Back on its feet

Spent a hot few hours putting all this back together, simple enough, just time consuming.
Ahh shiny new dampers.

The old bits I could save, which was pretty much all of them, put back onto the new shock absorbers.

and all back together

I also managed to cure the leak from the gearbox but alas with time not on my side before I had to leave no time for pictures.

Felicia dislocation

Time to get back to blogging about cars, never been a mention of another addition to the fleet, Felicia a 1999 Skoda Felicia 1.3 LXi.
Super little car picked up relatively cheaply (for Norway).
Obviously had things to fix, thermostat, alternator, front brakes....back brakes and on my way home from work the most major trouble yet....
Gah.

Trundled home from work, parked in the garage, went inside to get a work T-shirt on on may way out to start fixing the leak from the gearbox only to see a pool of oily liquid under the rear wheel. Barke fluid?? on closer inspection, damper oil, since it had self destructed in pretty major style.

Car wasn't going to be driven any further like that so no time to waste may as well whip them off :-)
This is why i love this car, reasonably modern..ish but i can get the suspension off with 2 sockets a spanner and my hands in 15 minutes. Gotta love that.

No point doing one without the other.

An internet search gave me all the answers I needed about new parts, I could get just the struts and reuse the rest, so next step dismantle the struts and find out what was reusable. Didn't even need a spring compressor.

a naked, damaged, strut. Two of these on order from Skoda next day delivery, could have got them slightly cheaper elsewhere but 3 -6 days delivery, just no good.

Constituent parts, the parts in the middle are junk the rest reusable. Everything I need is ordered, reassembly to follow. Then I can start work on the oil leak.

Project hubcap...

After I finally got the rest of my junk parts stash from Oslo i could restart / finish off project hubcap.
Although not strictly the correct offset for the Touran the wheels are otherwise a perfect fit, i don't think 2mm is going to make any difference :-)
The Touran needed new tyres anyway so I bought some Uniroyal Rainsport 3 on the interwebs from Germany, couldn't find them anywhere in Norway.

Took them down to my local tyre fitted who was not over enthused about putting tyres on rim that i hadn't bought from him, but money talks so he was persuaded in the end :-)

and the result...

feedback welcome.

Locked

Finally managed to pick up the lock barrel I managed to track down at a VW dealers not so far from Oslo.
Despite not being exactly the same part number I was assured that it would fit 'no problem', something that always sets huge clanging alarm bells ringing in my head. Annoyance number two was that although I didn't really need a complete set of new brass tumblers for my lock the parts man at the VW garage was in no way letting me rummage through his parts bin to find what i needed, so i had to fork out an extra 50 kroner (plus VAT @ 25%) for him to recode the new lock barrel to fit my key too. Grrrr.

OK so reasonably happy that I was restoring the lock to its original glory (and of course a brick in my OCD wall) I bounced down to the workshop to swap the parts over.

one new lock.

 

a pencil was sacificed for some of its graphite for lubrication purposes.

 

took of the door handle dismantled the mechanism and tried to put it back together with the new barrel. But i couldn't.

Spot the difference?
OK, pretty impossible to see on the photo but the old one had a threaded hole in the end, the new one had just a hole, unthreaded. Pah.

 

OK so out with the tools to give the whole a thread. M4 flavour.

 

 

Voila. After that it went back together OK albeit a bit stiffer than it was.

Thanks

The golf continues to provide me with enjoyable everyday motoring, the cam belt is now changed along with the super stiff perished alternator belt and i have racked up a good few km recently.
No power assisted steering, no electric windows, no radio, no plastic cover for the engine to hide under, no problems, unless. Some a*#hole decides it would be a good idea to break into the golf despite it not having a radio or anything else much inside apart from a pair of elcheapo sunglasses and the parking permit for work, which they naturally took with them. That isn't so much of a problem, what is ever so slightly irritating is the fact that they stuffed a screwdriver into the drivers door lock after which it was fubared.
Great, thanks a bunch.
The lock was useless as the key no longer went in so i had to lock it from the passenger side (no central locking you see, remember those days?) a real pita.
Every cloud and all that. I got to take stuff apart a find out how it fits together.

 

So off with the handle

 

 

the lock gubbins

 

the brass tumblers from inside the lock barrel, four of which were beyond repair. A bit of internet searching gave me the info that there are only four different tumbler types so a quick call to a locksmith turned up some of these, unfortunately the lock barrel was also mashed and unobtainable from VW so i'm in the process of hunting one of these down. Until that time i reassembled without four of the tumblers, so you can probably open the car with a lolly stick now if you wanted, but at least i could lock it again. To be continued.

 

They don't make them like they used to

So holidays are over and the new boring box drove to Ff, to the summer house, back to Ff, and back to Oslo and what happened?

Nothing that is what, it drove and it drove and it drove, it sipped a little diesel juice (amazingly little), changed gears by itself, controlled the speed of travel by itself (yes it has cruise control) swallowed all the luggage, didn't need topping up with oil or water and generally behaved itself.
So now i feel the need to take it apart, naturally.
There were a few things that the used car salesman promised to fix for us but when i went to pick it up weren't done, i didn't have time to faff about as we needed the car for holidays so i took it away, i'll fix the niggles myself. I have already started and had the trim off around the boot catch to fix the flappy thing that coveres the lock mechanism, yes modern cars have flappy things to cover up the bits nobody wants to set eyes upon because they are too ghastly to contemplate.
I didn't even take any pictures of the car while we were away it was that invisible. So i'll have to make up for that next time.

taking stuff apart

Some general tidying and as previously described a thermostat change and new 'old' bumper.

The cambelt is now changed too thanks to the VW dealer, who were actually cheaper than anybody else.

Just have to give the brakes a good once over now and we are good to go.

Always worth checking under the scuttle panel as nobody else ever does, always a good collection of leaves and stuff untouvhed for the last 19 years.

new old bumper

old one off, you can see the previous owners dents, probably what prompted him to cut out most of the old bumper 'innards' too.

really wasn't much holding it on.

the old was was missing pretty much all of the actualt steel crossmember, so pretty useless as a bumper really. It should look like this.

and on, and cleaned up.