82 vw rabbit engine build

One of my (best) friends is getting married (soon!) and he needed a car for his soon to be wife.  I got this old 82 rabbit shell as payment for some work i did for another friend.  I decided to "bless" him with the old girl, only problem is that it needed a engine.  So we sourced a old 1.8l and rebuilt it.

Its not a pretty car, but its functional.

enjoy


sitting in my trailer on its way up north


its got some front end damage. The yellow one is mine, we'll here more about that one later


all strapped and ready to go, had to take off the bumpers to get it to fit.


time to remove the old engine (the PO wanted to keep the engine, i said i would remove it for her)


2 hours later....


There is a big empty hole that needs to be filled up.


stripped the motor down and clean up what we could


it took a while, everything was covered in carbon


more engine porn


close up of cylinder head, im not sure what my buddy was taking a picture of here


the cam is in


shiny clean block.. i hope it stays that way for a while...


all put together


I put these in from the bottom (after i bolt the transmission to it).  make a pretty easy job out of it


have to literally set the car on the ground to put the motor in


as usual.. the drivers side mount was a son of a gun to line up, but we got her.


and look there, an engine is back in a vw rabbit.  Took about 2 hours to put her in and about another 4 to get her all wired up and running.  We had some electrical and tuning issues seeing that we were putting in a completely different motor.  No biggie tho, it got sorted out.


and proof that she's running!  Still got a little tuning to do