Mitch.W

It continued...

Then it was all back together and mostly rust free, The car sat for awhile more while i tried to find a panel beater to tidy the car up, ended up flying a good friend up from Chch to palmy one weekend and we had the car panelled and primed in 1 weekend, ended up doing all in the door jams, all windows out etc and painted it in the OEM red 

Chucked it back together and started to enjoy the car again 

During all of this i swapped the cars wiring to all AE86 wiring so it was all oem plug and play with the 4age and in tank fuel pump which was nice, i also sourced almost everything for a black interior out of japan in hopes of completing a full GT Apex interior swap on the car too which is much nicer than brown. 

so, afew years later,  

basic run down, got the new motor and j160 in, being doing plenty of drift days around nz in it and having heaps of fun

Then i decided it was finally time to tidy this car up, i had always wanted a levin notch so swapped the front end over to facelift levin parts and purchased a goodline bonnet. i somehow managed to twist Matts arm into working his magic and doing rust work on it for me during the 2nd lock down, what started off as "just 2 little patches under the tail lights and some bog in the guard" to the rear end of the car off and 70 hours or so of work. 

Got the car home and unloaded it, first thing first was to clean up the interior which looks like it hadn’t had a clean since it was new.

after a good water blast and bissell, with some other chemicals the difference is unreal. got really pedantic with it and cleaned the floor under the carpet, still happy to see no rust. 

other boring stuff like polishing the car trying to make the paint look as good as it can while I’m waiting for my savings to grow and parts go arrive. it came with a really cool old TRD gearknob that he said it had been in the car since he owned it

Thats about it all Caught up, working on finding another pair of SSR mk3 for the rear but i want original lips 9j A type which is proving difficult but OEM lips are so much nicer, also saving for an airbag setup because im too old for low cars now. 

If anyone has a good 1gge kicking around it would be great too. 

Its been a long time coming, i've been wanting to get back into the X chassis game for a few years but finding a nice spec car these days is super difficult. i decided my only otion was to try and hunt down some of the ones hidden away in the corners of nz with owners that don't know what they have. 

2 years ago on a motorbike trip around the south island i was told of a gx51 in Invercargill that was sitting at a workshop, so i stopped by and there it was, door rusted off, fist size rust holes in panels, weirdly rego on hold for the last 20 years, i decided not to pursue this and still no sign of this blue chaser i had heard of. 

I had seen and been sent photos of a blue and silver gx61 chaser and a friend had met the guy at a swap meet 6 or so years ago but at the time he wanted "too much" by todays standards it would have been a steal. funnily enough, if you google search "GX61 Chaser" this exact car pops up on the Wikipedia page as the main photo, unsure who actually changed it to this car. 

so i had a rego number and knew he lived in southland somewhere, i started investigating managed to pull some strings and got a name, good start. 

I went onto the white pages and started cold calling everyone with the same last name with not much response, until i was met with an older lady on the other end of the phone, i had the name of her father that had passed away 20 odd years ago (turns out this car was still registered in his name), She mentioned her brother looks after it but he is very hard to get ahold of, she gave me his phone number and just hold me to keep calling until he picks up as he is useless at answering the phone, after a day or so of calling each hour he picked up and after a bit of an awkward conversion he started to come around and was interested in selling, he said he had 2 other cars that i have to take with it also. Turns out he also owns the gx51 i went and found years prior to this. He sent some photos through, we talked numbers and managed to convince some mates it will be a great way to spend a weekend driving to Invercargill with car trailers to pick up a bunch of rusty toyotas. 

when i arrived i wasn't disappointed, the car is incredibly tidy for something that has 340,000k's on the clock and has been used to tow trailers around most of its life. 

one of the parts cars the rear end had rusted completely off, we salvaged any good parts and scrapped the rest and dragged the "good" parts car home

Bruce the owner for the last 30 years or so kept it garaged, fish oiled it everywhere and kept it in pretty good condition overall, i didn't really let him know my true intentions with the car, he had a garage full of 20-30 perfectly restored american cars and some in the process. 

Discussion - 

long time no update, basiclly finished building this thing then with about 200km's of testing it was time to hit the brass monkey with the boys, i had the only breakdown if the trip losing the nut which holds the shifter linkage on, easy fix. 

This thing tractored along great for something not made for gravel, only had 1 river crossing i had to push the bike through as the air filters were too low. i deff took it some places it shouldn't go and tested out the strength of the sump on some rocks but its awesome so fun to ride, the only downside is the seat is extremely uncomfy and the loud exhaust gets exhausting after 7+ hours or riding at once. 

the time has come to sell this thing and move on to the next build so if your keen ill do a os/ppsc discount. learnt some much building this but i suck at owning stuff.

Bit of a pic dump for you guys 10 days 3500k's and 3 dudes. 

decided i couldn't make the twin shotgun pipes work without alot of testing and i need the bike on the road sooner so i cut them up and bought more bends and a 2-1 

proceeded to chop them up, chop the rhs header up and spent an evening getting the headers equal length, went through afew designs and tacking then deciding i didn't like how it looked ended up with this and bought a purpose built moto stainless muffler have them on all my bikes and cant recommend them enough. my welding has deff gotten less tidier now i don't tig day in day out now, still fine just not super pretty and consistent like it was 1.5 years ago. also got acouple purpose built moto guards for the front and back to finish it off. 

will get a sound video but it sounds super rad nice and crisp and was worth the time to get the headers equal length. 

still needs black pinstripes on the tank to pull it all together but its about ready for me to take it gravel bash and drop it.

got this thing all finished up, stickers put on to make it go faster. 

maybe made it go too fast? took it out on Saturday for a bit of a shakedown at manfeild and its knocking quite bad so i ripped the motor out on Saturday night in preparation for a new one and a new gearbox as the current one doesn't like going into gears  and ill convert to hydraulic clutch while i'm at it too.

will slap a quick coat of white paint in there too to get rid of the last yellow on the car

forgot to update this, heaps has been done. 

Got some door cards cut out and chucked them in 

Interior all finished up

made an exhaust, before. and its now on the car and done perfect 4age raspiness 

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and thats about where i'm up to, car is getting stickers this week, 

i did some test laps of the street this weekend and it runs great everything works pretty well, i have my first race meeting in 2 weeks so hopefully it makes it through the day without breaking too much 

got these high pipes made up today, turned out super sweet looking, only downside is they are wayyy too loud so i'm going to have a go at making some baffles/mufflers. 

once i get them quiet enough that i'm happy with it ill make up some heatshields for them and a-couple of hangers too. 

(please ignore the terrible car in background its not mine)

got my fortune auto coil overs welded them up and installed them along with my "big" brake kit. 

gave the diff a quick wire wheel and paint black before i slapped it back in. the underside of this car is so grimey/caked in dirt i need to get under it and water blast everything off.

also got windows installed and a bunch of other small things done but im useless at documenting stuff.

Rolled it outside and gave it a quick wash, the new height is nice and all the arms seem to be at an okay angle but hopefully it handles good because i don't want to raise it/rear needs to come down 20mm

been cranking out getting this painted the last month or so, my first time painting so didn't turn out great but its all white now. 

painted the body this weekend, never want to paint a rollcage again either, wasn't much fun 

couldn't contain my excitement so put it all together last night and cut the dashboard to fit 

Next on the list of things to do is install all the new suspension parts up front with new bushes and ball joints etc. whip the diff out and install the new raito hopefully and all new suspension parts back there too build a rowdy side exit exhaust and then try and break it 

Been busy scraping all of the yellow off the car, whoever painted it last did a terrible job and the paint has been flaking off/coming off when you stick tape to it so thats been fun. 

also got paper back from MSNZ for my homologation, stripped all the sound deadening out of the inside and its all sanded ready for primer and top coat.   

also did the rear tubs, cut out as much as i could for future slam/travel.