mk2marty

Mitsuoka Galue on tri-spokes.

Winning

One year on from when I bought it, and it's looking a bit more respectable.
I bought a grille, front bumper, front air deflector, chrome moulding and column switchgear from the wrecked sedan in Lower Hutt, which has prettied up the front of the car immeasurably. Also, in a feat of impulse buying, I bought some headlight covers from a NOS Honda accessories bloke in Indonesia, who very kindly sent them over just before lockdown. They couldn't go on the car just yet though, because while the grille and surrounds were a lot better than the ones on the car, the surround was missing the left hand corner piece. There was a guy in the States who was selling a couple of corner pieces, and after lucking out of people in this country who might have the right part, I sent him some internet money for the piece of moulding in question.
Three and a half months later, it managed to fight its way through the COVID ravaged postal system and finally took its place on the front of another Accord, half a world away from the car it came off. It was definitely worth the wait though!
In other news, I fitted some headlight relays because the high beam switch had enough and self destructed one night. Fun fact: the switch is before the fuse in the headlight circuit, so when resistance through the switch gets warm enough to soften the solder on the terminals, there's nothing to stop the wire from falling out and then trying to weld itself to anything that has a body contact nearby. Unfortunately, without drastically altering the wiring loom there's no easy way to remedy this. The best course of action was to fit the replacement high beam switch and run it through a pair of relays to remove the current load. 

Other than that, there isn't a lot to report. Tune in next time for the valve stem seal replacement and 1980s stereo install, hopefully

Surprisingly I still own this. I figured i'd better update the build thread now, it has more metal in it now than it did 2.5 years ago. With a year of a long distance relationship, moving house, changing jobs, other cars and a fairly sizeable task ahead to fix all the rot, progress kind of came to a halt not long after the last update. In the last year or so though I have been chipping away at it, so far I have cut and welded the l/h inner guard, heater bubble, l/h floor pan, inner and outer sill section, rebuilt the bottom of the l/h A pillar, l/r wheel arch inner and outer, outer sill section, and probably some other small bits I can't remember. I also cut the front valance off, and I am very thankful for the abundance of pressed panels available new for old Fords in that I got a new valance, front guards, and a myriad of repair sections to stitch in, without these I probably wouldn't have taken this on tbh.
Here it is on its way to its new garage:

Some repairs to the firewall where every Escort rots - under the heater bubble. I've made an indent in the new heater bubble so water can actually drain away, rather than collecting in the bottom of the bowl and rotting through the seam that joins it.

It mightn't look tidy, but it's solid and there's good penetration through to the other side, so I'm reasonably happy. The l/h side floor section was probably the most daunting repair in terms of size, I ended up cutting the floorpan back almost to the seat mount before I found decent metal, but after I zapped in the floor section the outer sill and pillar fitted up pretty nicely.

This was the most recent repair - the rear wheel arch - which someone in the past has had a go at, not rust proofed behind the repair, and it's rusted again. There was a patch welded into the outer arch, which someone had beaten in with a ballpein hammer and shaped with bog, and a large patch on the inner which had gone rotten. It all had to go, I ended up cutting away the inner half and remaking it, and welding in a pressed section into the outer.

All that's left now is the l/h C pillar and vent, probably the r/h C pillar too, the bottom of the r/h A pillar, a random little hole in the rear apron, make some new front guard supports and attach the front. I have a full set of factory bronze tinted glass and chrome trim mouldings for the windows, which will probably end up on the car too. 

And this is pretty much how it sits today!

Some good things have happened to the Accord since the last installment! I gave it some CV boots, thankfully the inner and outer are the same size, because both boots on the L/H axle were split. Fun fact - pre-facelift Accords have CVs at both ends, but later ones like this one have tripod joints on the inner. Confused the hell out of the bloke at BNT, anyway. 
It passed another WOF last week without any hiccups, and we've taken it for decent number of road trips around the upper North Island. I even slept in it after Crate Day, which honestly turned out to be more cramped and uncomfortable than I thought it would be.
Still working on tidying up the front end, there's a sedan at a wrecker down country who might be able to supply the grille bits. The passenger side carpet is pretty rotten and it got consistently damp in the rain, which was a pretty good indicator that there were holes somewhere that there shouldn't be holes. I broke the unwritten rule of old car ownership, that being "don't pick at that bathroom sealant, you won't like what's underneath it" and lo and behold after chiselling away the layers of Selley's Bathroom Adhesive in the windscreen plenum chamber there was a decent hole.

After taking out the wiper motor I found another hole, so out came the cutoff disc and the welder. Just to be safe I pulled the dash out so nothing caught fire, to be honest this is probably the first time this car has seen the hot end of a MIG torch in its life.
I made up a couple of patches, binned them after I found more scabby bits near where I was welding to, and then made up some bigger patches. Glued them in with the metal gluestick, and hit it all with some epoxy. Might spray some underseal in there yet, or I might just spray it all with fish oil and put up with the smell for a couple of weeks. 

Otherwise it's been plain sailing, the front seats need some more foam because as far as I can see they don't actually have springs in them, just a layer of heavy foam which has disintegrated over the past 39 years. Local content laws dictated that as much trim as possible had to be made here, which is why we didn't get the neat colour coded interior fabrics that everywhere else in the world got, we got beige or beige.
I pulled out the amplifier that was tek-screwed through the floorpan underneath the passengers seat and the lil' Johnny spec head unit that was flopping around the dash and wired in with three core house cable, and wired in a period '80s Clarion spindle mount unit - less doof, but more class! It needs a set of TS-Xs for the parcel shelf next time i'm near Buyee.com.

Here's some pictures of it enjoying the scenery 

19 hours ago, azzurro said:

CRX and Carpi

 

Capri belongs to my dad, he works at the Ford dealer next door.

/for thread: neighbour doing laps in his VH Pacer

This was in Whangarei last week. Saw a little old lady get into it, crank up the mighty 1100 and drive away