SR ROLLA

Well, been a while. Not a heap going on, finally got around to switching the headlights over to proper semi sealed units I quite like the look, yellow looks good against the blue. Also been acquiring the necessary items to sort out the paint work. I have decided that short of a lotto win in the near future I am better off painting it myself. I've done it once before (with plenty of help) with pretty good results. I figure it wont be any worse than it currently is and if it's not great then it can just be a holdover paint job until I can afford the real deal some years down the track. Worst case I can learn a lot. I've also put in motion plans to rebuild all the suspension to a proper height. Custom coilovers up front with reset leaves+blocks in the back. Just finalising the shopping list at the moment, then it should all get sorted in the near future. Feels like progress. ish.

Hey man, love your car, it looks awesome. Can I ask what the specs on the wheels and tyres are? size and fitment seems bang on. Cheers

I ended up getting some cans colour matched by Auto Industrial Supplies and painted the doors and guards below the white lines and the tops of rear quarters. This has advanced the paint job from 'patchy bogan shit-heap' to 'good meh from far but far from good'. It's at least mostly shiny and mostly blue now. Went to Caffeine and Classics a couple weeks back, not a bad turn out considering the weather was iffy and Beach Hop was on at the same time. Got some pics with the other GTO guys: Turns out my car must have had a full respray at some stage with another, exterior only touch up at a later date. As you can see above dwlee's factory Himalayan Blue 75 is noticeably lighter. No wonder I had trouble finding a match for my mystery blue. I had a couple of little things done in time for a fresh WOF recently. Rear wheel bearings, nice and quite now, they were getting pretty past it. Tightened up the steering a bit. General servicey fluidy stuff. Flew through the warrant but with the note that the strut tops are starting to get a little perished. Apparently these can be re-vulcanised if no replacement part can be found but the plan has always been to replace with coliovers anyway. Guess I need to get on that sooner rather than later, just need to save up some of my not-enough-money. I don't know a lot about working with leaf suspension for the rear but I think retensioning to lower and stiffen a bit, maybe combined with small blocks would be the go? The slight rake has always bothered me, feels like the bum could happily come down quite a lot.

Thanks, that's a handy reference. Looks like I need to research more carefully and spend the money to do jobs properly/go to the right people. Shocking.

I decided to get a can of colour-matched paint mixed up so I could at least make the whole car blue while I wait to save up for a full respray. The VIN plate in this car is nowhere that I can find. A bit of internet research confirmed what I thought I already knew — the 74 GTO only came in 4 colours: Fuji White, Tahitian Blue, Alpine Silver and Athens Olive. I can't find reference to any other shades of blue, so this must be it right? Apparently no. I found the colour code for Mitsubishi Tahitian Blue, it was only available in 1974 – 1975. But the mixed up paint is too light and looks too yellow, the original colour is darker and more purpley. I suppose it's possible the whole car was resprayed at some stage… I know in the 90s it had a touch up where the exterior was painted, but not the engine bay, door jams, boot etc Even the racing stripe and badges were just masked. Any ideas? Discussion

Thanks man, I'm pretty stoked on how they came out.

A few bits and pieces over the last couple months. New master cylinder seems to have sorted some minor brake issues. New shiney: New HT Leads: Santa brought some NOS indicators: Finished off repainting the factory wheels, got tyres on and got them on the car: They came out a little darker than I wanted but it's nice to have a change. Tyres get whitewalled on Monday. really need to get the paint + height sorted Edit: Forgot, I also re-shoed, cleaned up and painted the rear drums. So all in all the brakes are really mint now.

Hi, sorry for the slow reply, only seen these questions just now. The only thing I've had from Rare Spares so far is the door rubbers. I replaced the brush seals (which run along the top edges of the doors and under the rear windows, I think that's what you're after?)direct from Mitsubishi NZ. Not sure if they will still have them, they only had a few left when I got those, which was a couple years ago now.

Lights are all sorted now. The good folks at Ron Wood Auto did a stellar job, very nice and tidy. Relays set up in the engine bay now so the lights are much brighter right off the bat. I haven't switched over to the semi-sealed units yet. The locator tabs aren't in the right places for my headlight cups, they would make the lights on a whack angle and also they sit a little too far out towards the outer edge. Do people normally just cut/grind these off? I also got around to checking out a dodgy looking patch under the rear bumper that I've been meaning to get to for a while. There was a horizontal crack in the paint just below the bumper which I could see was letting water in under the paint. So I cracked it off to have a look. It appears there has been a dent at some stage fixed with the tried and true method of filling it with bog and painting over it. It was about 8-10mm thick in the middle. I've taken off the bog, cleaned it all up and painted it black to seal it up for now. The dent will be added to the list of things to address when the panel and painting happens.

Have managed to source a new fuse holder, from a Celeste, to replace the melted one but don't have it yet. The car is currently with the auto sparky, hopefully I will hear from him tomorrow and the issues will all be simple ones. While the car has been going nowhere i decided to whip the side vents off and give them a bit of a tart up. They were in okay condition but look to have been repainted at some stage with some less than perfect masking and there were a couple of peely bits. after a quick sand on the worst bits: masked up: painted: back on the car I ended up getting impatient waiting for the right conditions and went ahead and painted them when it was a bit too cold, like a dick. So it took ages in front of a heater for the paint to go off and it has ended up a bit stipply (doesn't look quite as bad as the photo above IRL) and shinier than I wanted — it's a satin, should've maybe gone for full matte. Anyway, a bit of a cock up (especially after the ballache of masking them) but not the worst cock up ever. They look better than they did plus nice and clean and crisp. I can easily enough redo them when the weather is warmer with a flatter paint if they bother me.

Yeah, will definitely be running relays once they are converted to semi-sealed. Nick is going to be having a look when he can fit it in next week. I'd like him to have a bit of a poke around all of the electrics, see if I can get things tidied up a bit, make sure it's all on the up and up. I was hoping to get along to the OS meet this month but it might be a bit of a challenge bombing along the motorway in the dark with no headlights. D'oh.

Sweet, cheers.

So, I've not had the best time of it lately. First some lovely chap decided to break into the garage and nick every single power tool and hand tool in there. Was very tidy about it. Cunt. Also, weirdly, stole a spare (new/unused) water pump for the GTO and, I discovered tonight, my Haynes workshop manual and original owners manual too. Any oldschool Mitsubishi enthusiasts on here who are inclined towards the occasional burglary? Then I started having headlight problems. One side's lowbeam stopped working, the inner lights and the outer's highbeams were all good. I thought that the bulb was playing silly buggers, which was odd because they are not very old. I decided to take the opportunity to upgrade to semi-sealed so that I could actually see where I'm going at night. However when I plugged in the new unit it still didn't work. Balls. I thought "I'd better just check the fuses in case it's something super dumb like that" and discovered this: The fuses for "Upper R" and "Upper L" have melted halfway out of the fuse box. So. That'll do it I guess. They are both just regular 10A fuses which have not blown, despite getting hot enough to melt through the plastic housing and fuck things up good and properly. Electrics are not my thing at all so I am stumped as to the cause (has been fine for the past 3 years) and stumped for what to do. I guess find a good auto electrician. Suggestions here, if you have 'em: //oldschool.co.nz/index.php?/topic/38426-sr-rollas-1974-mitsi-colt-gto/page-3 Cheers.

LOLZ Nah.. got to treat it nice, might be mine one day…

So freaking hot, looks amazing. Must convince Richard to let me have a drive asap.

Yeah, no worries. I think the fit and quality on the rubbers seems pretty good, I've no complaints so far. No rattles, I spent quite a bit of time aligning the windows and getting the height right, so the fit is nice and snug. I'm pretty sure the bearings were packed well—I was super paranoid about not packing them enough after a couple of horror stories from friends who replaced bearings and then had to do them again a couple of weeks later due to not enough grease—so I think that side was just a little too tight.

So first of all, I drove from Auckland to Rotorua and back without any major issues. Was getting some noise from the front left wheel by the time I got home though. Fuck. No doubt something I cocked up when I put them in. The leading theory at the moment is that I just did it all back up too tight and the long drive at higher than norm speeds cooked it. Anyway, replaced and sorted now, seems to be okay. Next thing in trying to continue this project on a bit with effectively zero budget is getting the original wheels back in a better state. I'm going with a darker grey and decided to try the Lyndar paint system from Supercheap. I got a can of VW Pepper Grey mixed up, seems to be pretty good. This is the first coat, over a dark grey primer. Couple more coats, goes on easy without tooo much stippling/orange peel. I think it should come up good with a clearcoat Shiney bits just sitting in place

Finally got a couple of pics of these seals

The end at the rear is just cut off square and goes as far back into the pillar as you want—they are longer than needed so I trimmed them off to finish just past the end of the trim they clip into. The front end tapers down to a point, but doesn't flatten out completely and widen like the OEM ones. I positioned them so that they go forward a little past the front edge of the metal trim and tacked the end to the door frame with a small amount of adhesive to keep it held in place. This seems to seat against the closed door well. I think you could probably place them to end pretty much at the end of the metal trim track without the need to glue them down and they'd still fit without a gap when the door is closed. I'll get some pictures when I have a chance so you can see what I mean.

I got to see this in the flesh and meet the man himself on Saturday. I must say it's looking absolutely superb, the huge amounts of effort and hours are very evident in the quality of the result. The red looks amazing in the sunlight, pictures don't do it justice. It's going to be a real stunner. Very well done.

Boring progress ahead: So the rubbers above the windows have always been pretty ropey, they had had an extra foam strip glued on at some stage and they were getting hard and brittle. I managed to buy the last NOS item in the country from Mitsubishi (one side only) a while ago, for a retardedly high amount of money. Sadly, after sitting around all those years it turned out to be pretty average too. Already splitting after being on the car a few weeks: Not too chuffed about that. I also got some generic ones from Rare Spares but the cross section was so different that I thought they weren't likely to fit the same channel. Turns out that the indicated dimension is close enough that it can be squished into the rail and actually makes for a really good fit and a pretty easy install. The only difference being that the new seals do not wrap around on the inside but that is no big deal. Both sides are all fitted up now. I spent ages adjusting the window positioning on both sides to get the fit right and they are sitting pretty mint now. It looks much better, the rubber is firm but not too hard, seems nice.

Ha ha, is that your one? It seems to be a tricky model to find decent images of online to play with in Photoshop. I guess they are pretty rare and not as mainstream cool as Celicas, RXs and the like. I read an article on JNC which estimated only about 500 left. I got pads and rotors (and shoes to do the rears too) from BNT New Lynn. Once I got the part number for the rotors from you they were able to find a set easy enough. Turns out they are the same ones as used in early 80s Sigmas, which helps. I did the bearings and oil seals at the same time which partly came from Mitsubishi and partly from Saeco in Avondale.

Plans:

I finally managed to source all the parts to replace the pads, rotors and wheel bearings. Ended up having to go through three different places. Crusty old bits out: Shiney new bits in: All assembled, greased up and ready to go. Quite proud of myself, although not major by any stretch this is one of the biggest tasks I've taken on completely by myself and so far the car stops right and nothing has fallen off. Yay me.