pre kids I convinced my wife that I need this 16v swapped MK1 caddy 7 hours south of us in San Diego. Dude told me it would definitely make the drive back up.
Drove down to check the car out. It became obvious really fast that the current owner was not the same owner who did the swap. In fact, he seemed to have added a little bit of his mechanical ineptness to nearly every part of the vehicle. It was, however really cool and I got him down to under $1,200, so I bought it.
The drive back was a testament to how much my wife actually loved me. She was comfortably driving our Tundra behind me, but had to put up with all the BS along the way.
About 45 minutes into cruising up the interstate, I lost 5th and 3rd gear. We pull off in a supermarket parking lot and I spend some time wondering how volkswagen transmissions work when I figure out the shift linkage had a bolt holding into a little groove that was upside down under the car and the previous owner had greased the bolt instead of lock-tited, so it slowly backed out from road vibration. Not only that, but he had clearly had the issue a time or two before, because the little groves for the linkage were all wallowed out. I fixed with some lock-tite and aluminum foil I got at the supermarket. Back on the road!
We get another hour and a half up interstate 5 and right where there's a big old I-5, I-405 split, the gas pedal suddenly drops out from under my foot and hits the floor. WTF?! I pull over on the shoulder, and wife pulls in behind me. I check the pedal, it's good., but the throttle cable is slack. Uh oh. I check the throttle body and sure enough- the throttle cable had been hanging on by approximately 3 strands of wire and finally quit. I tell the wife I need to do some internet-ing and see if I can find somewhere that has a mk1 vw throttle cable on a sunday afternoon(not looking good). We were a short distance from my brother-in-laws house and they had a new baby, so she informed me she was leaving to see baby and to call when I had given up lol. Of course no specialized vintage water-cooled VW parts stores are open on a sunday, so I ended up macgyver-ing my own fix by backing out the cable tensioners just enough to squeak a small amount of frayed cable through the throttle body and then clamping it with a nut and bolt and some washers I scrounged off of non-important parts of the truck. Back in business. I fire it up and go ripping through the maze of on and off-ramps in the area to meet up with my wife at her brother's house. Side note- in my excitement, I hit one of the corners extra spicy and discovered that the left side of my seat wasn't bolted down. That was fun.
Finally we've got our life sorted out and we're cruising on the open road, though I'm careful not to hit WOT just in case I pull the throttle cable out again. We make it through LA and I decide I'd rather run up the coast on highway 101 since this thing has a GTI transmission in it, and I don't want to run it at 4k rpms just to keep up with 80 mph traffic on I-5. At this point our drive has gotten a bit long and it was dark as I was cruising up a hill about 10 miles outside of Buellton when the truck shuts off. Motor, lights, dash, everything. I coast over to the side of the road and my wife doesn't even bother getting out of her truck. She just rolls down her window and yells
"You've got 10 minutes before I make you call a tow truck".
At this point my 7 hour drive back is getting close to 11 hours and I'm nowhere near home. I have had enough of the PO's hackery, so I call him up on the phone and struggle to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
"Hey Bill, I'm still on my drive home out here in the middle of nowhere and the truck just shut off on me. If I were to be looking for some faulty wiring on this bad boy, where would you suggest I start?"
"Oh! Uh.. There's this little stud in the back of the motor that I ran all the ground wires to.. Uhm... sometimes that comes loose."
"Thanks Bill." Click.
I grab my flash light and sure as shit, there were about 6 or 7 old school vw ground wires all twisted together back there loosely dangling. It appeared he had just tried to twist the copper around a little threaded stud sticking out of the block and then run an nut down the stud. The nut of course, was nowhere to be found. I scavenge another nut off of a less important part of the motor, then grab the cheapo box of electrical connectors I keep in our tundra center console, crimp one on to the twisted together end of the mess of ground wires, and thread it back onto the little stud. Truck fires right up. At this point in the story, the expression on my wife's face was a war between annoyed and impressed that the truck was running again. From there I drove it the rest of the way home.
Total estimated trip time: 7 hours. Total actual trip time: 14 hours door to door. I found so many more ghetto ass improvements on that truck I had to fix down the line: (someone broke a header bolt off into the block, the distributer fell apart in my hands when I went to replace the plug wires, the timing belt was about to snap, two wheel bearings needed replacing, etc...) Once I got it running good, it was a hoot to drive, but I ended up selling because my wife wouldn't be caught dead in it. Some strange reason about the truck being... ugly? I dunno.
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The winner calls me and he’s from northern Montana.😜 He says they will be down to get it the next weekend. I explain that the thing weighs 11,000 lbs and bring the right equipment to haul it on and I will push it onto their trailer with the neighbors backhoe. They show up with a three quarter ton truck and a whole made tandem axle trailer I wouldn’t put a car on. I calmly explain the tractor weighs 11,000 lbs and they are why under trailered. The old man says push it on. I smile to myself and start to oblige them. Halfway on the rear tires on the truck are two feet off the ground. I stop and explain they are way under trailered. The old man is pissed now and says keep pushing. I calmly oblige him. The rear tires of the tractor go over the axles and head to the front corners of the trailer. Both corners fold down and touch the ground.
I’m serious. They finally figured they were under trailered.😜 They pull the backhoe bucket off and head back to Montana saying they will be back the next week to get the remaining part. The next week they show up with a home made triple axle pulled by a beat to hell one ton single wheel. I push the tractor on and they strap it down and head out. I followed them to the I15 on-ramp. Thinking the whole time there was no way people weren’t gonna die somewhere between Lindon Utah and northern Montana.
