It's worth mentioning as a bit of a disclaimer, my intentions are to keep the car mostly OEM so for those looking for a thread filled with lowering/big wheels and an abundance of mods, this probably isn't for you
For the most part this topic will serve the purpose of a place for me to record and keep track of my progress, the agenda being good car husbandry, some minor restoration stuff and bringing this lovely barge back to her former glory.First things first, a bit about me and my background and also some insight as to where this car will fit into my life/mini fleet.
I have an unhealthy interest in all vehicles Germanic and already own a Mk4 Golf SDI whilst the missus drives a 1.7 Lupo SDI. For those who don't know the SDI models were Volkswagen's now long discontinued range of normally aspirated diesels, I've got a bit of a fetish for them...
Whilst the SDI's are deeply reliable, amazingly frugal, cheap to run, simple and above all else utterly indestructible, they are also fairly slow and dull. I'd always had a hankering to try the TDI units, after all they're pretty much the same engines found in the SDI variants I love, only with a trubo to spice things up... I did worry for a while about the costs of turbo and DMF replacements (Both absent on the NA derv models we currently own) but in the end decided that life's too short.
intially set my sights on another Golf, I quickly realised Passats weirdly seemed to cost slightly less to insure and don't seem to have fallen victim to the bad mods/negative image when compared to PD 130/150 Golfs, also, having a young family the extra space seemed to make sense. Fast forward to last weekend and I became the proud(ish) owner of a fairly clean '04 Passat Highline saloon in full fat 130 PD flavour on 136k with a part service history.
The Passat makes up the third/spare car, the intention being to use it as a big/comfortable family weekend wagon, the rattly NA Lupo and Golf dervs will continue to be used for the weekly grind. It has a bit of a to-do list as most vehicles of this age do, but I enjoy tinkering and don't technically need the car to be ready anytime soon so I can steadily knock the rough edges off at a leisurely pace, it should provide me with some fun along the way
The SDI's...
SAM_5560 by And the Passat...
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