(04/13/2016) Goose's Car

A couple of weeks ago I bought this little car, it's 2002 VW Golf with 140,000 miles on the clock.  Doesn't look too bad, but it's definitely had a hard life and needs a lot of attention.

It wasn't running, so Flash and I tried to get it running - and eventually we did get it running, for about 20 seconds.  That small amount of time running let us know that the engine sounded good, but it wouldn't throttle up and then it wouldn't start again after that.  Further inspection revealed that the timing belt looked like a long-time meth addict - it was missing a lot of teeth and the few remaining were loose and easy to remove.

The next step was to put in a new timing belt, re-time the car and put in a new water pump.  We did all of this and the car seems to run very nicely now.

The test drive then showed that that the steering needed lots of help.  The lower control arms weren't connected properly and had lots of slack in them.

We were able to pull parts from salvage cars to repair the mounting of the lower control arm, and now it's driving much better.  We also repaired a coolant leak, shift linkage and a few other little things while we were at it.

The front end still needs to be tightened up some more (probably needs new bushings in a few spots) and the car needs a thorough cleaning inside and out - but I believe it's going to be a fairly nice car once we get everything sorted out.