Skip to main content

Forum Fridays: A Wagon Lover’s Dream

When the history of cars is written, it will remember the golden age as a time before practical, engaging wagons were replaced by the Milli Vanilli of cars: the crossover. Today’s pick revisits that time in the early 2000s when modern technology graced these elongated estates with all the amenities you really need and finding one to buy didn’t require a blood sacrifice.

User D Nasty discovered not just any Jetta wagon, but a cherished diesel-powered TDI in a lovely shade of blue outside of Knoxville, Georgia. It wasn’t long before D had the car in the shop, en route to becoming the successor to — what else? — another blue Jetta Wagon, Nasty’s previous car.

Can You Say TLI?

Mention the name Volkswagen to any gearhead on the planet and the first three letters that come to mind will be GTI. It’s easy to forget that Volkswagen also offers the Jetta in a more sporting trim level. GLI versions of the car have been around for years now, delivering upgraded performance and aggressive styling, but never for wagon body style.

Nasty felt the newly acquired TDI was the perfect prospect for a GLI wagon conversion. It only takes a quick look at the pictures from the multipage build thread to see this is an enthusiast with some serious bodywork skills. If the ones of the new car in the shop don’t convince you, there are some of his first custom wagon, which isn’t half-bad itself.

Prime Time

At what appears to be his personal, private garage — and a very well-appointed one at that — Nasty set to work stripping everything out of the blue Jetta. The car is also slated to receive an upgraded interior pilfered from the GLI to give it a little more sporting feel on the inside, but pictures of it stripped down to bare metal are enough to make you bite your nails.

An electric sanding wheel can be spotted in multiple shots, and the transformation from painted to bare metal comes together in photographs as this owner puts on a clinic about how to sand down the paint on your car. Finally, with bare metal showing, it’s time for a coat of gray primer.

The matte-finish primer makes the chunky early ‘naughts wagon look angry in the best way. However, the car was finished in true-to-VW candy blue that displays incredible depth even in the photos. We imagine that seen in person, the car would be eye-popping.

The Finishing Touches

Nasty fitted a set of chrome split-spokes to the car, which does a convincing factory GLI wagon impression wearing its painted ground effects. The shiny wheels continue the theme set by the paint, catching the light from all points on the car.

We’re impressed by the amount of labor the owner put into returning this car to a color very close to the one it was wearing when purchased. One look at the photos, however, is all it takes to understand how far it has come. Nice job, D Nasty. Now, about that other wagon — is it still for sale?

Check out the entire build thread here.

The post Forum Fridays: A Wagon Lover’s Dream appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex http://ift.tt/2Ex0Woy
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...
Post a Comment
Read more

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers.  The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience.  So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf.  In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...
Post a Comment
Read more

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...
2 comments
Read more