Tomble's adorable go cart / distraction / Alto Works

[tomble]

Fiiiine

Doug's happy 4x4 key arrived before the weekend, fortunately.

 

We put it somewhere safe until it was time to crack back into things.

 

It is indeed 4x4mm on the dot and has a fair bit of length for me to play with. I gave it a quick test when i got it to see how it fit, and it seems to be as people on the interwebs describe it should be - firm, but no need to tap it in, and no play.

 

I tidied up one end, cut it to length and tidied the other.

 

Fits gud! This let us complete the timing chain, but not before a bunch of thinking to make sure that the chain links were 100% where they should be. I'd rotated the crank twice with the plastic key when verifying everything, so the chain marks had moved on. Nothing some link counting doesn't solve!

 

The oil pump/chain case goes on next. The bolts were a bit manky so I tidied them up,

 

We schmooe'd the edges and this one little bolt hole in the middle,

 

Girlface lubed up,

 

Then we increased how much the engine looks like an engine by at least 15%.

This also completed the water pump job, as the final bolt goes through to the block.

 

The next morning it was time to tackle the crank pulley. I cracked out some iron and some old bolts to hand-fashion a special tool to hold the crank in place.

 

At about 30 degrees (out of the 70 desired) it was clear that this wasn't quite enough.

 

It's times like these I wish I had a welder, and the knowledge to use it. But I don't so... I hammered it back to straight, tapped it into the pulley for extra seating, notched the bar (weakening it further but what can you do) to allow the socket to still fit and then found an old socket to sit on one of the bolts to provide some rigidity against the other side of the bar.

It barely worked, but it worked.

 

Nextly is the cover, with a nice shiny new gasket and two tiny blobs of permatex where the oil case cover meets the head.

While I was at it I spent some time removing that shitty aluminium tape on the cover, and some copper tape on the oil cap - both still present in the picture below.

I don't know what it was for.

I think the previous owner was genuinely mad.

 

Then, since I don't like open holes, I cracked out the new spark plugs I'd been procrastinating installing back when I got the car.

 

 

The gap spec is 0.7-0.8mm. They were pretty good out of the box, but some very light taps (mild drops, really) on the anvil got them all a little better.

I put them in and followed up with cleaned and dialectric greased coils.

 

The oil pressure switch called for a certain torque that I couldn't provide, thanks to its 24mm socket size and my lack of anything deep enough for that. So girlface and I cracked out the maths to figure out how to torque it using a socket wrench attached to a torque wrench.

One of the scary things here is that it doesn't seat all the way into the block, there are exposed threads, so if you were a visual person you'd just send it and break something. Really glad I held back.

Then we came back and swapped torque wrenches post-maths. 

It was at spec already. Calling it good ...  

 

Things started getting on so kind of skipped a few photos.

- Got the water pump pulley on.

- Alternator's in there too baybee

- Mulled over why there's an empty hole in the case that doesn't seem to have a purpose. Decided it was always empty.

- Got the idler pulley and tensioner on and situated, ready for belt.

- Wondered why we never ordered a new belt.

[tomble]

I was thinking "oh I'll just finish X then get a post up" and that happened a few times so I guess I should stop and do a dump.

And what a dump!

Where last we left off I threw up a bullet point list and left it at that, so here's a follow-up pic barrage for that. I believe we're just after what engine reconditioners call a long block?

A long block with a nice un-aluminium-taped surface.

Little strips of copper and aluminium tape are EVERYWHERE. In the strangest places - on the insides of the intake funnel, underneath the steering wheel, covering the holes in the bonnet, some absolutely random spots like one corner of the windscreen and the top of the oil cap. Truly the last owner was absolutely mad.

The engine internals were mostly closed in. I rectified that by putting the new oil pick up on with a nice new lubed o-ring, off-brand threebond and the nice and cleaned sump and wire-brushed bolts.

If we were a long block before, I guess this is extra-long?

 

Then Girlface swung by and we took the engine off the stand as it was just getting in the way now.

We got the flywheel sorted out with a pry bar, four arms and three legs.

Brake cleaner was once again misused as a non-brake cleaning product to thoroughly clean the clutch and flywheel surfaces before we got it installed with the special tool. This is the one place that the manual's machine translation kind of suffered - it did a piss-poor job of communicating how it wanted the bolt sequence done - but we figured it out. The printed tool worked a treat!

 

And ya know, can't really leave it there before you go inside can you

 

The next day I further accessorised with the new thermostat and its housing and returning the water temp sensor. 

Followed up by intake manifold - but not before separating the throttle body to install its new gasket. I also gently cleaned the TB with brake cleaner, about 50x more filth came out of it than it looks like it contains in the pic.

 

One thing I tried to keep on top of was understanding where things went. Various bolts, pipes and other widgets are safely grouped on various garage surfaces and knowing where something goes ahead of time lets me avoid doing shit out-of-order and having to undo work, and gives me the confidence that I'm not going to be left short a bolt. So when stuff like the breather plate has a big ol' hole in it, I get antsy until I know what goes in there. Fortunately, my paranoia has served me well so far.

 

The injectors never left the rail so no need for new o-rings there, but we didn't think to order new o-rings for the business end. They seem okay and they're easy to access so I'm OK re-using them. I made sure to give them a quick clean before putting the rail on (bottom injector cleaned here).

 

I had left a coolant pipe attached to the oil cover because it gave too much resistance to being removed. I was going to leave it there, but after figuring out that the final item in my gasket kit was a new o-ring for it, we decided to just apply lube, pucker up and start jerking. Fortunately it got off after a few hard tugs and we were able to apply the new rubber. The old one was quite flat, so glad we did that.

 

Loom time. When we removed the engine it was a pretty mad dash to do so, and we didn't have the manual. If we did, we'd have known we could have left the whole loom intact on the car and just disconnected it at the battery and fuse box.  This hurt because the connectors on the back of the engine in particular are a total bitch to access and unclip, especially without damaging the clips. So, unfortunately a few of them suffered.

What extra-sucks is that despite ordering a ton of cable clips from aliexpress of various types, not a single one of them is suitable for any of the clips :|. Josh taught me how to re-use clips that had been sliced through the cable, so I got them set up for the most important two broken clips, threw a naked zip tie on the second most important clip, and have left the rest for a later order of fresh new clips - they're reasonably accessible.

I got left short a bolt. There was a bolt left for the knock sensor, but it only engaged by about 1-2 threads, so clearly not quite the right one. No idea where the real one went, but I had to get a new bolt from the stash. Maybe it ran away with the shaft key. Hopefully this is the only time that'll happen... 

 

Anyway, we've run out of things the engine needs before it goes on the car. Loom is on, turbo's going on after the engine goes in because it fought us too much on the way out, the extra intake stuff on the top will just get in the way. It was due to rain off and on over the weekend which is kind of a pain if you need to use the garage for something that isn't Starion work thanks to the Starion being not exactly weatherproof but... fuck it, it'll survive a little weather under a cover.

On Sunday morning I cracked open the garage, tetris'd stuff around, threw the steering column back in the starion and made way for progress.

First niggle: now that the loom was on the engine and not the car, there was no way of unlocking the steering (push-button ignition). We solved that by applying a lot of force to a tiny jack on a very weathered concrete driveway... :X ... but eventually we got it situated. An alternative would have been to dig around the steering column but easier mental path.

I procrastinated a little by noticing a bunch of rust on the wiper stalks, fixed with a careful wire wheel and light coating of grease.

Kelv came over to help and the three of us got stuck in. I always forget to take pics when there's company so... sorry from here on out lol. I remembered I hadn't done shit until the final engine mount was in place. The first two required some manoeuvring to situate, and at least one bolt was swapped with another, but honestly wasn't a struggle.

 

We had a car with an engine in it: day's goal complete!

With that done, we could now push the car out of the garage and tinker with it from the driveway or something. No need to wait for a sunny day and mess around with car locations. Everything is unlocked.

 

A secondary goal of the day was to get the drive shafts in. Because existing neural pathways are preferable to forming new ones, I wanted to just wrangle them in as we nestled the engine into the bay. It didn't look promising.

But with Kelv and his experienced brain with us, we instead decided to take the wheel route. I'd resisted this just because I hadn't put any thought into how the suspension on this car is configured and didn't want to crack into that with all the other shit floating around my head, and also because of the chance of it needing a re-alignment. But with Kelv leading the charge we managed to break the lower control arms free and bend the hubs just enough to be able to squeeze some shafts into some holes.

It ended up being really easy, to the point that we were actually going at it so hard we didn't even realise the ball joints were separated right when we first started wailing on them, and we were just about to get creative. No alignment needed fortunately!

Secondary goal of the day complete! It's all extra credit from here. Aww yiss.

 

Whilst Kelv and Girlface noodled with torque specs and radiator hoses (we replaced the two main hoses because... well, because),

I rushed to the bench to complete the turbo stuff I was meant to have done already. There's a set of gaskets and whatnot to fix up, and two crush washers need seeing to on the oil feed banjo fitting. Those old chestnuts...

 

Whilst doing this, Kelv sorted installing the belt and idler. The belt feels a little tired and there's a nick in one of the grooves, so I've ordered a new one. We decided that the old belt will do in the meantime. Based on Kelv's swearing and grunting, the new belt will be a PITA to install. He also went off and brought his poorly Alto over to serve as a reference for niggly bits like earthing cables and 1-way check valves. What a tiny-ass country.

After cleaning a silly amount of gunk off the turbo, flushing the turbo oil lines with brake cleaner then following that up with fresh oil and assembling its various components with gaskets into one turbo unit, it was time to put it on the car. It was very tight, and the oil line had to come back off to clear the A/C compressor, but we got it on.

And then we went to connect the oil line. 

No matter what angle we took, how we bent or held things, the banjo bolt absolutely refused to grab threads. It was happy to do so without the line around it, so it wasn't fucked or anything, it's just that the angle of the banjo fitting needed to be 100.0000% for it to even think about being seated. Access was pretty poor with lots of crap around the seating site. We undid the block end of the line and that let us get the turbo end on, but then the block end was fucked, and it was even harder to access.

The A/C compressor was in the way, and the A/C compressor is part of the belt system, which Kelv had already sorted.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued but we took the belt and compressor back off and with further effort were able to sort both of the banjo fittings out. They were proper bitches even with clean clear access, so I'm glad we didn't just suffer needlessly. Also Kelv put the belt back on so really, I didn't experience much personal additional suffering.

While that was getting wrangled, Kelv and Girlface got various bits of bracketry connected, hoses connected, ABS lines refitted, ECUs plugged in...

 

It was around here we were like... "wanna get it started tonight?"

Fuck yeah we do.

We sorted out the clutch line - it's a bit loose, so we'll need to mess with it a bit more, but on the plus side there's a solid bushing (Kelv has pointed out a lot of things that are aftermarket that totally sailed by me). Apparently that was a common upgrade for the clutch that I was probably going to look at down the line for myself anyway, so nice to know it had already been done lol.

Girlface sorted the cat and exhaust. "It was really easy". Kelv didn't manage to exit this pic.

We filled the transmission with nice fresh gear oil and two new shiny plugs.

The engine was filled with mineral oil to the most perfect mark on the dipstick I've ever seen. 

We double-checked all the coolant pipes, vac hoses, fuel pipes, plugs, sensors and whatnot. 

We ran the starter without injectors and coils for a while, which really made the battery quite sad, in order to circulate oil and build some pressure. It was looking a bit dire as the light stayed illuminated but just as the starter was really starting to lurch unhappily the light went off, indicating that pressure was okay <3

And seven hours into the job, what else is there left to do, but...

 

What a fucking rush.

It sounds good. The revs are all over the place because of the lack of piping but there are no leaks (that we can see), no weird noises, it's got oil pressure, and the knocking that the car always has is completely gone. We just have a (sort of) new engine now! All the bits that matter anyway. 126,671 KM -> 0 KM.

And Kelv's standing there congratulating us and our efforts, "you've just rebuilt an engine!" It's obvious he would have been chuffed at getting it running that evening, but I could just see that he probably was getting even more out of just seeing how happy and excited we were to have achieved this. This second-hand enjoyment of our chuffedness is what really separates blokes like him from the unwashed masses. I got a lot of third-hand enjoyment out of that lol.

Thank you @kws, we'd never have achieved what we did that night without you, and that manual you helped organise has saved a lot of headaches and added a lot of confidence in our work.

We threw the bonnet back on and zhuzhed the drive shaft nuts up to log(n) ugga-duggas in the absence of a sufficient torque wrench / brakes (we'll sort all that out later), swapped the two cars around just as it started spitting, bid each other good night and went to get inebriated and watch the eurovision finals.

Pretty good weekend, in all.

[tomble]

Monday. 

I had a little bit of time after work and before dinner to get some stuff done. I raced out to Supercheap and grabbed some demon water and set our poor little beastie up to get at least some light and tool access.

I wanted to take it easy that day, so just put the master cylinder back without attempting to bleed anything just yet (Kelv later looked at it and realised there's plenty room to access the belt with it there so it probably could have gone on earlier). The hosiery followed. I could remove the zip tied heat shields but... meh, some other time maybe, they're actually possibly slightly functional for the time being. Besides, priorities...!

I also got her started with some demon water - again, no real intent to bleed the full system of air just yet, just getting things started.

The strut brace and ECU found their forever homes, 

And then the cat heat shield was pretty much the last engine-related thing to go on the car. Let me tell you, it was a proper biatch to get in there.

For extra points - and because priorities, right? - I took the opportunity to properly clean up the wiper cowling of its waxiness with some isopropyl, a magic eraser type sponge thing (fuck me that was some effort, don't wax trim people) and then zhuzhed with some Meguiar's ultimate protectant trim restorer. We'll see how long that lasts.

Before packing it in for the night we also wanted to give it a cheeky start now that everything was on the car. Theoretically all the sensors and air and whatnot should be totally happy.

They were 

 

Tuesday.

@kws was coming over again with the goal of getting our first post-rebuild drive in and breaking the engine in. He had a vacuum brake bleeder and a chunkier torque wrench that we needed for the hub nuts, and of course his desirable presence.

First I did the car tetris thing and got the alto up ready for some brake bleeding before I got stuck in to tinkering. This shot is after I'd reinstalled the bumper mounts/braces and torqued up the bonnet latch.

The first real tinkering to be done is to get the clutch happy - it's a light clutch, but it's too light now, the pedal is super soft and doesn't really have much resistance until it's nearly on the floor.

The manual states that resistance should come at about 10-20mm. Uh... so I guess 45mm is too much?

The adjustment procedure is to tighten or loosen the I was about to get measurey but I noticed there was some easy slack, so I started by just winding it in until the slack disappeared.

This brought it perfectly in spec, so I did up the jam nuts to lock it in.

The other day while taking the bonnet off I lost a bolt, it fell down into a cavity over the wheel well and no amount of poking around with a magnet could find it. Kelv suggested running a hose down there to see where the water ends up (and hopefully flush the bolt out if it's just sitting somewhere high). It didn't come out, and the water ran out the sill far from where I could get at it with the magnet, so I just left it for the time being.

But I had a brainwave now that it was in the garage, what if bounced along the wheel liner and into the sill? There were only four clips left holding it in so I wrangled it off.

Of course there's more random padding... in the bin.

And the possible remains of a bird. But there's also my bolt . So now the bonnet has four bolts. Still needs adjusting but it's secure.

Not pictured: the extreme grot all around and inside the bonnet latch. It got an absolute shitload of brake cleaner, brush and paper towelling followed by some WD40 to get things less grease+road dirt sounding when actuated. We reckon the insane previous owner must have just kept throwing grease at it for some reason, because nothing else was even a fraction as dirty.

 

After everyone had had a feed Kelv popped over. We cracked straight into bleeding the brakes. It was really easy with the vacuum bleeder, especially for me. I just held a funnel and then changed roles to pedal-presser to finish it off manually.

Then we 175 Nano mangled the hub nuts with Kelv's calibrated rod and punched the retainer into place.

 

Girlface got the lights and bumper on in the mean time.

With the bonnet bolt found, we could put the cowl back into its forever home (sans a few broken clips :\) and install the wipers. We nailed the position first try.

Some final clips to install, then the wheels go back on.

The actual last of the engine bay bits go back in... including our previous "zip tie the rattly intercooler duct" fix because the clips are too large...

 

And now we're all prepared for the main event.

To break in the engine we took an amalgamation of the internet's collective wisdom and took the core of what everyone suggested, discarding the outliers:

1. get it up to temp, make sure the cooling system is fully bled of air (no proper coolant or additives yet because the steel head gasket doesn't like it)
2. while getting up to temp, constantly change the rev's to give it the best chance of avoiding premature ring bs
3. take it out for a spin, avoiding boost or high revs, constantly changing between gears and engine braking to provide different levels of RPM and vacuum to ensure the rings are correctly moved in and out of position as they grind against the bore walls
4. also avoiding boost  

Step one took fucking ages. Everything got warm but the thermostat just refused to open / fan refused to turn on.

The engine cooked off some wisps of oil from where we inevitably sloshed it on components, especially the turbo, but nothing major and it sorted itself out pretty quick.

After a handful of antsy minutes we were about to give up and just proceed anyway. Just after I turned the car off, Kelv felt the pipe start to get warm. I turned the car back on and a split second later the fan turned on and the thermo was open lol. We turned her off, waited for the bubbling to cease then zipped her up.

There was one minor scare where a dribble of oil had appeared on the floor under the engine. Crawling under the bumper, the sump plug had a thicc drip ready to separate from it ... :X 

It turns out that while we'd made sure that the sump plug was in, we'd never made sure it was tight. Oops. Another quarter turn and a paper towel sorted that drama out, really glad we caught that!!!

 

Anyway enough dilly dallying... off we go...

It was a blast. I struggled a little with the clutch at times, it's extremely light and a stark difference from the MX5, first in this car is super touchy with either not enough or too many beans, and I was never amazing at clutch control anyway.

I struggled much more with staying off the turbo. Fuck me it's so easy and every fibre of my being wanted to just absolutely send her. Almost every acceleration event was met with a "boost!" from the passenger seat, the back seat, or both.

At one point we decided to merge onto SH2 to make a loop. It's only a 70km section, but I'd forgotten it was up a hill. Fortunately, and I've never seen this before, but a Tractor just happened to be noodling its way towards the intersection with a long tail of cars behind it, providing the perfect merge window.

Of course since it's me and it was a hill start, there was a mild burnout. There was also a lot of turbo admonishment. And here I am, trying to baby her up to 70km/h, sweating as I see a literal fucking tractor gaining on me in the rear view mirror. We stuck to the 50km streets after that.

The brakes work perfectly and the ABS seems happy. The driving position is on fleek. Fuck I love this car.

30 minutes and 20 kilometres later we rolled back into the garage, with a nice little exhaust graze as we mount our stupid driveway.

 

The engine oil is now littered with ring glitter, assembly lube and whatever else, so we have to get rid of that. Feels odd to do an oil change after only 20km.

The engine was bone dry pretty much everywhere. There were a few lashings of oil under the turbo and the A/C pump which was totally expected - we really did slosh it around getting that thing on the car - and some legacy moistness on the subframe because it hadn't been cleaned. Nothing that caused concern. There were no dribbles around any of the sealed surfaces with the exception of the A/C pump's corner of the block, which again, was explainable. 

The oil looked good, the colour had definitely changed but no water or anything.

Girlface helped.

The glitter wasn't immediately obvious, even with a magnet, until we emptied the pan back into the empty oil container.

 

We did one last stock take at what was left and... well, there isn't anything notable, really. The two edge pieces of the cowl need to go in but I'm going to zhuzh them up first. The bonnet needs to be fettled a bit to fit quite right. Gotta address the squeaky belt or just live with it until the new belt arrives.

Our bolt supply was almost perfect. 

The knock sensor bolt had clearly been used somewhere a shorter bolt should have been, so after using a bolt from my stash to replace it, having one bolt left over made sense. 

We also mangled a few clips; I'll need to order a bunch.

We did lose a bolt however, which was one of the final bolts for the ECU mount. Once again, the stash comes in handy. I suspect this bolt is sitting somewhere in an otherwise empty bolt hole somewhere on the body, screwed in after-the-fact when i was trying to find homes for things.

 

Victory pose with bonnet not latched because we're fucking photographers

 

Wednesday morning

We left cardboard under the car overnight. Girlface reports no undue moistness, so she got her first 'normal' drive post-rebuild.

 

Girlface also thought up the perfect name for her, based on a quip she made last night in the garage. We bought a lemon, but instead of getting sad and throwing our toys, we made lemonade. 

So, her name is now Lemonade. Lemmy for short I guess.

It's a real shame that there's no yellow on the car... a real shame...

 

Anyway, we now have about 100km of easy driving, and 500km of no-dropping-the-clutch ahead of us. It'll be over before we know it, I'm sure.

[shrike]

Im assuming you did fresh oil and filter when you dropped the first load of oil? (again not wanting to tell you to suck eggs)

Lots of different views as you said on how to break an engine in

Did you hand crank the engine over a few times when you had put it all back together?

Great work

Typically if I don't want to see boost I just pull the rod off the wastegate actuator on the turbo so it doesn't stay closed as the flap will open without that resistance (or pull the spring out if its external)

In saying that, only if its something you can access easily

[tomble]

31 minutes ago, shrike said:

Im assuming you did fresh oil and filter when you dropped the first load of oil? (again not wanting to tell you to suck eggs)

Did you hand crank the engine over a few times when you had put it all back together?

No worries at all, I welcome feedback and questions and double checkings.

Yeah, fresh mineral oil and filter for the break in, then fresh mineral oil and filter after the 20km. We'll go back to the regular stuff after 200km.

We turned it "a few times" on the stand by hand just as a part of assembling and validating, then built oil pressure once it was all back together via the starter (spark and fuel unplugged).

31 minutes ago, shrike said:

Typically if I don't want to see boost I just pull the rod off the wastegate actuator on the turbo so it doesn't stay closed as the flap will open without that resistance (or pull the spring out if its external)

In saying that, only if its something you can access easily

Great idea with the boost. We did have good access to it. That'll be useful knowledge for the starion

[cletus]

Well done! 

Pretty cool that you and your partner just got stuck in and did it. 

 

Not sure what the story is with that sticky stuff but it's quite common on imports , had this in yesterday 

 

 

[kws]

oh god, old mate moved onto a Mazda after the Alto

[tomble]

We buttoned up the final bits left to put on...

The edges of the cowling, pre- and post-zhuzhed up with meguiar's:

(edit: Yes, those grates are custom. Yes, they look like shit. Yes, I'll do something about them some time)

The rear camera made a break for it at the track so I scored the mounting adhesive and surface with a craft knife and superglued them back together:

The bonnet wasn't quite aligned properly so we had a go at it. It's better, but annoyingly it seems like it simply won't quite line up perfectly no matter what. The fenders simply have more edge than the bonnet does, so either it looks bad at the cowling or bad at the lights. We opted to get the cowling right as it seems like it'd be the most obvious.

She survived the trek into work no problems the next day to break her first 100km <3

The final piece to go on is the crank access cover, which poetically was the first piece to come off at the track...

A couple nights prior I'd really sent one of those clips in (with a hammer) because I was getting fed up with it. Future Tom paid the price, but a batch of new clips reduced the annoyance of the job.

Said new clips replaced the broken ones in the cowling (we'd snaffled them for the liners) and one in the bumper edge. 

I also combined some with some random clip padding stuff from an aliexpress order of clips (literally none of them suitable for this car) to finally replace the zip ties holding the intercooler cowling down, as well as take the play out of the clips holding the intake cowling. For some reason they were super loose and the manual doesn't appear to have mention of any washers or whatever to take out that slack? 

And now that the head gasket had been heat cycled a few times, I drained and replaced the coolant with the good stuff.

 

200KM raced up on us and I wanted to do an oil change. I'd been largely following HPA's advice on breaking the engine in (though we hard deviated by breaking her in on the street) and they'd wait for 200KM to switch to synthetic.

I cleaned out brendan foot upper hutt's stash of OEM filters (and they loaded my open palm up with new sump washers). 

The oil change was about what I expected: still lots of glitter from the rings. There was one worryingly "large" red flake of material about the size of 1/3 of a grain of rice, zoomed in very far here to show it, not gonna lie that makes me nervous not knowing what it is or how normal that is but... what else is there to do but stay the course...

It was only after the change was done that the rest of the Wellington Kei Club responded to my DMs with some squinty eyes, reckoning I should have just kept going with mineral oil. Honestly if I had it on hand I would have, and after the squinty eyes I would have gone and gotten some, but I'd already changed it and my gut said it'd be okay. 

To be on the safe side I made a post on the HPA forums and got an internet barry who, while definitely gave off strong "I reckon" internet dweller vibes, made it clear regardless that waiting 200KM for synthetic oil was actually probably erring on the safe side. OEMs apparently often send it straight from the factory with synthetic off the bat, or don't even bother to change the original break-in oil at all. 

There's no smoke, I think 99% of the ring break in is done at this point, and she's running great so I think all is well. But we'll see at 1000KM.

 

 

I asked Josh if I could borrow his DA and he said "come by Sunday and allocate 5 hours". Alrighty! 

First we gave her a proper clean and clay barring the day before. We hadn't clay barred her at all until now, oops.

The clay bar did little for the water spots on the windows...but the DA did an excellent job

The roof and bonnet must have had acid rain on them or just never cleaned or something because the clearcoat is impregnated with water spots that have etched into it. The heaviest cutting compound we had and a solid amount of time on them with the DA improved the situation somewhat. There are still tiny defects but it's 50x better than it was.

Josh got me started on the DA then largely left me to my devices as he had family commitments.

The rest of the car polished up perfectly. The paint isn't actually in very bad condition, so the before and after isn't quite as breathtaking as with more neglected/older cars. After left, before right.

 

After an interruption to have a quick feed (mmm cheesy oven bake) Josh rejoined me and ceramic'd everything. And dressed the tyres because that's the kind of creature he is.

The entire car's paint is now immaculate - except for the roof but I don't think we can solve that without wet sanding and you really have to be looking for it + get the right light to notice it.

I am surrounded by truly selfless creatures who inspire me to be better.

Anyway.

A few days later and conditions were okay (except for me having covid :\) to proceed with the next item: Restoring the decals that the Japanese owner had removed.

Firstly we got Lemmy back in the garage and gave the area a good clean and polish to remove the ceramic coating.

Then we lined everything up as best as we could. Each decal conveniently had a small throw-away piece of the next decal next to it to make lining things up a lot easier. 

We positioned the decals and measured everything 16 times to make sure everything was okay. The stickers sit surprisingly high on the doors, if you applied them blind you might assume they're hard against the bottom edge, which would be a mistake.

We started with the smaller one first and decided to work lengthwise from the centre, as lining the decals up where they meet is the most important to get right.

We peeled a small amount back at the edge we started at, cut the backing away to provide an immediately accessible sticky surface, placed it as accurately we possibly could against the paint, then peeled and pressed.

Tip for anyone else applying long decals: get a second person to pull the decal taut where it's meant to go, as otherwise it'll wander. There's also a surprising amount of flexibility in terms of positioning these things, they can handle being moved back on track without too much drama, andwrinkles and air bubbles wipe right out or can be popped with tiny pins. We fortunately didn't get any major bubbles.

 

Then we peeled the application layer off... hell yeah....

The other side went a little easier, bar us having to reposition the start of the second decal slightly ...!

It looks slightly misaligned from this shot angle but it looks great in person.

 

I also bought something... dumb. But cool. Our wide NZ plates don't quite gel nicely with the taller skinner japanese plates that are meant to grace the bumpers of this little kei car, but buying full-on personalised plates is just a little too extra even for me, so I settled for our existing govt rego on japanese plates which is just within dumb-purchase-but-i'll-allow-it territory.

For the money you'd expect higher quality plates, but the black edges were flaking/flaked leaving a harsh silver edge that was noticable when mounted on the front against the black backing plastic.

We sorted that out with some CRC black zinc. I was afraid the texture would be noticeably different but it seems good.

 

Josh also gave us some Show Washers plus countersunk flat head bolts, which of course he polished up for me lol.

... though they overlapped the raise edge which prevented them seating properly and looking a bit meh. 

We notched some washers to pad them out.

In that shot you can see where the old Japanese plate lived. Why the fuck advertise Japan-style plates in NZ and then not even punch the holes in the right place to mount them??? Ugh. I'll have to solve that somehow - the brackets behind are as high up as they can be.

Anyway she's looking really mint now. <3

Aside from the wheels (though they also have Enkei wheels from factory), and the installation of some wire mesh behind the front grates (and some newly made holes in those little cowl side pieces) she's pretty much at factory now.

[tomble]

1000km oil change is up! .. plus a few.

No surprise, there's still some flakes. This oil has been in the engine for 80%~ of its rebuilt life.

Ignore the water droplets - some dribbled in from the wet engine bay.

We went to town and bought a reasonable hacksaw, then we went to town on the old filters.

The first filter, filtering the first 20km of break-in oil, was kind of surprisingly the cleanest? Some spots here and there but nothing crazy.

The 235km filter had much more easy to find bits, it was the most populated.

And this latest filter was somewhere in-between.

The alto club reckons that the material doesn't look like bearing material. And if it is bearing material, then the engine is eating them much slower - all three filters combined would only have a small fraction of the material we found in the pre-explosion filters.

The main thing is that the amount of material is decreasing. I think with 1,100km on the rebuilt engine, the next oil change should have less again, hopefully nothing at all but I'm sure something somewhere will be floating about. At any rate things look and feel healthy and she's back to regular service intervals now.

 

Comparison between aftermarket (top) and OEM filters. The OEM one is slightly larger in diameter as well, there's a lot more surface area available.

 

My broker in Japan has suddenly almost totally broken down with an insane backlog all of a sudden somehow, so I'm still waiting on the new accessory belt and some other frivolous things...

[cletus]

 

This might be helpful if you do it again, stops any extra debris 

 

[tomble]

Man I've left this too long.

Back when we bought the car, one of the first things we did was order a wang we saw while in Japan that we loved. We joogled around and just... couldn't find anything that was as cool. To us. Mileage might vary.

It arrived as unpainted FRP and so needed some paint. It also had a lot of rough-finished edges and pin holes that needed sealing. Sanding them flat also reveals more holes the more you sand... :X

So, let's see how well I can putty.

... not very well. Or maybe it's normal to miss a bunch of holes / create more while sanding the putty flat.  

More putty, more sanding, more holes...

The rest of it gets sanded too to get nice and flat for paint.

At some point I had enough pinhole-chasing / was happy I'd gotten them all and went in for the primer, some durepox, which should work happily with fibreglass etc.

This disabused me of my belief I'd gotten all the holes.

More putty, more sanding, more paint... 

More holes...

And one of the sheets got free in the breeze and landed on the part...

But eventually, I arrived at a nice primed and hole-less piece. I was originally suspending it from the ceiling but I think that made me a bit less likely to get enough on the trailing edge of the wing, so I instead constructed an internal mount using bunched up cardboard. 

I opted for 1K base and 2K clear, apparently there's no issue with this set-up. No issues at all.

It came out alright, but very orange peely. I'd also slightly under-done one corner because of how I'd mounted it; I guess I just suck at mentally mapping where to spray from lower angles.

Next up: wet sanding while the 2K was not fully cured. Holy shit I'm glad I didn't wait any longer because this stuff is hard to sand. I started with high grits but moved down eventually to 1500 then 1000 just to be able to make progress on the large sections.

However, disaster struck on the edges: I blasted through to the basecoat, and even the primer in a couple of areas. I think I didn't apply enough clear coat to the edges, even though it felt like I'd over-done it on the clear at the time.

Additionally, even with buttloads of effort, I really struggled to get down to the deepest valleys in the clear. I didn't want to go too hard seeing how easy it was to blast through the edges, yet somehow the main faces took low grits like an absolute champ without getting totally flat. The wet sanding process sucks as well as it has to be totally dried off with towels and an air gun to be able to see how I was progressing. And because it's so easy to go overboard, it has to be done often. As my results unfurled, that just made me more and more paranoid (and upset). It might be hard to see in these pics.

Then my car blew up.

I decided I'd get back into it eventually and either try and touch up the exposed base/primer and see how it looked, and if it looked really bad, just re-do it all again. But for the time being, the engine rebuild occupied my brain space.

~~~

Fast forward to a working car and I'd internalised the value of "just because I can do it with lots of effort, doesn't mean I should always do it". I really didn't enjoy the process on this wing, and I was dreading what the vortex generators would be like to wet sand with all their hard edges. I also wanted to broaden my horizons re: paint people, so I took the lot to a local shop and agreed on a reasonable price.

They ran into trouble re-spraying it: apparently, the base's 1K solvents reacted with the previously-applied 2K clear and made it all bubbly and strange. In the end they used their own 2K base and got it looking hot, though the vortex generators have some texture to them if you look close enough. No pic of that  so here's one with the old spoiler.

They also told me that it all looked pretty good prep-wise, and that the orange peel was likely because I didn't use enough thinner. I'd used the lower end of what the tin recommended, so I guess that's a lesson, experiment before committing.

The old spoiler had two bolts plus a lot of very strong glue keeping it on, and this glue gave us a hell of a workout getting rid of it. 

But eventually we had dry-fitted the spoiler enough times to be mentally psyched enough to apply tape and get it on for-realsies. The kit came with a bunch of double-sided glue tape and two bolts to fasten to the captive nuts set inside the spoiler.

This was teeth-gritting.

Then the vortex generators....

We did pretty well. A couple of corners on the spoiler weren't perfectly seated against the body likely due to miniscule misalignment while positioning, but some gentle clamping overnight sorted that out.

It makes us laugh every time we see it. It's so stupid and cool.

 

 

 

 

[tomble]

So it turns out when I ordered my $1 crank shaft key, it gummed the works up for all my other parts and my order sat in limbo for almost 2 months before someone figured it out. The way they fixed it was to remove the key order so... I guess that hand-crafted key is the end of that story. I was really annoyed with the export broker but after hearing it explained, I have way too much empathy and understanding for that kind of delay and how easily that can happen when you're understaffed. So whatever. I'll be avoiding small orders from them in the future, or at least being static in what I order and not trying to tack things on.

Anyway - this is what I got :). The recent sunny days have made installing these possible.

First the accessory belt.

Our old belt was sad and had a notch. We'd also gotten a bit splashy with the turbo oil while re-assembling, and the A/C pump had a hell of a squeal at times.

I got the old one off okay - access isn't amazing - and eventually figured out the mechanism for adjusting the belt, which I'd still not entirely grasped even though I put the damn thing back on the engine when rebuilding it. I also gave every pulley a thorough spray and wipe down with brake cleaner to get rid of any oil residue.

Now, this guy. This guy's the adjustment bolt for the belt. The idler pulley assembly's two bolts are un-torqued, then the adjustment bolt can be used to move the idler pulley assembly to make the belt taught before the bolts are re-torqued to actually hold it in that position.

In my infinite wisdom I removed the adjustment bolt entirely to help remove the belt, not realising that instead of fighting just the new belt, I now had to fight the belt and thread a bolt that really doesn't want to be threaded in an extremely tight space.

When I eventually managed to get it to grab, it became obvious quickly that I'd cross threaded it.

I tried a bunch of stuff to salvage the situation but eventually resigned myself to the fact that I'd have to start over. I took the belt off, took the adjustment bracket off and thread repaired them, then re-attached the bracket and bolt with no belt on.

Then I put the mahi into getting that thing onto the idler with the help of a Girlface and a trim tool, and finally it was on. The car is turned on for a hot couple of seconds to distribute the tension, then the adjustment screw is tightened until tension is all happy. The idler bracket bolts are re-torqued to hold it all where it should be. Finally, the wheel well trim goes back on to prevent it from getting splashed with road shite.

The belt has a minor amount of deflection when pressed until fingies hurt and the shortest run isn't quite able to turn 45 degrees with fingie pressure alone.

There's no squealing anymore and everything seems to be running happily. Job done!

 

The stereo surround. As a reminder, the previous owner got happy with a craft knife to make their previous system fit, and to hide the damage our stereo sits proud. Suzuki OEM parts are cheap as chips so I got a new surround.

Of course, the previous owner has copper tape on the inside of this thing...

The old vents are popped out and swapped into the new surround with just a little elbow grease and some care taken with where the rotating tab is aligned.

The stereo's mounting bolts can then be moved in a notch.

And now I saw why the previous owner hacked theirs up. The surround didn't clear the stereo at all, and the walls are quite stiff with backing structure.

I thought about how to rectify this. A cleaner cut using a dremel or just being careful with a scoring knife? Corner relief cuts? Remove the backing structure to make it more pliable?

Before I made any permanent changes, I first simply tackled it with a trim tool and patience - and fortunately, this worked. The sides had just enough give (with a lot of pressure) to be forced around the facia of the stereo.

Now it sits nice and recessed like it should. This also makes it easier to steady your hand on the trim while you use the touch screen.

Yup, it's meant to be two different colours of trim. I think.

 

 

The mirror covers and escutcheons (new word of the day) help tie the black in with the rest of the car as accents. The window covers do too, though I would like it if they were tinted a little darker. But they should still help.

The mirror covers come off much easier than you'd think fortunately; simply jab a trim tool between the indicator light and the lower trim, and that gives access to get a trim tool up into the clips for the covers.

Yup - copper tape. 

How fucking deep did this last owner go???

Assembly is just as easy as it sounds.

Here's a before and after of the other side.

 

 

Next is the escutcheons. I wasn't expecting them to be quite so glossy / carbonfibrey.

They're simple to install, but the element of positioning them with extremely sticky glue tape makes it a bit stressful.

Annoyingly, I got given four of them - aftermarket escutcheons include one for the boot.

I think the look is okay, but I would have preferred if they weren't so glossy. They don't have as much of the desired effect of bringing the black accents across the car. Here's some good angles. I might follow these up with some kind of black vinyl covers or something, and DIY the boot escutcheon at the same time.

 

Penultimate job is to install the window covers. Fortunately we found some guy online who had some reference photos to go along with our shitty translated printouts of the installation manual.

First, remove the rubber door seals from the top and thoroughly clean the areas and polish the ceramic coating away before isoproping it to total cleanliness.

They went on without a hitch, but as with all things of this nature, sticky glue + positioning is stressful. But we absolutely nailed it first try for all four windows.

 

Finally, I wanted to install a foot rest. Kelvinator has one in his Alto and I never knew I needed it. My foot barely fits between the pedal and the tunnel and I often find myself flicking the clutch pedal when I go to rest my foot. Amazon JP delivered the same model to me in two fucking days.

First we start with a nice vacuumed carpet sans-mat. The foot rest uses one factory nut and requires two holes to be drilled. The carpet is peeled back to find the factory nut so that I can poke a hole through it.

Then the pedal is temporarily installed using this hole to locate it. It's pretty fiddly with an allen key here. Wish I had those round-ended ones.

It's very red.

The other two holes are hole-punched through to locate them through the carpet, then the carpet is peeled back.

It turns out that this sound deadening and white padding is not typical, and is likely from the batshit insane previous owner.

A quick drill, debur and a dab of rust converter to oxidise and protect the bare metal and we're ready for my first ever rivnutting. Yes, I'm just going to go through the sound deadening.

A follow-up re-drill, re-debur and re-schmoo after I realise that the M6 rivnuts require larger holes than M6 bolts do, and I nut into my car.

These things are so cool!

I cut some of the padded cloth away, refit the carpet and stabbed two new holes through it to install the final two bolts. Et viola!

It's well designed, and allows for the mat to be tucked in under it.

Did I mention how red it is?

Monster also make a clutch pedal kit which moves it over a tad to make for a better position in terms of tunnel clearance, but it's a bit spenny so I'll leave it alone for now.

 

So yeah, that's where we're at!

Aesthetically I think the only big thing left is that I'd like to replace the rims but that'll have to wait.

[87creepin]

Somewhere in Japan, some sociopath is stripping back his new car and applying copper tape everywhere. 

[tomble]

5,384km since rebuild. Only a couple of the tiniest sparklies in the oil that I really had to hunt down to see, and the filter was almost entirely clean as well. 

Thanks @cletus that oil filter method works a charm

 

Kelv was parting with his GReddy intercooler so I scooped that up. It's a true bolt-on replacement to the OEM intercooler; all the pipes, the air scoop and the rubber isolated bolt holes swap over with no problems.

It's a much bigger sandwich.

While my butt dyno is pretty questionable, I think I feel the car pull a bit harder as the turbo kicks in. But its main value will be in the future when I get my larger turbo setup

 

The car's been running perfectly. We've been on a few road trips now and she gets driven almost daily without any issues. The number of thumbs ups and neck-craning we experience really helps us appreciate her that much more. It's such a stupid cute cool car that is impossible to hate.

[tomble]

Every fuse in my car is individually wrapped in copper tape.

[tomble]

We went to the MG club's driver training event again (same one from Feb) at Manfield. Most of the same crew turned up and we nabbed the first four bays. I brought tools this time

I had been feeling run down so wasn't super looking forward to it, but I knew I should come and would enjoy myself in the end, so I pushed to. I just told myself that I'd take it easy for both myself and the car's sake.

The day of the event I woke up with a solid headache which didn't bode well, however it slowly resolved itself over the day.

Girlface went out first and had some fun, just in case I broke the car again.

Then I went out, with my Ek9 mate in the passenger seat, who I'm very glad who was there - he's a great track buddy and a good teacher. By the end of the first session I was feeling more confident and much better at hitting lines. He then had a go with me as a passenger which was tons of fun and great to see how hard the car can really be pushed, also great to see that my lines were getting pretty close to his. Girlface also got a run with him and did great. I was terrible at capturing any video or photos so this is pretty much all I have. :\

https://i.imgur.com/XHakpcy.mp4

We definitely took the day easy and I'm glad we did. The weather was great, the car was great, we had awesome runs and a bunch of people from Feb wandered over and congratulated us on getting the car up and running again. It was the most ideal way to validate our work returning the car back to health, and to overwrite our previous track day's experience with nice new happy memories.

It turns out we had also won car of the day thanks to the combination of our car and story (though we had left by 4pm and missed the organiser by like 30 minutes). He mailed us some swag. He had no Alto stickers but I forgive him for that.

Next time we'll can get some lap timing going and go a little harder.

 

edit: more pix from group