Thought this might be of interest to some as I needed to remove all 4 wheels today to properly seal them on their inner faces..
I was asked over on another forum where the best place was to jack up the car and support on axle stands, and to be honest had no real idea. Well when picking up the car on Saturday, I enquired and was lead into the work shops and met their master technician. He very kindly put a MK7 up on their ramp and showed me.
Obviously the jacking points are pretty self explanatory, i.e. the strengthened plates in the inner sills with the thick plate - one at end end of the sill (both sides).
The axle stand points are slightly different from the MK5/6/Scirocco platform due to the re-designed front sub-member and lower arms, but this is where the tech strongly advised me to position the axle stands, and where I did today and can confirm it worked perfectly with no damage what so ever. Details as pretty self evident from the photos below:
Front
DSC_0960 by
Sootchucker, on Flickr
Rear
DSC_0963 by
Sootchucker, on Flickr
In the above photo of the rear you can see the cross member that I was advised to use. I placed a block of wood on this between the axle stand head and the car underside, to prevent damaging the underseal (sorry, I forgot to take a photo of this bit) -again, as advised by the tech.
Also, whilst I had the wheels off for polishing and sealing, I noticed that after just a couple of weeks life (my car was actually built end of August), that the calipers had the all too familiar signs of aluminum dulling and corrosion. The blurb on the GTD in the brochure said the calipers were painted, but as I suspected, this was just for the GTI, not the GTD, whose calipers are left in the standard aluminum finish.
Luckily I had some VW Red Caliper paint, that I purchased some time ago for the Scirocco and never got round to doing, so with the wheels off, I painted the calipers Red (2 coats over 5 hours).
Now let me make this clear, I am in no way trying to make the GTD look like a GTI. I did consider gloss black, but to be honest with the very open spokes of the 18" Negaro wheels, the calipers are very much on show, so thought Red against the white would work at treat. I totally understand if this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it really annoyed me on the Rocco, that whilst the wheels were in mint condition after nearly 3 years, the calipers looked very grotty, and it was quite clear that brake dust had eaten it's way into the surface finish, making them almost impossible to clean like new, so wanted to prevent this on the new car.
Procedure was:
Cleaned the calipers with brake cleaner spray, wiped them then dried with my hot air dryer / blower. Then masked up as much as I could, and on the rears removed the anti rattle clips (the long ones running top to bottom).
Then it was just a case of various size paint brushes. I just made sure that the sliding faces where the pads sit wasn't painted (as they are not on the GTI), to allow the pads to freely slide. Other than that just did one caliper, then onto the next, and by the time I'd finished the last one, the first one was dry and ready for a second coat.
You need to have some patience as it's quite tedious but hugely rewarding when finished against a clean car. Not sure Red would suit all colours, but on a white car I think they look awesome.
The only real problem I had was the bloody British weather. I ended up setting up our 3m x 3m Gazebo to put the car under to prevent me getting soaked.
Anyway, enough rambling - photos.
DSC_0964 by
Sootchucker, on Flickr
DSC_0965 by
Sootchucker, on Flickr
