Golfing with Ghosty: IT NEVER ENDS

[Supernaut]

Skim it again!

High compression, yo!

 

I am not an expert. Clearly.

[Noel Tidybeard]

...oh wait!

[SiC]

Speak to a good machine shop and see what they reckon. It's their business and so should have plenty of real world experience on what is passable. 

[dome]

2 hours ago, Noel Tidybeard said:

...oh wait!

Car magazine from 1992, after running an early MK3 VR6...

 

[Noel Tidybeard]

4 minutes ago, dome said:

Car magazine from 1992, after running an early MK3 VR6...

 

OMG i remember that

[Ghosty]

Been offered a 115k EZ from a local lad that's also got a CL and has put a 2.0 in it on bike carbs.

New lifters and a GTI cam.


£80.

No brainer!

 

[drewd]

Sounds like a bit of a bargain.

[SiC]

Pretty sure you should just set up a garage changing head gaskets on cars. You must be getting good at it! 

[Low ontime]

44 minutes ago, Ghosty said:

Been offered a 115k EZ from a local lad that's also got a CL and has put a 2.0 in it on bike carbs.

New lifters and a GTI cam.


£80.

No brainer!

 

Misery into positive! 
on a Monday too… 

[Ghosty]

17 minutes ago, SiC said:

Pretty sure you should just set up a garage changing head gaskets on cars. You must be getting good at it! 

I haven't done one since 2019 this is my first non-Honda one too.

[SiC]

Just now, Ghosty said:

I haven't done one since 2019 this is my first non-Honda one too.

Out all of the (shonky) cars I've owned, I've never had to do one!

(Famous last words from a BMW owner that are known for cooling system issues...)

[bangernomics]

That’s a result. Pull the other to bits and have both skimmed? Pre built spare then.


Gzongenflatch
In memory of Phil.

[Ghosty]

I don't know if I'll do anything with the 'old' head as it's pretty badly warped between the cylinders and I'm not sure how skimmable it is. It's clean, but that's about it.

The GTI cammed one will get a skim this week then the car will get put back together.

Meanwhile, I had a show to go to in the Civic. I'd taken the gearbox off, but the flywheel wasn't looking too smart, so I ran to Stoke on Friday to buy a replacement. Threw everything in: clutch gearbox etc, and finished work about 10pm Saturday night, for a 6am start the next day:



It turns out I forgot to put the vacuum advance lines back on the dizzy, but aside from that everything is fine and the car was faultless. 320 miles down is a bloody good shakedown.

I also picked up a rust free sunroof cassette that I'm in the process of swapping the glass from my rotten sunroof into, so I can fit the new headliner I've made.

 

 

[IronStar]

1 minute ago, Ghosty said:

I don't know if I'll do anything with the 'old' head as it's pretty badly warped between the cylinders and I'm not sure how skimmable it is. It's clean, but that's about it.

The GTI cammed one will get a skim this week then the car will get put back together.

Meanwhile, I had a show to go to in the Civic. I'd taken the gearbox off, but the flywheel wasn't looking too smart, so I ran to Stoke on Friday to buy a replacement. Threw everything in: clutch gearbox etc, and finished work about 10pm Saturday night, for a 6am start the next day:



It turns out I forgot to put the vacuum advance lines back on the dizzy, but aside from that everything is fine and the car was faultless. 320 miles down is a bloody good shakedown.

I also picked up a rust free sunroof cassette that I'm in the process of swapping the glass from my rotten sunroof into, so I can fit the new headliner I've made.

 

 

Reading this makes me really happy! Great job on the Civic, and a good outing.

Any nice bystander comments on it?

[Ghosty]

Just now, IronStar said:

Any nice bystander comments on it?

Not many, but it was parked right out of the way. As ever some bugger mistook it for a CRX which I just can't get my head around.
I've had quite a few supportive comments from internet pals that are glad I got it there though.

 

[IronStar]

Just now, Ghosty said:

Not many, but it was parked right out of the way. As ever some bugger mistook it for a CRX which I just can't get my head around.
I've had quite a few supportive comments from internet pals that are glad I got it there though.

 

Similar design language, but that would make me laugh if it was mine. 
Yeah, great effort after it got home on a big bus the other week. Golf will follow along soon! 

[Ghosty]

5 minutes ago, IronStar said:

but that would make me laugh if it was mine. 

It gets old very quickly... people think the Golf is a GTI too! I'm very glad I didn't buy a Daimler when I was looking at S3 XJs a few years ago.

[IronStar]

3 minutes ago, Ghosty said:

It gets old very quickly... people think the Golf is a GTI too! I'm very glad I didn't buy a Daimler when I was looking at S3 XJs a few years ago.

To be fair, not many non-GTI mk2s left in that good nick. 😄 I certainly haven’t seen one for ages here. 

[Ghosty]

The cammed Golf head has gone off for a skim and will be back tomorrow.

Civic has been having idling issues. Turns out it's only idling on cylinders 3 and 4: the carb over 1 and 2 isn't fuelling at idle, nor is it sucking in any air, and the two cylinders it feeds aren't firing as a result. Somehow, the spark plug on one of these also had a bent electrode that had closed the plug gap entirely.

Taking the 'cap' off the carb, removing the needle, spring and piston does nothing, so the problem is clearly lower down. If you put some fuel/brake cleaner/alternative combustible liquid down the throat it will briefly run on four.

The carbs are off the written off Civic - I swapped them around as the choke was irrepairably damaged on the original ones, and also because they were taken apart and cleaned up when my mum owned that car - more of a service than a rebuild, mind. I fear the diaphragm might have failed.

Carbs aren't the hardest thing in the world to get hold of, but they go for £100-150 a pair. Rebuild kit? Nope.

Hmmmm.

[Ghosty]

Right, it's definitely a carb issue. It fuels on throttle, because the accelerator pump is working and putting fuel in the venturi. However at idle it isn't, making me think a jet's blocked.

Timing is fine, plugs all look fine, nothing is leaking, and a compression test gave 175 across the board, so no issues there. It runs fine on load.

Rebuild kits for the carbs at least in a Honda sense don't exist unfortunately, the carbs are close relatives of the CVs on Harley-Davidson motorbikes though (and some Hondas supposedly but it's all Harley stuff that comes up), and there's a lot of diagrams of those, which is a mild help. Parts aren't the same though, if you wanted to re-jet using bike jets AIUI you have to drill out the carbs.

All the jetting and metering/float stuff is on the underside of the carbs, so it's inlet manifold off if I need to get under there... and I don't really want to.

They are a 40mm venturi... who was it that said DCOEs were excessive?

[barefoot]

Let me begin by emphasising that I know nothing about camshafts and am very definitely not a mechanic, but can I suggest that you perhaps shouldn't put the GTI cam onto the relatively slow revving engine that you have. I knew of a bloke who did this very mod to his Scirocco and told me that immediately afterwards, it'd do 130mph. I expressed delight & wonderment at his skills, pointing out that for VW to achieve just 118mph from the GTI Golf, they had to add fuel injection, a close ratio gear box and another 200cc as well. But I've also heard of people who've put fuel injected GTI engines onto the 4+E gearbox and complain that nothing works because all the ratios are too long, and folk who've put the close ratio boxes onto the low compression carb engine and again, the engine runs out of puff before achieving anything. Please don't misunderstand, and I'm sure you could swap the camshaft back in a heartbeat, but I don't want you to waste a load of time & effort for disappoints.

[Rust Collector]

I had a 1.6 Golf Driver, and a big annoyance was that on my commute along the A27 to work, it could hold 70+ on the flat in 5th but would lose a lot of speed on the hills unless you chased the gears down the box.

I chucked an 8v gti cam into the engine (shortly after doing the HG, as it happens!) and it markedly improved the drivability of the car. I could hold speed uphill in 5th finally, and it was just perkier all around.

Ive still got the engine in my garage, sadly not the car though.

After that experience, I’d say that an 8v gti cam is the first thing I’d put in any of the lower power 1.6 or 1.8 8v VW engines of that era.

[barefoot]

I stand corrected.

[Ghosty]

The GTI cam is purely a bonus: I posted on the mk2 group on FB that I'd had HGF, and apropos of nothing, a chap ten minutes away messages me and offers me an entire EZ with a GTI cam and new lifters, for £80. He'd taken it out of his Driver to fit a 2.0 EA827 he made himself out of an Audi 80 bottom end and a GTI head, on bike carbs. Impressive really! I took the head off and left the cast block for scrap as I had no way to move it.
He said that he found that the GTI cam did make a difference to the car and improved the driveability - if you ask online you get a load of grumbles of 'not worth it' and the like, but people that actually do it seem to speak well of it.

The basic 1.6 would have had a Pierburg carb originally, and 75bhp. The car has had a Weber conversion that was done prior to my ownership, along with a K&N filter in the airbox, and I've added an 8v GTI 4-2-1 exhaust manifold and a 2" Jetex exhaust, to replace the standard cast iron/mild steel EZ 4-1 and 1.75" stainless straight pipe to a single backbox. FWIW, it has 1.8 spark plugs too, and the dizzy has been replaced with a cheap 1.8 unit- the 1.8 dizzy has a slightly more aggressive vacuum advance curve for more throttle response.

Between all that, the cam, and the head skim, I'd say that there's genuine potential for the Golf to be putting out 10bhp over standard (laugh all you like, but arse dyno certainly feels like it hits 100bhp/ton, which would be 85bhp).

The 1.8 with a Weber puts out 90bhp, it'd be interesting to compare the breathed-on EZ to a 1.8.

[Ghosty]

2mm difference in height between these...

'Skim it again' wasn't going to work.

[Ghosty]

Carb issue on the Civic was a vac leak, a blank had been knocked off the end of a pipe.

Steady idle restored.



As long as I've had the car water has pooled in the footwells. The sunroof cassette was horrifically rotten. As mentioned I collected a better sunroof last week, today I swapped the glass over and fitted a new 'alcantara' headliner I made, and recovered the sunroof blind. I also added some fancy perspex sunvisors to replace the knackered originals (everything in the roof was rotten from water ingress).

It makes a huge difference, and I only broke one bit of trim getting it in....

[Zelandeth]

Well done.  Anyone who has the patience to deal with anything involving headliners and things hidden above them has my immense respect!

[Ghosty]

eight hours later...



Fucker won't start though, starter has packed in again, and there's nothing but a click from the solenoid. More investigation needed.

[Ghosty]

It's alive!

Wandered down to the scrappy and got a battery. That's helped matters, and the old Junkyard Digs screwdriver across the starter solenoid spins up the bendix, ruling that out. It doesn't always engage the starter now, but it's doing so fairly consistently, so any issues are down to wiring - suspect something has gone high resistance, like what plagues XUDs.
It runs, and well! Feels about the same - compression will be a bit lower, but the more aggressive cam levels that back out, and it's a lot smoother to boot.

[Ghosty]

 

Well that was fucking close. Took it out for a drive to see how things were. It was smoking a bit - I initially feared the expansion tank, but found that oil was somehow leaking onto the inlet manifold. I'd periodically stop to clean it out. By the time I got home, enough oil had run down on to the cast exhaust manifiold, where it could easily pool, and, well, yeah.

Either the breather is blocked or the rocker gasket is leaking.

Never fucking ends, does it?