VW Caddy mk2 (Felicia) Pick-Up

[Bete Noir]

Any thoughts of a wooden floor ended abruptly when I spotted this on eBay.

 

I made the seller an offer, which was accepted sufficiently quickly to indicate it was too generous, and drove the Caddy up to Cambridge to collect it the following weekend. The seller had acquired this for his own Caddy project, but had decided he was unlikely ever to get around to it.

 

The fuel tank came out, and the serious surgery got underway.

 

 

Unsurprisingly, cutting away the previous dodgy repairs revealed some nasties which warranted remedial action.

 

The replacement bed floor itself needed plenty of work before it was ready to be welded into place.

 

[Bete Noir]

Real progress

 

Once back together, it was treated to a liberal coating of stonechip

Edited 5 February, 2023 by Bete Noir

[Bete Noir]

There was a Caddy towbar in my lock-up for years. I cannot even remember where I got it from, but I guess I must have spotted it for sale locally and thought I might as well get it ‘just in case’. After I retrieved it from the lock-up it did sterling service as a doorstop for my workshop for another couple of years, before I figured I may as well fit it to my Caddy.

 

When I removed the NSR access panel inside the load area, I found evidence that it had previously had a towbar fitted, but sadly that evidence was in the form of Scotchlok connectors still attached to the wiring harness.

 

The previous owner had compounded the mess by attaching cables to feed his high level brake light (see post #1). This had to go.

 

After I had prised the dreaded Scotchloks off the cables, I was able to remove the pins one at a time from the 8-way connector and slip some heatshrink over them to repair the damage to the cable insulation. With the pins then replaced I wrapped the loom in coroplast tape. I got quite a bit of the white overspray off the connectors whilst I was there. Now the standard wiring was looking more like it should, and it was ready to have the towing connector wiring added.

 

The approach I decided to take was to make up a splitter loom to connect between this plug and socket, with another branch going to the towing connector. I suspect this may have been how it was done if the towbar was fitted as a factory option, judging by the blanking grommet I found adjacent to where the standard wiring goes through to the NSR light unit.

 

It was only once I had made up this additional loom and connected it for testing that I realised the OSR light unit must have been from a LHD car, as it had a reversing light rather than foglight lens. This gave me the idea of wiring this as a reversing light, and adding a foglight below the bumper. The wiring for this was achieved by using the wire already in place across the rear for the OS reversing light, and running cables from the towing connector to the new foglight.

 

Once I had confirmed that everything was working OK with the splitter loom connected, I removed it to wrap it.

 

When it was then re-fitted, a problem revealed itself, with the offside tail light no longer working. Even with the original wiring configuration restored and the splitter loom out of circuit, the tail light stubbornly refused to illuminate. When I unplugged the relevant light unit, I could measure 12v at the plug, but this disappeared as soon as a load (bulb, even LED) was connected. All the signs said I had a high impedance connection somewhere. This was traced to between the fusebox and the 8-pin connector behind the NSR access panel. Immediately I decided this was most likely to be where the Scotchlok had previously been attached. Maybe the Scotchlok blade had cut through part of the cable core. I cut out the offending section of cable and checked the impedance from the cut end back to the fusebox, which was fine. I took that to mean that I had identified the cause I soldered in a new length of wire where the Scotchlok had been located, but it made no difference. This was a nasty surprise, but then it probably was not the smartest thinking anyway. To preserve the cable colour code at the 8-pin connector I had replaced the damaged section of cable but retained the original terminal pin. There was no visible sign of damage or corrosion to the connector, but now I did what I should have done in the first place, and replaced the whole section including the terminal. Finally it was solved and I was able to refit the rear light units and bumper.

 

[Bete Noir]

I own a lot of wheels. Even considering that I have three viable cars and the same number of projects, I have sufficient wheels that I have avoided keeping them all in the same place for fear that my partner might notice how many there are. Once I finally accepted I had thirteen Oz F-1s in 16” that I was unlikely ever to have a use for I reluctantly advertised them for sale.

 

Two sets (the grey and the silver ones in the picture) had tyres which were worn or perished or both, and I sold those quickly and cheaply to people who needed a different size of tyres anyway. The yellow ones had a decent set of Toyo T1-Rs on them so I wanted to see a better price, which was not forthcoming at the time. My solution to this would not be the obvious one to most people, because my plan was to buy another set of wheels.

 

I reasoned that if I found a set of 16” steel wheels for the Caddy, I could fit the Toyos to those, then sell the yellow Oz wheels without tyres, and also sell the black 15” steel wheels which are on the Caddy in earlier posts on this thread.

 

It took a while, but eventually I found a set of Renault Megane Scenic 16” steel wheels which are 4x100 PCD to suit the Caddy. I had been debating whether to paint them in the same grey as the bodywork, but instead I decided on VW LA7Y which is my favoured gunmetal shade for alloy wheels. I wanted to put a red pinstripe on them but I could not work out how to do this neatly until I noticed the lip on the rim. The backs and lips were painted in the same Hammerite ruby red I used on the fronts of the other 15” wheels, and finally after three coats the coverage of the gunmetal looked passable too.

 

Once the T1-Rs (in 205/45 R16) came off the Oz F-1s and onto these Renault wheels, the F-1s went back on eBay. Ironically, they sold for a price that I would happily have accepted for them previously complete with tyres. Happy days indeed.

 

The Renault wheels sat in a stack in the corner of the workshop for a while, but eventually I got them onto the Caddy. They look a bit more ‘scene’ than I was hoping, but I am pretty pleased with them nonetheless. This does now mean I have more Winter-oriented tyres on my 16” wheels and more Summer rubber on the 15” wheels, which is probably the wrong way round, but as part of the object of the exercise was to find a use for the good Toyo tyres this was unavoidable.

 

Meanwhile the black 15” steel wheels were also sold. Having rationalised my wheel collection by selling thirteen Oz F-1s and four steel wheels, I am still not exactly suffering from a wheel shortage!

 

[Bete Noir]

I had been chasing an intermittent fault on the Caddy for months. It would run perfectly, sometimes for ages, then it would lose power, often leading to the engine cutting-out altogether. Whether or not it would restart immediately was unpredictable too. My suspicion fell onto the fuel pump control circuit, and bypassing the fuel pump relay seemed to do the trick as a temporary fix for a while, but this also proved to be less than 100% effective. By this point I had decided there had to be two separate faults, unlikely though that seemed.

 

I made-up a couple of test leads with LEDs so I could observe the function of the fuel pump relay control circuit from the driver’s seat, and this convinced me that the ECU control output was intermittent. The ECU now fitted to the Caddy is itself a replacement which I bought relatively cheaply off eBay a few years ago, so I thought I could easily get another. When I looked I found that the going rate has more than doubled since I bought the last one, and I was not keen to pay £300, so another solution was required.

 

The ECU fuel pump control output is active for a short time when the ignition is switched on, then is deactivated until the ECU detects that the engine is running. Whilst the engine is running the fuel pump is energised constantly, then it is stopped once the engine stops, so that in the event of an accident which causes the engine to stop, the pump will not keep pumping petrol. This seems to me like a pretty desirable safety feature, so I wanted to retain this rather than simply install an override switch to keep the pump running whenever the ignition is on.

 

The obvious solution (to me, at least) was to use an oil pressure switch output to provide the signal to indicate when the engine has stopped running, combined with a simple override to give the initial burst prior to starting. The Caddy has two oil pressure switches fitted, with the additional one feeding an LED located in the row of switches below the central heater vents, so it was straightforward to connect this additionally to a relay circuit to control the fuel pump. The photo shows the revised layout of switches in the dash centre, with the fuel pump override tell-tale LED (green) at the far right, next to the associated switch. The big red LED is from the extra oil pressure switch which I also use to feed the fuel pump control circuit. Inside the glovebox you can see another (green) LED which indicates when the fuel pump relay is energised. I had wired this when I was fault-finding the circuit, and I decided to keep it. It is not illuminated in this picture because I also have a security cut-out switch which was activated when the photo was taken.

 

Having got a solution in place for the pump control circuit, attention now turned to the pump’s power supply. I identified a couple of connections I did not much like the look of, and rectified those, but still the problem persisted. Eventually I tested it with the fuel pump powered direct from the battery, but it still cut out. The pump itself looked like being the culprit, and as this was only a few months old it meant a trip to JKM who had supplied and fitted the Deatschwerks pump which had now failed. Apparently there have been a few recent instances of quality issues with these pumps, which is worrying as I have also installed one in my Ibiza. Jim swapped the failed pump for an APS unit, and after he had also found and repaired a dodgy connection it appears we have got this resolved.

 

After I got the Caddy home I tried running it without my tertiary pump control circuit connected, and it duly misbehaved again, which confirmed that the issue had not just been the fuel pump itself, and the ECU output was (and is) also intermittent.