chopping out the rotten steel from the sills.

rear wheel arch gets same treatment, arch repair panel stitched in place, the name of the game is to remove the absolute bare minimum of the original panel as possible, it only needs to be cut back to clean steel, it was only the arch lip that was rotten where the water had collected in there.

T'other side

Drivers side almost ready for filler.

drivers side rear sill repair starting to take shape. The sound when this was originally lowered onto an axle stand was sickening.

drivers side rear inner wing was a bit crusty where it met the chassis rail so that recieved some tlc too.

drivers side rear arch, filled and primed.

passenger side. There is a trick that I learned, after the primer goes on you spray a light coat of matte black on top, this is done so that when you rub down the primer you know how far it's gone down, basically you keep going till there's no trace of black left.

busy with the 500 grit sanding discs, normally wouldn't do this but the paint is proper ****ed on this, so it needed to be quite coarse to take all the heavy scratches and scores out. This car is a victim of being sat in be workshop too long and careless folks sharing the same unit as me, there was all sorts of overspray, grinding splatter, dings pops and dents etc. it took a good 4 hours with a Stanley knife blade to scrape the crud off the windscreen alone.

other side, rear door was removed at this stage, on inspection internally it was too far gone to be of economical use, the regulator was a bit suspect because it had gone out of shape, so I sourced a second hand door which was red.

you can see a few patches on the bonnet where stone chips etc have been levelled and repaired.

Oh and I popped the rear window out too becuse the tailgate needed a little bit of attention too, same old story with these, round the bottom of the window rubber in the corners the paint was bubbling up with a bit of the old ferric oxide, so that's been sorted too but I don't have a picture of that either.

rear passenger door was too far gone to salvage after all so I obtained another one from a breaker. This needed a bit of work too.

all over with the red scotch, and then degreased.. All masked up ready for paint.

Tailgate needed some tlc as well particularly around the rear windscreen aperture where some rust had bubbled up... All fairly common on these cars.

more pictures to follow later on.

these pictures really don't do it any justice. All painted now..

there's me green door... That was red... Did I mention that?

another angle.. Original colour too it's a real oddball colour. It's got a blue pearl in it..

The paint code that is on the sticker in the boot is NOT the colour the car was painted at the factory I know that for sure, the code on the data label is L959 which is skoda emerald green, which is a good 4 shades darker than the original colour going by the swatches, this is the nearest match we could find to the original colour

i'm already thinking about adaptions i can make to make it nicer to drive

 

it's funny when you sit back and look at the bigger picture there are obvious things sticking out a mile that you could have done better first time round if more thought had been put in

finally got the car on the road today all legit. Still a few finishing touches to do

Busy engine bay, fits in there like it was almost made for it, I got a really good deal on the insurance too, all modifications declared £440 fully comp.

When you compare it side by side with another one it looks totally oem stock except for the glimpse of the intercooler through the bumper, and the stance is a little bit more aggressive compared to a standard one.. I've got a set of new 15" genuine skoda wheel trims to go on there, and I'm going to paint the rear bumper too

The temperature kept on dropping when i Was going down the road so it must have been a faulty thermostat, Replaced the thermostat and flushed the cooling system out at the same time too. It was a right royal pain in the hoop to get the thermostat cover off, wish I'd done it when I replaced the alternator.. Now the temp is rock solid sits at 90 degrees except when it's sat idling for long periods, it doesn't overheat but it does get pretty hot, I think it's because of a mismatch in the cooling system and stuff like the expansion tank being lower than the heater core and the radiator is slightly too small for the size of the engine too, I think I might fit an electric water pump from a golf vr6 to assist in moving coolant around when it's idling, this should solve this problem.

Next I decided I wanted a boost gauge, so I managed to pick up this bad boy at halfords for £19.99, I think thy are normally more but thy are knocking them out cheap, funnily enough I wasn't actually looking for a boost gauge when I went in there. Just happened to spot it there going cheap

it's a bit ghetto but there's nowhere else to put it where it's not in the way, I've hooked up the wiring to the iso blocks for the radio for now because I've got no plans to install a radio in there, it's backlit too which comes on with the headlights via the interior lighting feed wire in the ISO blocks

I got some funny looks from my neighbour when he saw me get in the passenger seat of the car carrying a massive power drill with a giant hole saw stuck in it, but he's learned not to question my sanity nowadays.

I've hooked up the wiring to the iso blocks for the radio for now because I've got no plans to install a radio in there....

and so it's started..... My phone goes off today and a mate wanted me to help him install a dab radio in his car, yes I says, anyway the long and the short of it is this, I acquired his 'old' sony CD player for gratis, I say old but I mean about 2 months old, it's got a USB port on the front for direct iPod control and it will play mp3 discs too allegedly..

anyway so after I declared I had no plans install a radio in there not 2 days ago, I didn't waste any time and had it fitted within 5 mins of returning home...

which leads me onto my next thing, I work with big concert sound PA systems etc, and I was sat there think these speakers are really ****, so I went down to halfords to have a look at what they had with the intention of not spending more than about £40 and low and behold they had these 2 way component speakers which are a bright orange colour and they were reduced to £15 because they no longer stock them end of line sort of thing to get rid of them. It is a 5.25" mid range driver that goes in the door, and there is a little 1" tweeter to fit somewhere when I've thought about it, they are wired in parallel (I think, there was no instructions) and the tweeter has a HPF so it filters out the LF stuff..

more on this later.

phase 1 complete, they don't sound too bad considering how cheap they are.