gibbon Posted July 12, 2020 Share Posted July 12, 2020 I last owned a starion almost a decade ago and it didn't end well. Since then I've gone on to be a bad owner of a number of other cars, and I can't say I ever kept an eye out for another one, or really even thought about them. Doesn't help when you literally never ever see one on the road ever ever ever. I was doing the obligatory "old coupe under x amount" search on Trademe and this one came up. I actually knew a guy who owned it for YEARS back in Hamilton, and he'd always taken good care of it. As it turned out it was also advertised for sale here on OS. Anyway I chucked a bid on it for fun and never thought about it again. I'd had a bit to drink and somehow didn't see the red flag come up. Fast forward to when I got an email late at night a couple days later, my blood ran cold lol. The missus was fucking furious The seller was a good fella, straight up about the issues with the car, he'd bought it off the previous owner that I knew but didn't get far before having to get rid of it. It had a cracked windscreen but he arranged to get it replaced - didn't get that far unfortunately as the rot around the lower part of the screen would have to be dealt with first. So it came up with the screen taped on, workmate had to collect it for me as the missus was still too angry. In the garage, starting to strip it down for an assessment. Didn't get far before the list started growing. The good news is that the motor had been rebuilt a few years prior (with receipts), Vr4 pistons, balance shafts removed etc. Couple of grand spent there. Oh and a serious crapload of spare parts. I have a pic somewhere but can't find it right now. The car was running, but not great. No handbrake, offset by the fact that all the brakes were frozen. Power steering pump noisy but that's so far down the priority list I could barely care THIS was the bigger issue. Where the car was straight, it was bloody straight. And where it was rusty, it was bloody rusty. I'd written off my last starion over corrosion like this and I'd be damned if I'd let it happen again. Plus pride was on the line for my accidental purchase, I couldn't just write it off. 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted July 12, 2020 Author Share Posted July 12, 2020 The green and silver rust converter earnestly applied by someone down the line was reminiscent of band-aids on a terminal cancer patient. Turns out after all the love and attention the car received back when I knew it, it'd somehow ended up parked under a tree for a few years which basically rooted it Inside of one of the guards. Both were completely blown out at the bottom. Someone had cut the top of the firewall out to assess the rot beneath the scuttle, it'd punched through in about half a dozen places This was rapidly getting beyond my mediocre ability to fix. Workmate knew a panelbeater who worked from home and offered decent prices. I tee'd a time for him to come and have a look, then lockdown hit. So I stared at this rotten old thing for a month or two. Actually I did a bit more than that, fixed the brakes up, and pulled the turbo to bits for fun But first some more corrosion gore 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted July 12, 2020 Author Share Posted July 12, 2020 I pulled the dashboard and wiring looms to get them out of the way, had a bit of a panic here as I thought the floor had been dodgily repaired with fibreglass, but on second inspection it's clutch fluid leaking from the blown master eating up the dynamat. Here's where the water has rotted through the scuttle, through the upper firewall, and is running down to the bottom of the A pillar, to rot out the sill and onto the floor. Door hinge attach points are mercifully solid. But it's the reason all the wiring had to come out. LHS was marginally better so the (extremely rare) ECU hadn't gotten wet at least Lockdown was dragging on so I started to peel the scuttle back, to just find rotten shit everywhere. Had a look around for donor vehicles (good luck) 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted July 12, 2020 Author Share Posted July 12, 2020 Pulled the whole scuttle panel in the end. Rot had even punched through the side of the heater duct for good measure. I've got a bunch of other photos but you get the idea moisture defying gravity to rot the underside of the scuttle panel because nothing nice is ever allowed to happen. Lockdown ended, replacement scuttle arrived but tbh was only marginally better, I was a little upset about that. Pictures somewhere but can't find em Panelbeater showed up for a look, he was surprisingly upbeat about the whole thing. Gave me a fantastic price to do the job, I was stoked as. This is where I feel like a bit of an ass as a lot of oldschoolers would just post up a few quips and a montage of them fixing this shit like it was no big a deal, but I have zero ability to weld. So yup, a good chunk of my "project" was just to pay another guy to fix it up. Sorry. Actually it was extremely liberating to sit on the couch with a beer knowing that some other poor bastard was wrangling the rot out of that old hulk. Panelbeater was impressed with how many pieces I'd managed to pull the car into. I've got a bunch of other pics but need to work out how to resize them 8 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted July 12, 2020 Author Share Posted July 12, 2020 The buggered scuttle Stuff like this is what ultimately made me realise I could never fix this myself - seam/upper side of the firewall blown through beneath a box section stiffener - the whole section would need to be unpicked to get at it. So I loaded it up and didn't have to look at it for another couple of months. In the meantime I contacted the original owner who I don't think was 100% thrilled about who had ended up with his pride and joy - surely he remembered the sik modz I did to my old starion back in the day. Anyway he had a bunch of other spare bits and pieces still in the garage, so popped by and donated them to me. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post gibbon Posted July 12, 2020 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 12, 2020 Here's how she left: here's how she came back: The next couple of posts are pics provided by the panelbeater Rebuilt upper firewall LH section New heater duct box built up/tack welded in You can see where he's unpicked that box section to get at the rot underneath (top of the pic) 10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post gibbon Posted July 12, 2020 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 12, 2020 Box popped off and seam rebuilt Box back on again Patching the holes in the firewall - I did have a go at doing this myself before I realised just what a job it was going to be to do it properly Soo easy to do when it's just an OS montage. Rot at the bottom of the A pillar post removed. A side note, the underside of the car is actually in fantastic condition. Patched up, simple as. RH upper firewall getting the same treatment. Box section off, rot out and the whole lot cleaned back more new than old 11 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post gibbon Posted July 12, 2020 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 12, 2020 RH box ready to go on Poor old panel man had to use the donor scuttle, there simply weren't any other options. He made a hell of a go with what little I'd given him though Lined up for repairs.. everything in that missing middle section ended up being scratch built as neither panel was any good. Little bit of rust around the RH rear wing getting fixed, plus the obligatory rear hatch seal rust getting sorted out Meanwhile I'd been given a spare inlet manifold and decided to make a flange for it at work in case I had a sudden attack of sik modz and decided to go MPI in the future. I also threw tools everywhere for good measure (pictured) and got a LOT of aluminum in my coffee Back at home I wire wheeled the remaining rust out of the upper windscreen frame and brunox'd it Little bit of surface rust around the spare wheel well got the same treatment. Had to abandon garage at this point as the Brunux fumes were starting to take hold 13 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted July 12, 2020 Author Share Posted July 12, 2020 Discussion thread Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post gibbon Posted July 12, 2020 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 12, 2020 couple more pics for fun had the old scuttle sandblasted. Lucky it wasn't going back on RH door is kooked. Panelman said he could fix it but it'd be a fuckaround. LH door is spotless. In fact I've never seen a starion door rot out at the top like that Donor door has a tiny ding in it but is otherwise perfect. I have an entire unused container of bog (starion strength) which I have lost the hardener for, I'm disproportionally upset about this EDIT: found the hardener, score! My offspring attempting to torch the project. This guy is also the reason the brake pins went missing and I only found them days later when I turned the dryer on 7 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post gibbon Posted July 13, 2020 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 13, 2020 Didn't do much today because I decided to do actual work at work instead. sandblasted and painted the battery box, pedal boxes and some stereo bracket things Had another look at the clutch-fluid-eaten "dynamat" when the brake pedal was going back in. The wiser amongst you already probably saw the previous mention of it and said to yourself "that aint dynamat lol". so I chipped more of it back.... oddly enough it looks like theres some impact damage (cant really see from the pic) punching INTO to cabin (by a quarter inch or so). No idea what might have caused that. Anyway the good news is that it's isolated enough that I can get back to it later without having to backtrack too much. Next time it goes to the welders I'll be driving it, I swear. I was going to seal up all the laps in the firewall but can't find my caulking gun. Probably go for a bit of a shop this weekend. Some of the repair work needs a bit of finishing up too so I'll be on the hunt for more bog 11 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted July 19, 2020 Author Share Posted July 19, 2020 got absolutely shat on by the weather over the weekend, garage had a bit of flooding but I was ready for that from experience so everything was already up off the ground. Poor old triumph took a bit of a bath from a leaky roof but no damage done. I went on another sikk modz tangent because the CA18DET inlet manifold arrived. Port spacing is unnaturally similar, both Mitsi and Nissan even decided to go with the same PSSP PSSP layout so I get the injector bosses in the correct ports. It's quite a strange design, the primary ports get ALL the fuel, the secondary is air only. The DASH engine opens it's secondary inlet valves around 2500 rpm if I recall, things might get a bit strange for a millisecond there as the injector has to double it's output, and God only knows how the charge will mix. Lucky the injectors are so close to the head that the air won't have much of a head start. In retrospect the factory setup is even worse with the injectors way upstream where Mitsubishi originally lazily wedged them in a hollowed out carburetor back in '82 and called it a day. The DASH engine activates the valves at the rockers a la VTEC, the Nissan deactivation system is a bit more agricultural with a TVIS style butterfly which had already been removed from this manifold. The old butterfly shaft bearing hole might be a good place for a vacuum signal. The coolant port was never going to work so that got trimmed off and went into the bin. Unfortunately the mount hole positions are a bit shit, there's only about 4 studs along the top of the manifold, and two of them are DIRECTLY under the injector bosses. I thought I had a solution by flipping the manifold upside down but that ended up misaligning the other ones even more. Decided in the end I'll pull those studs and countersink those holes on the flange. That'll allow it to be secure, and prevent it from fouling on the injector bosses. The only real downside is that that means the flange will have to go on first, then the rest of the manifold be assembled up against it, rather than it being a nice complete unit. The injector slots in the top of the port may be a problem too, right now they'd effectively be firing into a wall, I only have the thickness of the 7mm flange to try and relieve that. Might end up making a second flange to double the thickness and give me some more room to play with. Drilled and tapped the flange to suit, couldn't find my tap handle amongst the mess so did the bugger in the vice. The manifold spacing is extremely close to how it wouldve been on the Nissan engine. I could've just about used the factory upper manifold too. The flange will require a little bit more reshaping and probably some hysol/devcon to help build up the larger CA primary ports to match the smaller mitsi ones. The secondary ports are pretty bloody good and will only need a tickle. Instead I went with quad throttles for the cool factor, they line up so well, the width is perfect, I could've actually just shaved the eyebrows and gotten away without an adaptor plate, if not for (again) the unfortunate position of the mount lugs, one of the three hanging out in the middle of nowhere, and a second one over an existing, larger threaded hole. Thought about back drilling and tapping the throttle bodies so I could bolt them up however I liked but don't actually want to permanently modify them - as we all know they're the second most overpriced engine component on earth (after the RFB 300zx airflow meter) so if the whole thing comes to naught I'd like to be able to on-sell them Offered the throttle bodies up, became vaguely aware that it was beginning to look like a bit of a tower of shit tbh. I'll give it a clean up and a paint perhaps. By the time the (outlandishly large) 4AGE plenum goes on it'll be quite a big unit hanging off the side, I wonder if I can brace it a bit better. This is assuming I even use it. The 4AGE inlet I bought didn't come with a TPS but the starion one bolted up perfectly after a minute with a flat file lolol. I believe they work opposite the factory toyota ones but it looks like Tunerstudio has provisions for that. Next project might be cleaning up the bench 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted August 23, 2020 Author Share Posted August 23, 2020 Been a slow couple of months, lighting in the garage is garbage so doesn't exactly lend itself to crawling around an interior or doing paint prep, which is exactly what needs to be done got all the heater doodads installed (and replaced the dreaded tiny water pipe that lives on the heater box, thanks to starquest forums for pointing that one out) dashboard back in... not gonna lie, not every single nut and bolt made it back in. I call it "interior by Lotus". Previous owner fitted some swank white faced gauges... however I also have a prized '83 digital dashboard in the cupboard which is kinda tempting. Windscreen back in and the engine and turbo back together, just the airbox left to go. Had so much fun routing allll the wiring back around the engine bay, gosh I've just started scuffing the body back for painting but unfortunately only have a half-hour attention span before I start half assing any given job (ESPECIALLY) panel stuff, so it's slow going. At this point I also heard my son sitting in the Triumph shouting "sticky! sticky!" so had to hurriedly drop tools and intervene Bonus question: what on earth do the weight numbers mean on the dataplate? 8 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post gibbon Posted December 13, 2020 Author Popular Post Share Posted December 13, 2020 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 12 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted December 16, 2020 Author Share Posted December 16, 2020 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 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted January 4, 2021 Author Share Posted January 4, 2021 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 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted January 6, 2021 Author Share Posted January 6, 2021 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 2 1 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted January 22, 2021 Author Share Posted January 22, 2021 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) 8 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted February 7, 2021 Author Share Posted February 7, 2021 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 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gibbon Posted May 28, 2021 Author Share Posted May 28, 2021 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 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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