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So the #2 motor is STD bore STD rings and bearings . The 1st motor is over sized pistons and .25 on the bearings. The bore in the 2nd motor seems perfectly fine and will be good with a hone. But this means I aming to have go use the dirty shitty black fucking pistons and rods so i stripped them all down, checked them all and gave them a clean and the main caps I'm going to use the crank from the 1st motor as it looks like its had a recent grind and is good condition. The block from the 2nd also seems in good condition and cleaned up well....no cracks found just yet !! A quick paint with some black and ill sort the surfaces out at a later date.. So just need some STD rings and .25 main and rod caps and ill be able to rebuild the block. As for heads the head from the 1st motor is in great condition and even the stem seals look new ..so ill not strip it ...I'll just bolt it on as is. Cheers

The rusty shit is definitely concentrated around the coolant filler cap, someone's taken it off when the engine was hot for sure, but that could've been anytime really, it was a bitch to clean it off off Finally bought it home and after seeing it the wife has come around, big time. In her words "I just assumed you'd bought another absolute piece of shit"

Earlier this week, I adjusted the rear brakes up, and adjusted the handbrake. I'm still not 100% happy with the pedal feel. But I'll give the cunt another bleed once the engine runs/there's vacuum on the booster. Moved on the the kick panels. They were more or less intact. The passengers side had a wee bit broken off. I reinforced it with 3m aluminium foil tape, (I have done some unbelievably whorey shit with that stuff in the past) and glued the join with arelditie. The driver's side in particular was pretty worn from year of the driver getting in and out. I cut some whole where the speaker pockets are forward of the A pillar. Then bought some self adhesive vinyl off ali. Unfortunately the "don't care, no responsibility" approach of China post saw is creased. And the lines are still visible. I scuffed up what remained of the original paint. And decreased it with prepsol. Traced a larger outline and cut it out. And it turned out okay. Is it perfect? Hell no. Do I care? Also hell no. I think this stuff is meant for doing furniture repairs. It's quite stretchy. And while I dunno how UV stable it is, I think you could easily use it on a motorbike seat. Pics.

Finished joining the dots. It sounds perfect, not too loud, doesn't get raspy with a rev. I'll post a video some time. I'll put a tail pipe on once it's all together and I figure where it's going to run. It had a slightly noisy lifter sound this time which seemed to dissipate with time and I noticed some fan belt squeal too. Perhaps I couldn't hear those things prior when it was uncorked. Will investigate. Stoked to get to this point. It's no show pony but good enough. Final engineering tasks on/around chassis are to mount spare wheel hanger a bit further back, as the muffler occupies the position where that was. Build the handbrake caliper mounting. Finish gear shifter things. I got an auto column shifter from an early Previa at pickapart which have a similar 4 speed auto. It also has an overdrive button. I need to check out lever linkage ratios but have a pretty good idea how that's all going to go, half of it's already built. Probably only other things are to build an additional fresh water tank which will occupy void above the trans or down low in front of radiator above front axle to push a bit of weight forward to counter the engine setback and spare wheel shift. Also think about mounting a trans cooler - I'm not sure if I should do this now or just wait till it's on the road and measure trans oil temp to get a feel for size of cooler needed?

Yes, but the CCM says that Rotarys are only allowed to use missile switches for everything and the switch panel has to be covered in camo material.

I got the fuel tank back from being cleaned out. Three days sitting filled with some caustic solution. And a day and a half after that filled with citric acid. (Apparently the citric acid neutralizes the caustic) It's a fuckton cleaner inside than it was. Unfortunately looking inside I've spotted two small holes. The galv coating on the outside has been fretted off by the tank strap. This combined with probably some road dust accumulation has resulted in a bit of corrosion. It's likely fume free now, so won't be too hard to fizz up. I'm also going to change the fuel pick up. But I'll do a more in-depth post about that another time. Here's a shitty photo. (Just in case you have a burning desire to know what a valiant fuel tank looks like)

There are no photos to accompany this post, so you'll have to use your imagination. I'm sitting knee deep in dirty water with the boat pitching all over the place. I tried bailing the water into the sink but the sink wouldn't drain. So I'd bail it into the toilet, then flush the toilet when the bowl got full. Then spew into the toilet, then it would all slosh out when we got a wave, them bail it all back into the toilet, flush and repeat. Water was coming out of the shower drain pump and seemed to be siphoning in from the sea. I guess the level of the hose was below the water line with the boat leaned over. So I shut off the drain valve through the hull. Eventually got rid of all the water and went back up on deck for another spew. Dad was soaked through having had a load of spray come over the boat. The wind was up to 28 knots, we were on the edge of control and needed a sail change and another reef in the main. Slipper island was only half hour away so we decided to drop sails and motor there to check on our leak and recover a bit. While motoring towards slipper island, dad went down below to change and found the carpets soaked, his bedding damp and with shit weather forecast for the next few days - nothing was going to dry out. The Whitianga race was a DNF, the Mercs were still at least 5 hours away and we would be motoring head first into the wind and chop making 5knots at best. So we turned around, pointed the boat back at Mt Maunganui and put the mainsail up. With 25knots of wind behind us, we spent most of the ride home blasting along at 8-10 knots with bursts up to 14knots surfing down the swell. Made it back home in 4 hours and had a great time doing it.

both of you get out of my thread

Had another lift out and drained a gallon of milkshake out of the sail drive. Filled it with new oil since the seals I need are on backorder and the oil is cheap. I temporarily added a header tank to the gear case (using a Mondeo clutch reservoir from pickapart) so the oil level will be above the waterline hopefully slowing/stopping the ingress of seawater. It's working so far and should get me through till the new bits arrive. The new jib also arrived and looks good. Haven't tried it in anger yet but it flew nicely on a trial sail up the harbour in light winds. The autopilot is also working great! All set for the mega exciting Legends regatta on labour weekend.

😀 That made me chuckle. It could be as fast as the original, go 4 times as far on a tank of fuel and upset so many people. Obviously it would sound and smell completely wrong….,

Would have been easier to start with a BMW, no need for indicators at all then.

Why not start an RC version too, aliexpress is dangerous hahahaha

In poorly-made things out of scrap, knocked up a nectar feeder for the local birbs. Seems to work...

I can't quite remember the exact moment that I suddenly became aware that I needed an FD RX7, but it became a full blown itch over the next few weeks, checking trademe and FB marketplace pretty much daily - but also noting that the price of these cars was starting to tick down, and a lot of stuff wasn't selling. So the third time the price dropped on this one particular machine that was already in the cheaper category happened to coincide with half a dozen beers in my gut and before I knew it, I was the proud owner of a 1997 FD3S so it arrived on the back of a truck, which I am told is how these vehicles generally prefer to travel from A to B It was a quiet day so I anticipated this wonderful opportunity to dig around the thing and see where and how I'd been hoodwinked, but instead the towie turned up at exactly closing time so all I could do was roll it into the shop and bugger off for the weekend.

She’s all tacked in place and front screen just needs the top bar narrowed to suit what was cut out of the centre of the roof.

Lessons learned: Sail changes are a lot harder in choppy seas. Do them early. I knew beating into the wind is hard work but underestimated how miserable it gets on a long trip. Fix that shower drain pump and sink drain and make sure the same thing can't happen to the toilet outlet. If lots of smart people leave the day before, they might be on to something.

Better pic yeaterday in sun. But reposititioned after watching birds landing preferences...

Last thing today I took it for a drive around the airport which was interrupted by a BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ which was pretty fucking obviously trying to tell me something was up. the "add coolant" buzzer and light was on and the temp was definitely higher than it should be. I had drained and flushed the coolant a week or so ago and thought I was pretty diligent in bleeding the air out, so I topped it up (and it wanted quite a bit), gave it another run, and... coolant all over the floor, under the overflow bottle. I had admittedly seen a little bit of coolant on the floor after driving it in but to be honest I filed it under "I don't want to see that". So again, another "ohhh that's why it was cheap" moment. bad water seals? is the engine pressurizing the coolant and blowing the water out of the separation chamber? nope, just a bad pressure cap on the chamber. topping up the filler, it was running straight out of here and into the expansion tank. with a bit of heat in it it would've been fair pumping out. a $37 fix, and everything's back to normal Suppose I should talk about how it actually drives? so yes it starts hot and cold (and very hot!) so I think the engine is, actually, pretty good. It's got 78k on the clock which is probably still young enough, certainly for what I paid. If it craps out at 100k that'd probably take me decades to run that figure up. with standard porting and turbos it probably doesn't set the rx7 world on fire, power wise - frankly that suits me. my other cars are a pajero and a triumph, and this is the fastest thing I've driven in quite some time. And it's harsh as well, it's loud and smells like two stroke and the suspension is hard as hell. a million years ago I had two series 1 rx7's, one was bog stock and the other one was more extreme than this. 9 times out of 10 if I was going somewhere I'd jump in the standard one. So I'm super glad that this has a comfortable interior, I guess I just wish it were a little more tame. maybe I'm getting old? Only real plans to come are to hunt down the last bits of interior and get it wof'd ........."shouldnt take much" says the previous owner.........

Because you can get brand new parts for "drift chassis" nissans really easy, I opted to use silvia gearshift grommets etc. However the removable panel on the floor didn't have a big enough footprint to bolt the hold down plate to. I sourced some 3mm plate off a mate, and made a rough (emphasis on ROUGH here) facsimile of the hold down plate to weld to the cover plate. It's good from afar. But up close far from good. The knee-sans use bolts into captive nuts to hold the plate down. I would have used rivnuts, but again the floor cover didn't suit that. So I grabbed some m6 threaded rod, and fizzed the zinc off with some pretty nasty acid. Then being 3mm, I tapped the holes M6, and would them most of the way in. The hardest part was making the big holes. My only holesaws are ones that @peteretep left at my house. They're fine for wet cardboard. But they really baulk at steel. Buy the time I'd bashed my way through the 1mm floor cover plate, the saw was almost done. (It may have also been the one Peter and I munched a hole in the floor of his transit camper with) after bashing away untill the saw just made smoke and noise. Then I finished the hole by drilling eleventy billion holes around the outside and making the hole round with a carbide burr. A mate then tig'd the two pieces together, and welded the back of the studs I gave it a splash of black zinc, and slapped her together. Mr datsun used self tappers to hold the floor plate on. I elected to use rivnuts with caps crews. Pics for Fred.

CCM has recently been updated to allow polished checker plate

Many classic cars have this set up. Knows and switches on the dash. I have the indicators, headlight on/off, and wiper switch on the dash area to the left of the wheel in my l200 The only requirements are That they are accessible and not a interior hazard

Had the next round of the short handed series on the day I picked up the new sail. I was really looking forward to flying it as I was expecting 15-20knot winds but the sailmaker (who was also in the race) suggested I might want to use something smaller as it was going to get exciting. Taking his advice, we double reefed the main and put up our #4 jib, the smallest in the collection. The wind built through the race until it was howling over 30 knots and the harbour was getting rowdy. The boat was ok with those conditions, but with maximum heel on - I managed to fall down the cockpit and mildly injure myself. So we withdrew from the race with a DNF.

Thank you, I obviously wasn't searching for the right thing. I've done a couple of sealed wheel bearings as an assembly and they have been stiff but not rough like this, so presumed it was bad. Will leave it for now and put some ks on it and check again.

https://brakeperformance.com/rough-feeling-hubs.php?srsltid=AfmBOorpByE41niF0yOxuzYkahRlSIGU9xF3sxIYrcUg6RJ2UbXKYXv8 Tldr. They come with "gritty" feeling grease, Let it bed in for a few thousand revolutions

Well my exhaust making lesson comes to an end, but not the way I'd hoped. So after last time's episode about the pipe hitting the floor I decided to get some more bends and put it out the way in the path that the other exhaust took, just without the giant mufflers. So far so good. I also used Australia's entire supply of copper goop which generally worked ok except for the parts where it linked from the old and the new, seemed to leak most there. Turns out the solution was just add more goop. Then I ran the car a bit more on the stands after putting together a slightly better muffler hanging system. All was well so far; even got it to idle a bit better. Once I dropped the car down and.. well not so good. The portion that goes over the diff no longer goes over the diff but now into the diff, and as a result snapped the bolt holding my muffler on so it went on the piss. Additionally the car does not go low on the passenger side because it's stuck on the exhaust. I did also notice when looking at other people's exhausts that mine was routed weirdly over the diff so it's just a disaster all around. I did have an inkling that would happen but I wanted to use that route for two reasons. 1) Had that muffler so tried to reuse it and 2) research suggested people were not keen on the under diff due to the potential difficulty when jacking the car up. It just occurred to me I'm putting the exhaust together with the car already jacked up which means it's already at max droop so point 2 basically moot. There was some legality issue about it as well but clearly that's not really something I'm worried about. So after all this fucking about did I get anything out of it? Maybe 10mm more ground clearance and a lot of noise. I think what I'll do is just pull off that muffler and basically end it at the diff for the time being, just so I can move it around for some sweet instagram photos and then park it forever. I was going to try get this ready for a classic meet in early December but I'm actually going to be in Japan so no need to rush on it. Oh, one good thing though I found a brand new oil cap, so that's nice. Now that crusty water pipe and the K-Tuned filter does my nut in.

Dirty shitty fucking black mess .. thats how I would describe this motor. But original And well worn... the chain tensioner was almost all the way out and the chain just slipped off Motor is full of rust but no way ner as bad as the last bloody and the frost plugs hadn't rusted through....thats a good thing But shitty fucking black mess every where.. Will give it a good clean tomorrow maybe and check for cracks.

What possibly could go wrong did go wrong. The MC needs new seals. I thought it might and should have had it done earlier. Anyway I found a reasonable replacement rear rubber spring seat as one of the ones I had was a bit nackerd. I fitted that and now the car sits level. So I lowered it down and dragged it out for a wash and to see how it sits. The ground outside is not level but it’s the best I can do for now.

I probably need to have an engine hold its guts in for more than 3 minutes at a time first. haha. Hopefully I'm past the worst of it and can start getting to the good part... (drawing graphs and posting them on the internet) He's got very different objectives to me, so I dont think a collaboration video would make much sense. As he's running a business and looking for the cost/benefit point of making parts and so on. So ultimately his videos are promotional material for his business which is cool. I think it's awesome he's able to do that as a full time gig. I dont really add any value to that equation. One thing that I'm keen to test though, that he's pointed out as a flaw with factory cams. Is that he says there is a bank to bank imbalance because of the way the rockers work. I am thinking that this imbalance likely completely goes away once you have one bank's home position advanced slightly ahead of the other. Rather than assuming that the zero degree "hard stop" is each cams zero point in relation to each other. However that's just my theory and he's done a lot more testing than I have, so I could be totally wrong on that one.

So in all of my froth I neglected to take account of my handbrake shenanigans. The exhaust route was a but tight (see comparitive pic 1 below) and whilst would have been fine if no handbrake stuff was going on the diff, I realized I was blindly ploughing on without considering that. Luckily I hadn't finished the exhaust, so I spent a night chopping it up and rerouting with more space around the diff head, it's much better. Just gotta connect the headers now, hopefully tonight's mish. I'm excited to hear it.

You haven't mentioned what it's like to sleep in? Or is the wife ok

Then I hit the first major red flag - I'd been expecting an "ohh, THAT'S why it was cheap!" moment, and perhaps here it was: Excuse me what the fuck is going on down here? I do not appreciate busted wires and shit. At first I thought a rat might've gotten into the engine bay and chewed through the loom, but I found the rest of the wiring wrapped around the crank pulley shit, I hope it isn't anything importa-aaaand it's the oil metering pump so just to tell you guys how to suck eggs, that's the pump that feeds a wee bit of oil into the chambers to lubricate the seals. Now I did a bit of reading and discovered that the pump on the FD is a stepper motor controlled one, so presumably that means when the wiring got torn out of it, it just failed at whatever flow rate it was allowing at the time, as opposed to stopping working altogether. Hopefully that position was full tit max flow. SO, how long had the pump been fucked? Normally this would throw a fault code, but this thing has an aftermarket ECU so no dice I very politely contacted the previous owner and he said that he'd never seen the busted wires, and frankly knew nothing about it. One interesting tidbit was that he said he had had some boosting problems with the (notoriously finicky) sequential controls on the turbo, had replaced a solenoid, but the problem had come back shortly afterwards, and that that was when he decided to sell the car. Why is this topical? Because when the metering pump loom was torn to bits, it pulled a hose off the vacuum chamber for one of the solenoids! So there's every chance that this occurred pretty much the last time this car was driven. Needless to say it's on premix now.

My grandads wheelbarrow. Was a man that did everything by hand on a hilly property with the wheelbarrow. Had mixed up many cubes of concrete until he got too soft at 87 then he brought a concrete mixer. Was a little worse for wear and tyre was toast so disassembled for a blast and paint down the line, factory colour tub and frame in chassis black. Spent $10 more then a garbage tyre from M10 on a 3.00x8 Shinko scooter tyre, was a bitch to get on but now have a tyre even when flat that has a stiff enough carcass to be pushed around. Good for 100kg at over 80kph so good enough for home. Button head stainless cap screws because im shallow and like stuff like that Is going down to my sister in Gisborne so good to see it get another life.

Huge thanks to Harry and karl for enabling me with a LD28 to go with my other one... ( this is how the pinto issue started. ) So fingers crossed #2 ld28 will do the job..... dog thinks so.

So, having just replaced the RH rear wheel bearing on the Marina, because there was a definite rumbling noise/feel from it, the noise/feel is still there. The old bearing was bad, it was hard to turn/crunchy once removed, and the grease in it was gross. There were a couple of small marks on the bearing race, but not as bad as I expected. The new bearing spun smoothly in the hand, although with a fair bit of resistance (which i presume is the grease in the sealed bearing). The LH side wheel spins smoothly and silently. Any thoughts? I was thinking maybe it's a diff bearing, but having spun the wheel with my head near the diff center i can't hear it from there, it's only really noticeable from the wheel end. Could it be a bad, brand new bearing? Pressing it on went fine, I used the old steel retaining collar to only put force on the center of the bearing, not the outer. Once the bearing was "home" I didn't exert more force on it.

I brazed a hole up from a rod once, it has broken a bit off the bottom where the cylinder hung down into the crank cake but its still running

Thats very cool, even with the NFS Underground bodykit on it. Love a good FD, one of the most beautiful cars ever designed IMO. Hopefully the dorito spinner keeps working well. Do you know the origin of all the rusty shit everywhere, hopefully just the coolant tank?

I'm sort of trying to avoid messing with it too much, especially if it was going to need re-tuning etc. If the turbos give up I really can't say if I'd go hunting for another set of twins or go with an upgrade. Someone does appear to have replaced a lot of the hoses in the rat's nest, PO said he'd gotten in there to replace a solenoid so perhaps it was him It's got an Apexi power FC (with a hand controller - for when I want to press some buttons and make it explode?) Honestly they are just such a gorgeous car I just had to have one. Like everyone, I wish I'd bought it ten years ago for half the price, but that's life. And it is so refreshing to deal with a 90's car for a change (sorry fellow oldschoolers) not everything is broken, there's no rust, there's aftermarket support, the manuals are in english... coming from the starion to the FD is absolute night and day

now the bodykit, I can kinda live without. Initially I went looking for a very stock machine but fate would have it (and not for the first time) I ended up with something very much the opposite. It does look like it'll unpick easily enough if the day comes, although that would mean buying stock guards and a stock bumper and most parts aren't cheap. So I'll stick with the kit for now, the downside of this is that I'm limited to exactly bugger all wheels that will fit. As mentioned it came on Enkei 3 piece wheels which sounds nice, but they don't fill the guards, and sit way too far in (even with the 20mm spacers there's extreme wheel rub if you even think about steering. I thought about changing the lips, I thought about changing the barrels, I thought about how that would mean spending 5k just to end up with some beaten to shit centres just to keep the wheel snobs happy. So I cheaped out and got some 9" -20 Rota RKR's because they're pretty much the only thing that would actually fit, straight off the shelf. Realized what I needed on Friday, found some for sale on Saturday in Cambridge, @RXFORD was coming through on Sunday, they were in Auckland Sunday night, and one of my customers was driving a truck straight past on the way to Whangarei the next day, the system works! (compared to the time I tried to bring a starion engine up from CHCH, which wore out it's welcome with about three different OS members, and THREE YEARS LATER, having never actually arrived here, was sold sight unseen) Despite being only an inch smaller they seem absolutely tiny, it's taken some getting used to. But I can turn corners now. Oh but the previous owner had wandered off with the lock nut key. He sent it up to me but it was too late, I'd already created this piece of art what is it? it's a small piece of pipe with five castellations cut into it, hammered into a slightly larger piece of pipe, and welded up with great enthusiasm and little ability. but it did the job! oh and with a socket welded crookedly on the end because I still had half a rod left and by god I was going to use it

So the car is from the other end of the country, I did zero due diligence other than a quick carjam to make sure it actually existed, asked a few questions, got a few replies, pulled the trigger so first impressions; the exterior has definitely seen better days, the kit is cracked in multiple places, the paint is faded / blistered especially around the engine bay, the spoiler is gone (by request of the previous owner who wanted to keep it, no argument from me) leaving mount stubs all over the boot, the wheels are just there to get it rolling, the offset is totally wrong, they rub everywhere and have been kerbed with incredible thoroughness Comparatively, the interior (which wasn't mentioned at all in the ad and I only got a few grainy photos of) is much nicer than I expected. It has a half cage which I originally planned to ditch on day one but honestly the back seats are completely worthless. The seats are factory, it's got a few extra bits and pieces inside and some carpet missing which I'll hunt around the internet for The engine bay is a bit sad. First up: wedding night surprise, she's not a natural yellow. bit of a bummer but oh well. Still on the factory turbos which is a nice indicator that perhaps it hasn't had too much of an ass-kicking in it's life. Rusty water everywhere which set a few alarm bells ringing. airbox is gone and all that's left is ugly stock induction pipes flapping in the breeze and some chafed through pod filters So I cleaned everything off and spent a few dollars on things shiny and frivolous The stock air pump was sitting there but was unplugged, not sure if the ECU had been tuned for it or not, the previous owner had done some work recently (more on that in a minute), maybe he had left it unplugged by mistake? I got rid of it anyway as I really just wanted to get in and tidy everything up. Pic 75% complete as I had to block up the air pump inlets on the induction and fit a new alternator/water pump pulley and belt with the air pump gone. Tightest alternator pulley nut ever, holy shit

Made a little progress with the Ape.

Just been tinkering away with the exhaust for the Celica, collecting bits and pieces and making up some kind of a plan. Today I finally committed and cut the front portion of the exhaust that was on there so I could reuse the flanged bit to join on my new exhaust. In my plan to straight pipe the centre portion I didn't take into consideration the floor being in the way. Might still work but I've ordered some 45s to bypass it down near the driveshaft which is where it was going with the mufflers, this would also probably allow me to run it even more tucked up. I have to work out a better way to hang the muffler because it's a bit shit at the moment, needs some kind of interesting metal bending to be done, think I have enough bits to make something work by now but I'd like to get at least the rest completed without leaks. It leaks basically at every seal hahah. That said, I haven't actually got enough clamps for all the joins so I've ordered more again, and some different style ones as well as some copper rtv grease. Then after that I have to work out why it runs so shit and sounds really lumpy at idle. Goes good on song still but not happy with the idle and low throttle. I did try the old spray brake cleaner while it's running to listen for engine change but it didn't seem to change. I can see there's heaps of fuel seeping out from various seals on the carbs which means air is no doubt getting in as well so they'll be my next task after I finish barrying up this exhaust.

Cough, chem-i-weld, cough

I seem to recall a joke about "Norman the Ambulance " from my childhood. I wonder if this is where the name came from?

With some advice from a mate and against my better judgment as I've never played with an ld28 ...I stripped the head off to check surfaces and look for cracks Even the head gasket looked in great shape . So I ordered a full gasket set , frost plugs ,oil filter , thermostat and watetpump.. Wet stoned the face of the block and head ...and then out it all back together...even managed to get all the timing marks in place and bottoned down... turns over with no interference.....huge win for ...qas shitting myself ...bit of black paint ..and she's going back together And Thats this thing upto date.. cheers

My experiment has been successful! As expected (after I got in touch with the company that made the coilover sleeves) the front spring rate was 9kg, and rear 4kg so I've swapped out the front and rear springs. You can see there is a height difference as well as thinner spring. Additionally I removed the bottom collar from the adjuster as it wasn't doing anything anyway. I'm getting quite fast at removing the suspension. Worked a charm. There is some spring in the spring now and it's at an acceptable height. This is wound all the way down as well, I think I need to wind up the driver side maybe 3-4mm to even it out but it's hard to know because the guards are probably both bent so difficult to compare. Thing is now is the exhaust is an actual problem. That stupid middle muffler is only around an inch from the ground now so I'll have to actually do something about it. At least I can wind the front up to drive it to an exhaust shop now.

The next sacrifice for my wheel tomfoolery is this 13" starshark. I don't know why I have a 13" starshark. I suspect some whisky was involved in that one as I'm 14" for life. Anyway as you can see it's pretty old and crusty as per everything in my life so I figured why not try a new Rustoleum colour and learn about some new tape as well. Previously on this adventure I mentioned about bleed from the cheap ebay tape I was using so I ordered some fancy 3M edging tape. This tape seems more plastic than the other paper-based tape which is probably excellent for stopping bleed but makes it much more difficult to cut cleanly, at least that's what I found. I did a quick scuff over for the old yellow and also ruined the lip in the process by trying to get out as much of the old pitted crust as possible so now it looks matte and uneven. As you can see I taped around the edge and there's a little gap between the face and the lip which I could (for the most part) slip the blade into in order to get a clean cut. Then after that some more masking and the usual plastic around the outside treatment and into the paint booth. Couple coats of this blue (which actually looks a bit more tiffany blue in real life) and then some gloss clear coat which I've also never tried using before. Once the paint was dried and tape pulled off you can see some bleed still but this is actually not from the tape. The reason this happened is the lip is so pitted the paint actually went underneath the tape as there was a gap. Also to the surprise of nobody, paint doesn't stick well when the prep is poor. Anyway perhaps the finished product is better than the start product? Learnt some more things along the way. I think in my head the best way to approach this type of wheel would go like this: 1) dip or soda blast it first to get the old shit off 2) Cut the lip off 3) Paint what you want 4) Diamond cut the one star as sanding for an hour for an average finish was not fun 5) Weld new lip on That way you'd get a clean paint job. I may still do that just for kicks.

Front bumper beam is completed, took a little more than expected as it has some slight curve in it but that's all done now. The next thing that was completed is the bumper irons mounting points as one side was bent up so that was repaired. Aside from the final preparation of welding roof and rear all together there was some little repairs done around the gas filler and rear windscreen filler panel which need cleaning up. Also a weird drain hose that maybe was put in after the fact? Looks like some kind of previous repair that was botched in.

cheers for that i will go talk to terry when hes in office next a few people i have talked to have said just buy one already done but whats the fun in that i want to be a big part in this project.