Mk4 Golf diesel machine

[Gallons Per Mile]

Another day, another update

This time, It's an oil change first up. I'd done about 9k miles since the last time I serviced it, and knew there was the possibility of an impending Euro trip. Perfect time to get the servicing sorted before winter.

Old oil out:



New filter going in:



Both were replaced with genuine parts as they were pretty much the same price as a motor factor. My local VW dealer are doing 5L of the recommended glug at £22! The oil filter was £9 I think so not worth messing around with going to a motor factor just for that.

Just after the service I started getting the message on the dash saying "Service me in 2000 miles" or similar. I quick reset via VAGCOM and that was cleared.

And now for the fun part! My girlfriend and I were planning on going to Prague for a few days and we both decided it would be more fun to drive than to fly. Flying there was actually quite a bit cheaper, but who said shedding was all about money?! Oh...

Anyway. Once we'd driven off the Euro Tunnel train, this is what we did:



We stopped in Kassel, about mid way though Germany on the way out. Had a pleasant afternoon exploring local sights and a nice dinner in town. This was an excellent trip to get a lot of Autobahn in, and there were even some derestricted sections were I could really put my foot down. Quite a lot of the time on this particular route it was just too busy to try out some speed, but some sections were quiet and allowed for some fun:



That's 140MPH @ 4k RPM! Lowest RPM I've ever done at that speed

I was quite surprised that the car felt totally stable and well within its comfort zone even when flat out. I was following a Kia Stinger who was also wanting to make progress and that thing could accellerate quite well. He would be off up the road once the traffic in front cleared and I'd spend a KM or so playing catch up and then cruising at a safe distance behind doing the same speed. I found out that the brakes are working well too - a lorry pulled out on our two car convoy but it was around a left hander with not brilliant sight lines as bushes had been allowed to grow in the central reservation. 120 - 60MPH was dealt with no problem but you can feel the softness in the suspension - the front end did a bit of a dive. I may look in to new dampers at some point soon.

Prague appeared pretty quickly, and the Golf got parked on the side of the road outside our hotel for a couple of days' well-earned rest. The first thing to do was find a nice pub for a spot of relaxation. As it happened, I found a nice 'craft ale' pub a whole 3 minutes' walk away from the hotel! Several Czech 'craft' beers later and all was well!

The place was excellent, so I'll just leave this pic here. If you're ever in Prage and want a beer, you should go there:



I won't bore you with too many pics of pretty buildings etc, but this band were playing in the middle of town that evening. A kind of Czech/Scottish kilty and violinny theme. Except they were playing Greenday and Iggy Pop?! Not half bad actually, but I'd had a few by then!



Here's one from the castle grounds looking over most of the town. My hotel was near that big radio/TV transmitter thing in the distance:



Back to the important stuff! Time to head home. This time we decided to play Euro Tunnel/traffic roulette. We were 1100KM away from the train and had about 13 hours to play with. We took more or less this route home:



There was definitely a bit less traffic on this route and it meant we got to see more of the excellent scenery in Germany all while going as fast as we fancied. You can really make progress in Germany and I absolutely love the roads and the driving there.

We made it back to Calais with plenty of time to spare. We got in to the terminal and were allowed on an earlier train so just drove straight on. Absolutely couldn't have timed it any better! Door to door, from leaving the hotel in Prague to opening my front door was exactly 12 hours. Not bad really.

The car performed faultlessly, but I didn't really have any doubts about it as I've been over it fairly thoroughly by now. Remember that CV boot I replaced a while back? That was the only minor inconvenience of the whole trip. I noticed my front drivers' side wheel had started to look like this:



And this:



Leading to finding this:



And this:



That's a lot of grease thrown around the place... Luckily the brakes hadn't been affected at all.

Lets see if we can find the split then:



Aha!



The rubber boot obviously couldn't handle the speed. It's bellowed out at speed and been rubbing on the hub, hense why the rubber looks all grazed on one of the ribs. That caused the rubber to wear through and grease to go everywhere... That'll be why VW use much harder plasticy/rubber CV boots then.
I couldn't wait to order new drive shafts as I had a busy work schedule the following week, so my friendly main dealer sorted out a nice OEM boot, grease and all the clips etc for £26. I swapped that over and cleaned up the grease but forgot to take pics of that part of the process. Needless to say, it's now perfect again.

Yay for German design, Autobahns, Czech beer etc! I had a great little Euro trip and the car was better than expected at doing the speed thing. Golfs seem to really get under your skin...

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colin_p said:

Brilliant read, nice road trip.

Interesting v-max as well, did you counter check against a sat-nav?

Cheers!

Nope, didn't check with a GPS. That pic wasn't actually v-max. I'm sure it would have revved out if I had a bit more road to play with. It was pulling hard still at about 4K RPM so I guess I would have seen more on the clock! Parkers website reckon v-max is 134MPH so accounting for clock inaccuracies i'd say I probably did about that speed, and their quoted 'max' figure might be slightly low!

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colin_p said:

I can't remember if you mentioned it having been re-mapped? The thing is, any MK4 GT TDI is now so old there is a high chance it would have been mapped by a previous onwer.

It's not mapped that I know of. It certainly doesn't go better than my friend's old PD130 that had been mapped. That thing felt like a rocket ship!

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Another update! This time involving a turkey baster...

For the past few weeks if the car was stone cold, or it was a little chillier outside than usual in the morning then the dash would beep and scream at me to "STOP - Check coolant". I duly obliged and found that my coolant level was perfect. The car still moaned about it, and I've been living with turning it off and on again once the engine had warmed up a litte, which cures the problem for the rest of the trip. Rinse and repeat the next day, etc.

The coolant level sensor is moulded in to the expansion tank. Which means you need a whole new one if the sensor fails. No bad thing in my case, the old one looks a bit grotty anyway. Here's the offending item:



Let's get basting then! A great way to extract coolant from the tank without spilling it everywhere. I do this with brake fluid too:



Uh oh, there's a big hole where an expansion tank should be now:



Aha! A new one awaits:



Here's my professionally basted coolant, ready to be infused with brand new header tank:



Tank in place and ready for pre-basted coolant:



Filled back up, and a shiny new tank cap as well:



All for the miniscule sum of just under £15. And about 15 mins of my time. Voila.

For the shed men and ladies, I'm up to nearly £1600 spent on buying and maintaining in the 6-and-a-bit months' ownership so far. I've done 13k miles though, so my PPM ratio is looking good; just over 12p/mile at the moment

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colin_p said:

Nice update.

The cheapness of, and massive availabilty of parts for the MK4 along with probably more online information than any other car makes them perfect for shedding.

I'll be taking off the Monty II's (summers) and putting on the Avus II's (winters) soon on the Wife's MK4 Golfy.

Totally agree. There's a shop 10 minutes away from me that specialises in VW too, so I'm sorted for most bits and pieces.

I don't bother with winter tyres. It's balmy down here in the South still!

[Gallons Per Mile]

Christmas update on the Diesel Machine, and it's not a good one...

Lets start off with a couple of pics from Christmas Day, when I was at work:





Looking pretty unloved at the moment. Can't remember the last time it got washed but it had been really clocking up the miles including another dive in to Europe but for work this time. 7k miles in three months is something of a record for me!

This week the Machine started to run a bit lumpy - misfiring it felt like. One day I had to nurse it to work, yet the run home was almost perfect. This carried on all this week. I suspected the usual injector loom problem that these suffer with and got one ordered. I took my laptop and VCDS to work and plugged it in only to find no codes at all. Fair enough, the EML wasn't on either.

Fast forward to today. I've got the new injector loom so decide as I'm having a morning under the bonnet that I'll take the EGR off and see if it needs a clean:



Looks ok on the face of it, but...



Yep. That's a bit gunked up!



Yay, loads of gunk in the inlet too!

Scraping out the rubbish:




The amount of gunk in the plastic bag! That's all come from the inlet and EGR

I scraped out the joining pipe from the EGR cooler too:



Inlet looks quite a bit cleaner now!



On to the main job, replacing the injector loom. Cam cover off:



Looks reasonable in here. Better just check that chocolate cam while I'm there:



Hmm. What's that on cyl 1 injector lobe?



Oh dear:




That's dead then... Explains the rough running though!

At this point I put everything back together and went indoors. Didn't bother changing the injector loom just yet.

I'm unsre how to proceed now. The car's only cost 9p a mile to buy and run since I bought it in April and I've done nearly 18k miles now. Is it worth many hundreds of pounds for a new cam kit, cam belt and service or do I just throw it away and get something else?

[Gallons Per Mile]

col1983 said:

I guess it depends how much you like the car. It clearly doesn’t owe you very much so you could easily justify the repair cost, but then it’s also fun to get something different albeit at that price point, it may not be a better car and may actually have more wrong with it.

The Golf seems to have been pretty reliable give or take some minor-ish issues, plus you know it well now. You sound like you’re quite enjoying it so I’d probably say spend the money, unless you’re bored of it in which case you have a great excuse to get rid...

It's a good work shed. Never let me down and even coming home last night it limped along at motorway speed without complaining too much! I'm not bored of it yet. It's been too cheap to run, but I'm missing having the power and soundtrack of an M3... I don't think there's any point in binning this and getting another cheap shed - like you say, I might be jumping straight in to more problems. I don't think I want an M2 enough either to justify spending 34K just yet, so it looks like fixing the Golf is the way forwards

colin_p said:

You can buy cam and follower kits for reasonable money.

And you need a few specialist tools also to pull the cam pulley off..... which I might be able to help with. Do you know if the car has the earlier dampered cambelt tensioner setup or the later friction setup? It changed sometime on the 02-52 reg cars therefore yours is on the cusp. If it is the later friction setup then the cambelt is a doddle, if the earlier dampered setup then it can be a mare.

A shame and again being so old, chances are that "any old oil" has been used, probably more than once, rather than PD specific stuff which these engines must have.

No idea on the cam belt query - I'll have to check that out. I wasn't really paying attention to the belt other than making sure it didn't look like it was about to fall apart.

Looking online, I think I need special tools T10051 and T10052 to get the cam pulley off. If you've got those then I'd love to borrow them.

Yeah, bit of a shame really. I clocked 146k on the way home last night too. Nothing for a PD engine! It's definitely had the correct oil on the last two services as I did them, but who knows before that.

I'd better have a look around at cam kits, cam belt kits and more service items...

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That's a good point. Do you have those too?

[Gallons Per Mile]

Looks like the cam belt kit I need is this one, as my VIN is after 1J-2W592 783.

Does that answer your question above Colin? Looks like just a friction set up to me?

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col1983 said:

I know what you mean. Could you run an M3 or similar as a second car, keep the Golf to daily? I’ve got a Z4MR which I do that with and it works well - keeps the Z4 feeling special when I do take it out and more importantly, keeps it feeling fast enough so I’m less tempted to look for something quicker

I've already got a Mk2 Golf GTI 16v and an Escort RS Turbo as second cars... If I got an M3/M2 then it would replace the daily Diesel Machine. The more I think about it the less it's making sense at the moment!

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exgtt said:

Haa, I’m too chicken to explore LOO on the roads, just tooling about @ 70% gives me all the smiles I need!

Your Golf is a keeper, sure it needs a bit of work but 3dr 150’s in this nick are non existent round these parts (West Yorkshire)

This Golf is the pinnacle of sub £1500 motoring, sure it doesn’t tick the fun box but it ticks all the others.

You need to give it a try! Seriously, it's so controlable you wouldn't believe.

Yep, I'm sort of the same opinion. It's a keeper but it's just not amazingly fun. At this price point I guess I need to compromise on fun a little bit. Maybe a suspension kit and a remap would sort that out. But then I'd be spending more money on it... Ahh!!

col1983 said:

Yeah you’ve definitely got the fun car well and truly covered with those two! I do really fancy an M2 as well, just can’t bring myself to justify the cost for something i’d do 15k pa on. I’ll be all over them when they drop to £20k or less, but that’s a bit of a way off. Best of luck with the Golf!

15kpa is just my commuting mileage to my normal base, let alone any other mileage I do! M2 is only justifiable if I do some man maths. Basically I can spend about £500 on the Golf or 34k on an M2. I'm still tempted though. If I could bag a deal on one at 30k I'd be very interested. I'm not going to ring a dealer and ask about discounts though.

bassett said:

I enjoyed reading your thread, they are good cars if they haven't been messed with. I have a similar 2004 Seat Leon cupra TDI 150 I picked up 3 years ago and had many of your similar issues. After a bodged attempt to fix a driveshaft CV joint i ended up binning it for a full replacement only to find the other side needed doing a year later, every window regulator and locking module has been replaced, not expensive but it gets tiresome. It failed an MOT this year and realised the EGR was 50% blocked and I dare not take the rocker cover off! Good luck with yours

Thanks! Yes the EGR surprised me too. Couldn't believe it runs (ran..) that well with that amount of rubbish in the inlet. A neighbour had a Leon that literally had a lake in the rear footwells. I said it was probably the door seals as they're apparently prone to being leaky but he decided he knew better and got the bathroom sealant out all over the place. Eventually he crashed it in to someone and wrote it off, my imagination presumes there was a mini tsunami inside at the time

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I've got a cam kit and new set of securing bolts coming from Darkside Developments and a cam belt kit on order too. VW genuine parts were over £900 which is basically what I paid for the car, so that was never going to happen!

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colin_p said:

Nice. Did you / have you confirmed it is the later friction setup?

Give us a shout about tools and the lending thereof.

In fact where are you?

There is some very clever fetteledge that needs to be done regarding measuring the dynamic timing on these during and after the cam belt change. Do a bit of searching on "sync angle" or "torsion value". You'll need some decent diagnostic kit (VCDS) for that, which I may be able to help with if you are close'ish. Maidenhead here.

I've gone with the fitment guidance on Euro Car Parts website as per the link I posted up there somewhere. Hopefully that won't come back to bite me.

I bought a timing tools kit on Ebay which should do the trick as I like buying tools, but many thanks for the offer of borrowing yours

I'll have a look at the timing things you said about. Sounds interesting! I've got VCDS lite but it sounds like I'll need the full version which I may need to borrow. I'm about an hour and a half away from you but happy to have a trip over if you'd like to show me this funky timing stuff

[Gallons Per Mile]

Ok, once I've got the car back together I'll look in to what my VCDS can do. My cam should be here today but I don't know about the other bits.

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Ok, thanks for the advice. I'll do that first on Sunday and see if I can view the value that I need. I'm pretty sure the sticker on the cam cover is still there on my car but it's dirty so most likely unreadable now.

Luckily I'm borrowing a friends spare shed Mk1 Focus which has only done tip runs for the last year or so. I had to fix it before throwing it in to 90 miles a day commuting but that's another story!

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colin_p said:

Nowt wrong with a MK1 Focus. Getting rare now due to rot, something a similarly aged MK4 doesn't suffer from except the superfical stuff on the front wings.

It's a good car. The steering and suspension are far better than the Golf, but the driving position is too high. Golf wins hands down on driving position and has more comfortable seats too. I'm having fun with a revvy petrol

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200Plus Club said:

Thanks! This is my freebie car as the wife was given it foc and it's a 175k miler lol.
I need to get under and see what's going on as it might not be worth spending monies on tbh.
Front windows both not working and plastic shims holding the glass up with advisory not to use email lol!

All those bits are pretty cheap to do, so it might well be worth spending a few hundred quid getting it right and it should carry on being cheap and reliable. Hopefully!

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Time to get the spanners out! The Mk1 Focus I borrowed has been doing a brilliant job of running me to work but I want my own car back really

Firstly, on the advice of Mr Colin up there ^, I checked the synchro angle:




Ok, looking good. It was flicking between 0.0 and 0.6 so the mechanical timing seems pretty much bang on at the moment. I found some scribbled numbers on the top of the timing belt cover too but they mean nothing to me



Top cover off and you're presented with this. Those three bolts are the timing adjustment so I wanted to note where they are now before I start dismantling everything:



Time to get under the car and remove the big rubber bung that hides the aux pulley bolts. While I was there, I noticed the clip on the CV boot I replaced has gone AWOL and there was a load of grease hanging about the place



The arch liner took a pasting too!



I'll have to get a CV clip/cable tie on there, but that's not very important right now! Here's the aux pulley with rubber insert removed:



Before I start removing stuff, just a note of which way the aux belt goes around:



Here's a pic of the timing tools I'm going to use too. Only a cheap Ebay set but they seem to do the trick:



Aux belt slipped off the pulleys. Looks in pretty good condition so I won't be changing that:



Guess how tight the aux pulley bolts were? REALLY tight. Two came off with a small fight and the other two rounded. Good thing I've got rounded nut removers:



These things really are the business. I hammered it on and just undid the bolt like there was never an issue. If you need a set then these are what I'm using:



Aux pulley removed and lower timing belt cover also taken off. Hmm, there's a bd great engine mount in the way of taking the timing belt off. That'll be fun to remove...



I'll worry about that later... Back up top, I took the cam cover off and started to get busy on something else:



Removing the injector rocker arms:



Laid out in a box that was handily delivered the other day. 1 & 2 at the top. 3 & 4 at the bottom. Just so I don't forget!



Here's the head without the rockers:



I turned the cam a bit and you can see the real reason I'm having problems clearly now. Apart from the chunk taken out of No.1 injector lobe, No.1 valve lobe is really not very pointy any more...




Yay, that's definitely the problem then! Next up, the engine mount needs to come out of the way. That means the expansion tank needs to come out. And the power steering reservoir... Deep joy



That was relatively straightforward to do. Now the hard part. Getting that massive lump of engine mount off the side of the engine. This proved to be a massive pain. More fiddly than anything else. I got it loose from the engine but there was just not enough room to actually remove it from the engine bay. So I left it there for the time being and worked around it:



Timing belt off! You can't quite tell from the pics but it was just starting to crack and looked definitely past its best. My history file says it was changed in 2013 and this seems spot on looking at the belt. It had a 2013 date on it too:



Here's where we're at now:



Slipping the tensioner off the stud with the engine mount in the way was amusing... Uh oh, that's a damper for the tensioner, which means I bought the wrong timing belt kit.



I'll worry about that later. Time to remove the outer pulley from the cam and then the inner pulley that the outer one bolts to with those three timing bolts I was on about earlier. The main bolt is done up at 100nm so fairly tight. You can see the special tool connected to my breaker bar so I can counter hold while undoing the bolt :



Another special tool to pull the inner pulley from the end of the cam. Luckily my 32mm viscous fan spanner did the trick for counter holding as I didn't have a proper spanner big enough!



That pinged off after some persuasion, leaving me with this:



I removed the cam and cleaned it up:






Looks pretty dead doesn't it! Still, it'll make a nice garage ornament

Spot the problem with tappet No.1:



And the rest of the tappets with no cam in the way:



I cleaned up the loose oil a bit so I could check how everything looked. Here's a close up of cyl 1 & 2. Note the wear on the cam bearings!



And cyl 3 & 4:



Then I decided that the engine mount really did need to be out of the way because I wanted to remove the damper for the timing belt tensioner. After quite a large amount of persuasion I managed to align everything just so and squeezed it out past the brake fluid reservoir. Which I thought I'd broken at one point, that's how tight it was!



Offending engine mount:



Cam caps neatly stored in correct order:



Cap No.4 bearing had taken a beating, look at the scoring:



My garage is full of Escort RS Turbo shell, engine and various other parts so everything from this car went in the boot:



And that brings us up to date. Luckily I'm off work tomorrow and Tuesday because I need to buy the correct timing belt, 8 x stretch bolts for the injector rocker arms and a new set of aux pulley bolts. Oh and some fresh oil and a filter as I'd forgotten to buy those last week when I was shopping for bits!

Stay tuned for 'shiny new bits being put in to engine' pictures!

[Gallons Per Mile]

Cheers, I got there in the end, although as soon as I put the new damper back on I'll have to put the mount back or there won't be the space. Then I'l have to do the rest working around the mount again...

I'm not planning on changing the water pump - the coolant is perfect and there are no leaks. It should last a while yet, shouldn't it?

I've got a new damper and all the pulleys on order. I'll pick them up later. I don't have a vice though. Hope that's not going to be a problem! It doesn't look overly complicated to tension but I've not researched the '4mm' thing yet.

It's done 146k almost exactly. I figured I'll get my moneys worth out of all these new bits I'm spending out on. Plus it's going to be cheaper overall than buying another car. I suppose I'll have to actually give it a clean sometime soon!

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Thanks for the replies. New water pump has been purchased! It was only £20 and has a metal impeller so not worth the risk. I might as well as I'm doing everything else anyway. I've got everything outstanding purchased today but need to pick up the aux pulley bolts tomorrow as they weren't in stock. I didn't have time to start putting new bits back in the car today but hopefully will tomorrow. I *really* need a proper workshop. The drive just isn't cutting it, and I always seem to end up doing major work of some kind in the middle of winter...