I don’t like the weather this week, it’s delaying my project. Its supposed to snow on Wednesday, my day off and the transmission for the Van on gets built that same day. That will roughly translate into a muddy, messy car 🙁
Over the last few days I have been helping friends with their projects more than my own agenda but I did manage to pick up a few things that will help ease the pain. The first being a new Transmission, shift box, and cables for the Corrado. The transmission itself is out of a B3 Passat and has really long gear ratios for a VR6 box, this is the recommended O2A gearbox for VR6 turbocharged applications but I don’t plan on running this transmission for long as the 02M 6speed is the gearbox of choice for my setup and will be hunting one down in time. I moved so fast through the passat part out that I didn’t get a chance to snap a single photo, and there wasn’t much time to take pictures really because the whole ordeal was around 2 hours start to finish. After we got everything apart I was able to clean it up quite nicely:
Up until about a week and a half ago this transmission was in perfect condition, however a ball joint separated on the car effectively ripping the axle cup out of the transmission. The mechanics that looked at it decided to just shove the cup back in so the splines meshed and drove it from Parker CO, to Thornton which is like what 40? miles!
The thing about the axle cup is unless you have ever seen one before you can’t really tell that something broke, here is what the cup looks like out of the transmission, can you tell whats missing?
If you’re not sure, this should help give you a hint:
Now this is gravely concerning to me, I did drive the car immediately before I took it apart.. Actually I beat the living daylights out of the gearbox to make sure the gear stacks were good and everything else checked out. Besides the fact that the end of the axle cup and clip were floating around in there for 40 miles I think that the rest is alright, either way I am going to need to split the case to fish the remainder of the pieces out so we’ll see what materializes of this. I really just wanted a drop in unit that I didn’t have to fuss with and this was the perfect gearbox for it, up until about a week ago. Here are some other views you might find interesting:
For some reason it’s locked and won’t turn past a certain point, hmm I wonder what it looks like in there..
Then this fell out of the drain plug, it’s not the clip and its not related to the axle cup either so now we get to play guess that part.. I am thinking its a roll pin but really have no idea:
Here it is sitting in the drain plug so you can get a better idea of the size:
The Passat was useful for more than just the engine, I also managed to snag the heated seat harness. My Corrado didn’t originally come with heated seats, but I ended up getting some when I switched to the white dot interior and since the guy I got them from was putting heated seats back into his car I was unable to obtain the harness. I couldn’t complain especially because the interior only had 40,000 original miles on it, I am just glad that I am finally able to address this creature comfort. I already have a switch in the dash and it looks like it plugs in really simply. Here is the complete harness removed from the car:
The headbolts also showed up today, here are some lined up. Only 2 parts left out in shipping land!
I got a negligible amount of body work done on the Van, the weather has really been hindering my efforts in that department 🙁 I did get some more polishing done as well, I removed the lines on the valve cover:
It’s really wavy and needs to be block sanded for a while, its just an incredible amount of work. I am scheduled for sure to go in on Wednesday for the Vanagon 091 transmission build and will have loads of pictures to share so you’ll have to definitely check back towards the end of the week. Somewhere in the middle of this I will disassemble the 02A Corrado transmission for a failure analysis and take some pictures of that so I have lots of fun lined up for everyone. Work has been extremely busy lately leaving little time for other activities. I even have a 320gb hard drive for the server sitting here that i have yet to install and i’ve had it for weeks now. I am currently seeking a 5 1/4″ to 3.5″ HD adapter if anyone has one, drop me an e-mail.
I also have made progress on the digital instrument cluster and I hope to have some more to share on that later this week.