1/20  Decent weather allowed for much progress, but not quite as much as I'd hoped.  Still I got a lot done, ranging from installing the rear subframe, installing the shifter box, drilling a lot of holes, and routing the ABS wiring harness.  Follow along as I touch base on some of the mysteries of what holes go where when VR swapping your A2:

The clutch pedal assembly for the VR6 uses a hydraulic slave/master cylinder rather than the cable operated clutch found on most other VWs up until the late 90s.  The cable shift tranny with it's hydraulic clutch is really quite smooth, although sometimes they can be a bit notchy feeling which alleviates after time. (or a short shift kit).  Since the A2 Golf/Jetta never came with the cable tranny (at least in the US) a hole needs to be added for the actuator rod on the master cylinder.  If you are starting from scratch the best way to get the hole lined up in the right place is to install the pedal assembly, note where the rod would pass though then go back around to the front of the car and drill away.  I've eliminated the guess work for you with the photos shown here.  Basically what I've done is installed the pedal assembly, walked around to the front and drilled away ;-) ok I'll go into a bit more detail, right down to what size hole to drill. With the pedal assembly bolted in note the area where the assembly dips in, the hole will be right here, there are three grommets in this area, and the one hole closest to the pedal assembly is almost  a dead ringer of where to drill your new larger hole, but not quite its a bit more towards the driver's side of the car and actually slightly cuts into the second hole as shown in the photo.  It's tough getting a hole saw to start the cut which is why the area is scratched up in the photo, also note I'm holding a small stud in my hand that was in the way above the two existing holes, just snap it off with a pair of pliers.  Once the new hole is drilled cut the second grommet down to fit back in the hole and glue it in place, then glue the clutch rod seal into place, install the brake master cylinder assembly it's ready to roll.

Next up was the shift box assembly, I once gave another swapper some really good advice for installing the new shift box, but unfortunately forgot to follow it myself this time around, however in my old age wisdom set in and I came up with a couple other alternatives for installing the shift box. First though let me clue you in on what is still probably the best and most reliable way to install the shift box hassle free.  Start off by going down to a hardware store and buying four or five (five if your prone to loosing things) 1" headless bolts, the kind that have the base squared to lock them in place (so you don't need a second wrench holding them still while tightening up the nut) get four nuts to match (six if you are prone to loosing things).  Remove the existing shift box, it unbolts solely from the bottom, if it feels stuck from above it's because they've used a layer of that foamy double sided tape to hold it tight against the tunnel. With the old shift box unbolted you will see... the domelight, but that's not important, what is important is the four existing holes are nowhere near lining up with the four holes on the VR6 shift box and shown in the photo of the two shift boxes and again with the shift box pressed into the tunnel opening.  So here's what I'd recommend doing, hold the shift box up against the tunnel and mark where the four old nut holes are on the VR6 shift box, take the shift box over to your bench and file in four notches, return to under the car, bolt the shift box into place using the four existing nuts and the old bolts. Line it all up mark the four new holes. Drill the four holes out using a small drill bit (smaller than the squared area on the new bolts) File the holes square, drop the new bolts through from the top, fasten it in with the new nuts and your set.  You can even leave the four old bolts attached for extra security if you want.  Alternately you can use 10mm self tapping sheet metal style bolts, sheet metal screws, fumbling around with nuts and bolts and two wrenches, and probably a couple other methods I won't get into. 

One of my favorite things in buying a donor car is the fact that you get everything with the car, including ABS, all US VR6 have ABS so if you buy a donor you get the ABS as well.  A lot of people are scared off by the prospect of installing the ABS in their car but if I had to rate the job on a scale of 1-10 I'd say it's a 6. If you have a 90 or later german built car I'd drop that 6 down to a 2.  The installation largely consists of drilling new holes, and locating the ABS control unit and sensors throughout the vehicle.  The ABS system itself it very self contained, it's wiring interfaces with the fuseblock in one plug and one wire going to another plug.  Not much guess work there.  It can be a little tricky fitting the unit under the dash and on my 88 the ABS unit is fitted quite tightly above the fuseblock making servicing it or the fuseblock a bit of a pain in the ass.  On this Passat donor the control module was fitted under the backseat, making for a very easy install, using the factory bracket.  I haven't done the final fitting on the unit yet so there will be more on that later, but for now I went ahead and added the main wiring harness hole in the firewall.  This hole can be drilled easier from the inside rather than the outside, just clear the wiring out of the way line up center to the other two existing holes and let her rip, the hole is 47mm.  File the edges when you are done since you'll need to feed all the wiring through the hole into the engine bay and you wouldn't want to strip any of the insulation off (or layers of skin for that matter). With all the wiring harness ran now all that remains is adding four holes for the sensors (one in each strut tower, two under the backseat) and hooking it all up. More to come on this and a complete write-up will be added to our sister site A2-Vr6.com. 

Since hole drilling was the prominent event of the day I decided to go ahead and add the new hole for the ECU.  On the A2s the ECU is on the left side next to or under the short splash tray, while on the A3's , VR6 C's and G60's the unit is located on the passenger side next to the ventilation fresh air intake.  You could just route the new ECU up through the old hole and cram it in where the old unit was along with about 1.5" feet of extra wire but I've always chosen to add a new hole and locate the ECU where the factory intended it to be. The old hole can be plugged using a  VW 2" grommet found either at the dealership or a wrecking yard. The new 2" hole goes just slightly toward the driver's side of the AC hose plate (or block off plate) there are two studs most of the time, and lining the hole up just to the driver's side of these will work well. You've got some margin for error here so don't sweat it too much if you are off .75" or so. (a 49mm hole would be ideal)  I'll touch base on this more later but there is even a stud in the cowl floor that allows you to center the ECU, add two screws and it's fully secured, yet still serviceable.

I didn't bother to take photos of the pedal cluster installation or the rear subframe installation as they bolt right in.  The VR6 subframe does have two additional mounting points past the sway bar that requires you to pull the carpet up and drill a access hole for the new nut to be added to the bolt that comes through, I'll photo-document this later. It's really easy with just a little foresight. 

1/21 Only had a few hours to work on the car not to mention it was pretty miserable out that day but basically what I did was install a new rear beam along with the five lug rear disk brakes.  About the only lacking feature the CL has that I don't like is no rear sway bar, this coupled with what I thought was going to be a incompatible rear proportioning valve lead me to hunt down a new rear-end.  I lucked out here as my friend Harlan had a G60 rear beam that he had been saving solely for the the rear disk brakes, he gave me the beam in return for me pulling the brakes for him. Fair enough.  I spent some time removing his brakes and cleaning up the beam before removing the CL rear-end and installing the new beam. About the only thing that stands out in my mind is the rear left brake line bracket on the pre-90 cars? is welded to the body, but on the 90-later cars the bracket is welded to the beam, so before you start bolting the rear beam up remove this bracket with a hammer and chisel, or cut-off wheel.  A couple other things to note are buy new e-brake cables for whatever year car you have w/rear disks, so if you have a 87 8V buy rear e-brake cables for a 87 w/rear disks, if you have a 86 or 87 car with drums just substitute that year with disk brakes.  Let's see what else, the brake lines come into play here, if you have a 88 or older car (or a 89 CL) it will have two rear brake lines going back to the proportioning valve, where as if you are swapping over the rear you will only have one line. Swap the line over or if you can bend one of your existing lines to work with the new rear beam proportioning valve.  The rear proportioning valves on the 89 CL, G60 w/ABS, and Vr6 C w/ABS were all the same, only difference being the G60 and VR6 had a t-fitting so only one line was feeding both rear inputs (proportioning valve still had two inputs/two outputs), the Passat actually only had one input and two outs. Photos will explain this a little better but basically the two rear inputs have been merged into one via a T-fitting.

1/27 Updates (posted 2/1) not much to report from the past weekend due to a trip to the junkyard and a couple minor set-backs. I have made a document edit that should be noted regarding the rear e-brake cables. I incorrectly stated if you had a 1/89 or later car you could use the e-brake cables from the Passat, VR6 C, or G60 C, this is incorrect, the Passat cables are too long, and the Corrado cables are too short. So other than going to the junkyard and grabbing some non-project related goodies the rest of Saturday was spent running the main engine bay harness, re-taping wires, laying out the interior wiring , cutting both rear harnesses for the integration (Golf/Passat). One of my minor set backs I will share for everyone's learning pleasure is to always remember to MARK WIRES, I don't know what it is that I think will allow me to retain four wires in my memory out of 400 for over a month but it never ceases to amaze me, a month later I'll be like WTF was this for?

Case in point: I had a small harness on the main engine harness with five clipped wires, I don't usually clip wires so I thought to myself it must have been AC related, I could see the other end at the fuseblock and it was a single connection, so I pulled it out and taped the harness back up without them. Rewind to a month and a half ago.. I'm outside weeding out the wiring from the Passat, it's dark, cold I'm disconnecting things noting anything that looks like I might forget what it went to, and then there's the wiper harness, won't work in whatever car I put it in I thought to myself, have to use the factory plug... snip. Flash forward back to present day I'm routing all the wiring in the engine bay, can't find the harness to the wiper motor though... any guesses as to what the five wire harness was? Luckily there are a couple small grommet holes so I'll just use one of those rather than trying to fit the five wires back through the main grommet.  

Case number two: I have a single short harness that appears to be double-sided with both sides matching the fuseblock, no idea what this was for or where it connected... couldn't think of any use for it so I unplugged it and left it in the garage, a couple hours later I'm scratching my head wondering where the check Brake/ABS light harness is.... any guesses? So mark your work even if you are pulling it right from one car and putting it in the next, once it's all out and looking like spaghetti you won't be able to tell one plug from the next and any shape the harness may have had in it's original car is probably lost now making identification by location difficult. (wiring diagrams are useful for integration as well but at this point these are primarily routing errors which could have been easily avoided simply marking them with tape)

Speaking of tape the factory wraps the wiring harnesses using what is known as Friction Tape, it's similar in width to electrical tape but is a nylon? based fabric tape that you pick up at Sears or Home Depot (Lowes for your East Coasters), runs about $2 a roll, using it insures a factory looking harness re-wrap that looks original, and factory correct.  Using electrical tape to wrap a motor harness will leave you with a sticky gooey mess after the first month of use.

Other than laying out the wiring, adding the holes for the brake and ABS lines, and running the brakelines themselves I pulled the intake manifold and valve cover, cleaned them up and gave them multiple coats of flat black engine paint (more black parts to come for kick ass black on white contrast).  I went ahead and posted a couple of the photos of the non-EGR exhaust manifold and intake manifold since this is unique here in the US.  On Weds 1/31 I installed the front steering knuckles and ran the rear brakeline. This weekend should see the installation of the motor as well as the correct coolant reservoir bracket and the bracket for the clutch slave cylinder line.

Got wire?  This photo shows just how much can be put in one car! A lot of this is weeded out a great deal of it was for the passive seatbelts, central locking and power windows.

2/3 Updates: Left work a few minutes early on Friday to rush home and pull the stock suspension off the CL to send up to Seattle with a friend who was heading up for the weekend.  I had lined up some Bilsteins and H&R sports for a good price but the guy needed some stock suspension to run on until he got the rest of the $$$ together for coil-overs, so the CL springs and shocks would do along with the H&R Race front springs since I'd now be using the sports.  However the party involved was called in to work early so the suspension came back late Saturday night.  (so now the new plan is he'll come down next weekend and I'll swap everything out then... we'll see). Between this and the front subframe I've arranged to purchase STILL not arriving not much was done for the second weekend in a row.  Still it's inching forward and little tasks that have to be done are being completed.  The power steering rack was assembled with it's new Corrado tie-rods and installed.  The steering column was re-installed.  New E-brake cables installed, ABS rear sensors installed and the stock CL suspension along with H&R race front springs were re-installed until the new stuff arrives next weekend.  If the front cross member arrives soon I'll get it bolted in push the car in the garage and bolt the motor up sometime this week.  A few useful tips I'll throw at this week for the lack of pictures (sorry nothing exciting to see)..

Power Steering Racks I've received a couple emails from swappers regarding the steering rack to use , tie-rods and steering link (piece between rack and column ~ both words beginning in steering) There are a few different combinations you can use here so here's the options

• Use the complete steering rack from your donor car, including the steering coupler, the VR6 rack uses a course spline on the pinion so  you can't use your original coupler with the VR rack. Plan ahead here as this coupler can be a bit of a pain to install anyway so on top of that you don't want to be doubting if your piece will even work period.

•  Use your stock A2 steering rack, coupler along with the tie rods for a Corrado VR6/A3 VR6.  (assuming you use the plus suspension)

• If you don't use plus suspension and want to use the coarser splined VR6 rack, swap the coupler over from the VR, along with the rack, then retro-swap your stock A2 tie rods onto it.

Note: When I say Tie rod I mean the complete tie rod not just the ends.

Another useful tip involving the re-installation of the steering column and steering rack is fit the coupler back up into the firewall with the boot around it, line up the lower end of the coupler on the pinion shaft but don't push it all the way down or place the locking bolt through it yet. With the steering column loose slide it onto the coupler inside the car (don't forget the spring between the two) lock it in place with the bolt, pull the column up and onto the hanger hook on the pedal assembly, push it down firmly in place on the hook, don't tighten the two main bolts on the column yet, go back out and tap the coupler down onto the pinion, bolt it down, get back in the car twist the steering wheel to make sure there is no interference, and tighten the two bolts on the column down.  Done deal. 

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