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So, long time no update. I have been holding off as shit was so nearly there for fucking weeks but kept on dragging on... Early September it got shipped off to Wellington; Then early October it arrived back home with a very excited son of a truckie.. Then I got the list from the cert man and was pleased/kind of surprised how short it was; - Needs rear headrests - Extra size on the driveshaft hoop mounts - Front seatbelts needed to web clamp type not inertia - Change a vac hose for proper auto stuff - Wheel alignment That was it and apart from sourcing the seatbelts it was all done in that weekend with the help of some butty ramps I had made for this sort of thing; So if anyone needs a brand new set of vertical fit reels, hit me up. Then I waited for the cert man to approve all that and get the plate done - this was another couple of weeks... Then the compliance man was on holiday and couldn't do anything for another couple of weeks... Then I realised much to my disappointment that the head was probably cracked as it was using water and pressurising the system That will teach me to not get things checked by professionals and just trusting to the prime cause. So while I was waiting for the compliance man I dragged out the spare head out of the container and sent it to Mean Machine for crack testing. This came up sweet but the valves were dodgy and the surface was a bit banana. So I got it surfaced and the valves and seats recut, plus I got a spare set of injectors rebuilt as i didn't want to fuck up the newly sorted head. Getting it in and out was not too much of a drama with a bit of channel clamped to the forklift forks. I didn't really take any pics of all this as I was on a bit of a mission, just this one of the freshened head put back in place; New gaskets, head bolts, slightly thicker oil plus filters plus coolant and much money out of my account and the jobs a goodun. Then fast forward to today and we have this very very exciting situation early this morning... Resulting in this even more exciting situation this afternoon; Ah shit yes. Anyway there is still a bit to do, I am not happy with the radiator situation as it is pretty much relying on the fan even at road speed. I can fit a standard Safari rad in the same hole but with much bigger collection area, plus I have some cunning plans to duct more air toward it so at least on the open road it isnt cycling the fan. Still I'm pretty happy, it has been a long but satisfying road. Beer will be drunk tonight I imagine....

I had a close call the other day! A rather high truck popped its tow ball bang into the center of my tail light, no panel damage thankfully. They agreed to sort it out and paid for a set of brand new rear lenses to be shipped over. In the mean time I had 1 old L/R lens on the shelf so I could keep on driving. We've managed to put 8,000km on the old girl in the 6 months she's been back on the road! Up and down the South Island with no problems so far. I've probably been a bit hard on it in my excitement because the clutch is feeling like it may need replacing soon, might pay to bed the next one in properly first... I still want to lower it some time, but the current height is pretty handy with how many gravel roads I find myself on. Perhaps air bags are in it's future? We'll see, for now it's too much fun to drive to put it back in the garage.

That's sad news about drag day! Here's hoping your boss buys a new work car in the next couple of weeks? It's a shame, cause I won't be able to install your new windscreen banner now:

So obviously the motor was pretty much junk - the eccentric shaft was about the only usable part. This wasn't too much of a problem, as the car was comparatively cheap, and I'd bought it expecting to rebuild the motor anyway. We priced up all the parts, and it was going to be about 6k to do it correctly. I mulled on it for a while, and decided for not much more money, a crate motor would be a far better option. All new plates, all new housings, as well as all the little fiddly bits and pieces that come with the crate motor just made it a much much better option for longevity. After all, I just wanted a nice fun weekend toy that I could cruise around in! Also while the motor was out, I decided to fly up to Auckland and give the engine bay a quick respray, as it was in fairly awful condition. Rotaries and their under bonnet temps tend to melt paint off, and obviously this thing had seen some time at race tracks! So for a real quick and dirty spray job, it actually came up really nice. And this is where things started to spiral out of control...

While I was fabricating the roller, I visited a bunch of engineers in the region and found that no one had a lathe big enough to machine it. Bugger. After getting some quotes from further abroad that would have blown my entire budget by themselves (15-20k). I decided that I'd just build my own lathe.. I jumped onto Ebay and ordered the cheapest set of linear rails I could find, including the ball screw and bearing blocks. 3-4 weeks later I got set to mocking up the "lathe" using the compound slide from my Stanko mounted to some adapters. Spinning the roll by hand with the compound slide clamped to the linear rail, I took the first test cut. "Fuuck yeah, this'll work" I said.. It would have taken forever to machine the 3mm x 25mm weld bead off, but I remember once when @kpr mounted his angle grinder in the lathe to cut through some hardening on a set of axles from memory? (that image is burnt into my mind, probably thinking it might be a useful trick one day. cheers dude!) The grinder worked really well and made short work of it. Spinning the ball screw with a battery drill.

Been a bit slow but painting isn't all that interesting.... Have all the major panels in epoxy now... Still making more of these skins, been surprised how popular they are, even sending a set to ozzy this week.

prius motor swap its been a long strange trip on oldschool.co.nz these last 15 years. But here we are

forgot to mention, a supercharged 1UZ pulling hard at 7200RPM sounds pretty ace.

High build primer is like sanding chalk! Coming out ok but taking a lot of sanding!

Brady at BLG Engineering whipped me up a set of new coilovers for the front and camber plates Also made new 4x114.3 front hubs and mounted a set of 4 pot wilwoods. He also supplied a new wilwood master cylinder and prop valve as well as rear rotors & 4 pot wilwoods to get mounted to the diff.

Hi team. Long time no posting, since my kombi wasn't really going to be going for summer i thought i would get this on the road. well i had thought about it and then a mate asked to use it for his daughters school ball so i ended up splashing out and spending some money on it and getting a wof. the wof fail list was - speedo not accurate - rear door latch missing bolt - fuel leak in tank - Brake light switch to secure - high beam light in dash not working - front seat LR to short - brake shoes worn out - brake hoses toast - rear bump stop missing - front bump stop worn out - RH outer tie rod end worn - Pitman arm joint loose - LF wheel bearing toast - idler arm bush worn - carburetor missing bolt his one recommendation was to raise it LOL and here i was wanting to lower the rear a sly 20mm with the deadline of this week i said to go ahead and just do it all him self. 3 days later now and i have this There are a few things i actually want to do but with the kombi been on the hoist and been away for the weekend made it so much easier. after destroying my last set of tyres at the wedding i had been offered the ones that are now on it for a cheap price and they are 245 60 14 just a bit wider than the last 225 60 14 so thats the reason for the rubbing in the rear. will fix that with some smaller tyres and maybe lower it another 20mm in the rear talk about why i should use it more often and that your glad i got it going here

suspension was on point tho. till it broke. think a shock blew out aiding to the rollover. this wasn't the biggest jump..

Bolting clean painted parts on with new bolts is satisfying

Back to the story at hand - with the motor now ported, it left me with quite a dilemma. I bought this car with a specific budget to get it all done and dusted. I procrastinated for a few months while figuring out the next step. I even debated using the stock twins and the existing bolt on stuff, but deep down I knew that the stock turbos would just end up hurting the motor. One of my other good friends is a bit of a encyclopedia for turbo knowledge so I turned to him for advice. I was after something that could flow 400-450hp without giving away too much response. The ideal turbo would have been the Borg Warner EFR8374, but I couldn't afford a $4500 turbo. So the next best option was this guy: A Borg Warner S300SX-E, sorta the poor man's EFR8374. I chose a slighter smaller than usual 1.0 AR twin scroll turbine housing in an attempt to keep the boost threshold at a reasonable point, at the expense of some top end power. Given the most powerful car I've owned before was a 220kw turbo 4age, giving away some horsepower wasn't a real concern! I made another trip up to Auckland to dress the block up and install the motor - the turbo looks fucking huge compared to a bare bones 13B! And pretty snug in an FD engine bay too Because pedantry, I replaced most of the bolts on the motor, and engine bay, with shiny new gold passivated ones. I also splashed out and bought new coolant and washer fluid bottles, as the ones in the engine bay were all fucky. I also made the unusual (apparently) call to retain the stock OMP. Everybody says they fail yada yada yada, but I've not seen any concrete evidence that the electronic ones do. And also modern ECU tech can control them, so why the hell not? Modern ECU tech also means I ditched the Power FC once again, but this time replacing it with a Link G4 plug in It also meant a decent fuel system upgrade in the form of 1050cc primary injectors and 1550cc secondaries fed by one of the other wonders of modern tech, a brushless drop in fuel pump, capable of suppling well over 500hp worth of fuel. Thank god the days of Whinebro pumps are over! With this in the hole, only minor fabrication was needed to get it ready to fire up!

Dynafari! how good!

Today's job was to bolt the trans to the engine, fill the converter, figure out what starter I need, (there are Australian and US spec starters with different size pinion gears, mine needs a us spec one so that's good cause can get a gear reduction one off rockauto) , make a dipstick tube fit (fingers crossed this works with the firewall and exhaust clearance which is fuck all) , bolt the crossmember on and knock up a trolley to put it all on. The plan is to lift the body up and roll everything under the car to fit it, to avoid damaging painted parts

tidying a few things up with the tune. i had no speed signal so the ECU didn't know if we were moving or not. with an E throttle that makes quite the difference. so i put a wheel speed sensor in the back so now it knows we are moving. the other major thing that needed sorting was the rev limit, it was set too low (6500) and it was pretty harsh. so now th rev limit is a more excellent 7500 with a really nice cut that just works. lots of little things were made better in regards to coasting to a stop, the fan coming on, part throttle curse, just more drivability. the other thing that we did was add a bit of timing up top which coupled with the higher rev limit it made 275 killer wasps at the tyres. keen for drag day TBH.

Sorry about the IG photos, didn't take any other than saving them off my story, whoops.

Heads all back on, timing done, exhaust back on, wiring underway. Been tweaking some bits in the bay, re routing wiring to hide it below the manifold etc. Starting to tidy up really nice, waiting for distributor to come back then I'll mount the carbs permanently. Hopefully at the tuner early December.

This morning after dropping out the minuscule fuel tank I temporarily refitted the front suspension and pushed the Thames out into the sunlight. It's the first time it's left the shed in about 6 months. I couldn't resist tacking a few snaps of it in daylight. It's sitting pretty high with all of the weight removed. It's going to stay outside until I've cleaned up the underside. Tomorrow I'll crack into it with some degreaser and my pressure cleaner.

So both Jon and I are rotary guys from way back - we met back in the 90s while both driving FCs, and hung out in Paraparaumu. People from the region will know of the reputation it had for breeding some rowdy, rough, rugged and the occasional pretty quick rotary. Legend has it the very first rotor DX came from there! Naturally because of this, Jon wanted to build a bridgeport motor for this car. I wasn't super into the idea, as to do a bridgeport justice, it'd need way more serious gear than the car came with. Plus they aren't the most user friendly things for low speed, around town, general cruising, and I really just wanted something pretty quick but still usable. The stuff the car came with would easily support 220kw, which is heaps for a road car in reality. So I put the kaibosh on the idea. Stock ports are fine for what I want!. I get a message from Jon a few days later "Hey, it looks like they must test run these crate motors" Ahhh, why do you say that??? 'There's a bit of rust in the cooling jacket..." Oh FFS, I guess this is happening then. I got many pic updates over the following days as he quite gleefully hacked into my BRAND FUCKING NEW irons Now the first issue that I'd need to tackle anyway, was a decent clutch, because even a mild tune REW would torch a standard clutch without much hassle. No worries says Jon, I've got the old clutch from my Skyline, it'll be perfect for this. An OS Giken TS2B twin plate, with the necessary pull/push converter. Had done sub 1500km before he did a big upgrade, so ideal, albeit overkill for what I wanted. While it was in bits, I figured that I might as well get it all balanced, just for peace of mind. So the whole rotating assembly was sent off, returned all matchy matchy, and duly assembled.

It's a road, you'll all be fine. If anyone wants something proper challenging I'll find a gulley at home to send you into.

I checked up on the Mk1 yesterday. Panelbeater is doing a great job, and it is getting very close to final paint!

I wanna say A+++++ 100% would trade again. Thanks to each and every one of you specimens. EXTRA, EXTRA, EXTRA special thanks go to Mark for collecting me from the plane station, giving me the penny tour, and stitching me up. Jamie for the ride to J-5s, and back to the plane station. Mark Again (and Max too) for the epic catering. (Seriously, that shit was next level commitment) J-5 for being the hub that enables us all to come together. Hugs, high 5s, and handshandys all round!

I spent 4 hours cleaning the front seats today. They went from disgusting crusty greasy messes that I was on the verge of reupholstering to looking really good apart from a few worn patches I didn't take any pictures until I had already cleaned the dirtiest parts but this gives a bit of an indication Cleaned using wet and dry vacuum cleaner, a mix of washing machine powder and an old toothbrush

Popped into work to use TIG. I've only used one once and that was for about 30 seconds when I was in high school. It's pretty ugly but should come up good enough with a grind. That was on how welder was set and with zero guidance from anyone. I'm quite proud of it, for basically a first timer

Not finished...but you get the idea. I've made it so the top can move around in 90° increments, so you can use it in whatever position you need. Left, right, big wheel or little wheel etc...Paint to come next.

Boy howdy this was fun though.

Another Shot of the rear spare wheel well. came together quite nicely. Cut the bottom and inner supports off a spare RH guard I had. And welded them onto my slightly better, but rusty on lower parts, RH guard. To go with the new Dakota Digital Bearclaws. I spun these new pins up on the lathe. (no hex bolt head on them compared to the Dakota Digital ones) And my brother, Matt welded them to some countersunk plates. Which fit like this to the factory adjustable mounting plates/ And work great with the bear claws installed in the doors. Today I managed to partially fill two more holes that still exist between the chevy and lexus. Front of the sills, and a new Guard mounting point on the RH side, as it had also rusted away. From beneath you can still see the hole left to be filled between this new patch and the sills plate.

Full sharn mode.

Ha I have been practising my look of disdain that I will get to use when I pull up next to a 'tuff' ranger. Also I went to the servo to fill it up and a dude fist pumped me. This gave me joy.

Also I really want to give out some thanks to you OS peeps, it would have been a shit ton harder without the community. In particular; @Mof - sorting the gearbox top plate and other helpful advice @KKtrips - pointing out failings in my knowledge from a position of greater knowledge. And probably making the cert plate for me @cletus - also helping point out my failings plus much specific and useful advice @sidewaysickness - for testing the limits of Audi wagons and treating factory tow ratings for the mere indication of minimum performance that they are. @yoeddynz - for clueing me in on where the local safari foamers lived so I could sneak in at night and steal parts @mjrstar for the most super solid turbo deals possible @Beaver for sorting a boost compensated pump that I will be fitting in the near future Its probably not everyone that helped but its all I can remember with my failing memory.

Also I remember when I drove the Echo to Nats in Nelson and people thought it was new and awful But now... Its not new anymore

So the rear springs came back from resetting. 2.5 inches is all I could get them reset to, before they lost their arch. Will probably end up with 2 inch blocks also. Ended up going with some Saab 900 front shocks for the rear, as they're a lot shorter. Front Mk1 golf inserts showed up. So will get the strut bodies dropped off tomorrow for shortening. Part numbers for anyone interested are; Front inserts : KYB 363001 (Only KYB brand fit 45mm strut bodies) Rear shocks : KYB 343023 Carpet and tyres are on their way. Also picked up a coupe grille

Yeah that works good. Apart from one bolt that didnt want to go in its home it was a piece of cake.

Oh I have some items here. One trash sack of clothes, including a Fiji bitter singlet. One unidentified side stand One new 2.75x17 shinko golden boy, I'll keep it if no one claims And here's the two pictures I took this weekend. 

Unless something miraculous happens it looks like I'm not gonna be able to take this to the drags or do anything else much fun with it for a while. Reason being, this happened to my Nissan work car coming up the Bombay hill yesterday: With a BHG to match. So its off to scrap! Which now means I'm back to needing the Echo as a reliable and sensible driving appliance. For the meantime my job depends on it. Good thing I didnt manage to blow it up already. So I've gone back to the factory intake manifold so I can have an air filter back on it. It will still be heaps more fun to drive though than before! as the better springs/wheels/etc still make it a lot more entertaining. I put the new exhaust manifold on but it didnt make any difference. I suspect it would once the rest of the exhaust flows a bit better though. My printed ITB manifold was getting a bit tired looking with a few cracks starting to develop. It was still holding together fine but the idle quality was starting to get worse. I'm fairly amazed it lasted that long though, and the main cracks had just spread out from some areas that got damaged when I first tightened it up. A++ would prototype in this manner again but definitely not a long term solution. Looked nice with the black trumpets on it though. I'll still have the ECU and wideband in it though so I'll try wring some blood out of a stone in the economy stakes. 800km to a tank perhaps possible with lean burn strategy and some EGR? Usually around 650 on factory ECU. (from ~33 litres) which is 5l per 100km. In the meantime I will keep slowly hoarding some bits for a prius motor swap.

Had a busy week with the bug, changing gears was be coming rather hit and miss, by Wednesday I was having to start it in gear if I wanted to use reverse. One thing I'd meant to do during the rebuild was to replace the plastic bushing that holds the shifter rod in place inside the tunnel. I even bought the part, but, meh I had a whole car to build and it worked okay before, also it's a cunt of a job. The problem is to change the bush you need to completely remove the three foot long shifter rod. And this is the only access. You gotta take the spare tyre out, the front bumper, two access plates and as it turns out both front beam adjustment bolts, and poke the shifter rod out the front. Fuck me. Old thing new thing. Didn't end up taking to long, an hour or so. Gears still fucked, adjust clutch. Ah, much better. these two things have made the car so much nicer to drive it has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the car. So on Friday I cut the muffler off. Old shit. New shit. Some shit welding and a lick of paint. And a short five hours later. Tried to kick The tail up at the end. Sounds so good, very happy with it, I'd had the old one nearly twenty years so not bad. Makes prober vroom vroom sounds now! Also cut a hole out of a large trapezoid of mdf. For the jbl to sit in, speaker only just fits. Sub doesn't have the same punch of the when it was in the box, bit more boomie, but heaps of volume and is fine with a few twiddles of the eq. Was going to cover it but it's fun watching it move in the rear view mirror.  Random photo of small mount on can I had to jigger. Note self clearance flange.

I pulled the lower arms out of this today and what a crumbly mess I found. Luckily last time I had it in bits I cleaned all the threads and greased the torsion bar hexes so it came to bits nicely today. after a little grinding and a nudge in the press, good as new, Thanks to Valiant Precision Driving Team captain @cletus for supplying some new rubber bushes. The old bus should regain its razor sharp handling characteristics.

awwww unluggy

so i bought a new (for me ..actually the newest car I've ever owned ) daily driver.(had it since august now) its a 2003 mk1 ford focus st170. i have wanted one of these for a long time and we didnt get many at all here in nz so they dont come up for sale ...very often .. they are problematic and are known to had issues from the day they came off the production line. but that problematic nature got me a good deal..it was $6900 from the dealer and had been traded in..(177000 odd ks.......should have imploded by now)..but evertime time someone test drove it the check engine light came on ..so they returned it...i drove it 3 times over the space of a week and the light came on within the test drive each time. (5min -30min). so i went back and just said i would take it off they're hands for $3500 with no warranty ....just slap a wof and reg on it and ill take it...(dont think they did much reading up on it.) few days later and probably a few other test drives they rang me and i went and picked it up...(engine light came on on the way home.) but as im pretty updo date on these things i also know that nothing the engine light comes on for will put it into limp mode....and some have had the light on for 10 years in the uk lol....they even say you should be concerned if it doesn't come on.... so a small run down on these mk1 focus st170. the motor is a 2.0 zetec (not duratec as it says on plug cover).the motor was developed by cosworth and is 2.0 block with forged pistons and a 10.2 compression. . alloy high flow head (the flow is shit to be honest and people have had huge gains porting them) , vvt on the intake (problematic) dual stage intake manifold (the controller is problematic ) stainless 4 into 2 into1 headers and high flow cat..and a sports exhaust ( sounds good) ..has a pre and post cat o2 seonsors (also problematic ).has a factory cold air feed to air box that doesnt acutallu go to the airbox. a dual mass flywheel 9 that i cant stand)and all of this is good for 170hp and the cut is 8000rpm. has a close ratio 6 speed box , quick rack steering , huge brakes front and rear , factory 17s with 215 tyres, traction control , factory reacrao seats , . and being a jap inport it doesnt have the uk rust ( and these things are dropping down in numbers daily due to the rust issues.)...its a blood fun car and handles well......even cocks a leg when you throw it into roundabouts.. since i had it ive had the inlet runner controler apart and cleared that code...replaced the pre o2 and cleared that code....(engine light came back on the same day lol). replaced the plugs (not cheap and need to be gapped at 1mm no more and no less...runs like shit otherwise)...i do have a new coil pack and leads on the way as well... i pulled the inlet manifold off last weekend (complete arse of a job) re greased the moving parts and changed the broken vacume hoses ..made a cold air feed and thats where im upto now.... i do have some plans for it slowly as it is my daily (seems better on 100 octane as well)..and just fix things as they go wrong......... and here she it......in imperial blue as well......mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm imperial blue

@Dudley trying to flex on us with his extended lca with fresh black paint. probably got a ndt crack test done as well Oh an yeah the car isnt that broken, just lca poped tyre, and shock needs more oil, maybe seal stuffed. Hydro bumps worked good. watching the roll in slow mo looks like the steering arm over centered and the wheel jamed, along with lack of oil in shock done the weird bouncy thing and over she goes. extended lca's should make it a bit more stable and get rid of some of that positive camber when suspension droops

Great news today. Had the compliance guy inspect the car from top to bottom. He was happy with everything and said go ahead and seal it up and paint it. He wants to see it all back together for the next check and then the last one is taking it for test drives and brake checks. So I was pretty stoked with that.

The barry in me is triggered. Wagovan is a trim level It's been a year plus in the making for this diff. Pre orders getting snaked, covid etc etc. But it's finally here

Bushes turned up so I started chucking em in. Unfortunately I couldnt get other side in will go somewhere and get it pressed in tomorrow. Got the lower arm bush in too and installed it back in car along with new swaybar bushes Black I just removed reds came with the car. They are slightly less in diameter and a coil less? Thought I'd chuck em in see what happens Thanks for looking

Feels like it's taken forever but it's now a complete unit apart from master and slave cylinders

Short update today. I spent the morning poking a few holes in each of the mounting plates that are already tacked to the front beam. Took it nice and slow as I didn't want to overtax my little battery drill. Also cleaned up the metal ready for full welding, as that's the next step.

The Niva's replacement has settled in and proven it's worth, so unfortunately the rego is very much on hold and not looking like revival any time soon. The financial roller coaster of 2020 has had my finger hanging over the sell button, so far i've managed to hold off and I really hope thats all over with stability actually on the horizon. Lockdown feels like so long ago, like everyone else, with time on my hands I got stuck in with general maintenance and cutting out some rot, quite glad I got in when I did! This location behind the front wheels is a standard trap, there is a panel to flush the gunk out but, yeah, rust Over the winter the Defender was needed for another mission so with the aid of WOF extensions, I threw a month rego on and took the Niva for a spin up to work Was bloody good fun to have it on a skifield access road again and quite a fitting last trip. Right now there is no reason that it shouldn't pass a WOF so i'm quite happy to be putting it to bed in this condition, sleep well wee Niva, you shall hoon again!