Bluebear01

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.

Bit of a shakedown run out to Lake Sumner over the weekend. Back in her natural habitat, gravel roads. Went like a champ! 

Done! I took my kids around the hills last night and it blew their minds! They can't remember a time when it wasn't stuck in the garage so it was pretty cool. Big thanks to all you folks on here, you've been a huge help with advice/parts/motivation! Future plans are to finish tidying up the little bits of rust, throw in a 3.9 rear end that @Barnz.NZ helped me out with, maybe pop on some fender mirrors and debate if she should go low... But for now its time to eat up some miles!

So I swapped out the ancient genuine Toyota pads that obviously weren't up to the job with some Ferodo's and also changed the brake fluid to something a bit overkill. The brakes were completely different after that, so much better. They were able to bring the old boat to a stand still from 100kph in under 4 seconds consistently, and cert man was happy. I've been filling time waiting for the plate by making up new brackets to fit my old Cressida visor and throwing on some clip on white walls for the complete sleeper look! 

Hopefully the cert plate will arrive any day now and then I'll be hitting the road for some quality road trips! 

Stoked! He was very happy with everything, the only issues being the brake booster vac hose needs to be to spec and the brakes start to fade half way through the cyclic brake test. I'll try some fancy brake fluid & maybe different brake pads, but he did say the first 2 applications were up to spec so I'm hoping I wont need to go crazy. Worst case I do have a spare disk rear end from a MS112 I could use which might help. All things considered I'm very happy with that result. 

Last job before cert was the dash lights. I joined the tail warning & headlight warning lamps together to make space for an engine check light. The current symbols are etched onto clear plastic so I couldn't clean it off. My father in law came to the party with his new engraving machine that he was playing with over the lockdown. After he drew up the new design and calibrated it he got a great result! Only problem with a good job is no one will ever notice it 

And she's done! Off for cert to see what I've missed, hopefully it's not a large list! 

I haven't had much experience with panel repair, and it shows! But its now rust free in the important parts and I think I'll be able to clean it up to a paintable state after cert. This corner has been bothering me for a long time so its nice to have it sorted. You can see where the water was sneaking in at the bottom of the C-pillar and keeping the whole R/R wheel arch damp. I've used a syringe to squirt Rust Converter into all the gaps incase there was some rust I missed. 

Cert day is fast approaching! I’ve ripped out the seats, collected all the 5c coins, chopped the driveshaft hoops to suit and put it all back together with some beefy doubler plates. Hopefully I’ll never have to use them! 

It's been 3 years since I got the engine and I've finally booked in Cert! It's in for Friday the 15th, the pressure's on to get it finished now. I got it to work at Level 3 and carried on with the list. The ECU was still throwing 4 fault codes for the missing trans computer. The codes would remain dormant in the ECU until I gave the engine full throttle, then it would put up the check light. From the looks of it I could ether wire in a newer ECU with the trans computer combined or retrofit a separate Surf trans computer. I've gone for the 3rd option for now which is to wire in a timer relay to kill the check engine light 10 seconds after startup. This way I can still see if there are any hard codes every time I start it, and can easily check the flash codes with an extra switch I've put in. I've also thrown in some new shocks and made up a slightly longer clutch pushrod out of an old bolt to get a decent clutch pedal.

I guess the best time to go digging into the rust is with 1 week till cert! It's not too bad, but what would you guys recommend is a good product to fill in the cavities to avoid future cancer? While I had my head in there all the talk lately about tyre age made me look at the date codes. Yikes, 2004 on the front and 2002 on the rear! So a new set of Maxxis are going on before cert too. 

Thanks for watching!