All right, this is a box stock POS 80 Rabbit Pickup rockin a 1.5 diesel. Well it was a POS…I bought it pretty much unseen. Pictures really don’t do the rust these things have justice. I should have known it wouldn’t be a weld in a couple panels job since I’ve had a few already that never made it to the “back together stage” before they were cut up for spares. The previous owners didn’t know the extent of the rust in the strut towers, pretty much we went to weld in the obvious holes and there wasn’t anything to weld to. So… I found a 86 Cabriolet that had been rear ended and hacked the offending corner and the core support off to put on the truck. After welded up I have had to attack a hack wiring job, a five speed swap using four speed linkages, enough wet filler under the paint to smooth an Eldorado and ridiculous use of bed liner as undercoating on the lower edge of the truck. This isn’t a performance vehicle and won’t ever be, I commute about 80 miles so the duty it will see is highway. I will make it look decent and drive very well.

A few pics to start it, pics I got from Andy who was kinda the middle man. He got it since he was moving and the car he traded for it wouldn’t ever pass smog testing.











After we started stripping it. I have to thank Rick for the work he did, way more than I asked him to do…





More in the morning..after I catch a z or two.

A ton of work has gone into this thing. I went and looked at it before and it was pretty bad.

So after Rick got the strut tower, frame and core support welded in I found two NOS fenders on Craigslist; great guy that Craig. Slapped them on with a beat up old grill from a car we parted out and towed it back home.



It is dwarfed by my truck, the whole time I was towing it home the only thing I could see was the roof in my rearview mirror.


Got home, Andy came up to put the coils on his car and do the rear disc brake..some of that happened some didn’t. While he was here we pulled the motor enough to do the motor mounts, did three of them. For some reason(I have owned thirty MK1s first time I had seen this) the passenger side motor mount is pressed into the bracket that the injection pump is mounted on. That one can wait.


And hey I drove it to work a couple days.



Death wobble about 60mph so I checked the front suspension. Tie rod ends were shot so I got those in and ended up needing to replace one inner also. Good times.

Where we are now is a slight coolant leak, had me making a new gasket for the coolant housing, awesome perfect the first time. Unfortunately the head itself was stripped which is why it was leaking in the first place. So I tapped it to a M7 and we are good there now. Finishing a decent set of E92s up to put on. Shipment confirmation on the cam baffle, windage tray, tie rod boots, coilovers and drop plates so maybe when that comes I will take more pics.

BTW: if you are squemish don't look up tularemia. It is a weird skin condition you can really only get from Rabbits, the hairy ones not the wheeled ones.

I did and it is freaking gross.

Truck looks good

i love these things! nice work! sometimes i wish a plane would drop from the sky and land on the back of my jetta so i can have a good excuse to do a 1.8 swap to one. no casualties thou.. good luck wit it!

Pretty cool!

Stick with it Bro...I know they are stubborn little bastards, but it'll get there....

When the parts showed up Tuesday night I just put them in so no pics of installation; everyone knows how a windage tray installs...a cam baffle works the same way but its purpose it to cut the blow by that would spray into the tube back to the air filter. So it is more like a cam scraper and spray stopper. Then Wednesday night the coils showed up, I was stoked so I put them in leaving about 1.5" of thread figuring that would be tall enough since I won't be dropping the rear right away (a whole other process). Nope, it is DOWN. Quick pic, hard to see with the mess in my garage currently and black steelies under a factory coat fender.


Not sure what I'm going to do with 16s in there but I will cut whatever to make it work. I had planned to finish a set of 13" Enkei 92s but I stumbled on a set of D90s for cheapish so I will have some adaptors made up for those.

Also cleaned up a little under the hood, will probably paint in there so it is only one color...

looks good!!