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Darchangel
Feb 12, 2009

Tell him about the blower!


Spades posted:

Now aware this is actually a thing that wouldn't cost more than whole car, that's actually pretty useful. However I think I'll continue with the lock delete simply because the car already has central and without a rear handle the rear lock isn't very helpful.

Also the car cost $550 NZD so that isn't saying much

I couldn't tell you how much it would cost, especially in not-USA. A locksmith can just pop off the cap (destroying it in the process) remove guts, and change wafers to match, or even create a new key code and make a key to match, usually. Then they replace the cap with a new one. My locksmith had to remove and measure the wafers to cut me a door key for my Chevy Monza long ago.

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Spades
Sep 18, 2011
Seems like I could still make use of the locksmith in future sometime anyhow - the ignition tumbler and driver's side door locks are both currently functional, but 90s Honda ignitions are known to get finnicky over time so it'd be a good thing to fix.

Removed the bumpers, dashboard and towball last weekend, finding the unzinced square plate 'washers' that were used for the towball to spread torque had been working as sacrifice anodes and sucked lots of rust up, managing to eventually eat through the boot floor and put a pair of fist sized rust holes into the corners of the tire hole. For now I've hammered out the loose rust, wire wheeled and rustkilled the rest and will get to welding some new steel in given a chance.

Also managed to mostly just dent and puncture the rear wheel arches trying to remove the remaining sound deadening with dry ice so I'm going to remove the rest with Acetone and then spot weld the pinholes in the arches back up. Also managed to burn the hell out of my left arm by accidentally leaning on some pellets with my overalls rolled up, so don't do that poo poo basically

Now that I've got the dash out, I'm going to look at what would be involved in relocating the AC controls to where the cupholders used to be before I threw them out (since this needs to be a warrantable car and they seem to be particular about having a demister). First gen EKs like this one use a literal linkage cable instead of having actuators so I might need to somehow rig an extension or shortening thing up, but it shouldn't be an impossible change as it's only moving the controls down a few inches. Alternative is to just bugger it and reach across the whole car to wiggle the little heater flap arm under the dash manually as needed.

With that out of the way I'll see about sticking a killswitch in its place. Hopefully the car being relatively narrow will allow it to pass the reg that requires it to be accessible from an outside door without unreasonable effort.

Also going to repaint the whole interior metalwork eventually in NZ's rustoleum equivalent, since I've decided boat paint is too good and tractor paint must be used instead.

Spades
Sep 18, 2011
Picked up some more supplies for painting the interior/exterior today. While testing them out I blew the seals on my lovely paint gun so I went out and did the reasonable thing by buying a rolls royce:



Also, after constant badgering from a yuppie I know I tried this whole 'totally the future of cars bro' thing he was talking about




the future is meh and not fun or exciting to drive

Tomorrow I'll hopefully be welding up these gaping holes:



Left behind by this thing



Also, while there wasn't any misfire I decided to take a look at the plugs after pulling them for the compression test



new plugs my fucken arse

Spades fucked around with this message at 11:07 on Sep 22, 2017

Spades
Sep 18, 2011
Little update - bodywork is coming along, though taking far longer than expected (as usual) -

Fibreglass taped, epoxy and flex fillered the rear bumper cracks back together. Immediately dropped the bumper hard with my dexterous mitts the first time I went to pick it up and it didn't re-crack, so I assume the job must have been good.

Epoxied on and started to blend the plastic impact strips into the bumpers as they're too badly damaged to not just fall off the car from vibrations as it is. I realized after doing this that I could have just flex fillered the gaps left by removing those said strips and had a nicer looking bumper result in the bargain, but that'd cost a few grams more filler and that's my justification for not thinking about things while doing them.

Also got the fenders off and found they were a lot more dented up than they looked. Managed to get most of them out but I'm sure there's a weird high spot on the right side still so I'm going to have to strip back the primer and have another go.



Close up on the repair. Needs a bit more work but I'm weighing up how perfect the finish really needs to be on a race car, particularly given the 1k paint finish will likely ensure most of it falls off



Also got a new set of steel wheels (14s) and tires for free from a mate. The wheels themselves are rusty though so they'll get a repaint before I mount them.

Spades fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Oct 3, 2017

Spades
Sep 18, 2011


hail and well met



After a full weekend of filler work, getting somewhere.

80 grain blocked the entire car to identify the thousand-something hail dents and filled them all with flexfiller (these 90s car bodies are produced from steel so flimsy that it naturally oilcans from the factory, making it buck off carbon fibre filler), then sprayed them down with tractor primer filler.

Next weekend I'll be 320 graining the entire car to try to get the 80 grain scratches off the skin and start laying some paint.

Feels like a lot of effort just to get a track car together but at least doing this ensures I've gotten a good look at how everything's built outside of the engine bay.

Seat Safety Switch
May 27, 2008

MY RELIGION IS THE SMALL BLOCK V8 AND COMMANDMENTS ONE THROUGH TEN ARE NEVER LIFT.

Pillbug
I didn't know they made fibreglass tape for repairing bumpers. Looks like it's coming along really well.

Spades
Sep 18, 2011
Also, forgot - wheels got wire wheeled, primered and painted in styling silver tractor paint



+20 horsepower

DeVilbiss is loving great at being a spray gun and lays down thick, relatively peel-less coats (shot the photo there right after it was laid and even then has minimal peel for spraying a paint which isn't even designed to be sprayed)

Spades
Sep 18, 2011
Head down to Taupo last weekend and got some more track time in the Integra, finally using the semislicks for the first time. Naturally it rained the whole time and my semislicks weren't even rated for slightly humid deserts, let alone torrential rain, so the results were middling. After a spin or two I started to get a better feel for the car but FWD + slicks + rain is just not a good combination.

Having semislicks has improved my laptime to the point that, with enough concentration and some luck, I was keeping pace with some of the dedicated race cars on the day. As usual the 500+hp cars made up most of the time on the straights, but I didn't generally lose anyone in the corner entries. If I'd bought the Z06 it would have been a massacre that lead to the suicides of all involved, but I don't think I'll ever not walk away feeling embarrassed at how little I can get out of the Z06 which really detracts from the thrill of tracking it.

On a positive note, while I'm bad at driving the Z06, I feel like I didn't at least waste my power potential as much as this poor bastard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYtJbIo3rcQ

Some rain dancing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAT-jFaWLk8

A few overtakes and chases:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTNHIrIFdpo

And some hotlaps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7fLpitSaOo

The fastest time I managed on the day was a 1:52 with a pace time of 1:54 - a four second improvement over my previous best (with malus from being a wet track, too) and a 10 second improvement over my previous pace. Good to actually have an improvement instead of a fail for a change.

Spades
Sep 18, 2011
Finally got a semi respectable base coat down, with the exception of a bunch of dust I hadn't expected to be hanging around which you can see in some of these pictures.
Leaving it a week to dry (tractor paint takes several days to really solidify) -







Learned something important for when I work on a car that isn't going to be a rally car - body filler can shrink and also never assume you've found all the dents. That said I'll say it's straight enough for something that's going to be raced.


Process was hell, at least partially due to my own inexperience and using cheap paint, but also due to poo poo weather conditions - it has rained about six days a week for the last two months.




Primed things. Unlike the Silvia, everything on the car was contaminated with some kind of oil that didn't come entirely off even with wax and grease remover, so the primer also helped to identify fisheyes without having to do so while putting paint on.

First pass came out superficially okay - no runs and minimal peel.



Also learned the value of primer's filling properties when I noticed that the first paint pass of the hood looked like dog rear end:



Had to wet sand everything back to remove some of the scratches and a little bit of peel, and primer some dark spots where filler or bare metal were showing through the color coat.



Re-prepped and decided I'd do the door jams as well:






Repainted two coats with about four hours between each and a bunch of heatgunning for the result above. Going to give it one more coat on Sunday then turn attention to painting the rain rails / hatch interior and moving on to blacking out the interior.

Spades fucked around with this message at 11:34 on Nov 5, 2017

Spades
Sep 18, 2011
Had a painting disaster today - some fuckass stole my thinners, so I had to go pick up some substitute thinners from supercheap auto. Turns out said thinners are absolutely terrible and anything that didn't dry mid-air and leave dust behind instead lead peel behind. Going to take a week to get the paint dry enough to sand flat and try again, but this isn't going to work as the tuning garage I'm working on it at is going out of business and I'll need to also find a new place to store the car.

Darchangel
Feb 12, 2009

Tell him about the blower!


Spades posted:

Had a painting disaster today - some fuckass stole my thinners, so I had to go pick up some substitute thinners from supercheap auto. Turns out said thinners are absolutely terrible and anything that didn't dry mid-air and leave dust behind instead lead peel behind. Going to take a week to get the paint dry enough to sand flat and try again, but this isn't going to work as the tuning garage I'm working on it at is going out of business and I'll need to also find a new place to store the car.

Sounds like you got a “fast” reducer when you needed “medium” or “slow”.

Spades
Sep 18, 2011

Darchangel posted:

Sounds like you got a “fast” reducer when you needed “medium” or “slow”.

I think it was more like the reducer in question wasn't even real paint thinner and something closer to acetone or petrol - I was spraying in at cool temperatures which would usually retard the evaporation in the first place, and neither decreasing material, reducing pressure or increasing thinner caused the thinner to stay alive long enough to reliably hit the surface. To get even a wet coat I had to reduce the material to almost nothing and spray practically point blank on the car to get it to go on wet.

I am going to have to re-assemble the car soon in any case due to the way I'll need to find a new place to store the car. I suppose after the first rally race or two the car will be in prime state for another repaint anyway - and realistically this paint job is just to see how long cheap epoxy enamel lasts as a topcoat. Will repaint over the top with a proper modified enamel (and remove all the remaining dents) if I don't launch the car off a cliff right away.

Spades
Sep 18, 2011
Got my new thinners just in time to do the interior painting -





With this complete and my mind almost completely gone from repetitively masking taping so much, I'm going to move onto painting up the interior to see how long vinyl paint lasts on a regularly driven car.

slothrop
Dec 7, 2006

Santa Alpha, Fox One... Gifts Incoming ~~~>===|>

Soiled Meat
Looks like a great job considering you plan on DD/Rallying the car. Any reason to be so thorough other than learning new skills?

Spades
Sep 18, 2011

slothrop posted:

Looks like a great job considering you plan on DD/Rallying the car. Any reason to be so thorough other than learning new skills?

Nah, just for learning's sake - I have a beat up old Holden HQ muscle car back home that I never quite got around to fixing (at least partly since I bought it for $500 when I was 17, which was an insanely good deal) that needs the same treatment this car's gotten, and a $500 Honda Civic is a safe environment to screw up in because the parts all cost next to nothing.

Also I'll upload the pictures later, but I finished the headliner and started hammering out the carpet (for aforementioned HQ practice reasons) yesterday and gave the interior parts a wash as prep for vinyl painting. While painting some of the interior cladding I noticed an interesting issue where some of the plastic parts have been rubbed by human skin enough as to suck up lanolin and become extremely unpaintable - even after a rub with 600 grain sandpaper and some prepsol they just shed the vinyl paint if rubbed with a fingernail - so I hit them with 120 grain fistfucker stuff to strip off a little bit of plastic. Seems to have worked but wrecked the finish a bit in the process, so I'll try smoothing the remaining parts off with 400 before repaint in future.

Also painted the remaining crash strips that I didn't mould into the car's bodywork and pushed them back on, which has made a remarkable improvement to how finished looking the car is.

Spades
Sep 18, 2011
Overlate update post -

Due to the ongoing drama with the garage that I was building the car in I've been hurriedly working to fix the thing so it can be moved to a new secure location (my dads lawn) in a decent turn of time.

First things first -



Finally got those brakes back on the car and bled them up a bit. Still haven't gotten around to taking a look at the shoes on the rear drums - that should happen eventually though.



Finished cleaning up the panelwork et al and laid down some antigravel on the back of all the facings.



Put the panelwork back on.

Started on the interior -




Recovered the old headliner frame with a new piece of black foam to match the rest of the interior painting.

Commercial glue is a hell of a lot better for doing headliners than sprayable ADOS or anything - the glue I used was a special type of sprayable super high tack glue called 'sabregrip'. Bonds very quickly and very well.



Laid new carpet down. This is a type of carpet typically used for stuff like custom carpeted RVs and cars - it's an elasticized synthetic material which takes the shape of anything you'd like if you're willing to beat the hell out of it for a few hours.

This means no more creases and folds like the Silvia had - instead it looks like it was made for the car to begin with.



Before and after with recoloring the interior plastic. To get the paint to cling properly you need to really scratch the hell out of the plastic and rub it down with prepsol pretty thoroughly.




Did a bunch of cleanup on the lightwork. Since I hadn't managed to get hold of a replacement right side brake light yet I was limited to doing these three.

Annoyingly a set of hairline fractures in the tail light made themselves known after being lightly prepsoled (hopefully the solvent itself wasn't responsible).

Basically you want to use polishing compounding as a grinding media and, starting from 400 and working up to 800 then 1500 sandpaper, beat up the surface of the lights until it's flat and cloudy per each level.

Then you spray a special high build, UV resistant clearcoat over the lights which fills in the sanding cracks and leaves the lights looking as clean as all the dust that instantly settles in the clear coat.




Did the two sided gasket fix for the rear brake light.



Randomly met this very nicely restored 1st gen civic. The first gen was actually my initial goal of a car to restore, mostly tempered by part availability compared to the ultra-common EK.



This is how it looked today - it needs to go on the trailer tomorrow and I am glad that the end is within spitting distance of the decrappening part of this project.

Also I cashed out some investments so I'll be starting to modify the Z06 a little bit soon - likely starting with the ZR1-style split intercooler setup to ensure that the future modifications get the cold air they need to work best and then the Halltech intake de-restriction which adds a hilariously large amount of HP for a plastic piece of pipe.

Spades
Sep 18, 2011
Also I did some stuff that isn't working on the rally car -



Picked up my emergency nut rounding device. If you've got to carry a single tool ... make it a leatherman. But I guess a BAHCO or Crescent branch adjustable wrench as your second. Thing even has a monkey wrench attachment so if you do round a nut you can still get it off.



Test drove the new KIA stinger. It's actually not too bad - inoffensively decent and pretty comfortable. I haven't driven anything by KIA recently but this does drive like a decently built car - can see why they're pretty popular.



Got invited to a club drive. There were a lot of Mazdas.



While on the drive I made the acquaintance of this lovely lady who surely suffers from all loving manner of backaches



also a mystery kitten appeared at the house

Spades fucked around with this message at 12:59 on Dec 15, 2017

Mr-Spain
Aug 27, 2003

Bullshit... you can be mine.
I think I need a pair of fuzzy dice for my SS when I go to nifty fifty's.

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Spades
Sep 18, 2011

Mr-Spain posted:

I think I need a pair of fuzzy dice for my SS when I go to nifty fifty's.

Always dice

Personally I like to put them in my performance cars because it's like a tacit statement that you're the opposite of the guy who drives a Ferrari and has a Ferrari hat and Ferrari jacket and Ferrari butthole bleach and such

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