Grilling

Transforming the transporter's looks.

The front end of the T5 Transporter isn't a great thing to look at. It's not bad but it's not great either.

The T5.1 sportline facelift looks pretty great which is probably why so many people face lift the T5's. It's a simple bolt of job but does cost a bit to do and that's before you even get to painting the thing.

Another look to go for would be to convert the front end to a Caravelle style bumper either from a  Caravelle or Shuttle bus. The bonus of this approach is that I could find one already painted thus cutting costs a fair bit.

The reason I did not to do either of these was that I wanted to do something a bit different.

I had found a number of forum entries that inspired me to go and try some custom mods. Something I had not done before.

A brief forey with the splitter on the right (it did not end well) got me started but it wasn't till quite a bit later till I got really stuck in.

The grill

The inspiration for the grill mod I decided uppon was from gmachine03 on the T5 forum.
I bought the grill on the right for a tenner whilst picking up some parts for a webasto that I will be fitting in the future.
This gave me the luxury of getting to bugger it up once and still have a usable grill.
Once I had a good chunk of spare time I got out the tools and decided to take a bash at this.

 
First I took snips and a dremel to the middle two fins then after some thought I removed the top one too.
this would give a wide aperture to fill with mesh later.

 


Before any mesh could get inserted however I had to do a lot of work filling in the various gaps that the fin removal had left in the grill.
The above linked forum user had used two pack adhesive for most of this job but here I was going to take things a bit of a different direction. I used a Welzh plastic welding kit throughout this job which worked fantastically. I used ABS rods and the recently removed fins as filler for all the holes in the edge and badge area of the grill.


A lot of plastic welding later I had all of the holes filled in. 
Using a mixture of flapper wheel, dremel and sand paper I worked back the welds to a flat profile as well as rubbing back the complete surface of the grill for later painting.
Once this was as smooth as I could get it I used body filler to to fill in the little imperfections and blemishes left by the welds and the odd stone chip here and there.
Once dry this was sanded back and repeated till smooth / I lost interest and moved on to the next step anyway.




Next came the paint. Well after a good clean with wipes. prep is key remember!
I used plastic adhesion promoter primer as an initial dry coat followed by a wet coat. I gave the grill a rest to dry and did some gardening.

After a while (see the shadows have moved and everything!) I returned armed with a can of red caliper paint. I had thought I had bought a can of red paint but clearly not so some left over high temp paint was going to have to do. 

A dry coat followed by a wet coat was applied to the inside area of the badge bezzle. Being a tricky are to spray paint; I had to take care not to allow any runs by using short burs at various angles from the front and back.

Once I was happy I masked the area off so I could continue painting the rest of the grill.

Now I had a can of gloss black in my hand (I had managed to buy a can of that at least) which was used for a dry followed by wet coat of paint.

I took care to paint the tricky bits first then the rest was covered with long straight lines to ensure an even covering of paint.

At first I was worried the cooler temperature would cause me some orange peer issues but once the wet coat was on things were looking nice and glossy.

Meanwhile the badge was sat on the side looking grubby. I cleaned it up and looked it over. It was a bit tatty with the odd dent from stones/ pissed off flies; so I would probably swap it for the one on my original grill. If I'm going to do that I might as well have a play!
I rubbed the badge down with some sand paper, cleaned it again and got some paint on there.
I used matt black this time to give some contrast. If it didn't work I always had a spare.




The following day after everything had some time to dry the masking tape was peeled off and badge reassembled.
Suffice to say I was well pleased with the result. So far so good. The only thing I'd do differently is spend more time on smoothing that badge bezzle. I'm so damned impatient some times!










I took a sheet of the RS4 style mesh I had bought off of eBay and laid it out on the back of the grill.  The mesh I went for was different again from the original forum sourced idea. This one has a square section so more like the RS4 grill it is trying to emulate. It would be a very close fit so glad I measured it before ordering. I marked then cut it out to size to fit the outside of the remaining grill.
I then took on the great fun task of plastic welding the mesh to the grill. I used grill and mesh off cuts to save on rods.
 
 Once the mesh was done I took some coach line tape and chrome tape to make this Golf GTi mk7 stripe on the last remaining grill fin. I had intended to extend this into the headlamp which would probably make this look alright but once the grill was fitted to the van I didn't like it as it was. I may reapply this in the future but suffice to say this picture makes it look nicer than it was.

 

So here we are with the T5 Type R look grill.
This job took a fair few days to complete with my minimal body work skills but I was well pleased with the results.

 The wide mouth

I do not like the lower grill on the T5. It is the thing that distinguishes it as a bog standard van along with the "ribbed for her pleasure" bit by the fog lights which will get sorted another time.

An open mouth lower grill conversion is a simple way to give a more Caravelle like look and doesn't cost a great deal.

Following on from the previously mentioned forum however; and a slightly more interesting and crafty way of sorting the grill out was on offer. He had spent little time talking about this part of the mod so I thought it should be fairly quick and easy as well.

The lower grill pops out of the bumper with a bit of prising and pulling.

I took a dremel to the centre grill section of the lower grill to get it out of the way, next some masking tape was laid down to keep things straight and again the outer grills and pillars were cut out with the dremel aided with a hacksaw.

 

Using some roughly shaped off cuts from the removal I now filled in the gaps using a mixture of plastic weld tacks, 2 pack adhesive and body filler to secure the new blanking plates.
Masking tape was used to hold them in place as the adhesives set.

Once all was dry; off came the tape so the outside edges could then smoothed back and more body filler was used to make the radius's more smooth.






I had to drive the van back to Halfords as the paint I had bough was the wrong colour (never assume the paint in the canban is the one it should be!). So the lower grill had to be popped back into place temporally. 
To fit the grill some parts of the bumper need to be cut out where the original grill is separated into three.
Once in it looked great but three of the four filler places cracked during the fit.
On later inspection the 2 part adhesive was just not up to the job either breaking away from the plastic filler plates of cracking along its line.
As a result this all had to come off and be completely plastic welded instead. I built this up thick to add strength to these areas.

Once things were repaired I cleaned everything up and painted the full grill. Bair areas were platic primed the rest was just rubbed back. I used two coats (one dry one wet) of Reflex silver paint followed by another two of gloss.


Once the paint was dry the following day (yup taking a fair bit longer than hoped) I cut out the grill shape from the left over mesh. I had another sheet but didn't need it in the end.
Initially I had cut it out to fit the back of the lower grill the same as the upper grill but I realised it would fowl the mounting clips so cut it down further. 
Once the fit was good with no distortion to the grill mouth I plastic welded the mesh into place.
I started in the corners and gradually worked in a pattern so as to not cause any twisting or poor fit.
This part of the job is slow going but no messy self tapping screws or brackets were needed so worth it.

 When fitting I had to remove more bumper due to the bigger plastic welds on the grill mouth but otherwise everything clipped into place nicely.
The completed grills look superb (to me) and well worth the time and effort put in. 
It's worth mentioning here that the colour match for the Halfords reflex silver spray paint is very good. It might show up in the sun light but I can't see a colour difference at all.