Updates

After Radwood, I decided to spend time finishing steps I skipped and reworking some things I rushed.

First off, I test fit some new wheels.  Thoughts?

I drilled a bunch of access holes and sprayed 3M Cavity Wax all into the cavities behind the areas I welded, mostly around the rear arches and rocker panels.

I also spread a bunch of seam sealer onto the new welds, and all around the inner arches.

All masked up and ready for undercoating

I painted the drums with high temp BBQ black paint

I hit the front brake dust shields with some too.

Much better!

I re-sprayed the arches with the SEM trim paint.  This stuff is very sensitive to temperature, humidity, and film thickness, so it's really easy to get mismatched panels.  Now they better match the bumpers and door trim.

I spent some time re-mounting the trim as well.  Since I have the arches cut away to fit the tucked wheels, the original rivets wouldn't work.  I had previously hacked them in place with a few screws and tape, but made some stainless brackets with rivet nuts to hold them more securely.  I also trimmed the plastic arches a little neater, they were previously just ground away and rubbing.

I trimmed the rear arches to fit better.  These were from a Jetta, not a Golf originally.   Everyone on the forums seems to say that Jetta and Golf arches are identical, but this is not true.  There are different part numbers and the shape is slightly different around the rear bumper.

I used 3M double sided tape, with the primer, to hold the top of the arches in place and to hold the top of the side skirts.

I made a new rear engine mount.  The stock piece was rubbing on the axle at full drop.  I cut away the stock mount and had planned to reinforce it, but decided that trying to weld to a crappy old aluminum casting wasn't the best idea.  I decided to re-make the entire mount in steel.

/Here is the original mount after I had cut some clearance.

This bolts to the rear engine mount, so I decided to use an old rear engine mount to make the welding jig.

Certainly not my cleanest work, but it'll do for this project.  This is the welding fixture, based on the original part:

New steel plate

First test fit with the new plates and lathe-turned bosses

Here are all the pieces ready for welding

All welded up!

In this view you can see how much more clearance I gained for the passenger side axle.

It's hard to get a picture of the bracket in place, but you can see the axle now has a ton of clearance.

After putting it all back together, I ended up adding 5mm spacers to the front and 15mm spacers to the rear to get the wheels tucked up nicely under the freshly trimmed arches.