The Red Coupe - The Vapors

I saw a little water on my door-jam sill a few weeks back, after getting into the car on the way to work, and I tried to ignore it. Unfortunately with the rising temps, the snow left and the rain arrived leading to a meeting with a soaking wet driver-side carpet that forced my hand. I made a temporary barrier where it appeared to be coming from using a black plastic bag my last six-pack came in, which ended up working much better (and looked far prettier) than what I had jammed in my golfs door last summer.

I rolled over to Wheaton Service Center on the next sunny day of the calendar to get the golden roll of goodness from Tom and patch up my door. I love e30s for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it's so gd easy to work on them. I had the doorcard off in a couple minutes and I had some cleaner alcohol and a rag getting old adhesive off soon afterwards. If you inspect the previous vapor barrier carefully (second pic below), you'll see where it failed. All in all, it did pretty well for being the original factory-installed barrier on the car from 1989. I borrowed a box cutter, and got to work.

golden roll of goodness!

After smoothing out the adhesive sheet to create the seal needed in all the vital areas, I took a bottle of water from the car and tested the barrier. Success. If you look at the little square hole in the second to last picture above, you'll see where water running down the inside of the door is supposed to drain. It's now good to go and as I type the interior is now free of moisture.

Everything was going fine with the car, but I guess I was due for a breakdown seeing that I've never had one since acquiring it last January. I was driving home from work last Sunday and I noticed the interior lights were a little dim. A couple miles down the road and they had dimmed even further. Next thing ya know I was merging onto I-95 and the interior lights were just about off, the headlights were as bright as two wax candles. The alternator had taken a dump. Before coming to a complete stop, I realized that I could nurse the car further as long as I didn't come to a complete stop. I got to a well lit shopping center in Columbia, MD and used my AAA Plus membership (a must have btw) to get the car to Euromotive and me to my house.

My brother-in-law Nick took care of me with a discounted rental (so I could leave the other car in the garage, and the repair turned out to be rather simple. Little did I know the alternators that came on e30s can be refurbished by just replacing the brushes and regulator; that's what was done. I was back behind the wheel in no time.

Getting back to my last want-to-do-list for the e30, I came to some realizations. One, I love wheels entirely too much. Two, if I went after a set of wheels, they'd need to be pretty special. Three, the cost of a set of wheels I'd show with would be close to the cost of redoing the interior completely OR refurbishing the m20 currently in the car. For those that know me well, you'll be surprised by my decision; but in my defense, the wheels I really had my heart set on could not be attained (single tear). I'm now very glad that was the case.

What you see in this picture is a m54 cranked m20b28, built by a fine gentleman named Andre from NC. This motor makes enough power, currently, to help my S3.25 diff make a bit more sense. This lovely yet crude hunk of German metal still has power to be made, but more importantly than anything, it's been rebuilt thoroughly which solves multiple problems for me. I have a reliable yet aging motor and I'm on pace to break into the 265k mile range this time next year. Also I already planned on building up my current motor to levels that wouldn't have reached this motors power for the money I would've spent. This is what we in the business call "a win win". This motor will look different in the coming weeks prior to installation, some go fast tweaks and part swaps, but it's a wonderful place to start. Oh and I've ordered a set of daily 15s for the car and new tie rods, blah blah blah. Stay tuned.

The Grey Hatch - When it rains it pours Pt. 2

Now there are many reasons the speaker hole looks like this; I've had one major stereo install on this car since owning it and I've swapped in speakers here and there. Since I don't trust myself with wiring/snaking, I let my front components be installed by the same guys every time I need something done and swap out the rear coaxials myself. At some point the hole for the front pass speaker wiring grew in size and when the water hose test was performed (thanks beff), I could see that any water going into the crevice where the side mirror and window meet would come shooting out the break in the vapor barrier where the speaker hole was. Accordingly, the back of the speaker was wet (but thankfully didn't short out) and the screws for the +/- connections were rusty. Everything was way too wet to tape more plastic onto the existing film, and on top of that I was working outside while it was raining; the garage was occupied and I wouldn't have had enough space to work even if I was in there.

After vacuuming as much water out of the carpet as I could while the rain slowed to a mist, I took some plastic bags I had from my last wheel shipment and made a shower curtain of sorts. I also used some towels and some super absorbent microfiber drying towels to jam in both the speaker hole and reinforce the towel I had jammed into the door sill under where the water was coming from. I did another hose test to see how it fared...and it was...good enough. I laid an unopened trash bag over the roof and door mirror to keep as much water from going into my rigged 'diaphragm' while parked.


Far from pretty. Anyways I drove to work and squeezed the water out of the towels at a nearby gas station (and again that night when the rain stopped). I arrived at WSC the following morning and Tom came out to assess the situation; there were multiple problems. For one, at some point between when it was resprayed and now, the front sunroof drain plugs worked their way inside the body, on both sides, with no where to drain but in. I never paid attention to this before as I've never had leaks pointing to this being a problem before; now they're positioned like they should have been.

Lastly, the vapor barrier on the front door obviously needed replacing. While I had the card removed I also needed to remove the doorcard guide clips, door handle and mirror lever so I could put a clean sheet in right on the metal in the original location. The door handles were kinda tricky to remove until I found the release tab, but everything was straight forward until it came to the doorcard guide clips. FYI, these guide clips you see below in this crap cell phone pic are NLA in the US. Be careful not to break these during removal as you'll have to source spares already installed on another car or possibly European VW/Audi dealers; I haven't bothered to check. You may think you'll need needle nose pliers or something to get them out, but all it takes is a good finger tip squeeze to get the 'arrowhead fins' in while pulling them from the outside. The clip under the mirror is a bitch to get to, but it can be worked out with a flat head screwdriver, to do the squeezing action, from the outside. I'm 6'1" and have big hands so if I can take these things out, anyone can.

Once everything was out, Tom came over and helped me lay on the film. He wiped the surface down first with some alcohol/prep fluid first then we laid it on good and tight. I rubbed over the contoured areas that needed to be sealed for water run off. Then I did a bucket of water test, after making all the holes for the door parts, with positive results. Unfortunately I think we put the film on too tight as putting the doorcard on took some work to flex the film a bit; I'll remember that for next time. I cleaned up everything, picked up some food from Nava Thai (delicious) a block up the street, put the factory barrier foam/doorcard/speaker and sill panel back together and got on the road.

I razored everything tidy, but left some extra film wrapped around the bottom of the door because I'm paranoid and want to have the option of slacking up some film later if needed. I'm leaving the seat out until things dry out completely and I decided to drive the golf for another week or so to make sure things are right enough to wash it and return it to the garage. Facing problems head on is always the best way to go and it'll be nice to find out how well my new barrier functions with abnormally wet conditions; this week there will be 4 days of rain in a row starting today (Oct 3rd). Wish me luck.

The Grey Hatch - When it rains it pours Pt. 1

If you've kept up with my e30 build, you know that I've had it off the road quite a bit so I could get major things addressed. The car that I typically baby, which is why it's usually in the garage (thus has not been mentioned yet), is my Mk3 VW Golf. For some quick background, I've owned my golf since new in 1998 and have thoroughly enjoyed evolving it over the past nine years or so. Since being resprayed back in the Spring of 07', my golf is hardly ever outside. Besides oil changes and tune ups, natures affects on it have never been a concern. Fast forward to about a month ago, I've been driving it every day.

It doesn't look like this now of course; discontinued parts are for special occasions ha. It's been nice to get used to driving it again. Don't get me wrong, my driving technique with the e30 is much like how I drive the golf; the lessons of driving lowered VWs are ingrained in many of us til' the grave. However, the pan/subframe clearance differences of both cars are like night and day. The largest effective difference is that I can't drive the golf quickly in every lane of I-95, between my house and work in laurel, and I was reminded of that on the first week with a subframe grind at a little over 65mph. Every time I drive my golf I always remember all the small things I've learned to live with from the last time the car was seriously worked on, as well as the great gas mileage ABA code 2L 8v motors get when driven smoothly for long distances. I really forgot how much fun running around in this car is. I should make a to-do list for my kid at some point, but that'll have to wait for another time.

On a mildly rainy day a couple weeks ago, getting into the car to go home from work I found myself smelling something funny on the interior. Musty? Check. Moisture? Yep, on the passenger front carpet. I sniff the liquid on my hands to figure out if it's coolant from the heatercore, but I can't put a finger on the odor. Once the motor warms up I turn on the heat full blast and it works great; no foggy mist coming out of the vents or anything like that. "That's odd", I thought to myself. I have about 156K miles on the car with the original heatercore (knock on wood), so I boxed myself into thinking that's what it was. I put in an order for a 180 degree section of coolant hose to prepare for the worst if the heatercore was about to go completely. I threw a bath towel on the front passenger foot well and called it a day until I got more evidence of the culprit.

The following week it started raining here in Maryland. Heavily. Day after day. So I walk out to my car in the rain one morning, because I left my cell phone in it, and was welcomed by a small lake on the passenger side of the car. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

The good news is I had a water leak which is cheaper to repair than a heatercore. The bad news is I had to diagnose and fix (temporarily at least) the leak in the intermittently heavy rain, immediately, since I was going into work for an overnight shift in a few hours and wouldn't be able to get the quality film I needed to repair the vapor barrier with until the following day (upon looking at the leak trail on the inside of the car it was obvious what had failed). I made a call to my buddy Tom, Service/Shop Manager @ Wheaton Service Center and he still had the good stuff on a roll. Since Wheaton is relatively close to my job, I planned on going straight there after work, but I'd need to have a fix good enough to last me through another 10-15hrs of rain (Friday was supposed to be sunny and dry).

So after running to my sister-in-laws with the ol' lady to get the wet-dry vac, I got the golf on the driveway with wood planks and starting clearing the problem area. I removed the front passenger seat, then the inner door sill trim, speaker and doorcard. This is what I found:

Awesome.