VW Polo 9N3 GTI, 1.8T BJX Engine - Timing Belt Replacement Guide

A major service was due for my MY06 9N3 Polo GTI, which recently ticked over 90,000km.

I ended up changing the Timing Belt, Timing Belt Tensioning Pulley, Water Pump, Accessory Belt and Thermostat as preventative maintenance.

This is the very compact engine bay, where VW managed to cram the 1.8T engine from the outgoing Mark IV Golf (unfortunately detuned) into the facelifted Polo. It is a great feat of engineering tessellation, but it bites when you need to do major servicing.

Stock Bin

I use a metal bin to organise the medium-length bits of stock in my shop. These are all the odds and ends that aren't long enough to make it onto the stock rack. It was an old vegetable oil can in a previous life. I filled it with paper mailing tubes to try give it some organisation. I recently added some wheels to make it mobile (something that is increasingly necessary in the continually diminishing amount of shop space).

Tapping Guides

A set of tapping guides helps keep your tap straight when threading, and makes starting the thread a lot easier.

I made some simple ones using a piece of hex bar, drilled out to the relevant diameter. 

The thickness is three times the hole diameter. Each was stamped with its size with a punch. 

Here it is being used to retap handles for the Electronics Bench.

Milling Machine Drawbar

I made a metric M12 draw bar for my mill, as the original one was 7/16" and not suitable for the majority of my tooling. It consists of a long piece of 12mm CRS, threaded with a die on one side.

Lathe Bench

My lathe bench is in it's second iteration. The first was made with random pieces of steel welded together poorly with a cheap arc welder. 

The second iteration (/attempt) is made primarily from welded 50x50x3mm steel Rolled Hollow Section (RHS) and is on heavy duty castor wheels. It also doubles as storage space for raw materials. 

(Note, the pedestal where the lathe sits does not match the lathe. This is because I upgraded the previous lathe to a Hare and Forbes AL-250G, which is a vastly superior machine, but unfortunately with slightly different feet spacing.)

As an increasing assortment of stock accumulates, I needed a better way to organise it, so I could actually find what I needed. The original design had two drawers for storing lathe accessories, and two shelves for storing stock. I have cleared out the lower shelf in the photo below. This area will be replaced with four drawers. This area was chosen as it has more space than the upper shelf, and allows the drawers to be of identical size to the top ones.

Engineering Fails

This page is a collection of engineering fails that I have seen or experienced.

Cracked nuts 

These were found inside the the wiring box for a small 3 phase motor. I guess this is what happens when you over-tighten poor quality nuts!

Engineering Hacks

This page is a collection of various engineering hacks that I have done: 

Emergency Thong Repair

My workshop foot protection (/thong) broke. But it was New Years Day, no shops were open, and I couldn't be bothered looking for another pair... 

The person who invented cable ties deserves a pat on the back every time one is used to solve a problem. 

Note: I do not condone wearing thongs in workshops unless you are prepared to take the risk. 

Electronics Workbench

This is the third iteration of my electronics bench. The first was a small shelf in my bedroom. The second was an old sewing machine bench. This iteration uses a custom-made, electric height-adjustable table with two Linak linear actuators. 

Bench space is approximately 1000x700mm. The height adjustment also makes it useful for many other types of work. 

Garden Trellis

A garden trellis is a lattice structure used to support climbing plants as they grow. I recently bought a passionfruit plant, and needed a trellis to grow it on. I was keen on trying to reuse as much scrap material as possible, as it was going into the garden anyway. I also did not want to use the pine lattices available at Bunnings / Masters, as they are made from Copper-Chrome-Arsensate (CCA) treated pine.

Floating Floor

I had two packs of 1.5m^2 Mahogany Floating Floorboards. These are "engineered" floors, which consist of tongue-and-groove boards with a plywood substrate and a 3mm Mahogany veneer. I bought them purely because they were 75% off at Bunnings, thinking that they could potentially make some nice storage boxes.

After being stored for years, I decided that they would make a good floating floor under my bed - it would make it easier to store things there (especially if I got some boxes with wheels). It also would be a good area to store plywood sheets flat - as this minimises amount of warpage compared to when stored upright.

Building a Cajon

A cajon is a simple percussive instrument which resembles an innocuous wooden box. Despite it's simple appearance, it can produce a wide variety of sounds depending on where and how it's hit. An internal snare and a loose tapa (the striking surface) further adds to the variety.

I thought I would put my table saw to a good (and first) use, and try building one!

Magnetic Hooks

Magnetic hooks tend to be rather useful - as a lot of workshop surfaces tend to be metal. 

An easy, but effective one can be made in a few minutes using a spare rare earth magnet from a hard drive. 

These come with a convenient backing plate, so it's a matter of finding a suitably sized screw, and bending it into a hook. 

Jet JPM-13CS Thicknesser

A new addition to the workshop - a Jet JPM 13CS 13" Thicknesser / Moulder.

I put it through a fairly standard reconditioning procedure, which involved:

• Removing all guards and cleaning all accessible surfaces with ethanol / degreaser.
• Removing old lubricant and grime from the guide posts and the lead screwsand flushing the bearing surfaces several times with clean oil. 
• Greasing the leadscrews and oiling the guideposts.  
• Replacing stripped fasteners.
• Setting of cutterhead and roller heights. 
• Setting the drive belt tension.

It is interesting the types of problems that you find in the process... but the final result was worthwhile - a clean quiet machine, that produces a smooth planed surface, and makes less noise than the dust extractor! 

Doweling Jig

I needed a jig to help my drill 8mm holes in the ends of hardwood boards for my Outdoor Table. These holes needed to be accurately spaced, otherwise assembly would be difficult if not impossible. 

I started with a piece of 80x20mm mystery steel bar. (It later turned out to be a really fairly hard tool steel!) The bar was milled on all sides to 70x18x22mm. 

Router Fence

A router table is useful for profiling, rabbeting, dadoing, and a whole variety of other things. I find though that most of my router work has thus far has been on edges (eg. radiusing, rabbeting, etc).

I built a router fence to allow me to make rabbets, to make edge rounding easier.

Circle Cutting Jig

I needed to cut a 120mm circle for the back board of my cajon. I didn't want to shell out $50+ for a hole cutter that I would use once. Had the hole been smaller, I could've used my existing set, or had it been much larger, I could've used the existing fence attachment on the router and put an adjustable pin in it. But unfortunately, it was neither.

Here's how I did it.... 

W.I.P. - Garage Door Seal

Dust and leaves tend to blow into my garage through the gaps in the garage door. Anything stored near the garage door also has a penchant for rusting easier, presumably due to larger swings in humidity and temperature leading to condensation. In an ongoing effort towards a cleaner workshop, this gap had to be sealed.

W.I.P. - Curtain

W.I.P. = Workshop Improvement Project

My workshop has a small alcove, which is currently home to all the "dirty" equipment - sandblaster, surface grinder, bench grinder, air compressor, and eventually, the welder. The sandblaster is a particularly bad offender - every time it is used, the house floors get a fine coating of abrasive dust...and the entry to the house is 3 corners and 2 doors away. A greater amount of dust undoubtedly ends up in the precision slideways and leadscrews of my machines.

A 50x25mm rolled hollow section was used as a curtain rail. This was anchored into the 2 walls forming on the sides of the alcove. (Note the stock rack on the left hand side - this can accommodate stock up to 3.5m long. It is made from 4 angle brackets dynabolted into the brick columns).

Outdoor Table

I have collecting (/hoarding) a lot of hardwood timber floorboards (thrown out by less enterprising individuals during council cleanup). It's time to get reclaim the lost space under my workbench and turn it into something useful - an outdoor table, in time for summer.

The plan is to build a parallel slat table. The rough layout can be seen below. The target size (wood supplies allowing) is 900x900mm, with a height of 750mm. Approximately 14 boards are required for the top surface.

Milling Machine