What a fun week!

So the Lupo has sold, driven away by new owner George - who's going to put right the last few wrongs with the car.

We had the first viewing of the car a week ago and, understandably, they were suspicious of a nice shiny Lupo with only a few weeks left on the MOT - with the Caddy on the way we simply needed a quick sale. To help the car sell better we decided to put it through a test, which it passed with flying colours; not a single thing wrong...

...until the emissions test!

As suspected (the car did go through quite a bit of oil) it failed spectacularly - my diagnosis, and that of the garage, is an oil ring or valve seal has gone. To do the job right it is a cylinder-head off type job - simply not economically viable for us to do when we've just shaken hands on a £10k Caddy!!!

The price was reduced on Pistonheads (cue the vultures who offered stupidly low amounts of cash) and a chance ad on the ClubLupo forums - where the car sold in a matter of minutes.

So it's goodbye little car, I'm happy it's gone to an owner who will look after it and has the time and inclination to put things right.

For Sale?

So it's time to start looking for the right Caddy to replace the Lupo. Our little faithful friend has been great and to-date hasn't let us down at all, making the journey into Leeds daily, always starting first time and never getting too hot and bothered.

My plan is to be totally honest about the car's condition - unlike the previous seller.

80,000 miles (as of 1st October, car in daily use so will rise), Petrol, Manual in Soft Blue, paint in good condition with the usual car park scuffs and stonechips.
MOT until 21st Nov 2011. Tax until end of Jan 2012.
Factory pop-out rear windows and mudflaps. VW Alloys with four new tyres fitted 8,000 miles ago along with front discs and pads. New clutch cable and welding to pedal box also carried out.
Comes with Kenwood CD/USB Stereo. Lowered 40mm on lowering springs.
Priced to sell, a new car is on the way.

So if you need a nice-looking, reliable, daily runabout - ideal for a young driver - for a mere £995 then drop me an email: nikki.crossley@hotmail.com before it ends up on the forums, eBay, etc.

Spring cleaning

The first full sunny day of the year - a great chance to give the car a proper clean and get some polish on the paintwork. All-in-all, not in bad nick, if you squint. And yes, my neighbour's think I'm crazy, but I clean under the bonnet too. Do I care? No.

Check out the genuine G60 VW Motorsport badge on the airbox - that must give me another 5bhp right?

Down & out

Freshly cleaned after a visit to JC Motors for the budget lowering - now looking far less like a pensioner's car!

Click for big pic

Click for big pic

Aesthetically, the car is much more pleasing to the eye. The handling has sharpened up a touch; less wallow-y in roundabouts. And economically the whole lowering job has come in under £100, which makes me a happy lowered Lupo owner!

Pressed Metal Plates

Plates and surrounds fitted. Cleaner, neater, and legal!

We have reception!

The radio issues are now sorted. Following on from the 'why are things never easy?' posts, it seems I was right, it was never going to be an easy fix...

As radio reception was fine in Keighley (where the head unit was fitted) but not in Skipton (where we live), it made sense to go to a local specialist rather than back to Halfords. So it was a trip to Car Radio Skipton where the very helpful and informative staff went through a process of elimination to find the fault.

Head unit out, check for signal booster. Fine.

Change to a new booster, still no reception.

Put new aerial on new booster, reception.

The faulty part just had to be the wiring from aerial on roof to back of head unit - joy!

We left them to it. Two hours later and we're back, everything working perfectly. OEM aerial, booster and wiring (plus 30 minutes of labour) and VAT came to just short of £90. All of a sudden the bargain stereo has become not so much of a bargain!

Trim decisions...

Leave the bump-strips on:

Or take them off?

Can't make my mind up - any preference?

Spring time

At last, almost time to fit some parts that aren't to replace broken bits or someone else's bodge.

First up, a set of 40mm lowering springs bought from eBay:

These won't be on for a couple of weeks, so in the mean time I'll be fitting up a nice set of UK-legal pressed plates and German dealer surrounds:

Will update with fresh pics in due course.

Why can't things be easy? Part two...

Now it's the wipers!

One of the first things we changes when we got the Lupo home were the wiper blades; scratchy, screechy and not really doing their job. This is one area where I feel you get what you pay for, so I always go for Bosch. Silent, efficient and long lasting.

If only the wiper arms were any good!

It seems the springs that hold the arm down to the glass have all the gusto of a job-seeking chav. The passenger-side wipes really well... onto the driver's side which doesn't! Yet another problem to solve.

On another positive note, we had a good day at Dubfreeze yesterday and it was nice to get close up to some Lupo inspiration. We also picked up some UK-legal pressed metal number plates and tasty Berlin dealer surrounds - hopefully fitting these at the weekend - weather permitting.

Why can't things be easy?

So we've done a full week's worth of commuting in the car. No problems to speak of at all. The only real downside has been the stereo - radio reception around these parts isn't great but for us to have no radio at all in Skipton is a bit out of the ordinary.

We bought the car with a fairly average Sony headunit in place:

I've never been a big fan of Sony's in-car stuff, it tends to be a bit brash-looking and the red lighting didn't really do the Lupo's blue lighting and favours. Plus the surround wouldn't stay attached to the cradle and sound quality was pretty poor.

So far, this is exactly the same situation as the van; a pretty standard VDO head unit with poor sound quality that we later replaced with a Kenwood unit.

Time for a new head unit then! Remembering this is budget-motoring we had to find a bargain - and we did. Halfords had an end-of-line Kenwood head unit with iPod USB and aux in for only £82.00, reduced from £199.99. Sold!

A fairly straightforward swap-over you'd think?

Not so. It seems our little Lupo may have been the victim of crime - it doesn't take Miss Marple to work out that wires behind the Sony unit were not that of the ISO connector that left the factory - somewhere down the line everything had been hastily snipped!

We also noticed that the aerial connector had never been connected - hence the lack of radio reception. Just over an hour and the we-fit man at Halfords had grafted on a new ISO block and installed the Kenwood unit - great stuff! Or so we thought...

As we drive back into Skipton the little RDS logo flickers and disappears into a crescendo of white-noise - me thinks our aerial issues may be further down the wire. The stereo in the van gives a perfect signal in Skipton! Frustrating to say the least...

Any ideas on how to cure this would be gratefully received (pardon the pun).

PS: On a happier note I am pleased to say the sound quality is much improved over the Sony unit.

Back home again

Back on the driveway again and this time in a slightly more useable state. God bless small cars and cheap replacement parts!

I've used Aire Valley Workshop since we had the Lupo GTI, they're all ex-volkswagen service staff who realised when working for the local VW dealership that people were walking away from VW's labour charge and looking for an independent. They're good guys that can be trusted - this says a lot when you're looking for a good mechanic.

As for Allen Car Sales in Heywood (yep, I'm naming and shaming), this is their idea of an 'immaculate' car:

OSF Bottom Arm bush worn - replaced
OS Drive shaft inner bolts - fitted incorrectly, replaced
Leaking gearbox seal (a common weak-point on Lupos) - replace and levels topped up
Throttle body cleaned out
Oil breather and oil pressure switch - replaced
All four tyres replaced - as mentioned in previous post, the fronts and rears where different profiles, one front had a bulge, one rear had a cracking sidewall. It made sense just to change the lot.
Check and adjust tracking
New front discs and pads
Clean and adjust rear brakes
Clutch cable - wrong one fitted, now replaced
Adjust handbrake
New door trim clip (another Lupo weak-point)
There was also a bit of welding work to the notorious pedal-box (yet another Lupo weak-point).

Aire Valley were also kind enough to take this in as a 'hospital' job, working on it between other jobs, and as such I don't think they've charge every minute of labour.

I'm annoyed I didn't spot some of these things when buying the car, but as they said at the garage, they would have missed the same things. So if you can, when buying a cheap car, take a mechanic - or better still get the car up on a ramp.

Needless to say, the budget for lowering and wheels has now disappeared for a while.

So we're good to go. The daily commute starts next Tuesday - I'll report back soon on how things are going.

I hate buying cars!

For the second time now I've heard the line 'I'm not sure how they've got this through an MOT' when having a newly purchased car checked-over by a garage I trust.

And it's beginning to get a bit annoying.

I fully understand that buying vehicles down at the 'budget' end of the spectrum means taking a little bit of a gamble. And I'm also aware that I'm no mechanic and there's only so much checking of a vehicle I can do before purchase. But where do these little two-bit, back street garages get off selling cars that turn out to be barely road-worthy to people that don't have much in the way of spare income to repair them?

And relax...

At this point I have to tell myself the positives: low-mileage, good body and paint, cheap. If I wanted a car without 'issues' I would've paid more.

I'm not going to dwell on negative stuff: new pads fitted, yet brake discs at end of life, wrong clutch cable fitted, two tyres with incorrect profile (I'm annoyed I didn't spot this) and a host of other little bodge-jobs seemingly to get the car through a test.

So that's my word of warning kids - a car can be un-roadworthy the minute it leaves a testing station. DO NOT take an MOT certificate as some kind of guarantee that you'll have 12 months of trouble-free motoring...

...and (as much as I don't want to tar them all with the same brush) never, ever, trust a car dealer.

Finally home...

Okay, post one, time for a small introduction; most readers will have landed here from my other blog - Stone174 - where I'm in the process of turning a VW T5 panel van into a useable campervan, to do this we had to sell our other vehicles (a 2007 TDI Polo and a 1983 T3 camper) and use just the one.

All good until the price of diesel and the cost of insurance start to go through the roof, explained here in a previous Stone174 post.

So here we are at the beginning of a new journey.

An eleven year old, soft blue, 1.4 Lupo, fairly basic spec except for the wheels, mudflaps and pop-out rear windows. Just over 72,000 miles on the clock. The paintwork is pretty tidy; the usual amount of stonechips, a typical car park ding to the rear wheel arch, and a slightly grubby interior.

All sounding good so far?

Well I'm not going to pretend I've bought a peach. The only real downside (and it meant a bit of haggling with the seller) is the seven previous owners...

...yes, seven. Amazingly the car has a fair amount of service history and plenty of old MOT certificates with it to confirm genuine mileage. For further peace of mind we used the AA's car data check service to make sure all was legit.

The car also came with a bunch of receipts for previous work, brakes, oil pressure switch, gearbox rebuild... Gearbox rebuild?!

It would seem that one of the seven careful owners wasn't so careful - hence the gap in the service history, busted gearbox, and it was probably her kids that have left filthy marks on the headlining!

But, the only way from here is forwards and, although it is like finding out your new hot girlfriend has had a ton of previous lovers, what has happened is in the past. From here on in the car will be looked after.

So later this week we'll be dropping the Lupo off at Aire Valley Workshop for a thorough check-over; fluids, brakes, drivetrain etc. The outcome of which will determine how much budget is left for the car as a project.

Thanks for reading,
Richard