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Tomble's 1983 Mitsubishi Starion GSR-X fumbling


tomble

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Tomble,

Most impressive plating and I hope I can learn from your very detailed posts above on this subject!!

A couple of things:

  1. Since your Mitsubishi Starion has been de-registered you will need to have her certified if you want to ever register and drive the car on NZ roads again. I've just been through this, well nearly done, and you ABSOLUTELY should contact them NOW as the way it is supposed to work is you work with them while you make repairs. They guide and approve as you go. The process is not designed to work with you showing up with a shiny restored car and wanting them to certify it at the end.
    This might not be an issue if all the metal work repairs are done by a professional shop ... ?
  2. How did you get your Yellow Chromate for your plating please? I have a Caswell kit and to get it from Australia, even for the tiniest amount, is $1000 due to shipping of an acid issues. So I'd really appreciate some insight here, or even maybe to purchase some from you ... ?

Love you and partners work

Pete

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One of the other things I was putting off was disassembling these.  The boots have some life left in them but with a desire to make things shiny and without a service history I figure it's best to clean them up.

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Screwdriver the clip up and cut the boots off, then follow the manual for disassembly.

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One end is off. All looks okay.

But... the other end can't be disassembled :(.  It's either to be re-packed and re-booted or the shaft is to be replaced entirely.  Well I guess which direction I know I'm going there, but it does mean that I'm not going to be sending it off to blasting/powdercoating.  I wouldn't trust that there wouldn't be any grit that gets in there, and the powder coating pre-process would cook any film of grease out and leave it all susceptible to corrosion.  So I'll just have to c-c-c-combo break and paint it myself.

I thought about whether to paint it first or re-assemble it first, and the idea of everything just sitting there collecting rust and dust while I mess around with getting a top coat thinner etc didn't sit right with me, so reassemble first and paint later.

 

But first there's a critical problem: Two of my rockauto boots are grey despite saying black on the package.  Oh no!

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So off to BNT I went.

The price of OCD is approx $44.

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I sandblasted and wire wheeled the metal back to back to new, borrowed my mate's boot clip installation tool and got dirty.

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The universal quality of the boots meant that they had a little more length to them than the old boots; I was expecting to have to cut them much shorter but I was only one rung away from the max diameter it'd fit.

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Not really much to say.  Some youtube videos got me through and reinstallation of everything was messy but painless when I realised the boot length thing.

The other side followed in short order.

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I greased 100% of the surface and now they can sit on a shelf waiting for me to buy that thinner and go through the faff of painting them... but I'll wait for the pieces to pile up and do a batch painting job.

 

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As a newbie one of the most confusing aspects of this process is "what the hell do I do with the struts?".

I learned fairly quickly the basics of what the bits do... the purposes of the shocks and the springs.  You can lower cars with smaller springs but that the springs themselves aren't linear in nature - some of it is stiffer than the rest - and so you can't just lop some of one end off (not sure how true this is for this car but whatever).  Then you also need to get inserts appropriate for the new height or they'll be too stiff (unless that's what you want).  I think that's right anyway.  As a dumbass who took all the suspension off first, I don't actually know what height I want this car to be. 

I can look at the red starion for reference, but I also have some new wheels I'd like to put on it which are much wider than stock that have no tires on them as of yet - so not sure how that affects things as I'd rather not roll the rear guards if I don't have to.  And I'd rather not get new tires for wheels that are not a sure thing right now as they'll need spacers which means cert and all that.  

Anyway less rambling.

I took all the struts apart to see what I was dealing with.

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Stella's shocks are absolute toast, leaky and they don't really seem to dampen anymore.  The fronts are bad, but the rears might as well just have hollow tubes.

I read on the interwebs in many places that whilst the front struts can easily accept replacement shock inserts, the rears are a sealed unit and the whole body has to be replaced. 

I cracked open the fronts easy enough with a pipe wrench.  The inserts have been replaced at some point in the past, unless Mitsubishi subcontracted to Monroe.  

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Not pictured: lots of oil that had filled up the housings.

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However the rears have a different style gland nut that I just couldn't crack.  I didn't want to round anything off or explode oil in my face or whatever so I left it.

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So things are lining up with internet observations and it also explains why the rears are so bad compared to the front; they're not as easily serviceable.

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Because this may shock you: the rear strut bodies don't exist new anymore.  I'm sure some OK ones exist in some enthusiast's stashes but hunting for 40 year old "good enough" gas struts just doesn't sound like an appealing path to me.

So:

- The rears on this car will fail WOF, but I can't get new ones.

- Therefore the rears need modifying (cert needed) or replacing with aftermarket coilovers (cert needed).

- Therefore I will need cert no matter what.

 

I'm not married to authenticity with this resto; if I have to replace something stock with more modern technology I'm not going to cry.  Insert justifications here - bottom line is that's my attitude towards what I'm doing; YMMV.  Coilovers sound like an excellent route; they'll solve the gas issue, make the "what height do I want" question obsolete, and I'd like to be able to dial in my stiffness.  There are three well-known budget coilover brands I found that are advertised as working with the Starion: XYZ, D2 and KSport (they still need the fronts modified to get the spindles on them).  Reviews of these brands appear to have been very poor in the past but they seem to have improved over time to "fine I guess".  There doesn't really seem to be a step up from the budgets for this car, at least not one that my dumb ass can see. 

My mate has fortune auto coilovers and swears by them so I got in contact with NZ's distributor, MLP.  They've got a welding service for old RWD cars' fronts and they were happy to provide that service for me.  But the rears?  Not so much.  He wasn't confident he could get it done up to cert and didn't generally seem interested.

I made a post over in the tech talk forum which was very useful.  @Bling mocked up what I suggested and pretty much says what I was expecting.  The fortune autos have a threaded bottom which are paired with bottoms made for various cars so the idea would have simply been to cut mine off at the bottom and thread them.  Didn't seem like an overwhelming task but I'm also not a certified welder or aware of certification rules.

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My mate even had some spare bottoms that were mis-delivered to him he gave me that I can throw at people for reference.  Again, seems totally doable to me, ugh.

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So anyway, I pointed at a lovely fellow named Malcom Lovett who said that he'd had Autolign modify his rear struts ten years ago with new Bilstein inserts.  So I packed it all up and went off to Autolign.

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Now the first thing I will say is that the guy at Autolign in Petone (I forget his name) is a top notch bloke who genuinely had my interests at heart.  He spent a solid half hour with me essentially deflecting any attempts I made to self-upsell and save me from myself.

  • We talked about modifying the housings to behave like the FA housings so I could fit new FA coilovers.  He either dismissed that idea so fast that I've forgotten the reasons why, or he misunderstood, "you want coilovers?  We can do it but it'll be spenny".  He talked me through the process for essentially fabricating coilovers from scratch and put a rough estimate out there that was.. spicy.  I thing the conversation may have shuffled on too fast and we lost each other in the confusion, but also he really knew what he was talking about so it's hard to believe he didn't understand what I was suggesting.  I might still pop by again in the future to discuss this.
  • He pawed through the Almighty Tome of Shocks and found that the starions' front inserts aren't being made anymore.  But with a bit of fiddling he determined that there are some MR2 ones that would essentially fit.
  • He was adamant that the gland nuts on the rears could be removed by an engineering shop and there'd be a replaceable gas strut inside.  I raised my eyebrow.  He then did a quick bit of research and changed the tune to "oh.. yeah we can modify them to take new struts, would need to add a spacer...".  He confirmed that he could ship them up to Auckland and they'd be able to do it all, but he actually advocated taking it to a shop first to disassemble just to cut down on shipping costs for me.  
  • To confirm what I already knew, yes this'd be certification territory even if it's essentially just restoring to factory condition.
  • Likewise he also asked if I intend to lower the car - as these are not adjustable, I'd need to go in with a specific ride height in mind.  Not much point in me paying to get them shipped up and modified only to have to ship them back up later when I decide what I want right?
  • When asked what he'd do, he said he'd get XYZ coilovers, they'd be perfectly fine and way cheaper than a bespoke thing that likely would be just as performant.  Autolign doesn't stock these and he was clear that if he got them in they'd be paying retail price and passing the margin on to me, as I say, really looking out for my wallet.

Overall a bit dejecting, I was hoping to get this cloudy aspect of the rebuild checked off, but I guess that'll just have to wait.

So the plan now is to initially get the car back on the old shitty struts and figure out the wheels and ride height from there, then get the rears modified (involving cert guy from day 1 as suggested to me) and figure out what the hell is happening to the springs if I intend to lower her.

Probably jumping the gun a little here but I cleaned it all up to go to the blasters/powdercoaters (or in the case of the rear strut bodies, just cleaned).  Here the batch is just after parts wash, looking deceptively non-rusty.

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That was a few weeks ago, they'll take another couple weeks to get back to me and I'll just keep on carrying on with the myriad of other things that need doing.

If anyone has any alternate ideas or information or advice or suggestions please do hit us up.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

I finally stopped being lazy and spent the last hour resizing and reuploading all the images on page 1 and many on page 2 to fix the slow download issues.

Page 1 went from 498mb to 30mb!  And wow what a great reminder of how much we've already done.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

Earlier this (Nov) month I got reassemblin'.  The rear hubs were the first target - everything was powder coated and I had the shiny new bits for them.

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The blind bearing would have been a pain in the arse to get to the bottom of this shaft as I have no pipes or anything but fortunately the metal sleeves (one pictured here) could be stacked on each other to create a good surface for a race drive to sit on.  

The key would be to make sure both shafts have been bearing'd before continuing, otherwise I'd only have one sleeve and wouldn't be able press the other bearing on.  Wouldn't that be silly!

...

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So uh anyway here's one of them done!  All greased with wheel bearing grease and torqued up.

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The nut unfortunately requires stupid amounts of torque, more than I can apply with it freely on the bench.  It was a massive mission to remove those nuts in the first place, getting good leverage on the hub without marring the paint is probably impossible with what I have so I'm going to have to do it later when it's on the car somehow.  For now it's just dakka dakked real good.

 

Um... and the other hub is here!  Just as easy, yup!

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