My name is Stephen. I am a car enthusiast and I currently own a 2010 model MKVI Golf R.
This is a journal I have decided to create to document the changes and modifications which will be done to my car throughout the various stages of its life.
I have a vision of what my Golf R will look like after it's complete and hopefully with this journal, it will show a step by step process of achieving that goal.
Met up with two VWG forum members Rex and Miles. Rex had purchased my old S2TPP silver paddles from me and I had said I could give him a hand with the install. Miles, always willing to lend a helping hand, came along as well. Having done this a lot of times now myself on both my car and other members cars and with Miles having done a few himself, between us it was a very quick DIY. All in all it took about 15 minutes in total to replace the OEM paddles to the S2TPP's.
Since it was over so quick, we grabbed a quick bite to eat and decided to have a small photo session. My Golf R, Rex's MK6 GTI and Miles' latest aquisition : Suzuki SV650S, which is a 650cc bike, but learner legal! Note : get bike licence ASAP!
A small recap from the night. Photography by Rex Abergas.
The meetup location.
Removing the OEM paddles...
...and replacing them with S2TPP goodness. Miles fitting up the new paddles.
Putting everything back together.
Much better. The silver paddles really accentuate the other silver bits and bobs on the GTI.
Never get sick of looking at the rear lights.
Side on profile.
Rex's Tornado Red MK6 GTI. I'd never consider getting a red car but the GTI is one car I would love to have in red. It just pops.
Love the look of Miles' bike in this photo.
It was hard trying to get the position right for this one.
Saved the best for last. My favourite shot of the night.
Christina had organised a carpark meet for the VWG guys as it had been a few months since the last meet at Homebush. This time, the venue was at the Entertainment Quarter carparks at Moore Park. In addition to this, there was word that this meet would be a club feature in February's issue of Fast Fours & Rotaries next year so everyone was told to wash their cars if they wanted the opportunity for it to be photographed. I washed mine earlier today and had brought along a few detailing items just in case it rained or drizzled but neither happened which was good. It turned out to be a very nice day actually. The meet was scheduled at 7:00pm.
I'll let the pictures do the talking. Photographs courtesy of Ed, Josh and Kwong.
VWG meet at the Entertainment Quarter top level carpark.
Volkswagen teamed up with Adidas to showcase a special limited edition Golf GTI Adidas.
Unique features include 18 inch Serron alloy wheels (named after a Finnish race course), Bi-xenon headlights,
Adidas-badged B-pillars and Golf R LED rear tail lights. Limited edition of 500 in Australia. In every other way though, it's exactly the same as a regular GTI.
Tendy's Scirocco R. It's sporting its new carbon fibre rear diffuser by Garage Vary, a JDM company.
He is another wheel whore. Volk Racing G12's which Ross had on his Black Passat R36 at the Homebush meet & greet. Click here.
It may look factory but this car also has a host of goodies, such as an ECU tune, intercooler, high pressure fuel pump, DSG tune all from HPA/HGP,
VW Racing intake, ARQRAY custom titanium catback exhaust, KW V3 coilovers and huge RS6 8 piston BBK's amongst other things.
Pierre's Audi 8P S3. Recently back from his overseas trip. Always good seeing him and his S3.
Subtle and refined. Love this car.
The 19" BBS CK wheels in anthracite set his car off perfectly. And the red BBS centre caps completes the look.
He is looking at a new set of wheels though. Should be interesting!
MKIV Golf R32. What's special about this is that it was supercharged.
Candy White MKVI Golf GTI, Black Magic Pearl MKV Golf GTI Pirelli, Tornado Red MKVI Golf R.
Arranging the cars for the photoshoot. White, Black, Red.
Justin's MKV GTI which is currently for sale. A fine example of JDM mods executed properly on a German car.
Chris' Tornado Red Golf R. This is a colour which is available in Europe but was not available in the Australian brochure when the Golf R was launched here.
He somehow persuaded the salesperson to get this in as a special order and waited 9.5 months. It took this long due to getting the compliance for this car.
Thus, this car in this colour is as rare as hens teeth. Only three known examples in Australia. Looks better in the flesh!
Dev's MKIII Golf VR6 is always a welcome sight amongst the sea of new school Golf GTI's and R's.
Not bad for a 19 year old green P plater.
Ray's MKV R32 sporting 19" ADV7.1 wheels. This is the only other R32 which has the Capristo exhaust apart from Jose and Adam.
Needless to say, it sounds great.
The MY11.5 MKVI Golf GTI's now come with DRL's integrated in the headlights if you option the Bi-Xenons.
Michael's "beasty" Golf R. He plans to enter this car in the World Time Attack Challenge (WTAC) next year. Big things on the horizon!
Stock as a rock MKVI Golf GTI with factory optioned 18" Denver wheels.
Tech guru and all round good guy Miles' MKV GTI. Great example of simple, subtle mods which can transform it into something different without being over the top.
Group shot.
Another one.
Lora's Polo GTI being flanked by two MKIV R32's. Don't let the cute look and small stature of the Polo fool you.
It packs a punch with a plethora of quality mods along with a GIAC ECU reflash, pushing close to 150kw at the front wheels,
which will be super fun and super quick in a car that weighs approximately 1100kgs.
GTI : Function over form.
R32 : Form over function.
Yin Yang.
A fantastic photo of Dave's MKV R32 and Pierre's S3.
I love this shot. Tendy's Scirocco R facing off against my Golf R.
The meet was great as always. Very chill, always fun catching up with the regulars and of course, putting the faces to the forum names by meeting the newcomers. Big props to Christina for organising.
The Fast Fours & Rotaries feature should be in the February issue next year, hitting newsagents australia wide. There were 2 or 3 photographers from the magazine who also took photos at the meet. Curious to read the article and see the photos that were taken.
Miles organised a DIY day for the VWG members. There's lots of new folks in the community, many with new parts but without the knowledge on how to go about fitting it themselves. So he figured that VWG should have a get together day to educate everyone, get help installing some of the parts we may have ordered for our cars and give a hand to others. It was a great idea and a big success. Marko kindly offered his workplace as the location for our DIY day and it was the perfect. The day was quite hot as well. It was a very nice day, blue sky, no clouds, perfect way to spend a Sunday.
I personally had 5 things I wanted to get done to my car. They were :
Install quick drain tap for my 42DD oil catch can
Get rid of the rear wiper
Install garage button modification.
Use VAGCOM to deactivate the rear wiper water jet spray
Use VAGCOM to get the indicator blinking 4 times instead of 3 for when you pull the stalk down just enough to activate the indicators.
The 42DD quick drain tap is a brass tap which is designed to fit the 42DD oil catch can that I had installed about a month ago. This provides a quick and easy way to drain all the gunk collected from the engine instead of having to physically remove the oil catch can every time to drain it out. However, I still had not purchased the hydraulic hoses from Enzed to replace my heater hoses which were currently connected to the catch can. I decided to install the tap another day once I have the hoses, empty out the gunk and have a nice, empty catch can ready to collect the next batch of crap with my new hoses.
Quick drain brass tap from 42 Draft Design to attach to the oil catch can.
Just a matter of attaching a pipe to go over the drain tap, put the other end of the pipe into the opening of an empty bottle, open the tap and let all the gunk come out.
The rear wiper for me is useless. I never use it. Plus I hate how when the rear windshield is covered by water droplets and when you select R to reverse, the rear wiper automatically activates to remove the water from the windshield and give you a better vision. That's all well and good but quite unnecessary as I have a rear view camera which activates when I'm in reverse, allowing me to see clearly what is behind me on the head unit. Plus when the water dries up, I have a nice semi circle in the middle of the rear windshield. It looks ugly.
With help from Ray, I removed the boot lid trim to access the wiper. After a few minutes, we had disassembled the wiper. To plug the hole which will be left after I remove the rear wiper, I decided to get a glass grommet from GeCleant. They guarantee that their glass grommets would be a 100% accurate fit for all Volkswagen/Audi models.
The glass grommet from GeCleant, which guarantee a perfect fit.
What bullshit. The glass grommet was a fraction too big and the hole left by my wiper was a fraction too small. The glass grommet would look good if it had fitted perfectly like they claimed. I tried everything I could to get it to fit snug, but the inevitable happened. The glass grommet cracked. This was the same fate that Ray's grommet faced when he tried to install it on his Audi A3. The fact that it cost approximately $40.00 for a little tiny glass grommet which didn't even fit properly was the worst $40.00 I've ever spent in my life. In the end, I had no choice but to rock blue masking tape until I could come up with a solution. I've decided to buy an OEM Honda wiper delete plug which is used by the Honda boys on their Integra's, CRX's and Civic's. Justin had one installed on his GTI and it looked really good. He mentioned that he purchased his from JDMYard so I might hit them up real soon.
Removing the wiper motor with trim already off.
What the Gecleant.de glass grommet would have looked like installed had the grommet been a perfect fit.
The end result due to the glass grommet cracking. Temporary ghetto solution.
Justin's OEM Honda wiper delete plug, courtesy of JDMyard.com
If there's one thing I don't know anything about, it's electrics and circuit boards. I had purchased a garage door button from CarStyle4You to replace the blank buttons located just under the ash tray lid. There were two buttons which came with my Golf R from factory and that was the Electronic Stability Program (ESP) button, which activates/deactivates the traction control, and the parking sensor button. The other 3 buttons were blanks. I had decided to get 3 buttons to fill up the blank spaces. One was the Golf R's "R" logo, one was a button depicting an driver ejector seat and one was a button which can be soldered and wired with my remote control garage door opener so that when I pressed that button, the garage door would open. The good thing with these buttons is that Carstyle4you uses genuine OEM VW buttons and engrave their own pictures on the blanks and they are also LED lit to replicate the interior OEM red lights on the centre console. You can choose a variety of LED's but to keep it looking as factory as possible, I chose the red LED's to match the rest of the interior.
Miles brought his soldering iron and with me just watching on, he soldered the wires onto my garage door remote control. I was surprised at just how easy it was. I guess once you know how electrics work, it's not that hard. We installed it on the car and it looked great! Big thanks to Miles. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have been able to install this.
The "R" logo and the garage door push button. Notice the wire coming from the push button.
This is what needs to be soldered onto the circuit board of the garage door remote.
All five slots utilised. Of course, the "R" and the "eject" button are just for fun, but I'm really happy with how the garage door button turned out.
Video demonstration of the garage door button in action.
Finally, Cam gave me a hand with his VAGCOM prowess and did his thing. He deactivated the rear washer jet as I had no need for it now and if it were left activated, there would be no wiper to wipe away the water residue. It would have been cool to re-adjust the position of the wiper jet stream so that whenever there's someone who you think is too close and tailgating you, you can just give them a squirt...and piss them off even more! He also made sure that the indicator blinked 4 times now when you just lightly flick down or flick up the indicator stalk. This is great for when changing lanes. The default from factory is 3 blinks, but I realised that I would be in the middle of changing lanes by the third blink. A fourth blink and I would be in the next lane. Yes, OCD. Many thanks to Cam. Probably one of the most easy going fellows I have had the pleasure of meeting from VWG and always willing to lend a hand to anyone and everyone!
Cam with his laptop, making sense of all the numbers and letters on the VAGCOM/VCDS unit.
Really pleased at how smoothly everything went, bar the glass grommet. I guess there were a few more things I would have liked to have done to my car today but because I had to wait for other parts to arrive first, I was done for the day and I thought I'd lend everyone else a hand with their installs.
Here are some photos from the day.
Marko's work. Blum headquarters. Some fantastic hinge and storage systems sold here! Very impressive to say the least.
A massive shelter to stay nice and cool where we could all perform our DIY jobs.
Quite a big turnout!
The boot of Miles' GTI. I was amazed at how much the GTI could fit! There's also 2 large speakers in there somewhere too!
About half of what was in the boot of Miles' GTI. It's still a lot of gear! And he managed to fit it all in!
Miles' MKV GTI with colour coded rear bumper, sideskirts and powercoated 17" OEM Classix wheels. Fresh!
Everyone started unloading their gear and got stuck in.
Ian took apart his bumper to remove and replace his headlights for OEM style Xenons with DRL's.
Mark had installed his Stage I APR cold air intake to his MKVI GTI.
Hadn't seen Adam for a long time. He popped in to say hello.
This is the other Golf R32 with ABT supercharger, just like Jose's. Built by Ramspeed.
Adam's mod list are just as tasty as Jose's. 18" ADV7.1 wheels, Capristo exhaust, Vogtland coilovers, plus many other goodies.
He recently installed OEM smoked rear LED tail lights as he's going for the full "murdered out" black theme on his car.
Miles and Alan trying to install slotted rotors to replace the stock rotors.
Jason's MKV GTI Manual 3 door. Such a lovely car, this. Love the Tornado Red. You don't see many GTI's in this colour, let alone modified this nicely.
The death of "shitbox" signaled a new beginning for Ray. His new ride? A 2001 model Audi 8L A3. It basically has the same 1.8L engine from a MKIV Golf GTI.
Now that reliability is not an issue in this car compared the MKIII Golf GL he had, expect BIG things from this! Personally, I cannot wait.
Cam never really bonded with his Golf GTI Adidas version, so he did the only sensible thing and sold it. His new ride is now a 2011 model Subaru WRX.
Such a beefy car, and so much potential to be had! Much more than his old Golf GTI Adidas...plus a lot more fun with the manual box compared to the DSG.
Needless to say, Cam is one happy chappy now that he has this! And I can see why after having a short blast in it. Expect big things from this WRX!
The BBQ smelled so good. Miles cooking up a storm.
DIY Halftime.
Chillaxin' before getting back into it.
SUGA's new shoes : 19" Work Meister 3pc wheels with black bolts.
This definitely completes the look, much more than her old 19" Alpil 11's. So sexy!
JDM Style MKV Golf R32. Does it get any better than this?
SUGA on her daily driving height and me on still stock suspension.
After looking at this picture, I want wheels and suspension ASAP!
And finally, a little video Cam took of both his and my car. Launching and doing a drive by. Listen for the diverter valve flutter! Haha!
What a great way to spend a Sunday. Big thanks to Miles for organising, providing the music, the food, the drinks and all sorts of tools and also thanks to Marko for providing the premise. Perfect location for a DIY install day.
If you would like to purchase the parts for the mods listed above, please visit : Carformance
