UK-POLOS.NET - THE VW Polo Forum

(and if you'd told me i would a year ago i'd have said you're mad)

but.... kudos to me Mumsy for offering, unprompted, to selflessly turf her silver monstrosity* out onto the drive for three or four days whilst i invade the garage to get poloey things sorted.

bloody lifesaver, i would have been trying to get various head/sump etc things finished off in the garden or kitchen otherwise and got nowhere. (doing them in a lit, relatively warm, dry, windless, expansive and unobstructed room with some scrap carpet underlay to put things on and plenty tools & bits to hand proved hard and long-winded enough!)

got back in at about 2am (oops ) after dealing with disconnecting inlet from head (arrrgh, the solution turned out so simple in the end), cleaning up ports, finding a way to more easily rotate the cam (and see that the back of the valves really should have a quick brush-down), chiseling the remains of the old gasket off the sump, cleaning/degreasing/rust-scraping it to a state of relative smoothness and cleanliness, doing similar for the cam & exhaust manifold covers, and putting some primer on them

head has only just about stopped reeling from the fumes even though the doors were wide open and i was pretty much taking a breath outside, running in holding it to do a few quick sprays, and running out again! (zero ventilation!) ... hehehehehe

so yeah an odd flash of insight, sympathy and generosity there. as rare and as welcome as gold dust.

cheers mum ...and thanks
i was still a bit shirty at the time of accepting the offer as an hour earlier i'd been receiving stick for the amount of mess i was making whilst getting the pistons ringed up and inserted... whoops

* the rover 25. still dont like the feel of it.. i was the one maneuvering it as generosity only stretched to giving up the space, not going out in the wet twilight (with debilitating sinus infection) to move the car! awful awful drive response

Get some pics up!

when im done mate! im wasting enough time as it is doing a coupla three posts on here with a warming-up cup of tea whilst organising my thoughts
(point noted though! I think the Technical forum may get a new how-to ... or perhaps a how-not-to? out of this)

right now i f***ing ache all over and im off to have a bath (at midnight-45 with work tomorrow!) because i am covered in just so much crap it is untrue, all in my hair and face and arms and probably through the thick woollen mucky-work trousers too ... a shower would never shift it, not inside of an hour anyway. taken about five concerted soapy scrubs just to degrease my hands (for some things, gloves are just not suitable ... plus the first box ran out & the new ones in the boot)

house is getting a bit oily too

i've been getting quite a few pics as i go along but will need to sort them out proper like.... at the very least reduce the size as a five megapixel camera means 2600x1900 ish images!

anyway done about five straight hours today (damn!) bouyed along by terrorvision, mr scruff, and not as much coca cola as i thought it would need. with any luck thats the worst, most uncomfortable, messiest bits out of the way, just got to deal with torqueing the head bolts at some point in the future...
the pistons are in, the bearings are bolted up (did my best to make sure they were all clean, but as it was outside, anything might have happened between cleaning them up "up top" and bolting them together "down under" --- havent got verniers or plastigage neither so the clearance is a mystery, just torqued them to the prescribed level and gave it a couple hand-rotations to listen for obvious clonking), the oil pump is reconsistuted, the sump is back on with a new gasket (UTTER B*STARD OF A JOB!) and a new paint scheme , the flywheel cutout cover, and the right driveshaft.

Think i'll move it tomorrow now though. A couple experimental shoves showed that the discs are binding through disuse so i'll have to give it quite a bit of vauxhall BHP thru the bumpers and full concentration.

er............... i was going to say something but lost the thread now

never mind. late. tired. quite happy at having acheived exactly what i set out to today (though results may be poorer quality than desired ... fingers crossed). unable to think any further.

think i can have it running by chucking out time tomorrow?



oh yeah i remember now.... two things... questions that is

1. im not quite sure how my torque wrench is operating. my understanding was that once you reached the set-point, it would go into rachet mode and just spin on. instead it seems to issue a barely noticable "click" and a slight jump, then resume business. a bit safer and more flexible i suppose, but is this fairly normal?

2. ehm..... oh yes... the Elring gasket pack i got from GSF has all sorts of funny extra bits besides the "inlet, exhaust, head and cam cover" quartet I expected. any of them particularly important and worth replacing before i stick it all back together?

cheers!