tomble

I haven't looked too hard at it, but I think the brake mount is the same, so I guess it has its own one. It could be another firewall sandwich affair that just attaches to those two (currently missing) holes. I hope it is now obvious to all why I'm doing the manual swap later

I'm not sure what the process is re: vinning, it's been registered in NZ in the past. The donor is a turbo starion that had a NA 4g63 swap. I believe it was always manual, but the new engine required a narrow bell housing which used a cable clutch, so they mangled things to remove the hydraulic stuff and make it work. I have the "correct" bell housing for the OG starion turbo engine, which is set up for a hydraulic system. I think all I need to do is source the cylinders and tehy should just bolt up

Yeah, fair call. I think my list of stuff for the manual conversion is 1. that hole for the clutch cyl and bolt holes 2. (red car) drill out the spot welds on the bracket holding the manual shifter stuff in 3. (black car) enlarge the trans tunnel hole and weld above bracket in 4. take my two manual transmissions and take them both apart to swap the bell housings over 5. restore the manual drive shaft (it's longer) 6. swap the red car's clutch over and hope it's factory / not modified too much (was using a cable instead of hydraulic) 7. figure out + get a master/slave hydraulic setup 8. figure out what the heck I need to do to make the electronics think it's in neutral 9. find a certable solution to relocating the transmission mounting points 10. swap over the brake pedal and hope also fine re: certification 11. hope this all works nicely with the larger transmission tunnel and that I don't have to get hammery to create foot/pedal clearance No harm in doing some of it ahead of time...

Yeah, it's starting its (re-)life as an auto. I do have the bits for manualising it but currently planning to get it registered etc then do the "want" stuff. It's a lot less cognitive load to put things back where they were. If I get to 99% and breathing gets easier that may change but I'm not letting perfect be the enemy of good right now

Rewind a bunch and I had to figure out what to do about this. This was quite a while ago - over two years in fact, joisus - so the memory is a bit fuzzy. I remember that I looked into master cyl rebuild kits and what have you, and I couldn't seem to find one that wouldn't cost the world to get over here. The brake booster though, absolutely nothing. I also (back then as well as now) am not experienced enough to go "ah yeah mate that's a 42-HVY in the Kelby style, just get one from a 3rd gen hiace and it bolts straight in mate". The local clutch and brake people, who have been helping out with a bunch of stuff and shout out to them (MP Autoparts), were able to send them off for a rebuild for a reasonable price (especially considering the cost of finding my own seal kit and then having to figure out wtf to do about the booster) so I just did that. The reason I never posted about it is because it's been sitting in a box ever since. The wiper cowl area in the starion still needs painting, and access is already tight. The booster makes it tighter. Totally unrelatedly, earlier this year I got the crusty brake assembly bracket and wire wheel + evaporust'd it (in stages because I'm not made of money) before licking it. With paint. Evaporust is so cool. Even this super old stuff that's pitch black does wonders when left for a couple days. I know now that there's DIY stuff that is just as good so I'll definitely play with making some once this stuff finally dies. Fastforward to now, and I want to get this assembly in the car. It's kind of important to do so before the dash goes in, after all! So, cowl access be damned, it's going in. Problem: it's secured with the studs on the booster, creating a sandwich out of the firewall, and there's an engine in the way. You see, I'd plopped the engine in the bay and secured it with straps to prevent it from wobbling around all over the place. Free transportation! But, now there's just enough of a clearance issue that the booster won't fit. I therefore put it off for a week or so, waiting for an opportunity to get the engine back out. Guess who forgot until today that the engine, when on just its two side mounts, can tilt backwards and forwards an alarming degree with mild pressure. The steering column can then be unbolted from its bracket, as the brake assembly's bracket really likes creating sandwiches. I found a new circlip for the pedal to connect to the booster and there's another job done. Meanwhile, the back of the car has had a bunch of love. I stole the red car's rear window washer tank as it was in better condition. The pipe for it was fed through the bodywork, aided by a piece of wire and some tape. There's a bunch of bracketry around this area for the tools, spare, speakers, etc that's mostly in good condition but has the odd annoying spot of corrosion. None of it is visible, but I of course scuffed it all and licked it. With paint. I dug out the hatch struts. The RH one is in good condition, but the LH one's plastic wrap that contains the wiring is in pretty average condition. I considered using the red's one but it was sticky and leaky and made squelching noises. It didn't push back as hard as the black ones when depressed. In fact, the red car's RH strut doesn't return at all. Haha, suck it, red starion. Look at that PVC pipe it needs. What a loser. The chad OG black struts are perfectly fine! The final thing that runs to the back of the car is the pair of cables to open the fuel door and the hatch. It took a while of digging but I eventually found the original levers from the black starion, hoping that they were in better condition than red's. They're honestly about the same, just surface rust and scratched-up plastic. Not wanting to bother with disassembling rivets, I just wire wheeled and zinc'd it. I made sure to wiggle stuff while curing so that it didn't bind up. After that I hit it with some plastx polisher which didn't really do that much tbh. For the lettering, I used a paint pen to fill in the recessed area and then carefully went over it with a solvent-moistend rag wrapped around a flat head screwdriver. I had to start over a few times before I was happy with it. I might go back with some clear coat or something to give it a better chance of staying white.

The garage was an immediate bomb site after moving in. Despite the size increase, I'd done a really good job tetrising everything way in the old garage, and now it was just a mountain of boxes an mix shit. Half of the boxes are well labelled and organised, and the other half is what happens when the reality of how much packing there is to do hits your optimistic timeline theory. I didn't find my Alto's crankshaft key. Found my 8mm tho. It was my first time moving a whole ass house and garage worth of stuff on my own. My box truck rental went from an optimistic "four days is more than I need" to "I wish I had this for a week". It also was preceded by a shitload of packing things and followed with a bunch of unpacking. My poor programmer's body was battered and broken. The cat loves the fireplace though so it's all worth it. The garage remained a caver's paradise for probably months before I slowly got it in order. Even then, "order" was largely just "this pile of stuff in the middle of the floor doesn't impede my movement". And after that it took me a while to remember I'd actually packed the starion itself full of parts and boxes as a makeshift trailer. Aaaand then a bit longer to actually regain motivation to work on it again. Let's just say it's been a hell of a year for me. Pic is the current state of the garage because I didn't think to capture any. @kws convinced me (after seeing his marina in person) that it's best to have a registered car in poor visual shape that you can enjoy than a jackstand queen. So if my original goal was "get really fussy and 100% it", then it is now "aim for good enough and we'll improve it in time". Seems kind of silly in hindsight but it's better to recognise a self-made bottleneck now than never. As usual, analysis paralysis is the phrase of the decade, but I've got a lot of interior stuff that I'd love to thin out. That means the carpet should get sorted. Which means the stuff under the carpet should get sorted. Okay, let's start there. I gathered the looms out and figured out what went where. I'd originally been 50-50 about remaking the loom but with the new scope of the work now clearly established in my mind, the path is obvious: (1) of course I'm not remaking the fucking loom, (2) clean it and put it in the car! So I cleaned it and put it in the car. Once again, red car was invaluable for locating exactly where the bends and clips and whatnot go and also for pilfering miscellaneous brackets and gubbins. Surprisingly, there wasn't actually all that much under the carpet to sort out. Aside from the loom, the only other thing that should probably be available when fitting the carpet is the ETACS unit under the passenger seat which controls a bunch of random shit like the door alarms. Both starions' units were a little surface rusty so I gave the original a wire wheel and a black zinc. I wasn't super happy with the black given that it was originally just raw plated, so I grabbed some silver zinc for later. Next, I fished out the horrific old carpet and underlay (with gloves and mask on). I started with the underlay, using the old as a template for the new. The underlay doesn't have perfect coverage and isn't moulded at all, which makes it easier to cut into the required shapes. In the end, I had just enough. Just enough. The carpet is moulded but isn't perfect. The original is a single piece of carpet, while this comes in two pieces. There are no holes for anything and it's also slightly oversized to be safe. I dry-laid them several times and decided to start at the back. Flipping the old and new carpet over, I used the old carpet as a sort of template, but struggled as the moulding isn't perfectly the same and is hard to chase. I used a white paint pen to mark where I thought cuts should be made. Then I moved the carpet into the car, patted it all out, chased where things seemed to line up, etc... and made my first cut. From there I could more easily reference where the other lines were and adjust, cut, adjust, cut, until it fit perfectly. No dramas at all! I did the same with the front carpet, but cut a couple of seat holes in the wrong place. Fortunately they're either hidden or intentional-looking. Then I thoroughly cleaned the inside of the car and the new carpet before "final" installation, including chucking the foot rest and ETACs unit in. I'll probably come back with some spray glue to lightly hold stuff where it should live, and a heat gun to help mould some of the trickier bits of carpet to fit a bit better, but I figured it should rest a bit and have more opportunity for incidental feet, brackets etc. to help squish and hold it into place. The edges near the doors also need final trimming and a plastic rail stapled to them, but that can wait as well - the door sills still need fettling + paint. It's really nice having the interior feel... soft again. I had the seats and leather trim in there briefly for the move and it was really nice being able to sit in it. Additionally, the process of taking apart the red car's interior creates pressure to get stuff installed while the reference is still there / still strong in my mind. So, I'm going to continue to prioritise the interior, and take it as far as I can. I know that certain things won't be able to go to 100% or stay there permanently (eg. aforementioned door jams, windscreen, anything that pokes out to the panelwork like tail lights etc) but it should be really good for progress and for deleting things from my brain and the garage. The exterior will likely get a DIY 'won't rust' job that will take it over the registration line before I go back and get it properly done when funds are available.

So yeah as I was saying, the carpet needs cutting, and it's probably best to have some stuff to cut around. I cleaned up the handbrake cables and installed them. I thought I'd need to do some awkward plating jobbie on the springy part with half the cable dipped, most likely with unsatisfactory results due to the difficulty of cleaning all around the windings; however, it actually cleaned up really well with just a scrubby brush. It looked really rusty while dirty but it only had some light surface stuff. I wire wheeled then CRC black zinc'd it and happily the paint retains enough flexibility such that it doesn't crack off the springs (not immediately anyway... maybe it'll fatigue off quickly when on the road idk). The car had PVC tubing to protect the cables as they ran through one of the support structures in the car, happily I did not misplace them. Installing the cable was easy enough. I had to disassemble some of the brake gubbins to get access to the required bolts and there was some contortion involved. I think I messed the order of operations up a couple of times but I got it all in. The rubber grommets separating the inside and outside got RTV'd in per the manual, one was cracked up a bit but the RTV should hold it together. The red car got raided for (a) lost bolts and brackets and (b) as a reference for how stuff hangs together. Happily, some of the stuff in the red car is in better condition so I mixed and matched to get what I needed. The handbrake lever was somewhat rusty, just surface stuff but it needed addressing. I could not for the life of me get the plastic/leather sheath off of it, so I ended up just sitting the lower half of it in evaporust for a bit. It's not super ideal but I decided against disassembling it and to try just getting it done intact. After evaporust, I wire wheeled then CRC zinc'd it and made sure to actuate it before the paint hardened. Later I greased it up and it feels perfectly smooth. The bushings still have no play and everything seems good. Happy with that, for the time being. After extracting a snapped bolt from aeons ago and zincing some more bracketry, I was able to install the handbrake stuffs for good. Then I moved house. My new garage is a little larger, has better ventilation and has no places for me to hit my head on. It does not look this tidy now.

Hi sorry, been away a bit long. I bought from Knox Auto Carpets in Australia - https://knoxautocarpets.com.au/starion/

Alto's fixed, I got a high velocity fan for the garage oven, and I'm gradually regaining motivation... it's Starion time! There's a million things to do and that's got my ADHD arse stuck in a loop. It's so easy to walk into the garage, point at stuff "that needs doing, that needs doing, that needs doing"... and overwhelm myself and walk out. What I want to get fixed Right Now™ is the exterior; get those rusty doors repaired, the dents out of everything, and the final prep and colour on it all. But there's very little of that that I can actually do myself. Sure I could get a welder and all the fixings and give it a go, but chances are that'd just cost me more in the long run. The door rust I could probably do and maybe some of the dents but the damage to the bonnet and fenders, and the panel alignment at the front... I'd love to DIY it all the way up to the painting stage but I'm pretty sure I need a professional from here on out. That means money which isn't quite available at the moment. It's not ideal to do the interior before the dust-creating exterior but that's the direction I'm going in for now. There's a lot of stuff on the shelves that are This Close to just going back into the starion and out of my brain, and that really appeals to me! --- The very first thing I did to get back on the horse was something I'd started thinking about a year ago. There used to be metal stoppers in the floor pan for draining water. They're all rusted to crap and out of production, so I measured them and sourced some grommets to take their place. This worked pretty well, except for six in the main floor pan which have a cylindrical wall rather than just a sheet metal lip. I didn't want to cut off the cylinder part but after some test fitting I figured that if I forced and schmoo'd them in with RTV black, they'd likely stay put. Another thing I'd been researching a lot was what sound deadening to use. There's two real product types to consider. Butyl+aluminium dampeners. These absorb vibrations and are easily the most effective way to reduce sound. You only have to cover 25~% of a panel to get almost all of the benefits. The benefit trails off significantly as you add coverage after that point. Sound blocking material. Some kind of material that absorbs the sound waves from the air itself. The problem with this stuff is that you basically need 100% coverage. Even if you get to 95% coverage, that final 5% is going to let a surprising amount of sound energy through, to the point where you might not even notice a difference vs 0% coverage. So, I basically ignored the latter. For the former, there's a few people who have been trying to set up testing rigs to produce actual numbers for the various sound deadening products out there. One of the most promising products was Resonix, who of course produce their own tests. The problem is that the product would cost over A GRAND to import into NZ. Additionally, the products that Resonix and other enthusiasts tend to test are largely limited to sale in Europe and the USA and are overly expensive to ship here. I was considering an Amazon Basics brand that Resonix rated highly but in the end I just did the basic bitch thing and got the dominant brand, Dynamat. Its performance is high and even though it's expensive, the brands we get here are either rebadged and impossible to get numbers for, or not as effective. In the end, if you're in NZ, unfortunately Dynamat is probably the best value unless you're on a strict budget. Also unfortunately, I'm unlikely to ever know if Dynamat was the correct decision. It's either going to be noisy in the car or not and I don't see myself replacing it for shittier stuff just to measure dB! I got the bulk pack. Most internet sources said I'd need double the amount, but I know that only a small amount of coverage is necessary, so I was hoping this would be enough to stretch. Laying it out in the lounge, I realised I'd overestimated the amount I'd need. It quickly became clear that I had more than enough to replace the factory sound deadening, put extra sound deadening on every panel in the car, and have some left over. In fact I'd easily have enough to go well over 25% coverage. Well, better not waste it! First I got everything clean. To start with I was careful about how to cut and position it all. I still hadn't truly absorbed that I had enough of the stuff, and I'd read that this was a bitch of a job. Once I was happy, I went in. I peeled back a corner of the product and stuck it firmly before slowly peeling more and sticking as I went. I didn't run into many air bubbles but a prick with a pick was effective at getting rid of them. I got a free roller from hyperdrive for buying the pack, and this was great for flat surfaces, but for getting into curves, I found that the rounded back of a screwdriver handle was better. In all, the product was easy to stick firmly down. It's also quite forgiving; I was able to peel some off after half an hour without it damaging the paint or leaving any schmoo behind. I'm glad the roller was free because I wouldn't recommend buying it. You could easily get away with something rigid with a soft surface, like a vinyl applicator. I opted not to cut any holes for the drain plugs. My reasoning is that if water gets in the car such that I need to drain it, then the seats etc are coming out regardless, and at that point I'd rather just use a shop vac than go through the hassle of removing the plugs and re-schmooing them down later. Plus, the deadening acted as extra insurance against them popping out over time. My first goal was to replace all of the factory sound deadening... and here that is! I don't know what other people were complaining about when they installed it. It didn't take all that long, I wore disposable gloves but didn't feel anything remotely sharp enough to cut me, and getting it all rolled down properly was easy. Cutting it is easy with scissors and craft knives. I also wanted to cover other panels and areas of the car that never head deadening, such as the roof, but I really did overestimate how much I needed. I also bought some of the aluminium tape that Dynamat offers. DON'T DO IT. It cost $35 for 9m and I only got half the floor done! It's also totally un-necessary. I just did it to avoid getting butyl on my clothes and shoes as I moved around in there. I think any old aliminium tape can be used, and found these black rolls for $6 each. Exact same dimensions, but 10m long. It's a shame that some of the tape is shiny dynamat branded and some is black, but it's covered in carpet, doesn't matter in the slightest, and to be honest I think most people wouldn't even notice if they were staring at it. --- This is the firewall padding. It's stained, gross looking, discarding everywhere, and the car was filthy when we received it with a full ash tray, chicken bones on the carpet... I'm replacing it. I found a thick sheet of Mass Loaded Vinyl online which was priced well and almost the exact dimensions I required. I laid the old padding on top and traced around everything with a paint pen. I initially was going to use spray paint but less messy brains prevailed. Cutting it out was easy with scissors, and I used a drill for the smaller holes. The mid-sized holes were hard to get clean cuts on but I managed. And it fits great This is the carpet. Was it black? Was it grey? Was it beige? Great questions. The main thing is: it had CHICKEN BONES integrated into it when we received the car. Yeah, nah. A few places in oz sell replacement carpets so I chanced one of them. I opted for cut pile for a more lush feel, and some new padded backing as well. Dry fitted: I'll still need to harvest the plastic door trim bits from the old carpet (or more likely, the red starion). And of course I'll need to cut it some places, most notably for the shifter, handbrake etc. I'll also want to install the same hook and loop setup that the old firewall stuff had to connect the two pieces together. I'll hold off actually installing it for now because I'll want to route the loom and boot/fuel cables and what not. But it looks like it'll come up really nice.

I love how stubby this car is.

Yeah they should sit a lot higher. The witness marks don't lie. I haven't done anything yet - I'm quite lazy and have enough of a backlog as it is. The spacing washers also are rusting pretty bad (I didn't protect the ground edge but the whole thing's rusting equally, just aliexpress things) so I've got to rethink things. Decent 3M adhesives might work. Sounds so sketch trusting that though...

Well that jinxed it. The consensus was an exhaust leak, so the poor neglected starion got wheeled out once again and I went hunting. It didn't take long to find the culprit; the cat was loose. There's a pun there somewhere. But, that meant taking off the bumper for proper access. After wrangling the heat shielding off (literally have to deform it to get it out of there), a bolt fell onto the floor... :D... All three other bolts/nuts were loose as well. As much of a bitch as that heat shielding is to work with, I'm glad it functioned as a bolt bucket. I went around everything else and fortunately there were no other loose bolts. I think one of us just finger-tightened the cat and forgot to torque it down during all the chaos of putting things back together again. It's now secured with red locktite because fuck future Tom, and all the noises and power are back to normal.

Surely did, she's our daily . Currently on 10,922 km since rebuild.

A lil bit back I was ordering some audio stuff and a mate wanted an amp tacked on to my shipping, so what else was I to do but tack my own impulse buy onto my own shipping? I wanted to get back there anyway to tidy up my temporary twisties from hardwiring my dash cam. So once again the stereo comes out... Ugh I agonised about what constant +12v to splice into, but all of my candidate wires just gave me a bit of pause either because the wire seemed a bit thin or it was a critical circuit. So in the end decided to just use a fuse tap. Reliable, reversible, and a lot less stress about choosing the right circuit. I think I went with the horn one in the end. Have to do a quick test before final install of course... And once again the front seat makes it way into the back I was originally going to run the wires along the sill, but after laying everything out I would have been just barely too short. If I'd spliced into something on the driver's side I'd be fine, but in the end I'm happy with the route I chose - it just involved getting more of my arm blind feeling under the carpet. The wires won't rub or catch on anything. The bum sub is secured using hook tape - it isn't going anywhere! I'm no car sparky, but I'm not really happy with the job the electrical place did installing my stereo last year. I think now days I'd have given it a go myself and done a better job. But it's not egregious and I'm probably just hyping my own non-abilities up. At any rate, I soldered my twisties; first soldering since I was in high school, but it's done. So okay fine I'm almost certainly hyping my own abilities up. But they're solid and won't go anywhere. I taped them up with fresh electrical tape to blend in with the rest of the work I also tidied up the routing of many of the wires and also added some labelling. The new sub goes pretty hard. I had the equaliser a little too bass heavy... .... Crazy how much just a little bum sub can change the listening experience in a car. --- I was ordering some amayama stuff for the MIL and decided hey might as well put some cheeky other stuff in the basket... As is tradition, I copied KWS' mirror mod. Basically I'm swapping the mirror out with a different but similar OEM model that has a dipper switch (84703-81A14-6GS + 84782-76G00). I also splashed a bit and got a new wiper stalk from a Jimny with adjustable intermittent wiper speed (37310-74P20). KWS already detailed the mirror swapping process and all you need is a screwdriver. The wiper stalk is also pretty easy. First, the steering column bottom cover comes off with one screw and a light pull. Of course there's tape on it. The stalk is held in with one screw that is obscured by the steering wheel; fortunately, turning the wheel 90 degrees gives access to it. There's also a clip holding it in. The top column cover is very flappy at this point and you can easily get at the clip with a flat head. So strange that they wouldn't just ship this variant on the alto. How many cents did they save not doing so?? Installation is the reverse, clip and screw it in... replace the column covers... Not much movement otherwise. She's still our daily driver and is doing great, trying to spread the gospel of the tiny 660 car wherever it goes.

Love it, I'll live through you and Zac for the time being. What's with Starion people migrating to FD's?