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Right! I thought I better start a project thread so everyone can see and read about what I'm doing to my tatty but soild 1989 B3 2.0 quattro, my last offical project thread was called 'Mr Simmonds 3B Lite project' so I've named this one along very much the same lines for continuity. Also starting a project thread means I actually have to do things to keep people interested and as I've been struggling with anxiety and depresion I consider it to be a good way of motivating myself.
History... I picked up the B3 quattro years ago, I think it was 2016/7 but would have to check it could have been 2015. I got it off eBay from a breaker who had just gotten the car in and thought rightly it was worth more than it's scrap weight which at the time would have been £200. I won the auction for £360 as they were pretty cheap anyway back then plus the advert was awful, just one photo of the front and no details regarding milage or condition. The car was about 40 miles away from me and still had a couple of weeks MOT so I simply got a lift there and drove it home. My first impressions were that the car itself drove very well other than a noisy exhaust leak, it was on about 130K and everything worked properly. Due to it's close, low ratio gearbox it was actually quite spritly, far from fast but not slow... The best way to describe it's performance was like a four wheel drive 8V Mk2 Golf GTI, nice close ratios with a top speed of 120ish at 6K RPM, the engine is pretty much the same so this is no real surprise.
However the interior was really quite remarkably dirty and full of rubbish of every description, I have to tackle farmers cars at work and they're always stinking but this thing was a whole new level of unpleasent. I've only ever encoutered one worse car that was still mobile, that's a an A6 belonging to a young female customer who for some reason had taken to storing dirty nappys (dipers for our US readers) in the the boot (trunk) and using the rear seat and passenger foot well for general refuse in much the same manner as my 80. Finding the locking wheel key required a great deal of bravery! We had to have a word with her husband regarding the matter as it was terrifying to work on inside however she seemed oblivious to the hazards...
Not only was the carpet soaking to the point of pooling in the foot wells from water ingress there was food wrapping, quite a lot of rotting actual food in bags as well as just chucked on the floor, various evengelicial leaflets regarding God in boxes everywhere (and I really do mean everywhere) as well as wide varity of soaking garments and general stuff. So my first job once I got it home was to set about removing all the above mentioned crap and as we had a skip in the yard chuck the lot in there. It was so bad I took the seats out and removed the carpet and all the sound deading material and binned it. I made a couple of hole's in the floor to let the water out and stop it filling up again, though I've since cured the leaks, the scutle was full of leaves and moss so water could pour in through the heater inlet. Now I've removed all that with vigrous preasure washing it seems to stay pretty dry in there.
The seats were horrid and starting to fall apart so as I had a really rather nice early B3 Coupe dark grey Velour interior left over from a customer who had changed it for leather and said to dispose of the old stuff as I pleased I burnt the orginal seating so I could retrive the scrap metal and fitted the CQ interor. The front seat's obviously go straight in but the rear bench whilst being the correct diamentions doesn't really fit properly so that's being done away with as the much like my 3B S2 I aim to save as much weight as I can. I'm quite happy with it being a two seater, I don't like the extra weight of passengers anyway so win, win.
Whilst clearing the car out I found the orginal book pack with a fully stamped up service record from South Hereford Audi, the V5 registation and some other service history which was highly interesting. The car had one previous lady owner who through reading the vairous documnets I worked out was in her mid 80's who had the car serviced and MOT'd every year by the local Audi dealership until that year. I don't know what changed, perhaps she moved house or wanted to econoimise, however that year she'd taken the car for it's service and MOT to an 'independant specialist' and been presented with an estimate for about £1K to do all the work required!
I found that odd given that I drove it over 40 miles home without issue, so I got the car over the pit and tightened up a leaking exhaust joint, she'd been quoted for a complete new system but the original exhaust was still prefectly servicable. I checked everything over and the only thing I could find wrong with it was a slightly sticky rear brake caliper which took an hour to sort out, again she'd been quoted for new brakes all around. Basically the poor old girl had taken the car to an independant VAG specialist whom I know of but won't name and been presented with an outragous estimate in an atempt to rip her off. I took the car for a new MOT at my local test station and it passed with no issues at all so I used the car for winter transport.
Now here's where thing's get interesting... Please excuss the copy and paste of info from other thread's it's saves me typing up loads of info and get's everything in one place.
I have a Tornado Red/Pink Corrado G60 which I stuffed through a hedge back in 2019, it sustained moderate front end damage and one quite nasty dent to the offside cill, I am yet to pull the carpet and interior trim, but looking at the underside the damage does not look like it extend's to the floor pan.
The car already required a full respray anyway which as I work in the trade I can get a decent job done for between £1 and £2K, if I do all the prep myself which will be a lot of work, I could even prime it myself once I've painted my garage floor. I would also need to source a pair of decent headlights and wings, I have one wing but it's decayed a lot in storage. The front bumper is fine, though I do have a mint spare along with a pair of complete doors with really heathy window regulators in them, also a spare rear bumper in tidy condition. I've also got one of the now very sought ofter 90mm front lower spoilers and a pair of decent wing mirrors along with quite a few other spares from the couple of Corrados I've broken.
I've been keeping an eye on Corrado prices and they seem to have dropped back a touch like quite a few classic cars. It's a very early car (1989) and orginally from Holland so LHD (which the first UK cars were anayway) and only covered 116,000 kilometers. I have all the history since 2012 when I purchased it but not much from before then, a little but no service book unfortunatlly. It's a nice spec, tidy full black leather interior and steering wheel etc though no sunroof.
I've been doing some back of a fag packet maths and it questionable if it's worth me investing quite a considerable amount of money and a huge amount of my time in doing the repair work, unless I wanted to fix the car for myself as opposed to sell on straight away. As much as I'd love to keep it I've decided to thin down my colection to just three Audi's for which I have a huge amount of spares aquired from breaking a lot of cars as well as picking up RS2 bits and bobs over the years.
My RS2 resoration is going to have to wait until I get shot of my MK2 Golf G60 which requires very little work, the funds from selling the VW will go along way to covering all the work on my RS2, it my even cover it completely if if discount my time. The car is safely locked up in the dry with the tyres inflated to 50psi and every month or so I roll it half a wheels rotation to avoid flat spots, it's got a set of very nearly new Toyo R1R trackday tyres in 225/45/17. I'm not in a massive hurry to start the job, but once I do start it things ahould move quite quickly, the car will be worth so much once resotored I'll probably only use it for shows/meet ups. Hence my idea below...
My 1989 B3 80 quattro E, which is poverty spec, so manual windows and the 2.0L four cylinder engine. This car is metalic black with the nice boot spoiler and the paint has gone very dull, it will polish up a fair bit but to make it look nice it would require a full spray. It is however rust free and solid.
If I was to break my Corrado and sell all the spares I've got for it I could end up with a pretty much free G60 engine that I know the history of and has a fresh supercharger fitted.
So what going to do to get shot of yet another car is fit the G60 engine from my damaged Corrado to my B3 80 quattro and leave it looking a bit tatty and stripped out. It would be very light so the 160bhp motor would make it be quite a quick car, especially with the 80's orginal gearbox which is geared for 120mph at 6K in fifth. I know G60's can be tunned to produce much more power but I like to leave them alone as the charger is stressed enough as it is. Unlike most turbocharged cars from that era it's running pretty close to the design limits of the G-Ladder, the offical factory service interval (full rebuild) on them is 50K miles! As soon as one starts fitting smaller pullys the shorter the service interval becomes and given that it's a £500 job it's not something I want to have to do even more often. My second Corrado G60 had a chip fitted in Germany that retained the stock pully though upped the boost a little and add a touch of timing and more fuel, that was supposed to be 180bhp and the car was very quick however it eat gearboxes
This would be pretty much the opposit to my RS2's restoration, as long as it's not rusty I don't really care what it looks like on the outside, I might not even bother painting the replacement drivers side wing I have for it the correct colour. It will give me a car to fiddle about with unlike my RS2 which is retaining the MTM coversion but otherwise remaining stock. I can always the 80 look nice in future, I'd use the car in winter to keep the salt off my other cars, though the underside will get presure washed every couple of weeks. I do have a nice set of BBS RM's fitted to it currenly as well as a couple of sets of steels.
I've not seen a B3 80 quattro fitted with a G60 engine, the 2.0 block in the car is almost identical to the G60's 1.8, so it really wouldn't take me very long to install it. The only thing I'd have to spend any serious money on is a clutch, I'd proably get a custom one made which isn't as expensive as one would imagine. Though once I have access to the G60's flywheel I might well be able to find stock one that would work fine. I would also need to purchase an intercooler and a couple of bit's of hose but these won't cost a fortune thanks to eBay.
It's a fair bit of work breaking a car but nothing like as time consuming as restoring one and a lot of the Corrado parts are worth a surprising amount. The interior alone is £1K back straight away.
Yesterday I set about removing everything posiable from the car, it probably won't be to most peoples tastes but that car is being made as light weight as is fesiable, I got everything that unscrews or clips out yesterday including the rear door cards. I was going to remove the rear window regulators but they're very simple and don't weight a great deal so have decided to leave them in place...
I got it ready to remove all the tar sound deadening from the inside of the shell which is a tedious job that take's quite a while with a hot air gun and paint scrapper. I did that with my 3B S2, again to save weight, plus it does actually smell kinda funny when it's hot, I put 90% of the tar I removed from my S2 in a box and weighed it and I'd shaved off another 25kg. There seems to be even more of the bloody stuff inside my 80 so there's at least that much weight to save but I actualy reckon it'll be more like 40kgs which is a huge saving.
There's not much one can get rid of outside of the car without comprimising rust protection other than make a light weight exhaust system, Audi exhausts are VERY heavy as their boxes all weigh a ton. My S2 had a very simple system consisting of a 3" pipe straight from the turbo to a straight through SS Jetex Backbox, that saved over 50kg on that car as S2's have quite a complicated sytem with two large Cat's and couple of very heavy boxs.
Right! that's probably more than anyone want's to read in one post so I'll leave it there and add a load of photo's below which I have to do on my phone as opposed to my laptop.
History... I picked up the B3 quattro years ago, I think it was 2016/7 but would have to check it could have been 2015. I got it off eBay from a breaker who had just gotten the car in and thought rightly it was worth more than it's scrap weight which at the time would have been £200. I won the auction for £360 as they were pretty cheap anyway back then plus the advert was awful, just one photo of the front and no details regarding milage or condition. The car was about 40 miles away from me and still had a couple of weeks MOT so I simply got a lift there and drove it home. My first impressions were that the car itself drove very well other than a noisy exhaust leak, it was on about 130K and everything worked properly. Due to it's close, low ratio gearbox it was actually quite spritly, far from fast but not slow... The best way to describe it's performance was like a four wheel drive 8V Mk2 Golf GTI, nice close ratios with a top speed of 120ish at 6K RPM, the engine is pretty much the same so this is no real surprise.
However the interior was really quite remarkably dirty and full of rubbish of every description, I have to tackle farmers cars at work and they're always stinking but this thing was a whole new level of unpleasent. I've only ever encoutered one worse car that was still mobile, that's a an A6 belonging to a young female customer who for some reason had taken to storing dirty nappys (dipers for our US readers) in the the boot (trunk) and using the rear seat and passenger foot well for general refuse in much the same manner as my 80. Finding the locking wheel key required a great deal of bravery! We had to have a word with her husband regarding the matter as it was terrifying to work on inside however she seemed oblivious to the hazards...
Not only was the carpet soaking to the point of pooling in the foot wells from water ingress there was food wrapping, quite a lot of rotting actual food in bags as well as just chucked on the floor, various evengelicial leaflets regarding God in boxes everywhere (and I really do mean everywhere) as well as wide varity of soaking garments and general stuff. So my first job once I got it home was to set about removing all the above mentioned crap and as we had a skip in the yard chuck the lot in there. It was so bad I took the seats out and removed the carpet and all the sound deading material and binned it. I made a couple of hole's in the floor to let the water out and stop it filling up again, though I've since cured the leaks, the scutle was full of leaves and moss so water could pour in through the heater inlet. Now I've removed all that with vigrous preasure washing it seems to stay pretty dry in there.
The seats were horrid and starting to fall apart so as I had a really rather nice early B3 Coupe dark grey Velour interior left over from a customer who had changed it for leather and said to dispose of the old stuff as I pleased I burnt the orginal seating so I could retrive the scrap metal and fitted the CQ interor. The front seat's obviously go straight in but the rear bench whilst being the correct diamentions doesn't really fit properly so that's being done away with as the much like my 3B S2 I aim to save as much weight as I can. I'm quite happy with it being a two seater, I don't like the extra weight of passengers anyway so win, win.
Whilst clearing the car out I found the orginal book pack with a fully stamped up service record from South Hereford Audi, the V5 registation and some other service history which was highly interesting. The car had one previous lady owner who through reading the vairous documnets I worked out was in her mid 80's who had the car serviced and MOT'd every year by the local Audi dealership until that year. I don't know what changed, perhaps she moved house or wanted to econoimise, however that year she'd taken the car for it's service and MOT to an 'independant specialist' and been presented with an estimate for about £1K to do all the work required!
I found that odd given that I drove it over 40 miles home without issue, so I got the car over the pit and tightened up a leaking exhaust joint, she'd been quoted for a complete new system but the original exhaust was still prefectly servicable. I checked everything over and the only thing I could find wrong with it was a slightly sticky rear brake caliper which took an hour to sort out, again she'd been quoted for new brakes all around. Basically the poor old girl had taken the car to an independant VAG specialist whom I know of but won't name and been presented with an outragous estimate in an atempt to rip her off. I took the car for a new MOT at my local test station and it passed with no issues at all so I used the car for winter transport.
Now here's where thing's get interesting... Please excuss the copy and paste of info from other thread's it's saves me typing up loads of info and get's everything in one place.
I have a Tornado Red/Pink Corrado G60 which I stuffed through a hedge back in 2019, it sustained moderate front end damage and one quite nasty dent to the offside cill, I am yet to pull the carpet and interior trim, but looking at the underside the damage does not look like it extend's to the floor pan.
The car already required a full respray anyway which as I work in the trade I can get a decent job done for between £1 and £2K, if I do all the prep myself which will be a lot of work, I could even prime it myself once I've painted my garage floor. I would also need to source a pair of decent headlights and wings, I have one wing but it's decayed a lot in storage. The front bumper is fine, though I do have a mint spare along with a pair of complete doors with really heathy window regulators in them, also a spare rear bumper in tidy condition. I've also got one of the now very sought ofter 90mm front lower spoilers and a pair of decent wing mirrors along with quite a few other spares from the couple of Corrados I've broken.
I've been keeping an eye on Corrado prices and they seem to have dropped back a touch like quite a few classic cars. It's a very early car (1989) and orginally from Holland so LHD (which the first UK cars were anayway) and only covered 116,000 kilometers. I have all the history since 2012 when I purchased it but not much from before then, a little but no service book unfortunatlly. It's a nice spec, tidy full black leather interior and steering wheel etc though no sunroof.
I've been doing some back of a fag packet maths and it questionable if it's worth me investing quite a considerable amount of money and a huge amount of my time in doing the repair work, unless I wanted to fix the car for myself as opposed to sell on straight away. As much as I'd love to keep it I've decided to thin down my colection to just three Audi's for which I have a huge amount of spares aquired from breaking a lot of cars as well as picking up RS2 bits and bobs over the years.
My RS2 resoration is going to have to wait until I get shot of my MK2 Golf G60 which requires very little work, the funds from selling the VW will go along way to covering all the work on my RS2, it my even cover it completely if if discount my time. The car is safely locked up in the dry with the tyres inflated to 50psi and every month or so I roll it half a wheels rotation to avoid flat spots, it's got a set of very nearly new Toyo R1R trackday tyres in 225/45/17. I'm not in a massive hurry to start the job, but once I do start it things ahould move quite quickly, the car will be worth so much once resotored I'll probably only use it for shows/meet ups. Hence my idea below...
My 1989 B3 80 quattro E, which is poverty spec, so manual windows and the 2.0L four cylinder engine. This car is metalic black with the nice boot spoiler and the paint has gone very dull, it will polish up a fair bit but to make it look nice it would require a full spray. It is however rust free and solid.
If I was to break my Corrado and sell all the spares I've got for it I could end up with a pretty much free G60 engine that I know the history of and has a fresh supercharger fitted.
So what going to do to get shot of yet another car is fit the G60 engine from my damaged Corrado to my B3 80 quattro and leave it looking a bit tatty and stripped out. It would be very light so the 160bhp motor would make it be quite a quick car, especially with the 80's orginal gearbox which is geared for 120mph at 6K in fifth. I know G60's can be tunned to produce much more power but I like to leave them alone as the charger is stressed enough as it is. Unlike most turbocharged cars from that era it's running pretty close to the design limits of the G-Ladder, the offical factory service interval (full rebuild) on them is 50K miles! As soon as one starts fitting smaller pullys the shorter the service interval becomes and given that it's a £500 job it's not something I want to have to do even more often. My second Corrado G60 had a chip fitted in Germany that retained the stock pully though upped the boost a little and add a touch of timing and more fuel, that was supposed to be 180bhp and the car was very quick however it eat gearboxes
This would be pretty much the opposit to my RS2's restoration, as long as it's not rusty I don't really care what it looks like on the outside, I might not even bother painting the replacement drivers side wing I have for it the correct colour. It will give me a car to fiddle about with unlike my RS2 which is retaining the MTM coversion but otherwise remaining stock. I can always the 80 look nice in future, I'd use the car in winter to keep the salt off my other cars, though the underside will get presure washed every couple of weeks. I do have a nice set of BBS RM's fitted to it currenly as well as a couple of sets of steels.
I've not seen a B3 80 quattro fitted with a G60 engine, the 2.0 block in the car is almost identical to the G60's 1.8, so it really wouldn't take me very long to install it. The only thing I'd have to spend any serious money on is a clutch, I'd proably get a custom one made which isn't as expensive as one would imagine. Though once I have access to the G60's flywheel I might well be able to find stock one that would work fine. I would also need to purchase an intercooler and a couple of bit's of hose but these won't cost a fortune thanks to eBay.
It's a fair bit of work breaking a car but nothing like as time consuming as restoring one and a lot of the Corrado parts are worth a surprising amount. The interior alone is £1K back straight away.
Yesterday I set about removing everything posiable from the car, it probably won't be to most peoples tastes but that car is being made as light weight as is fesiable, I got everything that unscrews or clips out yesterday including the rear door cards. I was going to remove the rear window regulators but they're very simple and don't weight a great deal so have decided to leave them in place...
I got it ready to remove all the tar sound deadening from the inside of the shell which is a tedious job that take's quite a while with a hot air gun and paint scrapper. I did that with my 3B S2, again to save weight, plus it does actually smell kinda funny when it's hot, I put 90% of the tar I removed from my S2 in a box and weighed it and I'd shaved off another 25kg. There seems to be even more of the bloody stuff inside my 80 so there's at least that much weight to save but I actualy reckon it'll be more like 40kgs which is a huge saving.
There's not much one can get rid of outside of the car without comprimising rust protection other than make a light weight exhaust system, Audi exhausts are VERY heavy as their boxes all weigh a ton. My S2 had a very simple system consisting of a 3" pipe straight from the turbo to a straight through SS Jetex Backbox, that saved over 50kg on that car as S2's have quite a complicated sytem with two large Cat's and couple of very heavy boxs.
Right! that's probably more than anyone want's to read in one post so I'll leave it there and add a load of photo's below which I have to do on my phone as opposed to my laptop.
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