Passatclassic.de -- Das Forum...

Hi there, I found you guys after a member here posted on my website

www.vwdasher.com

I love VWs, we own 6 at present. 3 Mk 1 Golfs, 1 1959 Beetle, one 2002 Bora and my beloved Passat called Frank. I set up my site to find other Passat fans, as there are not many in Australia. There are not many Passats left either! Every year the VW Club of Victoria holds a big VAG show called Day of the Volkswagen and if you're lucky, one or two Passats turn up. Considering we now get around 40 Mk1, 2 and 3 Golfs, it's a bit sad! So I decided I wanted to find and restore a Passat. Frank is my project.

I have recently gotten him registered for regular use and now plan to do some work on his interior. Firstly I will get a dash reskinned, then get a motor trimmer to redo his interior. His carpet is very stained and quite ruined. I will get him redone in grey. What do you think?

Thank you! You are very kind

I am actually going to get the Ml 3 seats recovered when I get the interior redone. I have collected lots of brochures for the B1 now and I will have the trimmer make seat covers in the same original style. The whole interior will be like it was originally, just in grey. Black interiors in Australia are very hot in summer, it can get over 40 degrees here!

The seat base is actually from the original seat. We peeled the old foam off and stuck down the foam from the newer seat onto it. Then attached the back rest from the Golf. The Golf was a wreck we bought from Ebay, it had been used as a stunt car in a movie called 'Knowing' with Nicolas Cage that was filmed here in Melbourne, and all its doors and panels were damaged. We got it cheap for parts.

The steering wheel was a fluke, as you can see on my site Frank came with a smaller steering wheel. The leather cover was falling off of it. We found, in the mess of parts and junk in the boot, that there was another steering wheel in there, the TS one. I loved the look and had to use it instead of the small one. I only found out later it was a TS one.

Thank you, I will check out that other forum! It's so hard finding parts for Passats. It took us over 6 months of scouring the world to find the taillights for my car, now I have collected a few right hand ones but I would love a spare left hand light. Just in case!

Oh I do, I search Ebay Germany, Holland, US and UK all the time, to see what is out there. I managed to find a brand new left hand quarter panel too! Miraculously.

Juergen, that would be fantastic! I find a lot of Ebay Germany sellers seem reluctant to ship outside of the EU. Late last year I found a grill for my car on Ebay Germany, bought it and it never arrived $200 gone. The seller ignored all my messages too. And it was too late to dispute it.

At least my car is now intact, I am just scrounging bits if I come across a Passat at a wreckers here. But I have yet to see the facelift model at a wreckers, only earlier ones. And I also have gotten a lot of parts from www.germanautoparts.com - thankfully they have all the service stuff, and it's new! My car just suffered a power surge last week and melted the ignition switch so I got one from a wrecked Passat to go with until a brand new one turns up.

It's much easier to find Golf parts here than Passats, as I found out after buying my car. It's sad that so few VW fans appreciate them.

My name is Jodie

Is your listing the one with the headlights included? I've seen that one but I have new headlights for my car and don't need new ones.

I absolutely hate those rear louvres Sorry but that one was partially broken and has long been thrown out.

Frank came with the disc conversion - front was Ford Cortina and back was Nissan Pulsar!!! Neither worked well, both were very badly installed. Now I have Audi 80 on the front and Mk 3 Golf on the back. And the hand brake line from a 1998 Audi A4. Works wonderfully well now!

Sorry If I come across another one I will let you know. Mind you, B1's in Australia are few and far between.

Only a few years ago, there weren't many Mk1 Golfs going to the annual club show here. We took ours along and won second place because there were only two cars in our class But after lots of work getting people interested and involved (www.vwwatercooled.org.au is where many Mk1 Golf owners go here) now we get around 40 cars each year. The VW club is primarily Bug and Bus nowadays, us water pumpers are the minority. But this year's theme of the show is 30 years of the Golf. So maybe we'll get some more this year.

Anyway, I have found a few more B1 owners and keep telling them to bring their cars out of the garages and drive them. Hopefully this year we will have more than two Passats at the show. And my friend Alex with his Fox.

VW Australia actually shut down in around 1981 because of poor sales. They left Australia for around ten years, so we missed out on an entire generation. No B2s. At all. Audi remained but have always had far fewer sales than VW. This means we need to get creative with parts, and raid Audis and Seats. One of my Mk 1's has a Cordoba engine in it. Before the internet and Ebay came along we were forced to work with what we had around us! I bet my postie thinks I'm quite weird with the constant supply of car parts from all over the world.

Frank is quite a mix of different generations and makes. As for his wheels well I saw those on a 1989 Audi and really liked them. I also found some wheels on a 1982 Audi 100, which I need to clean up. Those are very eighties and cool.

Hi there! We swapped Frank's stem seals today because he's gotten a little bit smoky. And found that when we pulled the head apart, only the 4 inlet valves had seals on them. The exhaust/outlet valves were missing them! Have you ever heard of such a thing? I don't know who did it or when.

http://www.vwdasher.com/index.php/restor…-the-stem-seals

Now he has eight seals in there.

I've heard of doing it on performance cars, but Frank's engine would not qualify as performance. It's weird. I wonder if it was someone being lazy or cutting corners. When we got him he'd had some ignition switch problems so instead of fixing it properly they wired the ignition to the parker lights. Which meant the car had to have the parkers on to start. How stupid is that?

A small update: Frank appeared in an article in Volkswagen Magazine Australia edition 31

http://vwdasher.com/index.php/photograph…tralia-issue-31

He looks amazing, the photographer is very talented!

Single carb!Frank's grown a 40mm Dellorto The old carb was playing up and we picked that up cheap! Makes him go a little faster but his engine is tired and needs a rebuild. Hopefully we will get onto that in the new year.

We just had our annual VW Club show, with a sea of Dubs! Photos and video here if you're interested?

http://vwdasher.com/index.php/forum/10-c…mit=20&start=20