My Ginster Mk3

[Blau_RS2]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

That tranny issue sounds eerily familiar. The same three bolts came out of my RS2 transmission a few years back.



One got wedged behind the pressure plate and bored a home through the bell housing.







I was able to get the hole welded and it has been fine since.


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[GingerBeef]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Ok dope work, but what are those Hoosier slicks for?

I was running them on my little Suzuki haha. Now that its sold, nothing. But theyll probably make their way onto a Mk1 GTI eventually.

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[cam_wmh]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Ok dope work, but what are those Hoosier slicks for?

[GingerBeef]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Buckled up the last few tasks today. Man is it good to be driving this car again. I havnt put too many kms on the car yet, but I took it for a nice little rip around the community. That LSD is sweet, I noticed the difference immediately when I mashed the throttle in first gear. It still spins the tires but its alot more controlled and spins alot less. Its also nice being able to apply throttle mid corner without understeering and dying. I think that O2J shifter swap made just as big of of a difference though when it comes to just putting around town. I cant believe I lived with that floppy horse cock Mk3 shifter for the last five years... Also, the Suzuki went off to its new home tonight. I think ill be buying a set of winters for the Mk3 and temporarily winter drive it untill the new winter beast arrives from overseas. Im planning on completely redoing the body either this year or next year so im not too concerned about the salt.







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[witchcraftz]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Looking at the incredible amount of work you get in I feel like I'm the laziest person on the planet haha. Great job!

[Geobmx4life]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

[Circuits]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Amazing as always Jason; great work!

[GingerBeef]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Disclaimer: Long post ahead.

So some of you may have noticed that the yellow mk3 hasnt made many appearances this summer. Well, first off, as soon as I pulled it out of winter storage it started puking tranny fluid out of the input shaft... so I had to top it off every 50 or so kms of driving. Next, things took a turn for the worse when I hit a lump on the road, I couldnt react fast enough to air up and smashed a hole in my bell housing.



So that pretty much sealed the deal as far as enjoying the summer in this car... so I threw it back into the garage and pulled out my Honda Civic for its new summer duties.



The Civic was great, but then it promptly got stolen from my driveway 6 days later. Thankfully(?) it was recovered, but in terrible shape. There was oil all over the engine bay, the rear diffuser and spoiler were stolen, the whole car was sanded with 80grit and the front end was spray bombed white...



So that wrote off the Civic from being my daily in the mean time (quite literally). Obviously I did what any logical person does and bought another car! I was initially looking for a mk4 1.8t to pass the time, but then this thing popped up and I had to have it. A 1999 Suzuki Kei Works.





I absolutely fell in love with this car. A whopping 660ccs, 3 cylinders and a turbo pushing a monstrous 69hp is all you need to move 750kgs around. The car is so fun to drive in the city, and 50mpg was nothing to complain about either. Im quite sad that ill be parting with this car as soon as the GTI is back on the road. But such is life.

Anyways, back to the main event here. Ive pulled the drivetrain, and I've also pulled just the trans in this car. From experience I believe its much quicker to just pull the engine and trans as one unit from the top versus wrestling the transmission in and out through the subframe so I got to work.







That engine pull was a personal best for me! Took 2 hours between pulling it in the garage and having the engine and trans out. Then I split the engine from the trans to asses the situation. Pure carnage is all I have to say. At first glance it appears that the piece of bellhousing that broke off went into the trans, caught the fly wheel, got dragged around scraping the **** out of the pressure plate and the inside of the bellhousing before eventually punching its way out of the top.









Originally I was planning on welding the smashed bit up, but clearly I need a new bellhousing... Luckily Eric smashed a hole in his transmission on the other half of the casing on his way back from Leavenworth (sorry Eric!). So he gave me his old broken trans for free! Just needed to tear it apart and harvest the good bell housing off of it. Now, I was under the impression that you ugga dugga a few bolts off and the bellhousing just separates from the main case. Nope. In actuality you have to completely disassemble the trans and the bellhousing is the final piece left over. Of course.





While everything was all apart I figured that I might as well do some upgrades. I ordered a Wavetrac LSD and sent the pile of parts over to Calgary Autoworks! This is pretty much the first time I've ever paid to get work done on the mk3, but after tearing the parts trans apart I realized that I didnt want to screw something up and destroy my brand new diff.



On the bench at CAW we discovered that it was not the piece of bellhousing that caused all this chaos. It turned out that the 3 bolts for the input shaft seal backed out. So that explains why my input shaft seal started dumping fluid. You can see in the 2nd pic that one completely backed off, thats the one that eventually got caught on my pressure plate, the other two were finger tight.





While the Wavetrac was being installed at CAW I figured that I should reinforce the clutch fork as I heard that theyre a common failure part on O2A transmissions. I started looking at pictures of broken ones to find the failure point and that caused some confusion.. theres a couple of companys who make reinforced clutch forks to prevent this but in my opinion theyve reinforced the part in completely the wrong spots.







And you can see, they typically fail on the sides, yet people reinforce the faces for some reason. Id say that if anything the heat affected zone of these welds would make the failure point even weaker. With that in mind, I came up with my own reinforced clutch fork that in my opinion should do its job better. Started off with paper template, copied it in metal, bent it to shape and welded it up.











This brings us now to a few days ago, finally got my trans back with a clean bill of health. LSD installed with fresh bearings and seals, hopefully itll be good for another 20 years!



Time for more upgrades! Anyone whose driven a mk3 knows that the shifters are terrible. So I got the whole shifting setup out of a mk4. Shift tower, shifter box and cables all out of an 02J. The shift tower itself was bolt in, just take the mk3 junk out and plop in the slightly less junk mk4 stuff. The biggest bonus is that with the mk4 setup a whole bunch of short shifter options open up. I think ill eventually pick up a Diesel Geek Sigma 5 short shifter, but ill enjoy this fresh upgrade for some time first.



The shifter box is a different story though, many people on the mk3 forums chop apart the tunnel and then part of the shifter hole itself to clear the bigger mk4 box. But after some measurements and thought I came up with a different solution. I dremeled out the rear mounting holes in the 02J box to fit the existing mk3 studs, then I quickly made a bracket to adapt the other half of the 02J box into the mk3 chassis. You know the drill, measure a million times, paper template, cut out of metal, bend and weld.





And bam! Youve got an OEM+ shifter without cutting the mk3 chassis at all! Final touches were to tap some threads onto the mk4 shifter shaft so that my OEM mk3 knob threaded on.







Finally, with some words of encouragement I mated the trans to the block again, and started to bolt that sucker in.







Almost back together just in time for winter... tomorrow I need to fill the trans with fluid, bolt the exhaust to the header, attach the axles and then finally throw on the front end!

[Geobmx4life]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Lol.....ATTA BOY!!!!! I'd like to put my name on your ride list please!!!!!

[GingerBeef]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Nice pics!!!!

the recaros look awesome.

Thanks! Really stoked about the seats, not so much about my photography skills though..

Needs a turbo....seats look great and probably feel great too! Love it Jason!

No turbo in my future... but boost will be happening this winter (hopefully). Im continuing with the unconventional route in regards to the whole VW thing, this time by bolting on Monte Carlo SS parts

[Geobmx4life]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Needs a turbo....seats look great and probably feel great too! Love it Jason!

[Canadian Turbo]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Nice pics!!!!

[witchcraftz]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

the recaros look awesome.

[GingerBeef]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

So, Bob is bae and gave me a new lens to play around with sometime during the summer. I finally got around to taking some photos with it last night (or... attempted to I should say). So far so good, I quite like the range of this new lens, Its a 12-50mm vs my old 14-42mm but im no photographer so im pretty much talking out of my ass right now... Point is, thanks Bob!

Also, Yellow car + Fall = dank memes.

[GingerBeef]

Re: My Ginster Mk3

Man, guess I havnt updated this thread in like a year. Well not much has happened, I took the ESMs off for now because I want to change up the colour. They also need new tires so I figured Id throw my old TT 6 spokes back on for the time being.

Now, onto Recaro stuff!
I ended up going with the Sport Plaid fabric over the red "tire tread" centers, I think I made the right choice on that one.

So originally I was going to try to adapt the Evo IV rails to my Mk3's floor pan, but welding to the thin sheet metal seemed a little sketchy to me. In the end I opted to canibalize the Mk3 seat for its rails.





Next I unbolted the Evo rails from the Recaros



Using what I had laying around I cut and welded up some 90° angle iron to some 1" square stock, drilled holes to line it up with the Recaros.






Got 8 little adapter brackets made up and bolted to the bottom of the seats. I made sure tgese were strong, its welded in all planes so no matter the forces atleast one weld will always be in tension, and another in compression. I also plug welded tge angle iron to the square stock... just in case



Then, it was as simple as lining up the mk3 rail, making sure its squared up and flat, and laying down some weld!





These new seats sit about 2" lower than the stock Mk3 seats, which I love. Its a much more agressive driving position, and more importantly i now have headroom for a helmet!





Overall super happy with how these turned out. I havnt had too much driving time with them yet but from the first test drive Ive gotta say that Ive fallen in love with this car even more now!