Not a new member, just a new car. (1996 B4 Passat TDi maintenance/mods)

[Christ]

Started prepping the nose piece for a grille block and paint. There was rust in some weird places bit got all of it and smoothed out most of the stone chips everywhere. Gonna have to remove a little more paint to weld in the grille block and smooth everything out, then primer and satin black.



The car this came from had possibly the two good doors I need, and the hood. Fenders were too far gone to be worth $40 each, what they charge. A few possibly good black interior pieces I'll take, though most of the interior, like mine, is unkempt and heavily worn. May grab the headlights and headlight mounting panel after next payday/budget day.

[California98Civic]

really nice picture

[Christ]

hahahah I had to take it in the bedroom, with the lamp knocked over on the bed pointing at it.

The only camera I own is on my crappy $79 phone, so I do what I can with what I have. Someday I'll probably invest in something /slightly/ better and dedicated, but for pics I post online, it's soooo easy to just use the damn camera phone, because I can take the image, post it, and share it from FB to everywhere.

[Christ]

Anyway I'm hoping it's fairly obvious where the grille block ends up getting welded in place. Im not totally sure if I'm actually going to weld it, or just pin it in place with rivets or glue it on and smooth out the piece yet... all are pretty much the same viability for me.

I may end up just gluing the piece of tin on with some aircraft or body bond and smoothing out the edges from there.

Later on, I may be upgrading to BMW 3-series HID [aftermarket] lights, which /almost/ fit perfectly but leave gaps in the nose panel area that need to be filled, so I'm not concerned at all about modifying this panel since I'll have to do it again in that eventual case.

[PaulB2]

I had a '97 Passat TDI. I didn't mod it much (didn't know about ecomodder at the time) but I did find that larger diameter tires really helped. However the second time I went for even larger diameter tires, the handling got significantly worse - but I don't know if it was "a bridge too far" or if they were just worse tires than the previous ones. Only drawback is that when turning, if you hit a pothole and compress the suspension, it tends to snag the wheelwell...

[Christ]

I actually just started driving this car again after the oil leak in my F250 got bad enough my boss started noticing it... couldn't have it on the parking lot at work, so I had to park it and start driving something else.

I'm in the process of replacing the entire brake system on the car so that it will actually function properly, then I'll get back to modding. Since I had to start driving it again in the winter, and it was the only [operative] vehicle I currently own, of course it would start having problems with air intrusion and other running issues, but I'm quick enough on my feet that I managed to keep getting to work on time and still fix the car as necessary.

I've got a few other things that I need to do over the Spring in addition to taking care of our newborn [not born yet] child, but by Summer I should be back to no less than 3 available vehicles lol

The current tire size is 195/60R15 on Saturn steel wheels. I really should take some pictures of the car, but I don't exactly keep it clean or looking very nice, cuz it's a beater.