Sunday we had to shoot a 10K race in DC at 6 in the morning (SIX AYE EM!!! ugh) so when we got out of there at 10ish, we raced home and took a nap for a few hours to try and warm up which never happened so we decided to go for a drive out to Jason's house to see what was going on.

Jason was doing a number of things to some buddies cars so kate and I decided to finally install the battery relocate kit I got a few months back to lighten up the front end now that we removed the rear seats to distribute weight a bit more.

For this job, you will need to purchase two stereo distribution blocks as the MK3 battery terminals have multiple wires running to them as well as the main ground and power leads that ground to the chassis and connect to the starter/alternator respectively.

Start with removing the washer bottle and battery (don't lay the battery on the ground as it will drain the battery because it is grounded duh (thanks clint!))




Then, remove the battery tray by unbolting a few bolts as well as loosening the power steering bottle with a hex key. We are removing the washer bottle entirely with this project so be sure to keep the plug and sensor wire connected as not to get a CEL.





Use the distribution blocks to wire up what was connected to the battery. Ground the ground block to a factory ground under the tray and wire up the power wires the same way running the power lead through the firewall and up the side of the car under the door sills.


Last pic showing the semi final solution as we will be running an Optima Red Top in the rear of the car with hidden wires (obviously).

Viola.


After we were done with that and the car started without blowing up, we went in to check on Jason who was pulling some arches on a friends nasty Evo.





That was done so when everyone was taking a breather, we saw this:


And then saw these:


And then did this:


And this is with four more glorious inches to go down. Wheeeeeee!


The bad part of the install was that I wasn't aware that if you run coils on a MK3, you need spacers for the rear... Yeah, um, we didn't have spacers with us so we did what anyone would do, we fabbed up a jerry rig that nearly killed us (we drove slow mom, don't worry...)

We rounded up all of the spare spacers in the garage and slapped on a 5 and 2mm on each side and borrowed a friends MK4 wheels that had a better offset and finally we could rotate the wheel without rubbing and took a really sloooooow ride home. Tonight I'll add the 12mm spacers with approved longer bolts to make everything road worthy.

Special thanks to Jason who rocked out the suspension job at 6pm after busting his ass all day on everything else. I love my crew =)

This entry was posted by JKREW, on Monday, May 7, 2007. You can leave your response.