[MattRabbit]

I'm in Orlando. You drive the whole way here from Volusia by taking back roads? That must take a day! You are a brave soul, for sure!

 

[allklrnoflr]

just moved to delrico last year thanks to the economy, spent rest of my life in o.c., so i know where your at, spent alot of time off may- town rd, in the bogs. hope to meet you at the gtg.:thumbup:

 

[BoostedOne]

Yep, 5A is about a 20 min ride down the road, and its freakin awesome! I haven't been out there since Memorial Day I don't think but that was one awesome weekend!

Ended up pullin a guy a few miles in a 8000lb S10 to the parking area LOL.. Powerstroke over all :laugh:

Matt, its not that bad really.. I knew people that live in Waterford, and it only takes me like 10 mins longer to get home.. Its only a few redlights, mostly just 55mph driving on two lane roads. I'll take that over a 10 mile commute at an average of 15mph any day. I decided I could live my life based on work, and live in a average house on a tiny lot and deal with nosy neighbors, noise, and crime.. Or I could live where I wanted to and have a trek to work but outside of that be exactly where I want to be.. I can have 100 parts cars on my property if I wanted to, and noone would complain.. I am out running the compressor, grinders, etc at 2am, noone complains. I can shoot my guns in the yard, basically do what I want.. People aren't nosy, but they look out... Like, when you came by that night Erik, you were noticed, even before getting lost. I really like it.. Its like, you would have to be crazy to come around here to do dirt because you should figure that 98% of the people out here are well armed, but if that doesn't deter someone its nice to know that anyone who doesn't live here sticks out like a sore thumb and gets noticed.. And if somehow you didnt get noticed, you got photographed by someone's game cameras.


Anyhow, Im beyond exhausted... Sure had a full weekend..
Got the rear axled final centered and welded to the spring perches. New rear wheel bearings and seals installed, rear brakes, shocks hooked back up, fixed the fuel lines where I crushed it loading the truck on the trailer the night I bought it... Also, not necesarily in this order, also installed the new control arm bushings, ball joints, tie rod ends, rotors, pads, stainless brake lines I got from the junkyard, bled the brakes, installed the windsheild with a new seal, pulled the rear slider out of my other caddy and isntalled that, got the engine running with the wiring from the truck instead of jumper wires, got the alternator installed ummm... Video link below if you click the pic of the engine...



Its been hard to get much done... The weather has been SUCKING. Main reason this blows is because the main thing I need to get done is I need to strip and paint the doors.. Stripping the doors requires dryness.. Here is what it looks like at about 4:30pm on the average afternoon.. It should be bright and sunny..

Oh yeah, disassembled and fixed/cleaned the high beam low beam switch, now my headlights work again. And I did manage to get the doors blasted.. It ended up taking 14, 50lb bags of sand to do it.. The old paint on this thing sucked.. Also had to haul the sand in the back seat of my truck since it was raining so damned much..

Pic the other night after getting the windsheild in..

I also fought a bit with the Recaros from my MkII but couldnt get them in.. I think I need to energize the motors and raise them to the high setting to get them in? I cant get them to drop in the tracks.

Anyhow I did manage to get the doors stripped.. Blasted inside and out. Found 4 rust holes. One on the top of the drivers door, one on bottom of drivers door, and two on the passenger door. The passenger door rust was in the same spot, one hole on the inside one on the outside..
I cut out all of those rusy areas and welded in fresh metal.

Inside repair..

Outside repair..

I am seriously hoping to get the doors painted tomorrow.. But have a ton of work to do to get to that point.

 

[allklrnoflr]

powerstroke rule:thumbup: caddys looking real good, thinking of heading up saturday early am, are you staying in the saint friday night? would like to find out what junk yard your sorceing your parts from. hope we can catch up on saturday.

 

[SouthernRoads]

if you work nonstop, i think you can do it:thumbup:

 

[R32peterb]

awesome build!! this thing is amazing, so nice to see another FL caddy :beer::thumbup:

 

[BoostedOne]

Yeah, Im actually staying Friday and Saturday.. May as well make a weekend out of it.

I'm so effin exhausted..
Doors, hood, tailight fillers and gas door are now sprayed... They look like isht, but they are sprayed...

I have 3 hoods, all three of them have been apparantly used for gettin busy at one point or another..
The doors... Well, they looked straight when it had that nasty ass maroon enamel paint on it.. Now with a base clear...OMG they are freakin wavy..

Actually the whole truck looks like isht the more I look at it.. This is the first vehicle I have painted in YEARS.. its the first one I have EVER painted HERE... When I sprayed the shell I was still getting used to the gun, settings, etc. I have a nice gun(Devilbiss Plus), but havent used it in 3 years and that was just to spray a fender.
The part that really kicked my butt on the body was that the west side of my barn(which is where I did this) is really susceptible to the sun coming in out of the west... When I sprayed the shell, it was about 6pm, and the sun was just getting down near the horizon.. Long story short, the sun was either reflecting off the surface and into my eyes, or it was so intentense if it was at my back it made the paint look like it was going on too thin, or if the sun was hitting me in the face it was blinding so all I could see of the vehicle was a silohuette.
Then theres the bugs.. In the morning they are bad.. mid afternoon, not too bad unless we had crazy rain.. in the evening and night time, so bad you can barely spray primer..

SO I learned until I do some reconfiguring of the barn/shop, my spray window is about 11am til 6.. Once the time changes and it gets dark early, that will likely turn into 10am til 4:45... Any later and the sun angle and the bugs are just too intense.

Ah well, if nothing else the truck is jammed, and running. I can continue building it, driving it, work the kinks out of it, and when Im ready I can go and respray the exterior..

Didnt really take any pics today.. Will take some tomorrow.. But shes getting there..I drove it around the barn today.. As the paint dried I started going through the wiring. Previous owner stripped the dash, one of the things he took out was the hazard light switch.. I spent about an hour just figuring out which one of the plugs was for the switch, and jumpering the terminals on the hazard light switch so the turn signal switch would work. Also ended up tearing the wiring harness out of the rear for the taillights and going through it.. I never seen so many scotch locks, butt connectors, and electrical tape in a small area.. I dont know why people have to run new wires half assed when the old wiring quits.. hello, if it worked fine for 20 years then stopped working, chances are if you spend a few minutes and find the problem it will most likely work for another 20 years instead of your halfassed fix that will corrode and quit working in 6 months.
Ok, time for bed.

 

[MattRabbit]

You aren't lying about the rain! It's been raining every single day for a month. We're getting really tired of it too. Isn't it supposed to start drying out and cooling off in October around here??

 

[the-vwjedi]

Haha, oh well dude, it looks good from here.

I had a similar issue spraying here in Gainesville. I had an '86 Quantum syncro wagon I did a ton of body work on. I really took my time, shaved the rear hatch, antennae hole, rust patched etc. smoothed and re-smoothed. She ended up straight as an arrow, sprayed in my home garage, looked great.

Then I opened the door to let out the fumes and the bugs just rolled in! Ahhhhhhhhhh!
I think they love the smell of drying paint or something. I feel your pain brotha. Look forward to seeing the truck at the GTG. :thumbup:

 

[BoostedOne]

Well she's together! Atleast enough for gtg.
Worked til 4 or 5am weds night... got all the lights rewired properly, got the doors assembled(except door panels ) hood release, etc. Seemed like a list that would never end. But I got to the end, and when I went to fire it up and leave the shop it didn't want to run.
The injector pump would lose its prime and take forever to start and you would have to wait for it to clear up... now it wouldn't run at all. Best I could get out of it was an idle...
So I took Thursday off work, and when I woke up I drove down to Triangle for some parts. Got a front seal and a intermediate shaft seal, and an Aba pan gasket. I also went over to accurate diesel and got a seal kit for the pump incase this one spare didn't work. Since im taking off the injector pump decided to now replace the alternator bracket so I can put a compressor on it again, and also I changed out the water pump. I didn't do it before because the bolts on the water pump housing were breaking and I didn't want to remove the injection pump.

So last night was another long night. Replaced all the mentioned gaskets, water pump and housing, injection pump and timed pump. She runs like a top!
This morning went down to Sanford and got the new front tires from TUNERSHOP installed.

Fixing to get packed and off to Dt Augustine!

And proof she made it off the property!

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk 2

 

[R32peterb]

it was good meeting you and seeing this thing in person at the mkI GTG, good work sir :thumbup::thumbup:

 

[SouthernRoads]

you made it! what a beast. good meeting you man!

 

[BoostedOne]

THanks yall. It was cool meeting you two as well!

I didnt do anything Sunday night on the truck, which felt weird, LOL.. But monday I was back on it..
Did a drivers side rack boot(what a bitch), and passenger side tie rod end(I replaced all the other stuff last week, but one of my new TREs was missing the boot), shifter bushings so now I can get into 2nd and 5th, and hooked up the reverse lights.
Oh yeah, my wiper shaft seals finally showed up yesterday, so we installed the wiper motor and I now have windsheild wipers on her.
Final thing for yesterday was getting the odometer working again. At the show Raul showed me where this gear cracks in the speedo.. Fixed that, it still didnt work. I found out another problem mine had was the shaft that the "flipper wheels" for lack of a better term(the wheels that increment the next digit), had a light coat of surface rust. I removed that from the speedo and Dee put it in the bead blaster and cleaned it up.. While she did that I reset all my digits to zero. Put it all back together and now the odometer works, but the speedo reads about 25 mph high.. So I need to see exactly how far its off using GPS and reposition the needle.

 

[owen__]

:thumbup:

 

[BoostedOne]

Ok I haven't posted in this thread in a long time. Partly because some stuff wasn't worthy or lend itself to pictures, while I have also been very distracted by other projects.

As of my last posting in the thread, the truck made it to the A1 Classic pretty much as a shell with a drivetrain and a pair of seats. There was no dash, the instrument cluster was hanging by the speedo cable and the harness.

Long story short, I finally got the heater box, and cabby dash installed.. I thought I had pics, I guess I don't and will take some. It was a pain in the ass to do right.. At the classic, I saw some cabby dashes and they "caved in", due to not having the cabby dash supports installed.. So I was sure to cut those out of my donor clip, and weld those in, along with the knee bar mounts..
Word of caution to those doing a cabby dash, if you use a knee bar from a power window car(I wanted to use the window switches for air ride), the knee bar is so big it won't clear the window cranks.

Other notable time takers was I bought an 82 Cabby just for the front bumper(LOL)... Finally managed to get the bumper off, and the shocks compressed, and I got rid of the clipper bumper and badgless grille. I also installed a set of FK smoked lights. Guess I need to take some pics of that too.. But all I have is this one I took to make a motivational poster after a string of 51mpg tank fulls LOL...

Another time loser was I blew a headgasket over Thanksgiving.. Replaced that, and while doing that I also slapped a new set of rings in it, and rod bearings to try to combat the blow by. Well in beadblasting my pistons I guess some bead residue didnt get cleaned off the pistons and long story short, kept winding up in the oil pump locking the releif valves which would blow oil filters off the truck every few days.. It took me a few hundred bucks in oil and filters and used pumps to track that one down

On New Years Eve we made the journey from Daytona to Atlanta to meet up with Mike(funpig) to pick up a donor core engine for my rebuild. Caddy made it there and back without a problem, except I broke an exhaust hanger in Atlanta and had to tie it up with a piece of twine. Thank goodness I was setting out hay bales in the field the day before and still had the used piece of twine in the bed.


Oh yeah, another reason not much of anything that wasn't essential was done on the Caddy for a while is over Thanksgiving I was asked to repaint my nieces first car.. a 2000 Civic.. So as a surprise I decided to fix it up a bit, and then surprise her with it on Christmas. Very very long story short, it was a TON of work(some rust, much bent metal thats not seen)... But it came out sooo nice.. I hate Honda's, but I'd drive it..

Before:

After

Honda didnt turn out too bad for 3.5 weeks work while still working a full time job and squeezing in the problems with the Caddy!

 

[BoostedOne]

OK. One thing I do have pics of....

One thing that has been getting old is the total lack of any kind of stereo.. So a few weeks ago I finally broke down and decided I'm going to install one..

I figure I have a pair of tens laying around, and even though they need about 1 cube a piece, I will just throw them in as big a box as I can fit them in, and run them off my old RF 500S mono([email protected] ohm mono). I have a pair of Infinity 5.25" separates from an old car to use for mids and highs. I can run them off my old RF 500X(62.5wx4), Should be decent for a caddy.

Well I build the box for two tens, run some 8 gauge power wire, and hook it up. Damn it sounded like sh*t. High bass it actually did really well.. It would rattle your teeth at 100-120hz.. But anything remotely low, it couldn't hang at all.. Non existant.

Box for the two tens..

So back to the drawing board.. I need something smaller. I heard about some of these "new" era subs.. I start looking into Sundown Audio, and was pretty impressed by the specs on the Sundown SA-8V2 and decided to try one of these out and see how it did.
I picked one up and man, it is a MONSTER for an 8.. You'll see.. 28lbs.. almost 7" deep, and the magnet is as big as the hole cutout. 16mm one way Xmax. I was attracted to the fact that they spec out a .25 cubic foot box sealed, and .5 to .6 ported.

So I built a .35 cubic foot box(driver displacement is .08), and hooked it up to a 500X.. I didnt use the 500S because the single 8 is dual 4 ohm coils, meaning I'd have to run it 4 ohm stereo or 8 ohm mono... Using the 500X bridged to two channels is 250x2.. I have to say I was pretty impressed. It actually did play low as hell, and still had a high punch.. However, sound pressure level was not all that great for something that was pulling so much power my dome light would dim on every note..

SO, I spent 3 days figuring out how in the hell I was going to fit a ported box.. The chamber is not that big of a deal, .6 cubic feet.. The challenge was the port and depth of the sub.. Just fitting the sub in the back of the truck is a challenge.. you cant face it forward because while its only 7" deep, you also need to account for the fact that the surround sticks out of the face over an inch, plus the excursion, plus some room so it doesnt actually contact anything..
Problem with the port is it has to be BIG.. and I mean BIG, considering its only an 8.. Due to the excursion limits, it can move a significant amount of air, and a standard 3" diameter port would have horrible port noise.. According to the port calculators, it needs about a 14.5 square inch port section, which would be about a 4.5" diameter round port. I went with a duct port(rectangle shape) 3.75x4.25... The major problem is because of its large cross section, to tune at 35hz meant the port has to be 50 or 51" long!!!

So after several days, I got the box made.

IT IS SICK..... It just laughs at the 500X, so I upgraded to an old JBL BP1200.1.. The Rockford 500X was 500W on a good day, the 1200.1 is over 1300W on a bad day.. Only problem with the 1200 is that on long notes it pulls my battery voltage down to 9.9V(and that battery is only 3 weeks old!).. SOOO, all my power wire came out, and was replaced with 1 gauge, and a extra deep cycle battery is added to the bed..

It plays SOOO low and loud, for an 8.. hell, it plays low and loud for a pair of 12's! The sub is flat out freaking amazing.

So, impressed enough to continue, I did..

Fabricated a filler panel for the front of the box..

Spray glue to vinyl wrap the B Pillars and rear window area..

Vinyl applied to B pillar and back window area.. Disclaimer, this project is the first time I really tried messing much with vinyl.. And the flash amplifies the imperfections.. And some of the imperfections will be covered later by the pods for the 5.25's..

Upgraded power wires

View of the port entry.. Outlet is between the seats.. Port travels to passenger side then turns around and comes back. Thats what the screws are for going down the middle of the box, thats the divider to make the port.

Remaining portion of the B pillar is vynil covered to the floor. Also installed filler panels to fill in the gap.

Wrapped the front panel. left extra as it will be extended over the top of the box..

Glue applied to box top..

One final look at the sub!

And the sub is in.. Next is building the amp rack and rear speaker pods.. I lost the tweeters to to my seperates so I picked up a pair of Polk 6.5 seperates to replace them.. Then I found the tweeters.. So I will be doing a set of seperates in the rear and another set in the front..

 

[the-vwjedi]

Nice dude, she is comin' together. The Honda looks tight, I would rock a '89 Accord, always liked those. FTW

I like the clean look over the clipper kit, it was a little over the top for my taste. I have a crossfire 10" sub in my van, same thing only 350W going to it and it doesn't even begin to wake it up. Keep us posted.:thumbup:

 

[BoostedOne]

Nice dude, she is comin' together. The Honda looks tight, I would rock a '89 Accord, always liked those. FTW

I like the clean look over the clipper kit, it was a little over the top for my taste. I have a crossfire 10" sub in my van, same thing only 350W going to it and it doesn't even begin to wake it up. Keep us posted.:thumbup:

Thanks! Yeah, I wasn't crazy about the clipper at all either.. But at the time it beat having no bumper at all.. As much as I don't care for clippers, I really don't like the bumperless look.. To me even if the car is "finished" it just looks unfinished or halfassed.. like the trend with flat black paint on everything..

Ok, back to progress...

I finally have a fully functioning dash! Here you can see the Passat B3 instrument cluster installed. As I think I mentioned, I did this because I got fed up with the finicky mechanical speedometers, or more specificly odometers.. If you can find one working, it probably won't work for long. This is a VR cluster, so its full electronic.. If I hook up some more wires I will also get MFA.
Other notable addition is the knee bar. It came out ok. It was really beat looking when I got it, from being in a cabby with a bad top for almost 20 years.. The vinyl had shrunk and was peeling. I wasn't able to locate another one, so I stripped the vinyl off and recovered it myself. It has some wrinkles in it, but damn its a challenging piece to cover with a bajillion curves. This is the first thing I vinyl wrapped in 10 years as well, and only the 2nd or 3rd thing in my entire life.. So Im pretty much a vinyl noob who started with an advanced project. But it looks better than it did..
My next vinyl project went better. That was the glove box door. The one that came with my dash was broken, and I have been riding around since October with no glove box door. So I took the one from the same car I got the knee bar. Again, the vinyl was shrunk and peeling. So we seperated the top of the glove box lid from its structure, stripped it and recovered it and glued it back together.

The center console is also a new addition, and it looks like crap I know. I was actually just test fitting it to see if it actually fit, since I wasn't sure if I got the knee bar in the right place. It needs to be removed and cleaned up real good.

For the past several weeks(except for losing a week on a work trip), I have been feverishly working on finishing up my sub box and amp rack. Continuing where I left off in my last post. I started working on the amp rack. Amps are a Rockford Fosgate 500X for mids and highs, and a JBL BP1200.1 for the subs..

Test fitting:

Finalized the location of the amps, made a spacer for the JBL since its a little shorter in height than the Rockford, and vinyl wrapped the top and the area above the sub.

Oodles of wires.. Amazing amount of wires for such a small truck LOL..

One thing you will notice is the vinyl on the pillar doesn't come down far enough. I stopped there because at that point it was getting very difficult to work the wrinkles out, and I also knew that the area between the amp rack and the sides of the cabs was going to be filled with speaker pods. Well, at this point I tried to design the pods, originally for a set of 6.5" seperates, then a set of 5.25" seperates. Problem is I only have just shy of 6" between the amp rack and cab wall, and theres not enough space to angle the speaker surface to get the distance.. All I know is I spent an entire day trying to make a template work, and I gave up...

Then as I was standing out there, I also remembered the rust below the back window that I didn't bother to fix when I was painting the truck(wanted to get it done and driving, and the bed is going to be rhino lined anyhow). Well, it occurred to me that whenever I finally get around to fixing the rust, the heat from the welding will most likely heat the glue for the vinyl, and ruin it.

SOOO, I said screw it. I ripped all the vinyl off the rear pillars, and switched gears back to body man..

After what seemed like forever(it was a long night), I finally got all the rust ground out, cut out the rusty areas, and welded new metal in..

After that, I can't beleive I didnt take more pictures. A TON of work went to getting to the next shot. The rear pillars were re-vinyl wrapped from the headliner area down to the sub enclosure. Then I made a filler panel that went from pillar to pillar across the top of the amp rack. Then I made plates to mount my seperates to the sides of the amp rack. The amp rack and its wiring had to be removed and reinstalled about 4 times to do this and make sure it all fit, and nothing didn't "quit working".

Finally making some progress, it was back to making more templates.
Everything from this point forward was last night after I got home from work. I didn't get anything I started the template in the next picture on Sunday, but came down with a upper respitory infection Sunday evening that knocked me out of commision until yesterday.
For those wondering how I was making the templates, I bought a bundle of chip board(really heavy weight paper), and I spray it with contact cement. Then piece by piece close in on the details. It ends up looking like a patchwork quilt when you are done, but its pretty much dead on if you take your time..

And the result of that patchwork quilt was a single piece of luan with a bunch of holes that had to line up with very small margin of error..

Result? IT FIT.. Fit first time no less.. No trimming no secondary cutting! I was pretty shocked myself.

After that, test fitting, I removed that final panel and vinyl wrapped it as well. I then put speaker grill cloth on the speaker holes. Its actually not perfect, but considering my experience level, I am definately very very pleased with how it looks!!

And as can be seen, I didn't waste any space behind the seat, LOL...

Finally, for those who haven't seen or heard one of these subs, they are downright amazing as I said before. I uploaded a vid to YouTube of the system playing Bass I Love You. The vid is in 720P HD, but I don't think the low frequency response of my cell phone's camera mic is very representative of the sound, haha.

The Sub In Action.. Not bad for a caddy!

 

[BoostedOne]

And here is the next part of the project

I picked up a NEW(not used, not rebuilt) 1.9 long block from a guy.. NEW, as in never had oil run through it! Its a european spec engine(AEF code). Not a powerhouse by any means. But they can take a turbo from what I have read pretty easily, since internally from what I can find they are the same as the AAZ canadian 1.9 IDI turbos. I ended up buying this because I was just about to start tearing down my donor motor to do a full rebuild. I figured by the time I got the head redone, over bore, new pistons, new bearings, new gaskets, new blah blah blah and more blah blah blah, I would be in it for about 1500 bucks or so between parts, and machine shop time.. Not to mention my time, and part of that is making trips to Orlando where the machine shops are(which I hate).

I picked this up for about the same price as rebuilding the motor I have. I figured its brand new from VW, which has to beat a reman no matter how good any day, and a lot less hassle. Problem is, I didn't realize how much was different on the 1.9. Thankfully a guy on EBAY who lives only about 20 mins away was selling a bunch of 1.9 parts and I worked out a deal with him on some of the things I need. Although I still need timing covers, valve cover gasket, alternator brackets, and some other odds and ends.

 

[homiesmalls]

Dude!!?!?! Amazing work! I might be demanding, but it's builds like yours that ignite it

Looking forward to hanging out again :beer: And oh, that 1.9...........