Well managed to change my timing belt water pump etc yesterday but had a massive issue removing the upper timing belt cover!    Has anyone else had this problem?

no,is very easy to remove.

Mine came off okay, the devils own job to get back. Still does not sit right now a year on 

No mine came off ok...just the engine mount was a PITA..

Humm wonder if my engine is sitting too far over to the drivers side?

Never had a problem with it as when the cambelt was due for a replacement, I looked at it and made the executive decision that access was going to be too tight for my fat hands, so I gave the car to my girlfriend's brother, who is a mobile mechanic, and let him have the agro

Mine was a pain to remove, the PAS pipe was jamming it in 

Make sure you change all the engine mounting bolts too .... Apparently the vw specialist that did mine forgot to change them :( it's a world of pain with no Vaseline .....

Fortunately they repaired it all FOC

How did the bolts cause that? 

How did the bolts cause that?

They're stretch bolts and when reused can snap.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4

Yes I know that but what I see there is the bolts still in place and the mount itself has failed. 

Looks to me like at least one of the bolts failed, the bottom on on the right looks wonky.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4

If one of them either came loose or snapped you'd expect the mount to come loose rather than failing on the rubber. As far as I can see the bit of the mount on the right is still parallel with the chassis leg too.

Don't know, can't really tell from the one photo, my first thought was it looked ****-eyed.  I don't have a mkI to compare it against.

Don't get me wrong. They are stretch bolts and they should be replaced, I just don't see how the bolts caused the mount to fail like that

Looks like mount failure not bolt failure !!!

It was definetly 100 percent bolt into the block failure I know this because I stripped it all down myself before the garage picked it up on a low loader it was a pita to get the bolts out of the block...

What had happened were the 3 bolts that go into the bock with the peg to go into the engine mount snapped which then the engine dropped and came to a rest as it is in the picture

I have auto data 2012 that states that the bolts should always be changed once they have been out ...

Okay mount to block not main engine mount bolts