The high mileage ED30 Hero - On Track Detailing project car

[xjay1337]

Hi guys

Been many years since I have properly posted on the forum, as time constraints and moving away from the VW platform. some older members may know me from over a decade ago from my silly 1.9 TDI big turbo, GTI air ride build ( ) and my big power Scirocco TDI . Some new members must think I'm a massive whopper. 

I purchased Rich's car as I needed a new daily driver and it needed a lot of work to restore which I was in a position to achieve with my business (Detailing and Paint Protection Film installer). Rich was one of the first people I met in the VW scene and loved the car so rather restore it and give it some love than it go to some breaker or scrapyard.

Anyway, rather than doing a load of posts I have done a video docu-series to show the transformation.

There are a couple of little bits I need to do though which will be a more regular post format. 

But for now I will attach the links to the YouTube videos, I hope you enjoy them.

Episode 1, which is purchasing of the car, an initial inspection and doing some basic bits ( steering wheel retrim ) and dropping the car off at my mechanic (my days of being hands on with the oily bits are way behind me - and I'd rather pay my friend than do it myself as I genuinely don't have the time and even if I did, I couldn't be bothered).

[xjay1337]

Episode 2 was the paintwork, due to an incident with a careless driver who hit the car on the driveway, it needed front end paint work.

I had hoped the bumper could be saved but unfortunately it needed replacing as , while the old one could have been repaired, it would have cost so much - so it wasn't worth the time repairing it.

We work with Smash Paintwork in Swallowfield / Reading as Nico's quality of work is great and we have used him on our personal cars as well as customer cars.

So we have a tour of his paintshop here and you can see the car finished.

[xjay1337]

Episode 3 is where me and Dan (who was also a member on this forum and now is basically my bro and business partner) install PPF to protect the freshly painted front end, and then restore the paintwork with a lot of machine polishing, carrying out a paint correction and ceramic coating . In total it's about 65-70 hours of work, as the paint was very heavily swirled and the PPF took a little time as well, not too bad given we did it all custom without patterns due to the cars age.

Plan is to just use the car now for a while, although my commute is changing and going from 20 miles to 50 miles a day. I need to work out if it's financially viable as I have a Mk7 1.6 TDI bluemotion which does 70MPG (as well as a fully forged Renault Megane RS250!)  Ideally my Mrs would use it for work when she sells her car, so at least I can keep hold of it.


Things left to fix, which are pretty minor really and don't impact the car at all -

- The near side auto dimming mirror doesn't work, so I will need to replace the glass, but I hear it's quite expensive, will check with TPS).

- The mirror controller is wired up wrong - so when you set the mirrors to fold, they are actually heating, and the heated mirror setting folds them.

- The washer bottle leaks over half full - Originally I thought the bottle was cracked due to the impact, but it wasn't leaking from there  - (I think it's something to do with the washer jets).

- The car has OEM Xenons but retrofitted, and the shutter isn't wired up, so I will look into activating that with the additional trigger wire

- The car also came with a Polar FIS but Rich said it stopped working so I need to dig out an old printer-USB style cable and see if I can find the Polar updater software.

- Drivers door locking module is dead so 9/10 times it doesn't unlock the door and have to use the key, that's being sorted soon.

Other than that the car drives 10/10 and has no knocks, rattles or other noises and feels very tight, thanks to all of the careful maintenance and tasteful modifications carried out in Rich's previous ownership. It really is an epic car.

[Andy]

Good to see you back on here Jay and rescue Rich old ed30..
The polar fis might need resetting as my old gttdi did this so I disconnected the battery for 5 min the reconnected it and it sorted it..
Keep them updates coming

[Shoduchi]

As Andy said, good to see you back on the forum with Rich's old Eddie.

If what Andy said doesn't work, you can update the PolarFIS with the updater tool. You can find it here: https://autopolar2.com/.

I'll keep an eye out for new updates. 

[RBS]

Nice to see it back👍🏻❤️