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Spades posted:The car needs a new catch can since the PCV was contributing much to the filthy intake, so I drilled a hole in Sapporo can (easiest source for a steel can) and set it up to drain. Dunno who drinks this stuff Sapporo is a p.nice, mellow beer. In a world that's gone completely loving insane over IPAs it's super refreshing. Also nice work.
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Nov 13, 2018 15:25
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Actually yeah, it was the first time I'd drank it and for what I assume is the VB of Japan it wasn't that bad. Prefer stouts and there's bugger all hipster microbreweries making those today.
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Nov 13, 2018 21:02
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Took the Altezza out on a grass autocross again and the Altezza again dissapointed - not by breaking anything this time but by just being slow and understeery. The last event was a much more high speed event which allowed for plenty of oversteer while this one was basically just 7 180 degree corners smacked together so tightly that the car was unable to maintain any speed. The entire rest of the field was also running superlight FWD city cars with deep tread tires which made being competitive pretty much impossible when you're driving the equivilent of a Bentley Continental. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0gObmY1CZw 
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Nov 14, 2018 08:09
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accept sidequest y/n? y you have accepted the 'restore the SA3Rs' sidequest. So, in my previous thread I restored an S14 Silvia which had been used as a paddock car by a bogan farmhand, which included putting a 5 stud conversion on the car with the view to eventually upgrade the engine to a larger size. With the Silvia now sold to my dad (who seems to be eagerly eyeing putting a 351 and a toploader into it for whatever reason), I was left with a leftover pair of extremely rare Super Advan Version 3 Racing wheels, in the rare 114.3x4 stud pattern, with the rare combination of having all of the original fitting gear (nearly all SA3Rs at this point are missing the centre hubs which tend to get lost or thrown away due to the way they prevent easy access to the mounting bolts). basically theyre pretty rare So instead of letting them rot away in ignomy I've now got a goal to restore them to the classic Tokyo Autosalon style:  First big step was getting the terrible paint off of them. These wheels were originally the non-polished silver finish, but the extensive curbing and scratch damage makes it impossible to restore them to that state without extensive TIG welding and I much prefer the autosalon look anyway. Threw a bucketload of paint stripper on:  After two applications things started getting a bit thinner  Six applications later we were getting somewhere  Mostly clean!  Before starting on filler work, a layer of epoxy primer for improved grip and more importantly, no worries about aluminium oxide ahesion issues:  And here we are at the latest - repairing the curb damage on the rims. This one was particularly bad. Started out using aluminium compound filler (for stronger initial plugging) - the white stuff is what's called 'fine filler' and sands more cleanly for a nicer final finish for the last few mils.  --- The accessories were in a worse way than the wheels themselves due to the stupidity recruited when they were removed from the wheels last. The extensive damage from using a hammer and chisel to remove the nuts can be seen:  Close up:  Fixing the nuts with a bit of startard, spot-application style filler didn't work out because of how extensive the damage was. Instead, I decided to flowcoat the entire nut surfaces with JB weld steel epoxy:   Into the oven to set it in 30 minutes instead of 6 hours:   After some time with a tiny sanding block:  Also, underneath the nut is an O-ring that secures it more tightly to the centre plate. Since two of the nuts were bent beyond correction, I needed to use a die grinder to fix the fitment so the O-ring was able to seat itself again.  As for the plates - You can see that the centre plates have some gouged aluminium. They're made out of porous and extremely soft aluminium - the texture is similar to sea sponge - and they smudge very easily. Needed to clean this up with the dremel tool and a set of die grinders.   After a bit of JB weld (the body filler in previous photos pulled out due to the lack of primer and the unusual aluminium surface):  Note that I shaved off the hard edged line on the plate - I'll be restoring this later once the primer is present to prevent me removing too much more of the actual aluminium. Primed all the plates and and nuts, and masked off the text part of the coins (didn't want to fill in the text - will use some extra thin primer later for priming that part of them) and primed those too.  Next step of the process will be to sand back the primed up accessories, finishing sanding the curbing off the wheels, reprime everything and figure out whether I want to powder coat the centre nuts or just paint them - I'll be making up a fibreglass tightening tool for the nuts with rubber inset to ensure that the paint doesn't get damaged regardless. Spades fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Nov 18, 2018 |
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Nov 18, 2018 10:43
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Neat! Do they not make a tool for that nut? It looks awfully similar to this removal tool for E30s with basket weaves. There's also this style. angryrobots fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Nov 18, 2018 |
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Nov 18, 2018 14:31
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angryrobots posted:Neat! There's a standard tool that just about everyone has lost for them - basically a giant socket. Cost is pretty prohibitive for the tool itself (something like $120)
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Nov 30, 2018 09:44
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Made a start on the carpet and sound deadening. Laid the sheets of sound deadening out to get an idea for where they'd all fit.   Cut and laid them down.    Cut the component for the carpet which I hadn't bothered with on the Civic - heavy felt underlays for the floor pans to make the carpet feel extra plush   Before installing the sound deadening we'd already moulded the carpet -  So reinstall was pretty quick. Only real challenge was getting all the self adhesive velcro stuck down to various places to secure the carpet and felt to the chassis.  
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Nov 30, 2018 10:01
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Friend also wanted a custom headliner for the car, which had a rotted out cloth headliner. For whatever reason, search everywhere you can and it doesn't seem like there's a single tutorial on the internet of how to make a headliner for a car. Made a simple prototype to see if it's possible to use fibreglass to serve as a mould reinforcement for cardboard. It worked.  Now, an average car's roof is just an enlarged negative of the inside of the roof itself, so I figured some improvisation was in order. Bought some cardboard boxes and some fibreglassing epoxy, and laid the cardboard boxes out on the roof:  Trimmed the cardboard box to loosely fit the angle of the roof, making a dozen or so relief slits in the spine of it to force the box to bend cleanly. Cut up some fibreglass cloth to use to repair the now-weakened cardboard in those curves.  Resin'd the entire piece.  After the resin set, popped it off the car. For a very rough moulded piece it comes together ok.   Did the other half, and soaked the left side in more resin to ensure the stiffening of the entire backing. Unfortunately during this process, friend forgot to weigh down the cardboard and the wind smashed up the right side headliner. In order to fix the sag we would need to later use some large plastic washers underneath the headliner material to clamp more of the cardboard down.  Stuck the headliner into the ceiling, cut down the centre point, and duct taped the sides together to create the hinge to make it removeable. After this, I'd draw the headliner cardboard out and bend it in half before taping down the spine, allowing a compression hinge on the other side to strengthen it.   There are a variety of options with which you can line a headliner with. Most people choose a nice felt black which you can even buy with the foam pre-applied to the back. My friend didn't.   It took a few hours' worth of trimming, but we got the headliner jammed up into the headspace, trimmed and spread the headliner out. Not too terrible but I'll take the fact that the centre line of the zebra spine doesn't line up with the centre of the roof to my grave.  
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Nov 30, 2018 10:02
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Lastly had some progress with the SA3R parts. Finally found a somewhat matching metallic acrylic for the centre coins and the centre nuts:  'Brassy' and 'Coppery' metallic golds are pretty hard to come by as most paint out there seems to be some hideous shade of butter. I seem to remember there's even a company in the states that mostly just sells a spraycan paint that looks similar to the color of old BBS wheel spokes.
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Nov 30, 2018 10:05
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Neat idea for the headliner. That print choice was really something... How did you make it fit on the inside, since you’d moulded the outside which would be larger?
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Nov 30, 2018 13:25
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That’s gonna look good, I think. How did you keep tension on the headliner? Did you use British-style tension bows (it looks like it) or are you just taking advantage of it being slightly too big?
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Dec 2, 2018 04:00
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Granite Octopus posted:Neat idea for the headliner. That print choice was really something... After fitting the first half of the headliner, I cut it down the centre line of the car and trimmed off the far ends that were past the front/rear windscreens. Since only the curves themselves are fibreglassed and it's only a single layer, there's still a little flex to the whole thing so any differences between the inside and outside of the car can be solved with some bending and trimming. Seat Safety Switch posted:That’s gonna look good, I think. How did you keep tension on the headliner? The original headliner was a bow style, but the replacement we've made just uses a cardboard backing board like a modern car's headliner - to tension it all you need to do is lay foam underneath the fabric and it gives it the taut look. The edges of the headliner are tucked underneath a pair of metal screw-in tension braces (for the fore/aft windscreens) and also tucked under the rattlecord that goes around the doors - so we used some Butyl Sealant (a type of non-setting, very sticky sealant that's basically super Blu-tac) to pin the fabric up temporarily until we're done with paintwork and can put the rattlecord back in.
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Dec 2, 2018 05:55
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Spades posted:There's a standard tool that just about everyone has lost for them - basically a giant socket. Cost is pretty prohibitive for the tool itself (something like $120) Well right... I'm saying the one I linked may be the right size or close enough to work. The BMW one is 82mm (clearance for 80mm nut), and either style is under $20.
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Dec 2, 2018 14:45
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Finished some upholstery work on the Cressida interior - will upload the photos later. In the meantime, coming up over christmas I'm going to be working on fixing the paint and door handle for dad's old BMW to get it ready for sale, as well as fixing everything on the Commodore because that's how much fixing it needs.
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Dec 14, 2018 09:18
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Managed to get a bit done on the bmw - body is ready for paint touch up, engine now longer sounds like all its lifters have collapsed and the seized up brakes are taken care of. However, family drama has driven me out of dad's house house for a while so I'm back on the Cressida. Managed to get most of the left side of the car ready for priming last week - will post photos of both cars when I'm at my desktop.
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Jan 13, 2019 05:40
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Alright, starting with the good cars - I got the Integra's steering wheel recoated as it had started to look a mess.  The Z06's front splitter periodically gets mashed up from scraping on things and in the past I've repaired it with just body filler, but this is a pretty mediocre fix compared to doing it properly.  I got some high grade epoxy resin, knocked all the old filler off the splitter and reglassed the nose. First pass was just to start building.  After building, used a tiny bit of flex filler and touchup painted the underside. Left some deliberate extra high build in places to reinforce the lip - which is triangular in shape and so 'folds in' on itself on scrapes, causing chunks to break off.  I also changed the oil. The oil filter ran away. get back here oval office 
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Jan 14, 2019 04:32
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As for the BMW - Before ever getting moving, all four brakes were in various states of seized due to a floor having gotten silt and salt all over the car while it was parked. Getting the calipers off was complexified by a few mysterious design decisions, such as the insistence of using allen bolts with 7mm allen key heads for the slides and not having a banjo bolt holding the brake hose on (meaning you need to either twist the whole caliper off the car or remove the brake line to remove the brakes from the car).  I got to blow the pistons out, which was hilarious because of how much filth come out with them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGPLspou3pg   The lovely caliper design has a fatter bleed nipple than the actual bleeder screw which makes it a balls-wrenching experience to remove them with a box head wrench instead of a ratchet.  Because the calipers were rusted and full of dirt, I wirewheeled and painted them up to keep the rust off for a while.   Reassembled with silicon paste for the pads and brake antiseize for the slides.  Back on the car. Yes, painting the discs doesn't make them stop better Also touched up the curbage on the wheels themselves.  
Spades fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Jan 14, 2019 |
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Jan 14, 2019 04:48
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Fun sidenote: I had to replace the Civic's door handle due to it being snapped off at the handle part. To do this required the following steps: 1: Remove two 10mm bolts and then spin the handle off of the door lock 2: Spin new handle on, put two 10mm bolts back on Meanwhile, the BMW's door handle replacement involves: 1: Extent window to top of travel and disconnect battery 2: Take a cheap medium size flathead screwdriver and bend the head 45 degrees so that it can be used to reach around corners 3: Remove rubber end cap from top of doorframe exposing a small access window that you can insert the screwdriver into 4: Using a torch, put the end of the screwdriver up against a small metal retangular piece on the backside of the doorhandle 5: Strike the screwdriver firmly with a rubber mallet while simultaneously pulling on the outside garnish of the door handle to release it 6: With the garnish removed there is a circular metal castle nut around the external lock; use a broad bladed screwdriver to carefully loosen this and be sure not to slip and gently caress the paint up 7: Remove the rest of the ring by hand as a tiny o-ring behind the ring may be lost in the loving grass if you remove it entirely with tools 8: From inside the door, use a pair of bull headed pliers to either pull or nudge off the small retaining clip on the back of the clevis pin that holds the rest of the door handle on 9: Confirm that the door handle is now disconnected and able to be moved. This does not allow the door handle to be removed yet. 10: Remove the two allen bolts from the bottom of the far-end window regulator guide 11: Remove the two 10mm bolts from the top of the far-end window regulator guide 12: Undo three size 17 Torx bolts from door lock box 13: Undo 15 Torx bolt from inside door handle and remove inside door handle 14: Reconnect battery 15: Move window to bottom of travel and use a universal joint and 10mm socket to disconnect the regulator guide carriage from the window itself 16: Disconnect battery 17: Remove retaining split pins from plastic window regulator clips. If either of these have been installed backwards at the factory you will need to hook a piece of fishing trace line blindly before the regulator arms to yank them out. This will take hours. both of mine were installed backwards 18: With the window removed from all regulators and guides, Remove the brass far end window regulator guide bar. 19: Have somebody else lift it to the top of the door so that it can be raised an extra half inch above the original maximum travel height. This is necessary for removal of the door handle as it is 1/4 an inch too tall to come out of the door with the window at maximum height 20: Using the working space inside the door cavity, move around the door lock box inside the door and use a pick tool to remove the internal lock rod, the internal door rod, the connecting keyway between the door handle and the lock box itself and the external lock rod. Be careful to remove the external lock with with extreme care as the plastic bushing it sits in is integral for the lock's operation and when broken the door will be locked permanently next time you lock it. 21: Remove ground connector from door lock and wonder why they used a microswitch to determine when the door was open when they could just use a grounding button like every other car manufacturer 22: With all rods and connectors removed, wiggle door lock box until it can be removed from the door 23: Now that the door lock box no longer occludes removal of the door handle, the door handle can be dropped down into the base of the door 24: Remove electronic central locking actuator from the door handle 25: Remove door handle from door 26: Installation is opposite of removal but either way the window will never line up again afterwards -- Anyway. The car's doorhandle was broken due to the complexity of the mechanism not accommodating the same mechanism being cast from very soft and low grade aluminium and using a truss design where an I-beam design was actually required:  Threw a huge glob of JBWeld on the elbow and speed set it with the heatgun. Tested the joint and it was able to take plenty of force.  Inside of the door.  Lubricating and cleaning up the regulator connectors before putting them back in. For some reason the rail was completely full of gritty crap.  Back in to the door. 
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Jan 14, 2019 05:17
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Getting the car started wasn't as difficult as expected - needed to charge the battery initially. I had however been told that the car had been being driven occasionally when in fact it had been sitting for 3 years, so when I cranked the ignition, 3 year old gasoline promptly flooded the poo poo out of the engine. also there was a botanical garden growing out of the engine bay Dug the spark plugs and let it evaporate, did my best to jiggle siphon the tank and threw some new gas in. It started under a good deal of protest and as it coughed to life I was greeted by the chorus of six sticky lifters doing their best to crank through three year old oil varnish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feW-9y5QDMw It really didn't want to move at the time (hence the brake fixes above), but after getting the car ambulable again I figured some minor service work to get it going wouldn't hurt.  Got under the car to drain the oil out. Found I hadn't gotten rid of all the weeds growing up through the engine bay.  Old oil has certainly had its day  Because of the lovely idle I did the intake tract - MAF, throttle body, idle sensor etc   I also painted the oil filter housing and cleaned the engine bay up because I wanted to thats why   Got everything up and running again and gave the engine a new testing out. Lifter tick was reduced and after 'bleeding' the lifters (holding the engine revs at 3000rpm for 30 seconds three times), gone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myluFnmkOUU
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Jan 14, 2019 05:31
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Removed the bumpers and started wet sanding the parts that needed paint touchup. This was most of the car - Left fender, roof, hood and bumpers.  Took apart the plastic bumper guards and got them ready for painting.  Sadly didn't get this done due to family issues but I might eventually get around to doing so. -- While disassembling the car I noticed the foglights were totally hosed. Lamp cover of one of the lights had fallen off and the exposed chrome paint had fallen off:  Also immersion corrosion had completely buggered both earth and positive:  Soldered new wires into the plugs and sprayed some liquid chrome into the old housing  Resealed with RTV (other foglight on left) 
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Jan 14, 2019 05:38
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Removed all of the interior cladding work of the Cressida. It was all sun damaged, cracked in places and the weird factory flocking had started to rub off so it looked poo poo. Got to upholstering the pillar covers using headliner foam and some carpet offcuts. Some pieces completed - pillar covers and kick covers:  Test fit of the upholstery work:  The dash was cracked right through the middle of the cluster support so I made an interference weld with two layers of fibreglass to ensure adhesion and strengthening:  Used some fine filler to fill in the remaining holes in the passenger's side doors and used some cheapo primer to check the linework out:   Considerable work remains for the quarter panel as it has an enormous number of small dents which I still need to finish chasing down. Thankfully no other parts of the car have been crashed into four times, so it shouldn't be too long until it's ready for final prime and paint.
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Jan 14, 2019 05:43
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Lastly decided I wanted to finally remove the final few rattles in the Z06's interior - these were in the door, airbag/horn assembly and the tail lights. I nerd out about this crap way more than I aught to because my unusually high hearing range, so I have a kind of 'toolkit' for removing vibrations from cars which basically amounts to self-adhesive foam weather stripping, acoustic sealant, RTV, silicone paste, antiseize and duct tape. Acoustic sealant is kind of hard to come by in some places - I use the ProForm butyl tape (http://proformproducts.com/en/products/repair-products/glass-repairs/butyl-tape/). Best way to describe it is that it's softer, stickier blu-tac - it never hardens and absorbs vibrations amazingly well. Anyways, if it helps anybody, what I find works is - Pieces which can rattle in place - Wad with acoustic sealant until they can't move Pieces bolted together - Remove pieces, apply very thin gasket of acoustic sealant between both, apply antiseize to threads and bolt down. Secure bolt heads with duct tape. Plugs that rattle in housings - Remove plug, coat sides with very thin acoustic sealant and plug back in, use a pick to push more in between plug and housing if required Trim clips, metal or plastic - Wad with silicon paste Large broad surfaces - weather stripping Surfaces that need to be able to move (e.g. back of the horn button) - weather stripping -- Anyway, removed the door cards:   Rattling in the passenger's door was caused by a plastic welding job not having been done properly in the factory - You can see the part which broke loose with the glue clamps holding it here. I RTVed it back to the door card since this allows for a permanent and highly flexible join that absorbs vibrations.  Driver's door rattle mostly came from the window controls cover creaking in place. Took some effort to get this to stop making noise - in the end I gasketed the entire piece in sealant and scraped and left over after sticking it back together.  These little plastic inserts hold onto the door's pushpins. From factory they have small plastic o-rings that allow them to move a bit in their housing so I wasn't having any of that. Made washers out of acoustic sealant for them.  Driver's side door ready to go back on. Everything has been fixed in place with acoustic sealant, duct tape etc where it needs to be.  Also removed the rear tail light surrounds which were squeaking against the tail lights themselves; gacked the contacting surfaces with the acoustic sealant.  I didn't get a shot of the airbag as I wanted the bomb to spend as little time as possible outside of the steering wheel where it belongs. I wrapped it with insulating foam since I didn't want the acoustic sealant to bind up next time I use the horn.
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Jan 14, 2019 06:02
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Also after all the work on the BMW I decided to show these fuckos how it's done https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpUfYC8DB6E Burnouts for some inexplicable reason are considered a huge deal in NZ, but they don't require any skill or talent to do whatsoever and I have never understood why but, have a 90hp car doing a sick standstill, bro
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Jan 14, 2019 06:10
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Posting just to acknowledge the work you're doing. Please continue.
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Jan 14, 2019 15:50
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdvD2lMR47M We got the Cressida reassembled last night and managed to get it chugging again. Funny, the lovely rice exhaust on it actually seems to make car louder (at the moment it's got open headers). Runs and idles an absolute poo poo ton better than it did before - as I mentioned before, the throttle blade, intake manifold, IAT gauge, idle valve, throttle arm and crankcase vent were all completely caked with bullshit and without all the obstruction it now sounds as good as new that isn't saying much.
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Jan 15, 2019 01:34
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I assumed you were in the states?
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Jan 15, 2019 10:07
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SquirrelGrip posted:I assumed you were in the states? The Corvette is a bit of a curve ball
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Jan 15, 2019 12:32
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SquirrelGrip posted:I assumed you were in the states? Nah, NZ the whole time. The Corvette was purchased semi-legally with a bag of cash from Florida and then shipped out to NZ without a title - something that'd probably get me blacklisted by GM if they knew about it as there's meant to be dealership contracts preventing titleless sales or first year exports. My older thread has some more details about the screwing around that it took to get the car out of the states.
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Jan 15, 2019 22:04
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lmao that loving owns
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Jan 16, 2019 03:54
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Started getting the fenders ready for primer today since they're been unfinished for a while and it's about time they get sorted out. As from the archive picture, the driver's side fender had a terrible filler job that didn't really work right; the entire fender had a filleted radius with no camfering on the edge.  Used the wire cup to clean up the fender's rust patches and then rustkilled and began filling. First pass to just fluff the flat spots a bunch, done freehand:  Extended the fill and used some slow catalyst to shape the carbon fibre as much as possible while it was setting up  After some more freehand, did the old man's trick of laying PVC tape over a body line and then sanding over it - ensures a hard edge  Edge finished:  Ran some fine filler over all the pinholes and primed it up  The 'real', 2K primer will hopefully go on tomorrow if nothing interrupts this process and then they'll be ready for actual paint
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Jan 22, 2019 07:25
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Managed to get the primer down but the seasonably ultra-hot weather has been playing havoc with the ability to lay down non-dusty paint and primer - tried to lay down a coat of paint and immediately ruined the finish with a gritty astroturf texture so I've ordered slow thinners to try to get some wet paint for a change.  Bought some extremely soft crappy hardware store aluminium beam to make a fire extinguisher rail for the Integra as I'm well tired of having the thing roll around in the back footwells.      I looked underneath the Cressida donor car to see what the 'custom exhaust job' looked like. my welds arent this bad  Took the Corvette to the ocean for a while - Raglan beach:     Finally got the Altezza road legal again and WOF'd, so I decided to polish the turd for the first time:  
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Feb 4, 2019 09:36
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Finished up a good chunk of the Cressida work this late week. The driver's side door had been poorly repaired in the past (standard non-reinforcing body filler on top of metal that hadn't been cleaned or primed), so the rust had come back. Wire cupped and rust killed the entire bottom half of the door.   Applied some reinforced carbon filler. Didn't think to take a photo of the rest of the reconstruction but I worked the filler until both sides of the door looked as-new.  The roof didn't look like it was that bad, but the primer had thinned enough to let several rust spots form up, so I sanded it mostly back to metal and applied rust killer.  The rear left quarter had always been a pain in the rear end due to four difference impacts to the vehicle, making the whole thing into a mess of cheese. First filling attempts failed because of how lump the bodywork had become - you can see how many 'steel islands' rose out of the filler:  Burned off all of the filler with an oxytorch and then beat down all the high spots with a ball pein and impact socket, refilled and longboarded. This was about the fifth attempt and it passed the ruler and hand tests. While I was at it, I improved the body line with the same PVC tape technique as the fender.  Primed.  Primed the rest of the car at same time.   This dude showed up, cool  Finished stripping the donor car so that the later Bosozoku panels can be made from its parts 
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Feb 24, 2019 22:38
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Got some painting done and identified the real issue with the paint spraying of the fenders was lovely paint thinner again - using my usual guy's paint thinner came out with vastly better results. The finish is actually very clean in these photos but all the dust settling on the paint kinda wrecks the look. I didn't actually personally do anything but the clearcoating - my friend did all this painting from my direction. Either way, painted the doorjams:   Since we got a bunch of overspray on the bodywork doing so, we decided to extend it onto the rest of the sides of the car. Friend was getting used to the gun still, hence the patchy finish on the doors. We only clearcoated the doorjams, hence the lower gloss as well.   
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Feb 24, 2019 22:43
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The rear hatch, lower front valance, bumpers and hood still need to be finished so got started on the hatch. Removed rust with wire cup, smacked in the trim mounting holes with ball pein, welded blocker panel into now-shaved lock cylinder and rust converted.  Threw on a big stack of carbon filler and got the basic shaping down:     Flow coated the leading edge on the hatch with regular filler and ground it all down. Barrel sanded and sphere grinded the back faces of the hatch so that they lost their chewed bubble gum look.  Primed. Kind of proud at how smoothly the inner faces on the corners came out given how many edges needed to be cleaned up.   Also applied the first pass of bumperpaint to the rubbery bumper covers. Used an adhesion promoter spray and then hosed down about 250ml before wet sanding it back a day later. 
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Feb 24, 2019 22:48
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Pain of the rear end this week has been the Corvette deciding that just throwing a P0300 Random Misfire error code with no other errors or even symptoms including not even having demonstrably perceivable misfires, is a reasonable behavior. Cylinders are primarily driver's side with a concentration on 5 and 7 - rear two half. Put in new plugs (coming up anyway @42k), swapped and cleaned coils and spark leads, checked o2 heat briefly, cleaned MAF and MAP sensors, replaced battery (was already due), ran fuel tank dry and replaced with new fuel - still get a rare p0300 CEL sometimes for no apparent reason, without any misfires I can actually feel. Remaining suspects are a bad O2 sensor, bad cat or exhaust leak leading to a bad closed loop fuel reading, as it primarily occurs post hard driving rather than during hard driving itself.
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Mar 1, 2019 09:32
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LT4 right? I can maybe make some inquiries.
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Mar 1, 2019 14:08
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Yeah, that's the one. A guy with a bunch of experience on the main corvette forums is helping me look into it and it may potentially be a fuel supply issue, though it seems strange it doesn't throw a CEL at the times you'd expect it to. It doesn't seem to be end of the world engine destroying because the plugs aren't getting a rich or lean burn finish to them, but I'd rather not have the engine working wrong regardless. No codes for the fuel pump pressures (either pump), but also no codes for O2 failures. Gonna get the backpressure checked on the cat and a boreoscope in the gas tank to see if I've been sugared.
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Mar 2, 2019 09:40
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I wish altezzas were actually fast. Thread keeps my head spinning. Great work.
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Mar 7, 2019 04:09
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Just posting to say that I'm enjoying this and look forward to more.
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Mar 7, 2019 06:57
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Got started on the remaining panels - bumpers and hood. The back bumper seemed like it'd been poorly painted with a house spraygun or something - it turned out that it was actually melted, and the surface mottled from the contractions during the melting. After an hour or so of sanding, this is what the bumper looked like:   Went from 80 to 180 to 400 grain sandpapers to smooth out how 'fuzzy' the thermoplastic became while being ground down. Then applied a layer of adhesion promoter and painted it with some bumper paint.   Wet sanded the first coat back to smooth it out a bit and applied another, then repainted the front bumper too. These aren't final paint passes but just build layers to take out some of the extremely rough finish that the bumpers have. I'll be using my high quality paint gun instead of the primer splasher for the final finish.   
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Mar 11, 2019 01:09
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