gibbon

Hatch and rad louvres on, side skirts and front garnish on... so just the front and back bumpers to go. Front bumper skeleton is off getting sandblasted, it's pretty shabby so will need to have some plates put in it I meataxed the downpipe together before deciding to get cute and run the wastegate outpipe separately for as long as possible for MAXIMUM POWER. so waiting on a matching 1.75" flexi to arrive. Then I'll take the bumper skeleton and tacked up exhaust to an actually competent welder at work to finish off Managed to sunburn everything from my biceps to my nipples putting the downpipe together, spicy! Tyres have gone flat from boredom. Wheels need a polish too I guess. Bet those friggin brakes have seized again in the meantime

more stazzin' occured today, with pics to follow. in a sudden outburst of "i refuse to do work at work", I hauled the side skirts, rear bumper/spoiler and front light panels into the hangar and got them stripped back and repainted. Glad I elected to strip back, the front garnish *looked* nice but had all sorts of rusty nasties starting to form beneath the paint. Made the same mistake AGAIN with the rear spoiler ("I'll seal it up with silicone and then paint over the top!") proving myself an irredeemable retard. When I put the skirts back on I'll just try to discreetly seal them up without painting over the top In the sikk mawds department I've started tacking together a 2.5" dump pipe to replace the existing mishmash. Also seeking an appropriately 80's headunit so yeah no pics right now but haven't seen a starion on the projects front page for a while so decided to bump it up

I used amayama, got the usual thing everyone says, part not in stock... they refunded my money though. Does make you wonder why they list stuff they know they don't have

Been paintin'. de-masked and in need of the meke polish but otherwise pretty excited to start bolting stuff back together. If only I could find where I put anything Played a LOT of huey lewis during painting to try and correctly channel the 80s spirit. Yuppie rock in the background, assuring the wife that everything was going just super great, white powder everywhere.. this must've been what it was like to be a stockbroker back in '85

Oh yeah it needs it lol Next question - painting rubbery plasticy bumpers, should I add some kind of plasticizer to the paint? Old paint was cracked to buggery

quiet day at work again today so I got back down to real business. Blew some primer on the guards to see what I was dealing with. So many chips, cracks, fuzzy lines from drowning in twelve coats of paint.... I flipped them over and saw no dents or anything in the sheet metal so thought bugger it, I'll paint strip them One guard is a donor and obviously from an earlier year stazza, hence the welded up nose mirror hole. funny enough I swear the metals had different sheens to them... import vs domestic treatments perhaps? Otherwise my hunch paid off and they were all pretty good honest metal underneath. Feels good to not just blast more high build and paint on top of everything. Can proudly boast that the car is a 1/8 bare metal jobbie now Paint stripper, bonderite C-IC surface prep, zinc phosphate primer onto the bare metal followed by strontium chromate altra-bond. I'm the script kiddie of paint prep and basically blazed away with carcinogens for the better part of the day. This car is going to be a rolling fukushima. fume extraction was less comprehensive so feeling wooo Couple of little dents but otherwise we're in business. There are some weld repairs at the bottom of the guards that I didn't disturb - they look good from the inner side of the metal, I wasnt really interested in grinding bog out just to put it back in again I also painted the first door and it came out... average. Forgot to get a pic but just a reminder that paint hides nothing lol. Painted the B pillar vents and they came out GREAT (could be the fumes talking)

Yip just a single stage. Our machines at work are just painted in a top coat and look pretty good, i just figured itd be hardly any more effort to clear coat it now... now or never really Still I'm always down for less work So what's next then, 1500 wet sand and a polish?

Thanks for the replies guys, I'm just starting with a single door as a test. 2k white is on and looks to have come out ok, a bit of dust though. My "complete car paint job kit" didnt come with clearcoat, is clearcoating a personal choice too?

Should I wet sand my high build primer? Worried the top coat won't stick if it's too smooth

couldve done more on the car today but too pissy about the paint can debacle. havent had a beer in two days but this shit is pushing me to the limit

had another wonderful day of pushing shit up hill and trying to paint my car with it. decided that the amount of faffing around with the side spoilers warranted a can of high build primer, to save cleaning the gun a trillion times. drove to town and bought one. pulled the trigger and it promptly fountained paint all over my fucking hand. drove back to town and hit up the paint shop guys for an exchange. "no, you mustn't have shaken it up enough, here.... OK i've cleaned the nozzle out and gave it a real good shake up, works like a charm now" drove back home feeling like a bit of an idiot. went back to work on the car, grabbed the can and hit the trigger: if you can make out the picture through the tears of rage which somehow permeated the camera lens itself, this is what happens when a motherfucking geyser of paint from a shitbag fucking paint can hits 1k filler primer. well what you can see is from after i quickly wiped it off.. too bad it'd already taken the paint with it. not sure if leaving to dry would've been any better. guess i shouldve tested it first :/ didn't go back to the paint shop again, too mad

awesome man, if theyre the goods then I'll have them in a heartbeat

Hey while I've got you on the line, do you have any lowering springs for a starion on the shelf? This thing sits super high (might be clearance for the kit - will be funny to find out) Olds cool can do cobras for about 450 shipped, mookeh in the USA can do a similar price, with 250 of that being shipping! So probably worth it if I can get them into a container or something

I'm not sure I could pick the difference between an aerotech and a stock 3 piece spoiler? (This one is definitely aerotech, its etched on the underside) One of the mount holes had turned into a big rust hole and another had previously been repaired... I got the buggered one fixed but did end up re-drilling them, I've just been quite diligent with sealing them up (I hope) I've already come to terms with the fact that this car isn't going to be perfect, I'm simply not a good enough bodywork guy. So I'm trying to compromise and come up with something that isn't an embarrassment, but will actually still get finished eventually

made some pretty big fuckups over the last week or two, lads. Blew some high-build primer over the body and that came out pretty good at least. Yucky stripes on the roof, my compressor decided it was no longer self-regulating so I had to manually shut it off every minute or so to stop things going pop. definitely need to get that sorted before I do anything beyond laying waste with the primer Decided I had to smooth the spoiler into the body - it'll never fit perfectly so shit was always going to get trapped between it and the body, and ultimately rot out. So I banged some sealant (KD bond+seal) on the side pieces and fixed them on. I was originally going to blend them in with bog, but when some of the sealant squicked out the side, I thought "why not just mask it up and blend it in with the sealant?" So I did just that. Then it dried and didn't look very good.... and you can't sand this stuff.... so I ended up trimming all the carefully-shaped sealant off and then reformed the blend with filler Then I made another fuckup. At the top of the spoiler where it blends in, the radius forms a little valley all the way along. And so I thought "why not just pour paint into the valley, it'll self-level and come out perfectly smooth?" as it turns out, paint doesn't like being poured in real thick, and it all cracked and just turned into a bag of roaring ass. So I scraped THAT back, and reshaped it with some filler. Two cockups from being a lazy ass SOB this is the Valley of Death. Best of all it's 90% hidden by the window and trim so really it's a lot of work for no great reward. blending this fucking spoiler in has nearly beaten me tbh. I wonder if I should have just owned the seam. masked up a tidy, straight seam of bog or even sealant, painted it up, and have it visible through the paint rather than spending hours trying to make it all blend in. It's a 4mm bead of sealant around a bodykit, who gives a shit? I probably will end up doing this around the sideskirts as it's less likely to root the paint if they ever have to come off started prepping the guards too. Thankfully they're pretty straight, some meaty repairs at the bottom but it's all steel and again will be under the kit

I'm an aircraft mechanic... pays just well enough to pay a local fella to do rust repair works of art for me Regarding holiday pay I'm in a similar situation, the boss semi-seriously informed me that I wouldn't be getting my full payout if I ever left, because the company would go under trying to pay me out lol. Typical thing though, once you start taking a bit of ownership its hard to just take time off and let others deal with it

Man we need to try and close up shop for the year every week... fucking phone has been ringing off the hook all day. Looks like I'm not getting my early holiday :/

another quiet enough day at work to get some stazzin' done. paintstripped the donor door, not a single spot of bog to be found, she's honest as. very happy about that. ground off a little bit of surface rust and converted the dregs, then a coat of filler primer which came out pretty good considering the 20 knot crosswind. I will have to bog up a couple of shopping trolley dents but otherwise it's all on track the next thing to look at is the area around the wraparound rear spoiler - it'd been originally faired into the body with some substance which is absolutely fucking rock hard, and I think protruded a little too much too. I'm currently looking at not fairing the kit into the body - it makes removing anything down the line a shit as obviously everything cracks. So I'll have to chisel off all the shit that's on there to allow a really clean looking joint. thought about smoothing the spoiler in and leaving the skirts looking distinct but I'd rather keep it consistent, I dunno

December shaping up to be Starion Month so far, loving it

This doesn't really belong here but not worth starting a new thread over: I was wondering what the weights listed on the dataplate relate to?

Looks like the previous owners left you a fine trove of treasures under the seats I would recommend getting internal access to the upper firewall box section and have a real good look for rust around the base of the windscreen and the back side of the bonnet hinges... hope your machine had been garaged! All that gadgetry in your centre console I believe is the VELNAS computer which is pretty retro chic

sort of an update, more to show that I'm still alive. Maybe not for long, having inhaled a few cubic meters of bog dust over the last couple of months. Caught up with the panelbeater as he had to weld up my other car to get it's WOF. I asked if he knew any good painters "sure I do, remember that Escort that was in my workshop? they just painted it, it came out absolutely awesome.... cost the guy about 12k if i recall" So yeah I'll be handling the paint job at home. So i've been bogging and sanding and bogging and sanding and bogging and sanding and bogging and sanding and bogging and sanding and bogging and sanding and boggind and sanging sag broggin snd srntibafhfsda;lkjdj,ngbdk;ljhfad;lkjs,k learned a lot of dumb and obvious lessons with bog (which I somehow hadn't clicked on to in my youth); 1. every little bit you put on, that you don't actually need, is going to have to come off again 2. just because you have some left over, doesn't mean there's still somewhere that needs that little more more added to it. 3. no the paint won't hide that I also chassis black'd all the sills, front quarters under the guards, and in around the rear light recesses. I haven't really looked at the bonnet, guards or donor RH door, just been concentrating on the shell. It's all there, it's all straight... just there sure are a lot of little nicks and scratches when you start hunting for every single one of them. my favourite pastime recently has been obsessing over this section just in front of the passenger rear wheel. There was a little patch of rust here which had cracked the paint, and the more i picked, the more came off, including over the ridge of the body line. So when I sanded it all back, the radius of the ridge was sharp in some places, and smoother in others. Then of course I started looking around all the other ridge lines on the car and could suddenly see where they'd been sanded back over the years for various repairs. So I spent a considerable amount of time shaping tiny ridges of bog to try and sharpen up the lines in a number of places. Meanwhile everything that's going under the bodykit got a shrug and a scuff. pick your battles. a while back I picked up a sweet tubular exhaust manifold to suit a sohc 4g63 (maybe off someone here?). but the turbine inlet port was too big for the teeny weeny starion turbo. likewise the stock downpipe is horrific and I wanted to replace it with something nicer, which would require porting the turbine housing of said teeny weeny turbo in order to make it worthwhile. So i said bugger it and bought a small 16g subie TD05H and lucky dip chinese pot metal ebay 8cm turbine housing that at least will match the manifold and downpipe. likewise the subie compressor housing isn't really suited for starion duty so that's another thing to go hunting for Then I cleaned up the garage a bit because I'm fucking sick of bogging and sanding and would rather do literally anything else. cleaned out a whole nest of tail lights which had been breeding up in the back of the garage, yuck The boss reckons we'll knock off for the year at the end of this week, so then I should have some time to get some actual progress made

Working now mate. I use Brave browser so the government cant beam thoughts into my head or something, I'd say that's what was causing the pics to not load

Am I the only one not seeing some (but not all) of the pics posted by Tomble? In both this thread and the build thread itself?

Ok swing and a miss from me sorry, just realized that none of my distributors have a vacuum advance unit God there must be a million of them sitting in the back of various sheds