Well.. I missed the forum, and found an excuse to come back on
I sold my G40 a while ago as you know, had an affair with a rather sexy Japanese car, felt guilty and bought another VW. I really miss my G, I love the power delivery and the fact it was only a little 1.3 plus it sounded immense! and good on fuel! So after buying a few engines for my mk1 and not being happy with them then selling them on, I think ive settled for a G40 lump. Ive looked at every possible engine, they are all a bit boring or silly expensive. A g60 lump would be nice, but people want up to £1500 for a setup!! The Golf weighs as much as a G40 so will be just as fun
I m going to put a wanted add up. but if anyone knows of one for sale let me know, even if its in bits. I dont mind, rebuilt a couple now
Heres my build thread so far (copied from retro rides where I originally posted it)
Well, I've been meaning to start a build thread for quite a while now and as I've reached a milestone in the progress of my car what better time to start!
As I sit here typing this on a borrowed laptop, I can't help but grin from ear to ear. I feel a huge sense of achievement; in the last 3 months I've worked as many possible weekends, evenings, overnights and holidays on what could possibly have been the most rotten MK1 golf on this island. A car that should have been sent to car heaven, with far more work required to get it even close to road legal than it's own value, but I've always loved working long hours on my cars. There's something about working all those weekends late into the evening, asking favour upon favour from friends to give up their free time at home in the warm to get their hands dirty, work all weekend with 3 hours sleep and give you a hand doing the impossible. Like stripping all the panels off a Polo and respraying the entire car in a weekend (when you told your manager your "just doing a few blow ins") it makes you really attached to your car. Its such an amazing feeling when you finally get to drive it, it makes it feel like so much more, you appreciate it and each drive of it is more like an event than just a drive.
I feel I should say now that this will probably be the last build thread I will do for a while and I'd like to tell people a bit about myself and my love of cars in detail rather than just a string of pictures (thats not to say you can't just scroll through the photos and piece it together, as thats just as fun) but I recommend you grab a cup of tea and prepare for a bedtime story.
A bit about my love for carsI think the best place to start is at the beginning and with how much I love cars. Everyone into cars say's this but "I've always loved cars since I was kid",I really have. All of my toys growing up were just cars. My favourite was a Castrol replica 90's Toyota Celica. I've always loved watching rallying and touring cars from when I was little. I think my fascination came from my parents; my dad has always been motorbike obsessed and my step dad used to pit crew for a drag racing team, so I'd spend weekends with him watching drag racing at santa pod from a young age.
In year 10 of school I did work experience at my local garage and loved it, so much so that I got my first job there at the age of 14! I used to work Saturday mornings and as much as I could in my holidays. Not long after this I got my first taste of owning a vehicle. At 15 I got my first 50cc bike, a very early Aprilia RS50. It was an absolute wreck, the guy who owned it had used it to rag around a field but still, I was 15 and just got my first bike! Not long after this I left school and knew exactly what I wanted to do. Study mechanics at college of course! After a few years at college, 3 motorbikes and a car later I landed an apprenticeship at BMW as a mecahnic. I felt incredibly lucky. I met some great like minded friends there that have helped motivate and inspire me on my projects. Once I'd finished my mechanics apprenticeship I was then offered another apprenticeship within BMW studying paint spraying! It meant £3.50 an hour for another two years and emptying bins but I didn't care, I'd have two qualifications under my belt!
During my time at BMW I made some great friends who were more into their retro rides, which spurred me onto purchase my first old and "almost classic car". It was an obvious purchase though of course, everyone must own one in their lifetime - A MK2 Golf. I absolutely loved it! It was a 3 door in capri green, a 1.6 driver. It was the slowest car I'd ever driven but it was so much fun, got so much attention and was immaculate. The car was low mileage and hadn't been driven for two years, so naturally I drove it two hours home the longest way around the M25 and even being it's first run after those two years it didn't miss a beat.
After a while I got a bit bored of the lack of power. So I grabbed Dan, my apprenticeship mate from BMW and went to look at 5 different MK2 Gti's in one day. The last one we came across was in a farmyard and as we walked up the drive we passed a MK2f Polo G40. I'd never seen one before but it was capri green, the same colour as my Golf. As we got closer to his house we noticed his yard was strewn with many Polos, Golfs and anything old. He had a very rare MK2 Polo non face-lift G40 from Germany, which I'm sure only 500 in the world were made(?) I had a look at the Golf and it turned out not to be worth it but the little Polo had caught my attention, I loved the shape. I didn't know anything about a G40 then, so I signed up to the G40 forum and enquired about the car. As it was only down the road I went and had a quick passenger ride and a proper look over the car. It was dark and raining when I arrived but the owner took me out anyway. It was tiny inside compared to my Golf, rattly and generally smelt pretty bad but as we pulled out and the guy got onto the main road, he put his foot down and very abruptly I was thrown into the back of my seat. I was not expecting this! Everything outside started to become a blurr and before I knew it we were screaming down a country road at night in the rain in a poor handling car at 110mph in 4th! The smile was so big on my face and it stayed like that for a few days. As soon as we got back to his place I told him I'd have it and agreed to pay full asking price. I didn't have any money so I asked my nan and £2500 later I was driving away with possibly the most fun I've ever had in a car.
By now I'd had 10 cars/bikes at the age of 20. However the Polo was not all what it seemed. It turned out to be a bit of a bodge. It had been fiddled around with at some point. For example it had a fully forged bottom end (not to my knowledge when I bought the car)and a remap for g60 injectors but with g40 injectors fitted. During my two years of ownership of the G40 I made some fantastic friends of the forum, learnt a heck of a lot about modifying cars and really got my first taste of modifying and just how addictive it is. As well as driving the most incredible roads in the world on an amazing road trip, by the time I'd finished with the Polo I'd resprayed it and sympathetically restored it.
After a few 2000 mile road trips in the Polo and using it every day to get to work, it had clearly proven it was ... you could say, unreliable. So after coming back from a Wales road trip I decided to start looking again. A good friend of mine who I spent most my free time with at college whilst doing my apprenticeship had a DC2 Integra. I loved the car, it was so much fun and most definitely the best car I've been a passenger in. Coincidently just up the road from my girlfriends house was a very 'rough around the edges' dc2 Integra. It had been there for years with a 'for sale' sign in it's window so I went and had a look. There on the window was a price in small print... £2000.. I couldn't believe how cheap it was. It turned out to be a JDM 1996 type R! The reason it was so cheap turned out to be because the guys mum was sick of it being on the driveway, so she decided the sale price herself and put it in the window! Haha. Again, I didn't have the money and I like to make things difficult, so I sourced a standard g40 engine in bits from a new friend I'd made on the G40 forum (by far the best forum ive been on, everyone is friendly and helpful, I've made many, many great friends on there) I converted the G40 back to standard and sold all my modified bits to afford the very under-priced Integra. A few handshakes later and there I was driving around in possibly the filthiest Dc2 in the UK. Ihe guy had used it as a daily for his kids and dogs for a while and then left it standing for years. During my ownership I resprayed the car at a workshop I was sharing with a friend and rebuilt the cylinder head as the cambelt snapped. I also broke my Nurburgring virginity and got caught speeding in Switzerland which led to myself and some road trip buddies being banned from the country as well as getting a 1200 Euro speeding fine!! ...But more on road trips later.
By this time I'd also landed my dream job. Restoring classic cars. I was so lucky, they wanted me to do mechanical and paint, I couldnt believe it! I got the job around the time of my birthday and I havent stopped smiling since. I love it there. My first job was to fully restore a series one etype which took me 7 months. My manager is more like a friend and the guys there are just as crazy as I am about cars. The owner of the land is so down to earth and owns 40+ classic cars himself!! Lotus Cortina, E9 batmobile and Etypes amoung them . Since working at Pittlane I've learnt an incredible amount. It's the most rewarding job in the world. You get to know the customers whos cars your working on and you get to see just how enthusiastic they are about their cars which is great!
The workshop was a prefab, but we dug the foundations ourselves (with the help of other crazy friends) we kitted inside out with insulation, lighting, an extraction for painting as well as all the tools you could ever need to restore a car. It was fantastic! Unfortunately, due to me living so far away and wanting to do my own cars more so than making money, it didn't work out. The workshop lives on currently storing his stunning mk1 golf and lovely immaculate BMW z3.
Many thanks for reading so far, I hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as I have writing it.
Taylor