up of 10 years of dust/rubbish, so did some testing.




Not much happening? Blocked!


Got persistant and years of built up dust and gunk came out.


The front driver's side also had rubbish in the hose, but not as much


So anyway removed the old hose and fed through and connected a new hose on the rear left side.








Pulled the old front (blue) hoses through (was replacing all four hoses, better to be safe than sorry)






Old junkers Vs a new front hose


Worked out an easy way to pull the hose through the very tight 'run' it has to pass through, got a couple of long zip/cable ties and locked them together to make a very long "puller" and threaded it through and then taped it very securely the end of the blue hose on so I could pull it through. Wasn't sure if it would jam or the cable tie rip out as it's pretty tight to pull through.




It worked..




Decided to PVC tape the end of the hose to the new "nipple" just to give a bit more of a seal, probably not needed but did it anyway




Did the same on the passenger side, all new parts


Old hoses, do all the leaking you want now, in the rubbish bin

 

[Franko180]

I wish I could find a r32 shell like that, good work though!!

Thanks, if you did find one, what would you do with it?

 

[vwharry]

Interesting read so far, keep up the good work mate :Y:

 

[bl1tz]

Thanks, if you did find one, what would you do with it?

Possibly restore it (my current car has the urge to become a r32 so I have a few parts already) or the other option is to stick a different engine in there, something along the lines of r36