Mk2 Golf - big bumpers and vibration (oo-er)

Sep 20, 2005 1 Replies
A

Two questions about my '88 GTi.


  1. It's a small bumper car, however the bumpers are faded and extremely wonky. If I replace them with big bumpers, does the car become more or less desirable? (When I bought it, I decided that I wanted to keep it as original as possible, but big bumpers seem to get talked about a lot.)


  1. There is noticable vibration at speed. It is very hard to pin down at the moment. If pushed, I'd say it was happening in gears 3, 4 and maybe 5, and occuring at about 50-70mph.



I know that's a crap description, but where do I start? Wheel bearings? If it's not those, where do I go from there to diagnose?



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M

We're talking a 17 y.o. car here that has at best medium collectible value and mostly has just cult status. Anyone who might care about "big bumpers" will also know they're not original. Old cars that are of greather value are usually not customized and are restored to original condition. I'd be willing to bet that big bumpers would hurt the car's value and not help it. But either way we're talking like $100-200 USD in value here on this car for a bumper swap changing the value. If anything, if you do a sloppy job, the car will look like crap and nobody would want it (and I've seen quite a few big bumper conversions go wrong, particularly the back bumper often doesn't want to fit right).

Does it happen in neutral as well?

No. They would be noisy but not vibrating.

Most likely it's wheel balancing. Swap the rims/tires front to rear on the same side of the car and try again. if the vibration is no longer in the steering wheel that's the first confirmation (although all of them could be out of balance but usually it's not to the same degree).

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