prn31's Biscay Blue MY10.5 R36 Wagon

[Domatron]

The problem is the vendor may not know that it has been in an accident - it may have been a previous owner.

Unfortunately the quality of repairs is not always great. In order to provide a competitive quote or make a bigger margin on the job corners are cut, especially when you can't see the result.

With a private seller I try and get an independent inspection but it isn't always possible with a dealer. A PPSR Certificate will usually highlight any repair work performed under insurance. I didn't do this until after I bought the car because the dealer has to guarantee title and thus I thought such a certificate wasn't necessary. I was wrong.

Yes hindsight is a very smart fellow isn't he...


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[pandas]

This was about the only thing that the dealer did a satisfactory job on...

From memory they told me the trim rectification cost for the bolster was $270 - probably trade price.

Would you know where they took this too? Has it been holding up for you well for the last few years?

[kamold]

Cost me about $200 Inc shipping for the new factory seat base foam from Germany. If you rally knew what you were doing with the seat you could probably replace it in a bit over an hour.
Took me and a friend about 3 hours as we were making it up as we went along.
End result was worthwhile.

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[prn31]

Would you know where they took this too? Has it been holding up for you well for the last few years?

Sorry, but I have no idea who did it. Kamold's solution seems like the go and I can imagine any good trimmer would have the new foam in there within an hour.

Interestingly enough I owned a Honda Integra Type R with those heavily bolstered Recaros for 14 years and never did any repairs to the seats! Mind you every 5 years I would swap the seats over so that they would wear evenly....

[prn31]

I've found a few photos of when I had the front wiring harness (for the parking sensors) replaced last year.


1. The first pic is of the Passat with the front bumper removed. The washer bottle on the left of the picture had taken a bit of a battering and should have been replaced when the previous owner repaired the car - shoddy. Also notice the radar for the ACC.

2. The front bumper removed, with new wiring harness in place.

3. The old wiring harness - plenty of electrical tape and splicing of wires here. No wonder the sensors were shorting out...

[prn31]

When you spend a bit of time on the forum searching for things R36 specific it’s not hard to go back to the time when our cars were new – 2008 to 2010. It is interesting to read first owners getting excited about the R36s they ordered, what they’ve optioned and how much they paid – in some cases over $80K!

I started reading about one forum member called Dr Block who joined the forum in late 2009. A Lexus IS250 owner from western Sydney, he ordered his Biscay Blue R36 Wagon in November 09 for a 22 March 10 delivery. He optioned Sat Nav, Sunroof, Bluetooth, Dynaudio and Power Tailgate. With two teenage kids he needed a bigger car. Over Christmas he discovered that on the MY10 model that Adaptive Cruise Control was available, a feature his Lexus had. He was able to add this feature to the order at a cost of $2,975 (ouch!)

The first hiccup was discovering that the RVC was no longer bundled with the RNS510 Sat Nav and he was unable to add it to his order. I understand that someone at Volkswagen Australia forgot to tick the RVC box for all the Australian orders and that very few if any MY10s and 10.5s came with the correct Highline RVC. Dr Block was not happy….

Things were about to get a lot worse for Dr Block. His March delivery was put back to May – something to do with a shortage of VR6 engines, or something. Indeed the car hadn’t even been built! What made things worse was that Mr Block had already sold his Lexus in anticipation of picking up of his R36. So now there was a fight with his dealer in South Western Sydney for a loan car whilst he waited for his R36. This took a bit of organising and VWA became involved before our man was able to get his loan car.

Late May became late June (the 30^th actually) when Dr Block finally picked up his R36, minus Dynaudio. Somehow this option was left off the R36 and a refund was given.

Dr Block racked up the kilometres in his R36 and was happy with his car. He had originally optioned the basic Bluetooth and upgraded to the 9w7 kit, which was fitted by a VWWatercooled sponsor – he was very happy with the job (more of this later…) And that was about the last time (mid 2012) we heard from Mr Block and his R36. Until now….

Yes, that’s right! I own Dr Block’s R36!

As I’ve mentioned in past posts, the history of my R36 has been a bit murky. The logbook was lost and it took a while before it was “discovered” who the original dealer was and I was able to get the service invoices. Yes, that’s right the dealer was from south western Sydney. My R36 was first registered on 30 June 2010 (6/10 Compliance and 4/10 build.) It has the all the options that Dr Block described, including the rare Adaptive Cruise Control. It also has the 9w7 Bluetooth stuffed behind the RNS510 instead of in a carrier under the drivers seat – no, the installer actually did a crap job…

Dr Block hasn’t been on VW Watercooled since 2012. He said that it was his intention to changeover his R36 wagon when it was 3 years old. The last service at the original dealer was in November 2012 and I presume it was sold soon after. I have been tempted to PM Mr Block – I’m not sure he would be keen to hear from me as I suspect there things that he wouldn’t want to tell me, which may well be why he stopped communicating on VWWatercooled…

I’m happy that Dr Block optioned up his MY10.5 Biscay Blue R36 Wagon with all the goodies including ACC. It’s just a bummer it didn’t come with an RVC (which I’ve since retrofitted) or Dynaudio. Nevermind…..

[prn31]

So it has been over three year since I last contributed to my own “build” thread. I suppose in that time not a lot of interesting things have happened to my R36. I just keep putting the kms on it and keep up the servicing as it approaches 150,000km.

I did replace the original Sachs dampers with Bilsteins B8s at the 130,000km mark back in October 2018, see here:
https://www.vwwatercooled.com/forums/f234/r36-oem-suspension-106737-2.html?highlight

In February 2019 I replaced the PCV Valve myself, and started a thread here: R36 PCV Valve Replacement

What I had been steeling myself to do was the Dynaudio retrofit. Part of the reason is that my R36 was actually ordered with Dynaudio but when it arrived it wasn’t fitted and the owner was refunded the ($2,000) cost of this option. My car was meant to have Dynaudio.

I had read Nermal’s Dynaudio Retrofit guide, which was plug and play, see here:
R36 Dynaudio Retrofit Guide

I had also seen Kamold tackle the same retrofit but without the benefit of plug and play, see here (page 13 to 15):
Kamold's R36

Unfortunately my MY10.5 fell into the non-plug and play scenario. I was potentially looking at a lot of grief here… It took me a long time to get my head around this. If I got a Dynaudio system out of a MY10.5 would it be plug and play? Would a complete new Dynaudio wiring harness be the answer? Could I buy the Dynaudio speaker trims and attach those to my existing door trims? The answers were no, no and very doubtful.

I did come across a complete Dynaudio system from a wrecked MY10.5 wagon south of Sydney. The price which included all the speakers, amplifier and all important door trims was fair. Unfortunately one of the rear door trims was damaged in the t-boning accident that wrote off the car and some of the brackets that held the all-important Christmas tree clips had broken. I managed to get another old door trim as a spare.

My panel beater Ron is old school. He can turn his hands to anything. The door trims required some plastic welding and one needed quite a bit of rectification to get it right. In hindsight it would have probably been easier (and cheaper) to swap the Dynaudio speaker grill onto my good existing door trim. I guess, you live and learn.

I was going to drill out the old speakers and pop rivet inthe new Dynaudio speakers but I ended up leaving that to Ron. We also replaced the driver’s door mirror while we were at it – I had smacked the original absentmindedly reversing out of the garage one day. S@#! happens…

We put the front door trims on but left the rears off as I grappled with reason for needing crossovers in the rear. Kamold in his write up kind of breezed through this part of his build. Not knowing audio speaker theory I made contact with Kamold and did a lot of Googling before I finally figured it out. Here goes.

The original Blaupunkt amplifier has only 8 channels for 10 speakers. The rear Blaupunkt bass speakers have a very basic crossover, really just a resistor that powers the rear Tweeters. The rear Dynaudio bass speaker doesn’t have this so you have to build your own crossover, or if you are really keen you can thread the four wires out of the amplifier into the rear tweeters. As this would be a mammoth job, I chose the former.

Before we got that far I had to make up the adaptor harness. It had been a challenge for Kamold and didn’t look like an easy exercise for someone like me. Without any soldering skills this was always going to be farmed out. My friend Ron suggested the local auto electrician Tony who used to work on car audio and was quite a methodical kind of guy. In the meantime I had bought the correct connector from out of Hong Kong – Kamold had taken apart his existing amplifier, but I didn’t want to touch it as it was another part that could get damaged.

First up I needed a pin map/diagram and Kamold kindly sent me his spreadsheet. I gave this to Tony who looked at it for a day and then asked me to come by for a chat. He couldn’t make head of the pin map and spreadsheet though he had put tape around the new connector and numbered the pins. I said I would number the wires on the green and grey Dynaudio plugs – that turned out to be quite an intricate job. But I figured it out. Kamold said we didn’t need to feed a wire to the fusebox like he had, which was a relief.

Tony soldered all the connectors and heat-shrinked them. The challenge was fitting this cumbersome adapter harness onto the physically bigger Dynaudio amplifier all within the tight constraints of the area under the passenger seat. One problem we encountered was that the original connector had been damaged. It still worked if you were careful but we took no chances by securing it closed with a cable tie. It was all a tight fit with the amplifier cover but we checked to see if it would catch with the electric seat mechanism and it cleared it ok.

Next was the rear crossovers. Tony had sourced two NOS (new old stock) Hertz 300W crossovers and was told to just connect the output from the crossover onto the power wires to the bass speaker and let the crossover power the amplifiers. That way the crossover wasn’t splitting the bass speaker and tweeter with the possibility that the former could overpower the crossover. Well it kind of made sense to me.

Ron then fitted the rear door trims using brand new Christmas tree clips (he insisted) which I think for the four door trims cost $130 – not cheap, but then no rattles either.

The final step was to do the correct coding and the piece deresistance, the “Welcome to Volkswagen - Sound by Dynaudio” splash screen. Again Kamold came to the rescue. I’m a novice OBDeleven user and I eventually managed to long-code the Dynaudio into my RNS510. But there was no Dynaudio splash screen. Turns out that when Kamold loaded the 5238 firmware onto my RNS510 some years ago he also gave me a custom Volkswagen R splash screen. To get the Dynaudio splash screen, I had to download 5238, copy it onto a disc and reload onto my RNS510. But guess what? As 5238 is a later firmware I also got the later “Welcome to Volkswagen Sound by Dynaudio” splashscreen used on MIB equipped Mk 7 Golfs and B8 Passats. Nevermind…

Was it worth it? Well, it hasn’t been a cheap or easy exercise. But thanks to Ron, Tony and especially Kamold, we saw it through to he end. Still it looks like a factory set up and the sound out of those speakers is pretty amazing. Like nothing I’ve ever experienced in a car before. So that is a yes...

[Passat R36]

Great work!

Plug and Play is for 2008 model, later model VW changed the connector.

Maybe you can make the convertor harness to sell, lol

[kamold]

Well done!
These sorts of things are all the more satisfying because they aren't a simple plug n play exercise.

[prn31]

Great work!

Plug and Play is for 2008 model, later model VW changed the connector.

Maybe you can make the convertor harness to sell, lol

The 38 pin connector cost me $47 from Mouser Electronics out of Hong Kong. Air postage was more than half the cost. Sure if I bought in bulk it would be a lot cheaper but I don't really plan on going into production....

Having said that, I’m sure that as these cars get older more second hand units will come onto the market via Ebay or Gumtree – quite a few early R36s and Highlines were optioned with Dynaudio. It is a worthwhile upgrade to do but as a purist it has to come with the Dynaudio speaker door trims. Now if I can only get that original Dynaudio splash screen loaded…

[sn809]

Its great to get the history of a car. Good detective work.

[prn31]

There’s not been a lot of discussion in this forum of late. It seems to be mainly random questions on troubleshooting problems on cars that are now ten plus year old. The R36 model is in that age bracket where it’s cheap enough for fourth and fifth owners to take a punt on and hope for the best but not quite rare enough (yet!) to be a future collectable classic. Having said that, I was able to increase the insurance value of my R36 this year, albeit not by much.

It has been five years since I updated this thread, when I reported on the Dynaudio retrofit that I did during the middle of Covid-19 (May 2020). At the time the odometer reading was just under 150,000. It now reads 193,000, which is not a big increase – I guess that since Covid I’m doing less commuting, plus I do have another (newer) car that I use to spread the load (not a VW.)

Since that time, I’ve fitted a new set of Michelin PS4s (at 155K) which remarkably are still on the car but will need to be replaced soon. I’ve never got such high mileage out of ‘performance’ rubber before. I had a leak in the air conditioning system, which luckily wasn’t in the evaporator. It came from a deformed O-ring in one of the large pads (not sure what this is) in the engine bay. I have to say that the air conditioning has never been super strong in the Passat – it certainly isn’t as good as a Mk7 Golf.

The 2022 annual service included the DSG and Halex service (162K) but I was stealing myself for the big one – the dreaded timing chains. They had always been noisy on start up and I even had an advisory on my 120K service bill, which was back in 2018!

I did the timing chains at the beginning of 2023 (177K.) Alfredo from Muller & Muller kept on saying they needed to be replaced. I did check the cam phasing parameters on OBDEleven and they were right on 5 degrees, so I bit the bullet. I got most of the parts from FCP Euro in the States - their timing chain kit, main oil seal and rocker cover gasket - that came to $780, I didn't get the brake pump gasket or inlet manifold gaskets - so I paid through the nose for those parts here - $290. Alfredo's labour was $2,000 - so it was about $3,100 all up, which I thought was very fair.

However Alfredo told me the rocker cover was warped and would leak oil into the head. Sure enough, I soon had a misfire, which meant I needed to order a new rocker cover, this time from Pelican Parts - not OEM but still German - for about $300 (over $600 here) landed. I also needed a new coil and spark plug as they were wrecked by the oil. At local prices this was expensive - the total bill was about $800, which included labour. I saved the old PCV as it is only a matter of time before the PCV in the new rocker cover fails...

In 2023 I also had to attend to a number of non-mechanical issues, which my local panel beater and mechanic Ron, who I’ve used for over 30 years attended to. This included replacing the headlining, which was cut by a local trimmer but fitted by Ron, who has done plenty of these over the years. As my car has a sunroof, this was quite involved and we made the call not to replace the material on the sunroof blind as the amount of work needed to remove it was just too much. In any case the original was in good condition and a very close match to the rest of the headlining. I also had the drivers seat fixed with new foam and new leather (on the right bolsters) by the local trimmer. Both front and rear bumpers were removed, repaired (for cracks) and repainted. The rear roof spoiler had lost most of its clear coat and was repainted in situ as it was too difficult to remove. There were other scratches, an old repair on the rear left and insurance work on the left rear door (someone backed out into me in a carpark). I also had all of the Omanyt wheels refurbished and Ron got carried away and repainted the brake calipers blue as well! The cost of this was, well a lot more that I had originally envisaged, but as I have no plans to sell the car, I thought it was worth doing.

After the previous service I purchased a spare set of coils from the States and a set of spark plugs locally. These went on during the 2024 service at 188K.

Since then I’ve had a go at fixing the dreaded centre console rattle. When this first occurred about 5-6 years ago I went out and bought a second-hand console and replaced it. This did the trick but I guess it was only a matter of time before my new console started to rattle – by that time I had thrown out most of my old console, which was a big mistake! The only solution was to take the console out, take it apart and stick in some contact foam between the layers of plastic. This was a very involved job and getting it all back together complete with lots of foam in between wasn’t easy but it has pretty much cured the problem. The interior of my R36 feels quite solid now.

[MIG]

Nice work on sticking with it, a lot of people give up once a car hits that level of maintenance. (R36 is worth the effort )

At least with the R36 there is a lot of overlap with the later B7s and CC with spare parts, so availability should be good in the future.

And if you like DIY check out this Youtube channel, been doing some cool stuff with the R36 in the UK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8GWGRv4x-Y

[Bavarian]

Regarding that guy in the You Tube video. I have been watching every stage of that restoration he's doing on that R36 and I have to say he has my praise well and truly.

Just watched him do the timing chain and he was pretty careful with everything so definitely gave me the confidence to do this myself in the future when that time comes.

When he'd gone through all the steps and finished putting his chain on and it wasn't starting it turned out to be just a plug he'd left disconnected so I was pretty stoked for the guy especially putting up DIY on You Tube. He has even sourced a lot of new parts through that whole build. Damm I wish I had a hoist that would just make life so much easier servicing 2 cars.

[MIG]

Regarding that guy in the You Tube video. I have been watching every stage of that restoration he's doing on that R36 and I have to say he has my praise well and truly.

Just watched him do the timing chain and he was pretty careful with everything so definitely gave me the confidence to do this myself in the future when that time comes.

When he'd gone through all the steps and finished putting his chain on and it wasn't starting it turned out to be just a plug he'd left disconnected so I was pretty stoked for the guy especially putting up DIY on You Tube. He has even sourced a lot of new parts through that whole build. Damm I wish I had a hoist that would just make life so much easier servicing 2 cars.

Yep I also just watched his last video, I have been there before, left the LIN harness disconnected from the alternator when I had the front off last (scratching my head for a bit), it was good he left that part in, shows that everyone is still human

I am also going to be doing my own chains at some point, at 170k now and the last oil change had some bad chain noise as the oil pressure built, filling the filter from empty (it's not sounded that bad before).

With the money saved doing it yourself, I was thinking the luxury of a QuickJack maybe