My Glorified VW Beetle

[Capt. Obvious]

Welp, time for my first bit of unscheduled maintenance.

I went out to my car to go get lunch on Tuesday and noticed there was a puddle of water under the car. This wasn't the first time it had happened, but I had chalked it up to AC condenser drippings. This time, the puddle was quite a bit larger and it occured to me it was at the back of the car, so it couldn't be the AC. Sure enough, I take a closer look and it's coolant. Yippee. A closer look reveals the water is coming from behind the water pump pulley. Not a huge deal, the water pump is known to only last ~50k miles or so on these cars and it looks like it is the original pump, so it lasted a good 90k miles.


The Good News:
- The leak appears to be due to a bad seal on the pump, not an exploded impeller which is a huge pain in the ass to clean out of the engine.
- The water pump is really easy to get to on these and should only take an hour or two to replace.
- A new OEM pump was under $300 which was surprising since OEM parts for these cars tend to be retarded expensive (for example: an OEM oil filter is almost $30 from the dealer... WTF!?)
- Since I'm doing the water pump, I'll toss in a low-temp thermostat. Several people have gained around 5hp on the dyno by adding one of these, so it's definitely worth the few extra bucks.

The Bad News:
- It FINALLY got nice here in Seattle after a super crappy winter and now the car is sitting in the driveway undrivable. FML
- I had the Passat torn apart to do some work on it anticipating that I would be driving the 996 all week. I had to spend Tuesday night slapping it back together so I could get to work the rest of the week, but the alignment is all kinds of fucked up from putting the new suspension in so I really shouldn't be driving it anyway.
- I was supposed to drive to Portland this weekend to visit some friends and go to a friend's bachelor party, but now neither of my cars are in any condition for that long of a drive.
- Work is kicking my ass lately and I have no idea when the hell I'm going to have enough free time to fix the damn thing.



Too long, didn't read?

- The waterpump blew on the 911 this week, I am annoyed.



Here's a picture someone took of it at a GTG last week:

[Capt. Obvious]

I need to either learn how to take nice pictures or do a shoot of this car with someone who knows what they're doing so I can stop posting photos like this:

[l3xxd]

Rofl. I was going to say that sounds like a roll cage install from hell, but that seems to be an understatement. Well at least you got it figured out! :P

[Capt. Obvious]

The roll cage finally went in this weekend. Holy crap, what a pain in the ass! I had to remove both seats and the center console to get that son of a bastard in there, and the cage I have is considered one of the easier cages to install.

My friend Dave Meister stripped the cage for me and powdercoated a test section with a "chrome" powdercoat he has. It actually turned out really good, but it wasn't quite convincing enough for me. If my car didn't have anything else chrome/polished on it, it would have worked though, it just didn't look right next to actual polished metal.

At this point, I just wanted to get the cage in the car so it can be "finished" for now and I can just drive and enjoy it for the rest of the year. So, I painted the cage with some satin black paint on Saturday and went to install it yesterday morning.

Round 1: "Hmm, looks like if I put the seats all the way forward I can Tetris this fucker in here." Nope.

Round 2: "Rookie mistake, it needs to go in THIS way." Nope.

Round 3: "Guess I have to yank to seats. Damnit, I don't have the special inverted Torx bit needed to remove the bolts." Off to O'Reilly's. :youbestbejokin

Round 4: Seats out, center console out as a precaution, cage wrangled into the car. The front mounts line up just about perfect. The rear mounts are about 4" away from where they are supposed to be. The cage needs to come back out, again.

Round 5: After some sweet-ass backyard engineering involving a floor jack, a pressure-treated 2x6 and a 5 feet long 4/5" diameter solid steal rod I happened to have laying around (thank Dog) I was able to coax the cage back to its intended shape (I'm assuming it got damaged during shipping or something). Unfortunately, the fresh paint is now a bit screwed up, but I need to at least do one last test fit to make sure it fits now before I repaint it. After some more Matrix-like shit I finally get that motherfucker in place and it fits perfect now. At this point, I don't care about the paint anymore so I say "screw it" and bolt it in.

It looks really good in the car and definitely gives it that "this car means business" look. The places where the paint got screwed up aren't really noticeable unless you're really examining the car, so I'll live with it for now. I want to get a few small things repainted over the winter, so I'll pull the cage again when that happens and get it painted Arctic Silver. I'm just glad I didn't spend the money right away to get it professionally painted, or that would have been a couple hundred dollars down the drain.

Lesson learned: Always test-fit aftermarket parts, even the stuff for Porsches can fit like shit.

Oh yeah, no pictures yet because I was too aggrivated by the time I was done. LOL

[Capt. Obvious]

^^^ Good info, thank you. I'll have to look into that some more. I'm actually getting some pretty annoying bump steer with it this low, so I wouldn't be surprised if that has something to do with it. Probably going to pick up some extended tie rod ends as well to help with that.

[AudiOn19s]

There was a bracket for the factory sway bar end links that threads onto the shock body and acts like a giant (over an inch tall) perch. I have aftermarket end links that attach in a different place, so I was able to take that bracket off and get another inch+ of threads to work with. Luckily, there was plenty of shock travel to spare too, so it still rides fine.

Just an FYI, the stock drop link mount (pinch bolt on the wheel carrier) on lowered cars (particularly if you put a GT3 bar on the front) will cause the links to bind and the car will wheel lift pretty badly and sometimes break drop links because the geometry is poor. Just make sure you check the links from time to time.

Moving the drop link up onto the coilover like the GT3 does improves this geometry and is the solution to the problem.

Shorter springs up front would have been a "better" but much more difficult and expensive solution.

[Capt. Obvious]

NICE! those fx's sound nice.. 35 or 45?

It's an FX35. I love the VQ35 in these things, it sounds so badass, even stock. I'm still learning about them, but I think I'm going to add an intake manifold spacer and intake to give it that NA growl. Might do exhaust too, but Sarah wants it to be fairly quiet so I need to see which exhaust options will fit the bill.

[animal]

NICE! those fx's sound nice.. 35 or 45?

[Capt. Obvious]

I'm no photographer, so I apologize for the half-ass cell phone pics. I'll promise I won't post any more pics until I get some real ones taken.

Here's how the car is sitting now:



I still need to do some final dialing-in on that stance, but it's pretty darn close to where I want it now.

Other than that, I need to install the roll cage, then I'll probably just enjoy the car for a few months.

Also, the wife informed me the other day that my cars are getting too much attention and I'm not allowed to do anything else to the 911 until her car gets suspension, wheels and some other stuff. Oh darn.

So, I'm going to have another small project soon.

[HEcreated487]

Drop.Dead.Gorgeous. Patiently awaiting updated pix

[Capt. Obvious]

I saw the car on Thursday (4/5) in the Udistrict. Maybe its your evil twin!

Ah, that explains it. The wife was driving it Thursday.

[EThirtySicks]

Hot as fuck, man! 12" rears, drooooooool.

[TruTaing]

I saw the car on Thursday (4/5) in the Udistrict. Maybe its your evil twin!

[Capt. Obvious]

Oh what? Where was that taken, I don't remember being anywhere like that recently? Must have been when the wife was driving it.

That was taken before I lowered the front more.

[animal]

o goodness gracious.. coming up to seattle in a week to find my new digs. looking forward to seeing these cars around neighbor