Next was to get some tint on the rear window, this is something I would usually do myself but I was never normally 100% happy with the result so decided that paying someone to get it perfect would be a nice change. So I found a local company Alexandria-Autotint and got it booked in. I had gone for a limo black and was more than happy with the results.
Next task getting fed up of using a key to unlock the van ( who even does that anymore ) I ordered the Right Click Central locking kit which comes with the nice flip keys and as a side note don’t even mess around with the universal rods just order the genuine rods and clips from VW which save you far more time than the few pounds you would save not buying them.
I have fitted a fair few of these so it was a pretty straight forward task, The only struggle I had was looking for some genuine door bellows at a sensible price. I ended up at the local car shop finding some universal CV boots which were the correct diameters and make a nice tidy finish.
Now for a common annoyance the heater’s not quite doing what they should do, I only had Hot air and only blowing on the windscreen which in fact was quite alright with me as I could just turn them on or off and most of the time I only wanted them on the windscreen.
Taking the heater controls out of the dash I immediately spotted that the plastic had gone brittle and all the tabs that should hold the cable outer had broken off. Manually moving the cables all appeared to work smoothly so I had a quick attempt at super gluing them then epoxying them, but the force from the cable quickly undid that. Again up against the VW tax I could not find a sub £30 used heater control and paying that much or more for a used item that may end up not working was not a game I was going to get into.
A quick search on the net found some articles stating that other VW models were using the same unit with different internals so I took a punt on one from a VW Caddy on ebay the picture looked spot on and for a few pounds it was worth it.
So low and behold it was exactly the same unit I just had to switch the heater positioning mechanism from mine to the new one and re install.
As always this led to the next problems the heater was taking a long while to get hot, so suspecting the thermostat I just ordered a new one and switched it out. This then got me back to what I remembered and the heater getting hot after only a few miles. While down replacing the thermostat it was a good chance to try and trace the oil leak which luckily turned out to be the common Oil pressure switch leaking so this was nice to get rid of the constant drip.
The other problem which I had not previously realised was there was now no cold on the Heater it went from Hot to Really Hot, normally this is down to the cable between the controls and the heater valve but this was all freely moving. This then I have diagnosed as the actual heater valve but considering I am not needing to turn the heat down at this time of year I can live without fixing this for a while.
After the happiness of all these little fixes I decided to treat the van to a new side step and rear threshold, these are copies made in fiberglass and apart from the side step being a bit warped are a good fit and really smarten things up. A.C.H Glassfibre
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