1983 Mk2 VW Polo GL classic/derby

[pologaz]

Retro ride #2 of 2 in my stable

Original spec; 1.3 4-speed Polo GL Classic

Nearly finished this one. Here's how she was in June 2005 when acquired;





She was named Doris some years ago by a friend of mine (not me this time, promise)

I attended the gathering in this 2015. One of my reasons for signing up is I appreciate a lot of other Makes of older cars, attending the gathering was a real breath of fresh air after attending many vw shows over the years.

More to follow.

[pologaz]

So the roofrack had to go. The wheels weren't working either. All in all, that picture makes it look really dated in my mind.

There were a long list of problems when I got it. The main one was the alternator packed up on the way back from a car show the weekend I bought it. My friend who I gave a lift to, turned the engine off during a period when it was working and charging a battery at a motorway services. I think if he hadn't done that, we'd've made it home. Instead, the engine cut out about 10 miles short and we had to be rescued. Not a great start!

But after that things started to improve. Managed to find a new alternator and things went from there. The clutch was juddery so I Thought about changing it. But I wasn't about to stick with a 4-speed box when you could get a 5-speed out of a later one for £40.

I was also well stocked with polo spares after scrapping a couple of breadvans I had lying around:


This one was a keeper and I Was gutted when it was written off.


Started stripping it, suspension was GT spec, therefore betterer


Started cutting up the shell with a deadly 8 or 9" grinder, i forget exactly.


This made removing the rear axle a doddle



Wish someone had bought this off me, but nobody did. MOT ran out, broke for spares


off she goes - didn't need the suspension off this one







Anti roll bar and gear linkage from a 5speed. The green blocks are an aftermarket replacement for the rubber bushings used on the arb. They stop the suspension wandering about.

Ok so cars dismantled and disposed of, gearbox swapped, flywheel and clutch changed to suit. Suspension also changed as the front anti roll bar is different on later cars with the 5-speed box.

Put some polo GT steels on it I had lying around. Time for another car show






This time I made it there and back no probs, and driving at motorway speeds was a lot more bearable!

[pologaz]

Some more pictures from around this time. Forgot to mention I'd visited a friend who fitted a full set of tinted glass for me, I decided to get a brand new windscreen complete with retro blue top tint















Up next, I Decided I wanted to extract some more poines out of the old 1300. This car came with the early 1272cc 60hp mechanical tappet version of the VW small block first fitted to the audi 50.

Another variant of the engine made 75hp so I knew it was possible to achieve a bit more out of the old girl.

I looked at my options. The easiest one was a carb upgrade. The car was fitted with a solex 34 with a manual choke and there were a couple of weber options

[pologaz]

Now prior to this, I'd always had cars cars with fuel injection and I'd converted any carb'd vehicle I had over to injection. that white polo you saw earlier was converted to run single point fuel injection using the parts off a later car. This was in place of the temperamental and much maligned pierburg 2e3 with autochoke - an efficient carb when running properly and serviced correctly. But awful when not. It transformed the car, and I was tempted to do it again as I had most of the parts.

There were some design issues to overcome, the car was too early to have the fuel injection pump/filter/accumilator cradle support under the car, and the fuel lines were all wrong. The extra wiring would need to be added. The fuel tank was also wrong and to change that required a different exhaust which required different hadnbrake cabels and handbrake mounting.

So at that time (2005-6) that was enough to put me off. I'd looked at what was different between the 60hp and 75hp engine and started trawling ebay for the uprated parts

There are some fundamental differences between the 60 and 75hp engine. One being the compression ratio. The 60hp engine has a compression ratio of 8.2:1 while the 75hp engine has a compression ratio of 11:1. Surprisingly enough, the polo engine tuners on the continent prefer the 60hp engine as a base due to its combustion chamber design.



The combustion chamber being in the head allows for the running of higher lift cams. Together with skimming/decking and thinner headgasket there's lots of extra compression to be had.

Ignition system - the 60hp engine used points, the 75hp engine used an ecu to control advance, calculated from a vacuum pressure sensor to detect engine load. I'd already ditched the points for electronic ignition some time before using a combination of SAAB and mk2 golf parts, but the ECU was the holy grail and I was lucky enough to find the loom new old stock and 2 second hand ECUs for under £50

Next up - inlet manifold


This is actually a comparison between the later 55hp engine and the 75 - but you get the idea. It's bigger therefore betterer.

Finally carb options. Webcon did a kit to convert the pierburg 2e3 used on the 75hp engine into a weber 28/32 DMTR. One of these didn't immediately present itself but I did find a weber 32/34 DMTL as replacembet for the pierburg 2e2 fitted to 1.6 golf (Also 75hp) I figured a bit of jetting and I'd be away.


The DMTL kit.

Wasn't quite as straightforward as I'd hoped doing the weber conversion. It wasn't simply a matter of swapping the manifold and carb and away I went. Oh no. This car was being awkward.

[pologaz]

The awkwardness was all the exhaust's fault. The exhaust does some extra work on these early engines. It has extra ports to heat up the inlet manifold, then, with a separate connecting pipe, it joins with the main system under the car. The exhaust manifold also has a restriction to help the exhaust flow through the inlet manifold. It's a bit of a dogs dinner.

So these ports needed to be blocked off in the head, as the new manifold didn't cover them up, so the exhaust was just open to atmosphere on the inlet side of the engine. Only way I could see this being done is at a machine shop. So off with the head!

Before I started


Head off, some cleaning of the block done



Head off to get those holes sealed up. Need to find an exhaust. Friend of mine is breaking a mk2F saloon with a G40 conversion. Full cobbled together exhaust available cheap. Great. That'll do nicely. For now anyway, I want a stainless one doing when this is all sorted and back on the road

Everything sorted and up and running. Head skim and thin gasket increases compression ratio to around 10:1 (i did many calculations at the time, but these are long since forgotten)





It should be fairly obvious from this pic why the exhaust had a short future! Also some alloys were purchased, but more on them later.

All up and running. I'd fitted a lambda probe in the exhaust, since it was off a car with fuel injection, there was provision for it. This gave me an indication of how the fuelling was doing. I was able to jet it really nicely for cruising. But top end felt flat. But there was no more time for messing about. It's off to another show.

[pologaz]

I wasn't driving this time though. One of my friends had a G40 converted saloon (different G40 converted saloon to the one previously mentioned) and we had planned this big road trip, along with some other poloers to, what would end up being, the last VW mania ever, in Belgium in 2006.

So I Brought myself, my tent and some alcohols and we set off in my friends G40. All was well until we hit traffic on the M6 near hilton park services, when this happened:


That's not me in the pic, but I am also ginger, for reference.



Car was clearly a write off. Some bellend in an E36 went into the back of us in stop/start traffic. Perhaps he was sending an SMS. It was 2006 afterall.

So what, were we going to do now?

[darrenh]

brings back allot of cool memories i had a C reg boulevard and did the GK manifold + weber + ashley 4 branch on that too (in a former life as oddball ). in the end the power was nudging GT levels, while still low compression carb engine

p.s what the ff at the windscreen washer tank yearly top ups

[pologaz]

I've never topped it up in 11 years! I had to drain it once for some reason but I kept the fluid and refilled.

I remember you mate - white mk2 coupe with colour coded plastics and it had the HK engine?

[pologaz]

Ok. The next part of the story. It was around lunchtime when the accident happened. We had a hotel booked near folkstone and a trip on the chunnel booked for early the morning after.

We had a couple of options:

Give up and go home
Get back down there, somehow.

I had my mk2 saloon. I'd done all this work on it recently. So confidence in it was pretty high in it not blowing up on the journey. It'd be hard work though, getting back down with the time we had, hoping to get some amount of sleep before the journey continued. I also didn't have the insurance or breakdown cover for the trip. Several phone calls while heading back home in the recovery truck sorted that. The trip was back on again!

We got back to Manchester around 5o'clock. I had to collect my car from work as I stored it in the factory car park at the time. By the time we'd sorted all of the logistics out, we were heading back down south around 7PM. At least the traffic would be pretty light. A good 5 hour drive lay ahead of us, and we'd already spent 6-7 hours traveling in some form or other.

After the poor start with my mate's car, we got down to the hotel around midnight. We had to be up at 5AM to get on the train.

We made the train and got over to the other side. It was then 2-3 hours to get to our destination. Foot down!
The only problem we had was keeping up with everybody with G40 engines and newer 16v/GTIs! My car was the slowest there, but probably the most economical. There were frequent fuel stops, but we all got there in one piece. A few lairy moments, when everybody suddenly dived off into a services and I had to come off the sliproad alongside another lad in the convoy. But all safely there.

Pic mid convoy pitstop in france.



Our convoy managed to get a group pic on the main show field at mania as the event was winding down. Had an absolute blinder. Can't remember much of it as the alcohol seemed very potent that weekend. I got terribly lost at one point trying to find my tent. The place was on an enormous scale like no car show I've been to over here.

There then followed a mad-dash to the Sunday night train back over to blighty. We'd booked a hotel on the south coast again and we probably slept 12 hours that night. The final drive home occuring sometime the following day.



The mileage all-told. Doesn't seem that far now but at the time it was twice as far as I'd ever driven.

[pologaz]

I forget half the things I've done on this car. It had all new brakes around this time. From the master cylinder to the brake lines right through to the rear shoes. I also upgraded the front brakes to vented discs and bigger pads. I fitted braided lines while I was there. This made the brakes everso slightly better than they were before. The polo is somewhat lacking in the brake department due to lack of servo.

Time for another car show - you can see the wheels a bit better now


I'd put a better exhaust on by this point






Someone else took this pic with a better camera.


managed to find some less knackered seats in the correct fabric. Although they turned out to be more knackered underneath (welds gone)

The wheels were actually two completely different alloys. The fronts were ATS cups, the rears were CW-borbet of some type I can't remember. They looked very similar and I was on the lookout for another two of the CW wheels for the front. They are only 6" wide but have crazy dish.



I just had to get  a full set!!

[pologaz]

I set up an ebay saved search and I began to play the waiting game. Meanwhile it was wintertime and I was contemplating the future of the car. At the end of 2006 I was made redundant and had some spare money so I thought I'd get it resprayed and the rust sorted. So I started doing some of the preparations.

Carpets out, seats out. New seats trial fitted (from a corrado, more legroom in the front, zero legroom in the back)





Got distracted with some other wheels that turned up


Ready to go. Sort of. I stripped the rest at the bodyshop.

[pologaz]

May 2007 it entered the bodyshop. It emerged, finally, in September 2008! It was being done as a sort of favour by a mate's-dad's-mate so he did it when he wasn't busy. Unfortunately he was never not busy and I had to badger him regularly to get it done. But in the end he did, and here it is:



Wasn't a huge amount of love for the Borbet A's. A lot of people thought I'd ruined it. What I'd actually ruined was the tyres. They didn't fit under the front arches at all.

Fortunately, my patience paid off and I found myself the proud owner of a full set of the CW-Borbet thingies I'd only had a pair of previously.





A whole year had actually gone by now since the car was painted, but apart from the wheels I hadn't done much. Bought a house with a garage and the polo took a bit of a back seat for a while. But once I was in, I started thinking about what to do next.

[pologaz]

I was never completely happy with the carb setup. It always felt a bit flat. No matter what carb I used, the larger DMTL (probably too large) or the correct size DMTR, it just didn't have the pickup that was expected. I had it rolling roaded at the club rolling road day and it made 76bhp. So I should have been pretty happy with that, but I wasn't particularly.

I investigated a few options. There are a lot of conversions of different types out there. You can drop in anything up to a 1.6 16v from a 6n2 polo GTI with little-to-no fabricating, it's the fueling that requires the most work. I'd toyed with the idea as early as 2005 of a 1.6 8v running on a carb or carbs, but with the solid lifter head so it looked period and also the solid lifter heads tend to rev better. But there were a few problems with a block I found and some design issues and so I ended up scrapping the idea on grounds of cost. I also didn't like the idea of changing the engine while there wasn't anything wrong with it, so I started thinking about a fuel injection conversion.

I ended up buying another breaker for the parts to do the conversion. Found a polo GT (1.3 MPI, 75bhp) in Leeds for £150 and had it brought back on a low loader. Stripped the shell and sold off what I didn't need. It was around this time that I was offered a 1400cc block for cheap cheap and I decided I coudldn't say no. So it didn't take me very long to get over the idea of taking the original engine out. Hopefully it would go to a good home.

I'd done a 1.4 GT conversion years before on a breadvan and it turned a very peaky engine into more of an all-rounder. It just added that bit extra torque low-down that someone might have said was a good component of the 8v golf GTI. I took it to santa pod a couple of times and managed to beat a few of them. Great fun.

[pologaz]

I'd acquired some parts to do the 1.6 carb engine while the car was being resprayed. Mostly for the solid lifer head. I still liked the idea of using the solid lifter head with the 1400 block. I just needed a slightly later one with a heron head. Unfortunately, the first one I found was cracked between valves on one of the cylinders but the second one I found was ok. So I got a machine shop in Rochdale to rebuild and port the head and fit the uprated parts I'd sourced

springs


Meanwhile I removed the old 1300. The guy who bought it put in in a mk1 golf on bike carbs and still has it today.


Quite a lot of time elapsed. Almost another year, before I finished the swap. Not sure why it took so long, I think I was probably waiting for the head to come back (another one who was always too busy)

Swap was pretty straightfoward. All the mounts are the same, flywheel and clutch, gearbox. It could all be transferred. I had to swap the drive pulley on the crank to the early tooth profile to drive the pulley for the solid lifer head, and I had to find a temperature sender that coudl be threaded into the aluminium thermostat housing (later cars use a plastic one) I found a vauxhall one that does the job nicely. and that was about it


Oh yes and I changed wheels again. This time Passat 15" steel wheels (Sometimes called "G60 winter wheels")

The difficult bit was what to do about the fuel tank and handbrake. Well it turns out you can still fit the lift pump in the early carb tank just about, and everything else can therefore be left alone. It was a simple solution to what otherwise would have been a very difficult problem.

[darrenh]

right you are on the white coupe. still single handedly the best car i ever owned, i do miss it. i've been told its been scrapped now i sold it to a very enthusiastic lady owner who had even given it a name, which i was sure would secure its future!! Then i heard it was sold on and spent the rest of its days sunk to the axles in mud under a yew tree in a church yard, with the owner refusing to sell it due to rarity of parts and stupid asking price

[pologaz]

Parts have gone up in value a lot. I think I paid £20-30 for the GK inlet manifold. By the time I sold it it was worth considerably more.

I was after a vw motorsport rocker cover for mine some years ago and even then they were over £100. Not sure how much they go for now

[steveo3002]

gaz any words of wisdom for fuel lines? ive got a carb polo and most of the gt set up to swap over but no fuel lines , is it worth holding out for the orig stuff as no one wants to sell me any , or cobble something else up?

[pologaz]

If you've got the fuel pump cradle and accumulator you could just make the lines. Probably best to make the plastic sections from 8mm and 6mm kunifer, lift pump lines are 6mm to and from the accumulator and main lines front to back are 8mm.

[pologaz]

Some more pics from that weekend. I swapped the borbet As for the G60s. The Deep dish CW wheels were in need of a refurb. Lots of lacquer peel.





Some mk1 Derbys joined the party







Interior shot. I'd decided to change to a smaller wheel. The Scirocco wheel was just too big and too thin. Not nice to hold or operate.

Hadn't quite gotten around to retrimming the seats...

[steveo3002]

thanks for the pipe info

how do they feel on 15s? normal or like its on stilts