Felicia 1.8T transplant thread

[TeflonTom]

first job was to put in the new axle beam pivot bushes, they are fairly easy to put in on these cars, they are not a press fit like most vw group applications, all you need to do it either use washing up liquid or a little bit of copper slip grease then just knock it in with a mallet till it's fully home.

the brake flex hose pushes into a hole, then there is a little spring clip thing that engages with the collar on the brake hose end fitting

the plastic brake pipe retaining clips just screw onto studs, the hard brake pipe just clips in

[TeflonTom]

apologies for the naff out of focus pic

the other end of the flexi pipe attaches to the bracket that bolts onto the body and has another of the spring clips to secure it, also note that the pivot bolt only fit one way round because the bonded crush tube inside the bush is shaped to the profile of the bolt

[TeflonTom]

its all starting to come together now, the mk3 golf stub axles are now bolted up. But it appears my big tub of bearing grease has gone walkabout so that was as far as I could go with that today. I've decided not to use the back plate that goes behind the brake discs

[TeflonTom]

I've got a few chairs from a Subaru that I'm going to fit in, I've measured up the subframes and decided that I'm going to try and fit them to the skoda oem seat slides, I'm going to pick up a couple of sets of them from the breakers yard tomorrow if I get time, should be fairly easy to fit them, just a few piece of metal bar and a few nuts and bolts

[TeflonTom]

the rear arches are completely shot.. Both would be mot failures

here's my 99p eBay special, genuine skoda rear quarter panel, I've ordered some arch repair panels from imperial and they should be here Monday on Tuesday, when I'm finished with these arches you would never even know they have been rusty.

[TeflonTom]

I would have preferred to use the brake setup from the lupo/6n2 polo type because they use a sealed bearing, but alas the rear wheel bearing is formed as one complete piece with the hub flange and they are over £100 each so I opted to use the cheaper option.

[TeflonTom]

nothing too exciting really, the rear brakes and bearings etc are all assembled now, it's all bled up and ready to go, I just need to order in a set of rear brake pads, then I need to figure out how to make the handbrake work.. All fairly simple stuff.

[TeflonTom]

the rear passenger door has a 2 foot gash in it but apart from that the rest are all ok to re-use

[TeflonTom]

sorry another dodgy pic, had a brief play with the handbrake cables today, basically the inner part of the cable is too long to be use with the hand brake mechanism on the rear calipers because the oem cables at designed for brake drums... I unbolted the cable stay bracket from the caliper and welded a spacer tube to it, I must admit I don't know precisely what vehicle it was from but I'm pretty certain it was the centre crush tube from a classic mini subframe bush, it was literally the first thing i put my hand on when I rummaged through my stash of shiney things. The felicia handbrake cable fits perfectly inside it and it is 25mm long so effectively it shortens the inner part of the cable by 25mm....

by my reckoning the cable is 40mm ish too long so the remaining 15mm will be obtained by using a spacer at the hand brake lever end of the cable... Hope this makes sense to everybody

oh yeah one more thing I shortened the spring that is wound around the cable inner that goes at the drum/caliper end too, it was really tricky to do as well, the spring is now approx 80mm long..

it sounds complicated but it makes sense in my mind.. I need to rummage around again for a pair of spacers for the hand brake lever end.

[TeflonTom]

I appear to have lost 2 of the wheel bolts for some benign reason, odd because I put them in a little box and they were all together... But I can inform you that they are £1.40 each from tps....

the hand brake cables are normally attached to the bottom of the axle beam by this god awful p clip thing that pushes onto two studs, I chucked these in the bin with every intention of buying a couple of new ones only to find out they are no longer available from skoda.. Nevertheless I shall use some structural cable ties or maybe some gaffa tape to stick them on instead.

[TeflonTom]

well with a little bit of luck the car will probably roll out of my workshop under its own power some time tomorrow, need to do a bit of road testing to check a few things out

[TeflonTom]

everything is put together now, it's absolutely filthy.

[TeflonTom]

well it did drive out under it's own power :-D it was absolutely belting it down with rain but i still got the bucket out and threatened it with a sponge.

I left the engine running whilst I washing it to try and get it good and hot, but when I put it back in the workshop i did something really stupid, I released the cap from the expansion tank whilst the engine was hot and it instantly boiled over and proceeded to dump about 3 litres of coolant out of the pressure relief vent in the expansion tank, glad it did that really otherwise it would have blown up in my face.... Don't know what possessed me to do it, I should know better.

[TeflonTom]

there was a couple of minor teething issues I picked up on today,

1. oil pressure switch, the felicia dashboard is wired up so that the switched is normally closed which puts the light on the dash, and when the oil pressure comes up with the engine the switch opens and turns the light off... On late vw/Audi cars it's wired round the other way, so the 1.8t prssure switch operates with switch normally open then closes when the oil pressure comes up so consequently my oil pressure warning light on the dash is doing the opposite to what it should do, I've ordered a different pressure switch from my local motor factors to solve this, the operating pressure is not the same but it isn't far off.

2. Power steering pressure switch, the ecu has a contact closure input (switch) which is basically a pressure switch on one of the power steering fluid unions, when the steering turns the pressure demand from the pump is higher so the ecu increases the Idle speed to compensate to avoid the engine stalling when the extra load is applied to the engine, I didn't wire this up to the ecu because I didn't think I would need it, but now I've changed me mind and want to put it in because the engine does falter a bit on full lock, trouble is I can't remember where in the engine loom I terminated the wires, I definitely remember chopping the plug off and taping the wires up...

[TeflonTom]

Oil pressure switch is now sorted out and working correctly, new number plates are on, new wiper blades too

I've stripped down part of the engine loom to identify which wires are supposed to go to the power steering pressure switch, found these and tested it's operation and it seems to work ok, I twisted the wires together and it raised the idle speed by 50rpm which is good, now all i need to do it find a pressure switch from a scrap car along with the wirring plug and splice it to these 2 wires

I've taken the rear bumper off in preparation for fixing the rear wheel arches and all 4 of the lower mounting studs sheared off when I tried to undo them, the centre 2 are very difficult to get to so I'm just going to leave them, but the outer 2 are accessible, I ground them out with a die grinder then welded an m8 bolt into the hole

then I sprayed up the whole of the rear valance panel and some of the under side with stone chip. Thats all for today..

I still need to find a strut brace to fit on there too... Word out..

[TeflonTom]

rear valance all sprayed up with stone chip,

[TeflonTom]

ghetto centre console, it looks a bit rough but this is just a template so I can make a proper fibreglass one.

[TeflonTom]

I've sorted out the power steering pressure switch wiring now, just having a few minor issues fitting the thing to the steering pump, it sticks out too far, I need a 90 degree elbow for it.

[TeflonTom]

i took the car out for a run today.

omg it goes, i took it nice and easy being the maiden voyage and all but it does exhibit all the characteristics of a machine that is desperatly trying to kill you even when its switched off, more on this thead later

[TeflonTom]

The process for putting in a pd diesel would be fairly similar, the engine mountings would be the same.... Certainly would be a possibility in one of these cars...

[TeflonTom]

took the car for mot test today, thought I might as well even though I knew it would fail on the bodywork items, it only failed on high emissions and the afforementioned bodywork. Big thanks to jimbo and Kate at jkm motor services in Portsmouth, I've got a lot of respect for those guys, they've never once tried to diddle me and old jim is always thourough, it's so refreshing to find a good garage that dont try and take the ****. anyway enough about that.

next job is to plug in the old vcds and find out if the coolant temp sensor is working properly and test that the oxygen probe is working, I suspect it isn't tbh, it was a second hand one that I chucked in there that's been rolling around in the top of one of my toolboxes for about 2 years, then it's time to break out the welding torch.

[TeflonTom]

stopped by the beach at hayling island on my way to mot, That's the isle of Wight you can see in the distance.

[TeflonTom]

Coolant sensor appears to be working fine now I've checked it, there doesn't seem to be any response from the lambda probe at all though, which is odd because there is no fault codes relating to it.

[TeflonTom]

oh yeah one more thing, I'm on the lookout for a rear passenger side door too, all the ones I've seen locally are fubar.

[TeflonTom]

It's having a respray at the moment, I had to pinch myself to stop me doing it porsche macadamia brown. I love that colour.