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mech205eng

[car_upgrade] 205 Gti6 Immaculate Road/track Car

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mech205eng

I'm finally getting round to starting this project thread, I didn't want to start it until I fealt I had a half decent amount of progress to show.

I've wanted a 205 gti for a few years now, wanted a project to keep me busy and wanted a track orientated car that i can drive on the road that'll be uncomfortable and impractical(for the novelty)

Elements of this project have changed as i've gone on but the general theme has stayed the same. I'll try to keep it all brief as I can go on quite a bit.

I wanted a white 205 gti, stripped out, gti6 engine in it, roll cage, immaculate condition and with some tasty other bits on it too. The plan was that i'd never sell it, so it doesn't really have a budget...within reason.

First of all I decided to get rid of my current car to free up a bit of capital and too get a more project friendly vehicle (for carting parts around)

So i sold this

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and bought this

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Then I had to find the car, as i was going to be changing the engine it didn't matter how good this was, I wanted a 1.9 although as I look back now this didn't matter, I also wanted a white one (this also is irrelevant with hindsight)

The most important factor was getting one with a solid shell. So i hit ebay on the look out for white 1.9's, none within travelling distance. After a few weeks I ended up buying a white, G reg, 1.9 from Somerset on ebay. It had 10 months MOT but no tax, 117,000 miles and looked half decent. It was bidding with no reserve but I hate bidding wars so rung the bloke up and offered him £850 and he snapped it up. So I had bought this car 200 miles away, unseen, and had no intention of travelling all that way to get it. I used shiply.com (if you havn't used it, it's an amzing site!) I got the 205 picked up from Somerset and brought to York for £180 on a transporter. I couldn't of done it myself for that cheap.

 

When it arrived it was a little rough around the edges, the interior wasn't brilliant, but I didn't care. The promised service history was 'missing' too, although the bloke had kindly left the reciept from when he'd bought it (just 1 month previous) in with the old MOT's....£400!!!! Thought i'd got a bargain at £850. Anyway here she is the night it arrived.

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The plan was to get it all stripped down and search for rot, if it was bad in a lot of places I was going to sell on and not bother, so wanted to get it stripped down quick to find out.

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It was hard to tell so I sent it off to get the floor blasted and primed on the inside

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mech205eng

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After it came back from the blasters it was much easier to see what I was tackling

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There was a few places that needed tackling, mainly under the seats and in the boot floor

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I also anted to weld up the drain holes, few pics of a bank holiday weekend with welder

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mech205eng

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I didn't just want to buy a GTI6 engine, go to all the trouble for it to be a tapper etc. and i needed some 6 brakes too so I decided to buy one.

I bought this completely standard 1998, taxd and tested, nile blue example for £750. Had 108,000 miles and I bought it off a lovely woman around 30 who had had it for 7 years and got it when it had only 20k on it. I liked this very much!

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So i lowered it, painted the wheels and drove it round for the next few months to make sure the engine was good!

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The next thing I needed was a rollcage. Making my own rollcage is something I've wanted to do for a while now. So I gave it a go (keep in mind im not a fabricator)

I ordered some steel from a local stockholders;

1 length 1.25" CDS seamless tube

2 length 1.5" CDS seamless tube

1 length 1.75" CDS seamless tube

1 length 1"x1" mild steel box section

 

All the steel delivered was like £200ish I think. The plan was to make the hoop from 1.75", the door bars from 1.25" and 1.5" for the rest. Obviously it was going to be a weld in cage. I did all this at home with just a welder and a 4" grinder.

I decided to start with the hoop, I taped some cardboard together and made a template and also did some measurements

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To bend the hoop I borrowed the use of a hydraulic bender off someone on my industrial estate. After a bit of maths I had a hoop that was a perfect fit, so much so I had to ratchet strap the legs in, then when in position release the strap so it fit really tight.

 

As for the front legs, I managed to get a set off stu8v, he'd ordered a cage and his front legs came with the incorrect profile on the end to mate to the hoop, his cage company sent him a new pair and told him to keep the others as they didn't want them back. So I had a ride down to Lincolnshire and got them off him, ground the ends off and fettled a profile on to fit!

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I had a plan about how to weld it in, I couldn't see how I'd be able to get in to weld around the top of the cage, mainly where the front legs meet the hoop. So instead of using flat cage feet, i fashioned these boxes that fit in posiion nicely on the sloped floor, but weren't square so the tops of them were perfectly flat. The plan was to sit the hoop and front legs onto these 3" tall boxes, tack the legs to the hoop, then knock the boxes out and be able to lower the front section of the cage by 3" which would hopefully give me enough room to get in with the welder. Then lift it up, slide the boxes back under, weld boxes to the car and cage to the boxes. This worked a treat.

Anyway pictures speak a thousand words and so on

 

The box pieces

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The complete hoop boxes, welded inside and outside then outside welds ground back

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Front leg boxes with same treatment

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mech205eng

Hoop box in place

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This is how the hoop fit (I stitched the hoop to the B pillar where it touched for extra rigidity)

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Had to do a bit of shoe horning to weld all the way around

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Moving on to the back of the cage

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Stu

Good project! Out of interest, what happened to all the trim? Im doing the reverse with mine, turning it back from a track car to a b road blaster ;)

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mech205eng

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Then before doing my door bars i decided to mount my seats.

 

I got a pair of brand fire Sparco Pro2000's, a local bloke had bought these in 2008 for his mk2 escort rally car he was building, he'd taken alot longer to finish it than he though (just as we all do) and he still hasn't finished it to this day so he was getting some more seats, so I managed to get these off him at a good price still packaged

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Been just over 6 feet I worked out that I was going to be sat way to high up, so had to hack out the exhaust tunnel and weld it back up

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I decided I wanted to mount my seats on 1"x1" box section, took a bit of thinking how I would fix them though, toyed with the idea of welding captive nuts but thought f*** it! I'll make a proper job!

So I turned up 8 of these inserts at work from 304 stainless, they are 20mm od, 22mm long with an M12 tapped hole 18mm deep.

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I cut 4 lengths of box to roughly the right length and spent a whole saturday afternoon with the box layed in place, with a seat balanced on top, with me sat in it trying to find my perfect driving position (all this with out letting the seat or loose lengths of box slide) then marking and measuring. Eventually I had the exact centres of where my inserts needed to be and where the box needed to be welded to the car.

I got the lengths of box in a vice on the milling machine so I could accurately plot the centres, then reamed 20mm holes (so my inserts would drop in and be tight, and also would sit flush with the top because of the size i'd made them)

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Edited by mech205eng

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mech205eng

I've kept all the trim to go back on, the plan is to make it look standard from the outside

 

A bit of weld prep on the inserts and box

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Nice bit of tigging on them

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Milled the weld back so there was a flat seat for the sidemount to sit on

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Got some alluminium side mounts but they came with no holes in the bottom, so set them up flat on this angle plate and machined some nice slots in them, that way id have slight side to side adjustment (10mm or so)

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Bars in place

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Seat trial

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Now it was time to start on the door bars, I wanted these to be lower at the front then the back so it'd be slightly easier to get into. Also it was very important to me they were symetrical and identical, I have slight OCD

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mech205eng

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Test the seat to see if it fouls on the door bars

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1900 engine out

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Loom out

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Welded some harness mounts in for 6 points, FIA plates used off ebay

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Cut the dash to miss the cage (this will be flocked later)

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mech205eng

I was now on with stripping it bare so it could go for paint. Whilst underneath taking the tank off i noticed a horrible bit of welding it had had previously, after examining closer I noticed that in between the two skins (wear rear belt mounts go through to boot floor) there was something inside, after poking my finger through one of the drain hole I could tell there was a lot of metal 'things' in there, I had no choice but to cut a hole in my perfectly good underneath to get these mystery items out.

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and this is what i found inside!!!!

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The only thing I can think is that a previous owner has been doing a bit of home welding on his 205, he'd cut the rot out and while he's away making a plate to fill the hole with, one of his mates has not been able to resist ramming his car full of scrap, only to tell him when he's just finished welding it up.

 

Anyway I filled it back in

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I also discovered more welding that needed doing when the engine was out so did that too

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After a good hoover out

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Skipping forward a bit I took the axle and subframe off, sent it off to the blasters again and that the underneath and engine bay blasted, had to do a little more welding to the underneath where the tank had been and on chasis leg.

Then to the painters where it was etch primed underneath and bay, then white stone chipped underneath and bay and then fully resprayed inside and out along with all panels. I wanted to do it a bit of a brighter white than standard (some of you may argue against this but i stand by it)

In the end I chose ford frozen white.

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mech205eng

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Back home

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The white stone chip underneath looked a bit creamy compared to the rest of the car, also with it not been a smooth finish mud can easily get engrained in it, so I brushed smooth white hammerite all underneath

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mech205eng

I stripped my subframe down and sent it for powdercoating, then I painted a few bits myself

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Gave my wheels a quick rub down and rattle tin up while I was at it

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Then got them wrapped in 4 new proxes

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I bought a 309 gti beam off WooDooUk, which was rebuilt by Anthony in 2009

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Needed a fresh lick of paint though, so I stripped it all down, cleaned. painted it and re-greased it

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mech205eng

Thought i'd get engine out of gti6 for something to do one day

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Then got engine ont stand

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Just managed to squeeze into the group buy before it closed and got these

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Pair of 6 point sparco pro racers

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That's me all up to date I think, I've got quite a few more nice shiny bits to go on but i'll upload them photos when I fit them.

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cybernck

Very inspirational! I'm looking forward to seeing new updates :).

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Lowercase

this is going to be cleeean mate! keep pictures coming!

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mech205eng

Thanks alot guys

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pip470

loving the work on this. And the tig welding looked incredible, seemed a shame to mill it flat. Keep it coming.

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mech205eng

Bit of an update here...

 

Next stage was to get her rolling, needed some new bushes for my beam so bought a baker bm grp A kit.

 

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In all honesty I think these are terrible. The acetal bushes hadn't been de-burred at all, a quick measure with a vernier showed every diamter to be tapered, including the hole, which in my opinion was way too big anyway. This might just be the machinist in me speaking but there was no way I was gunna put these on my car. I didn't send them back though because they weren't a faulty set, this is obviously just the quality of their turning, They will be on a automatic bar feed and it wouldn't surprise me if you could knock 100 out an hour when been made to that quality, All I know is that if i produced something like that at work, i'd be sacked instantly (rant over) the aluminium mounts though I was impressed with, they seemed of much better quality.

So I turned up 4 bushes myself to a much tighter tolerance, I made them out of Ertalyte instead of acetal as it is much less brittle.

 

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On went the beam and then the new brakes, When checking the bleed nipples though I sheered one off, I do have a spare caliper though but left the knackered one on for the time been, thats why I left the pads out

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I got my subframe blasted

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Then gave it a couple of coats of satin black

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Then re-assembled it and bolted it to the car

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mech205eng

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Then on went the petrol tanks and filler neck

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I didn't like my doors and tailgate getting tip toed around on the floor so I wanted them out of the way on the car, got some new hinge pins, check straps and strap pins and got the doors on, national windscreens came and put my rear window back in so i could get the tailgate on. While they were there I got them to put my windscreen in (which was original with the car and also had a sticker in the corner i liked of a silverstone peugeot meet in 94). Anyway the big meat head technician cracked it with his first push. Apparently they aren't responsible for this cos it was old glass so I had to buy another, although i did get it at a very discounted price off them.

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I bought sum uprated strut top mounts too, much stiffer to feel

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On went the hub, my gaz golds newly painted calipers, discs and red stuff pads

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I think i'm going to have to exchange my springs though, gaz recomended 350lb springs to me, I now realise I want more like 225lb. The coilovers are wound right down to the bottom and it sits this high, I know there is no weight in it, but when me and my mate stood on the subframe (circa 25 stone) there was no drop in ride height at all.

I banged the wheels on and pulled t outside so I could clean the garage out.

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mech205eng

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Then back into garage tucked away for now

 

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johniban

bludy brilliant this is! inspired me to strip mine down i just havnt got the room :(

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BusEngineer

Really great project so far, will watch with interest :)

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mech205eng

bludy brilliant this is! inspired me to strip mine down i just havnt got the room :(

 

I'm quite lucky to have the space I do, the shed I'm in i actually built myself (minus sheeting, electrics and conc'in) in 2011, took me nearly all year. Was thinking about doing a project thread for that too.

 

Stripping it down is all well and good, and will probably be worth it when it's done, but god everytime i go into my shed I just want to drive it! and it's depressing when I think I won't be driving it for few months yet

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johniban

yeah start a garage project build! everyone loves a garage

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Lowercase

updates dude!

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