Information Project '54 (or Project X) Maritius Blue

sciroccorrado

A2OC Donor
Project X (Originally Project 54)
Mauritius Blue

Open Sky (Working :p)

2004 1.4tdi 75 SE

54 registration

I suppose I ought to do a project page for Wifey’s A2.

Originally back in April 2017, I saw an A2 on FleaBay with “cambelt damaged engine”, doesn’t run. However, my interest was picqued by the other little snipped, hidden away amongst the description of “Sunroof”. The bidding was ridiculously cheap at the time, but looked interesting. The few photos showed a fairly straight car, albeit rather dirty, but no indication of whether the roof worked, or what the problem with the engine actually was.
Unfortunately, the car was sat at a garage in Kendal, and despite me having been near there the week before on a work related trip, I would have no chance to view the car before the auction finished. A few messages were exchanged with the seller, and it was found that the OpenSky did work, and that it also featured the desirable Double-Din dashboard.
I thought it was worth a punt as, despite, at the time having 3 A2s on the drive I was confident that GG (Wife’s current 1.6FSI) would sell quickly, and I could do with a summer project (oh, hindsight is a wonderful thing!). A silly bid was placed, and consequently forgotten about.
The weekend arrived, and it happened that the auction finished on 30th April (around lunch) when I would be in the middle of a nowhere at Stanford Hall VW Show. Very poor phone signal, and even worse interweb signal, but just after 2pm my telephone “kerchinged” and I found that I had won the auction. A mild panic started to set in, as I had just received a message that the person who had left a deposit on GG now wanted to pull out, and also, I hadn’t actually thought about how on earth I was going to collect an A2 from nearly 150 miles away.
This is where the name started off as Project 54, as the car was a ’54 registration, and it was the first thing I could think of at the time.
Contact was made with the seller, and a deposit paid to secure the deal, and talks were then put in place on how to collect. Fortunately I was working in Blackpool the next weekend, so an evening in Kendal was arranged where I would view the car to verify the details etc., and hand over the rest of the monies on the car.
The initial viewing was positive, I had a chat to the then owner, who had little knowledge of what had gone wrong with the car, and apart from it stopped and wouldn’t restart was stumped. The garage he had taken it to, seemed a bit “industrial” in their handling of the car, hence the dirt, but apart from changing the starter motor had pretty much given up on the enterprise. Oh well, I thought, we’ll have to start somewhere. Apart from that, the car looked to be in extremely good shape for its age. The Symphony II stereo worked fine, a false floor was present and correct. All doors and electrics seemed to work, and we even tested the OpenSky, but only once given the battery that was running lower and lower. Monies were handed over, and details of garage taken to arrange collection.
On the recommendation of Timmus I contacted WOM Automotive in Staffordshire to have a look at the engine issues, and try to get the car back up and running so that further plans could be put into place. Having had various quotes for delivery, it occurred to me that delivering it to my house would create a problem, as I would then have to pay extra to ship it out to WOM, nearly doubling the collection costs. The solution was staring me in the face really, as WOM offered to collect the car from Kendal, and take it directly to their workshop.
The car was collected from Kendal on a rainy Monday morning in the middle of May, and Marcus started to strip down the engine to see what damage had been done. Initial findings were not too bad, effectively the water pump bearing had failed and various bits had flown around the inside, lodging themselves where they were not welcome and the valves had jumped and touched the pistons. Luckily, because the bits of the bearing that got where they shouldn’t have got there, it meant that the engine came to an abrupt stop, and stopped more damage.
It is believed that although the cam belt had been changed some 6,000 miles ago, the need to change the water pump was missed, and the failure of this item only goes to highlight the need to look after these at the same time, especially given their parts price, which is miniscule compared to the price of a) NOT doing it, and b) it’s virtually no extra labour to fit them at the same time as doing the cam belt.
A few other minor bits and bits (service items really) were found on the car, and Marcus managed to put the engine back together and running in about a week. As I was not in a rush to collect the car, as I still had GG, it was decided to put the car through a thorough inspection, and get the MOT up to date, as this had recently finished.
The good news here was that there were only a couple of things needed to get through the MOT and soon we had a nicely running, road legal A2.
It is now the middle of June, approximately 6 weeks since I won the auction. Whilst all this was happening a post on the A2OC forum caught my eye, with a chap selling an A2 with very nice black sports leather, who was considering removing the leather and replacing with his original cloth trim to ease the sale. I contacted him, and suggested that if he did this I might be interested in the leather as a possible upgrade. A deal was apparently done on the car, without the leather, so he contacted me back to offer me the leather. Negotiations were done, and it was agreed that the leather would be dropped off at WOM to fit it whilst we waited for the finishing touches to be put to the engine rebuild.



Original (Optional) Equipment
False Floor
OpenSky
Heated Mirrors
Heated Washer Jets
Climatronic
Symphony II
Fog Lights

Upgrades:

Current

Black leather Sports interior
BOSE
X-Car Link
Custom Audi badging
A1 Sports Steering Wheel

Planned

Rear Cup Holder (When the rocking horse poo comes)
DIS --> Colour DIS
Rear electric windows
 
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Initial Photos (pre collection)

IMG_20170504_190742.jpg
IMG_20170504_190813.jpg IMG_20170504_191846.jpg IMG_20170504_190903.jpg
 
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Beautiful Jeremy. Makes the interior look so modern.

Thanks Steve! And it just feels nicer as well, especially on long journeys I always found the standard Sports wheel to be "wearing" on my hands, just a bit too firm. Not so with these wheels.
 
To answer that we need to look at the wheel a little closer, compared with my Baby Boomer one (which DOES work buttonwise)...

BB 2017 Small (4 of 7).jpg

If you compare the buttons you will notice that the red one has a MODE button instead of " << >> " buttons on the left of the wheel. These buttons are electrically compatible with the A2 architecture, so will interface with the RNS-E functions, whereas the Project X wheel has later buttons which are not backwards compatible with the Symphony II in Project X. That's not to say you can't get working buttons on the wheel, but you need to change the buttons to the earlier style which are getting increasingly difficult to find as they only came on a couple of years' worth of Audi A3s (I think). The red one from Baby Boomer actually is made up of three different steering wheels, the wheel itself from an A1, the second wheel which supplied the buttons is actually the one fitted to Project X, but with the buttons swapped over, and a third supplied the airbag.
 
Thanks to PutYourMittsOn I now have a summer set of Pepperpots for the car, so these will get some fresh summer tyres over the next few months and a set of quite reasonable 16" SE wheels will be available - unless my dad decides he would like an upgrade from his 15" Special Edition (ex)chrome rims.
 
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