JDM55

pow!!! turned out pretty good , took well over 5 hours of spraying time to paint , has one base coat ,3 coats of colour and 3 coats of clear, all in all I'm prety happy with it, theres a few small ripples here and there that i must have missed , but on the hole its a lot straighter than it was,and no more rust and the colour just looks awesum,

so to start the painting off , i wanted to put a base down to cover any rubbed thru areas ,and seal off the primer also doing this helps with the coverage of the actual colour....

and finally after 2 years and much much work its in the oven ready to paint!! , the next pictures are of the exstensive masking i had to do due to the insides all ready been painted,,,,

a few more then , here i started sanding the car down to get it ready for painting , how i sanded it was , all by hand using blocks, start grade was 240# on a block then followed up by going around the edges, next was 320# on the block same again around the edges with the 320 ,then finally was 600# wet and dry by hand , using water, for the final sanding , cleaning was in the way of just clean water to wash away all the excess guide coat(black stuff on the panels) and the air gun to blow all the water and dust from the cracks ,

cheers mate , detail becomes nessasary I'm most of the things I'm doing ,i try to go off the rule of you can't make one piece look all pretty and fancey and then leave the part next to it all rusty and old ... lol well thats the general idea , sometimes its not as easy as that lol , thanks for your comments

haha good things come to those who wait :P .......

yes lol its going matt black to match the cooler :)

haha cheers mate , yes I'm loving the cool it is lovely! haha :) and yeah it will be great to see it done, it has been a bit of a bump ride so far , hopefully not to far away now......

next lol , before i go to paint the outside i wanted to make sure the front panel parts actual cleared the intercooler ,something i hadnted checked when modding the rad support and making intercooler brackets ,so had to assemble that up to get a look at the clearances between the cooler and the front valance and front filler panel.............. not the bigest intercooller i know , but keeping it close to stock for the time being ,but it sure fits in there realy nice and by some kind of sheer miricle with the front panel on it clears !@@!!@!@@!@! 5 mm haha was happy about that one . yes the filler panel is orange!!!!!! i stole it off my daily 55 like many other parts hahah

front guard other side!!!!!!!! here can see the guard mod for the ba clear indicators,yes i know its been done a hundred times,this was one of the first mods i did to the car ,well over 2 years ago now, was interested to see how it would turn out....

bonnet hinges ... looking like a car again!!!!! rr door front right door!!!!!! this is a big deal right here, the car hasnt had panels on it for over 2 years and to see them finally gonig back on was great :wink:

so finally got all the insides painted up , next plan was to get all the panels back on and line up the whole thing ,which seem slike an easy task ,but gess it takes a long time , far to many movement options on the doors haha, any way to fit the doors i needed the catches and the latchs put back in ..... also bot rid of all the old bolts ,got all new stainless steel shiney ones :P there arnt cheap when you need a hell of alot of them :bash: door insides ..... wooo hinges back on,and catches and now the first door!!! its exciting stuff rite here lolol 2nd door!!!!!!! and boot lid :dance:

and shell unmasked....

after all that it was time to get the parts in and paint then also,,, 4 doors bonnet and boot and 8 door hinges afair bit of painting ,spec when your trying to do a good job lol, everything jamed in the oven..... again with the magic gleaming blue :happy: door with custom speaker thingos :P

after a bit of work ended up with some paint on the thing!! the colour has several pearls in it so getting a good picture is very hard as it looks differnt in differnt angles and lights but any way heres a few shot of the colour on the shell insides,..... all paint is ppg and the cost of this paint was quite abit of money ,put it this way the auctal paint far out wieghs the cost of the car ,hahaha ,how ever it is quality paint and lasts a long time , you get what you pay for i spose same shot looks differnt .... have to say i am loving this colour ,its very clean ,bright and dark sparkly but not too sparkley but not too much ,all in all its very nice I'm quite happy with it sexy :dance: :dance: :dance: :dance: :dance: :dance:

after the panels were all sanded, thats all the insides 4 doors,bonnet ,boot lid , guards, turned my attention to the shell, sanded the door shuts and the boot insides, after the shell was all prepaired, and cleaned up, got the shell in to the oven !! woo exciting stuff ,first steps to geting some real colour on the thing,can see the exstentive masking up lolol , again over kill , but all part of it , removed the door hindges at the last moments i ummed and ahhed about it, but turned out the rite move , the masking in the boot was set up to allow the hindges to be pushed down and up with out disturbing the rest of it

and now for some fun stuff, but more importantly a big step in the progress, partly due to money restricitions and wanting to avoid the mechanical side for a while, i decide to start geting some paint on the car!! finally after 2 years looking very close to getting it painted, so as with everything on this build certain things relate to certain other things so had to set a bit of a plan out before diving in to just spraying the car and being done with it, first of all i couldnt paint the engine bay as i still have to have the engineer check over the car once its running and didnt feel like going thru all that work just to turn around and be told i have to cut something here,grind this,add a thing here do this, which these vic engineers seem to be coming famous for,well at least in my dealings with them, so no paint on engine bay, next had to decide about the order of painting paint out sides then the inside ,or paint insides then the out side,what about over spray from painting the outside going all over the painted insides stuff like that , wanted to do it once and do it right, well at least to the best of my ability ,lol decided to go with the logical way and paint the insides ,bolt together and hit the whole out side of the car, so then shes fairly well done,still this is a masive task and to do bymy self like everything on the car takes alot of time .... so heres the shell as it is at the moment, now I'm a car painter not a panel beater, so my panel skills are fairly average i spose , but for what ive done it should be ok for what i need, not going in shows and stuff like that i mean ,I'm build this to drive not sitt there, starting with the doors and panels , the fun job of sanding in great detail begins! using 320, dry then 600 wet then scotch bright, and alot of time , alot of cleaning and using airguns and water and prepsol , etc

thanks alot there mate yeah I'm glad too , realy want this finished this year so I'm going to be pushing a bit hard over the next few months , fingers crossed can hold it together,funds are still very tite (next to zero) haha but doing as much as i can on the cheap and by myself seems to save a fair bit of cash, cheers

cheers mate, got a few things to post up over the next few days so keep an eye out, the muffler was just under 400 aus dollars, a bit on the pricey side, but it is highly polished s/s , 3" inlet and out let, and comes with a remote control of all things ,to operate the butterfly inside the chamber, be interesting to see how it goes, cheers

next cut out a 2nd piece of wood, put a larger hole in it than the speaker ring and glued it onto the base, that left me with a fair chunky bit of wood, but some shaping and sanding and eventuly a bit of paint to seal the wood up it was looking more like what i was after..... then finally after all that the pod thingo was covered with the same material as the door trim (was tricky to cover this shape as well) and the finished thing ::: and on the completed door trim

heres the recesse on the other side;;;; next thing was to make a wooden ring that the actual grill could mount to, the grill i ended up using was actualy a 2 piece thing, one piece the grill 2nd piece a steal ring that the gril squesed on to, so needed something for the grill to mount to .....tricky cuting out a wooden ring also lol .... next the wooden ring was glued and clamped to the base piece ...... that gave me a base with a hole in it that nicely fits over the speaker and a wooden ring to mount the steal speaker grill mounting ring too :lolcry: ...

primer on... i know i rattle on a bit and go into fair detail with what I'm doing, but i like to show how much work is actualy invovled in doing just some simple tasks,after allits all the small things that at the end of the day make the car what it is, just my thoughts any way ..... so that being done i could move on to look at the door trims ,or at least get an idea what i wanted to do for the speakers, after geting the door trim cut out and the speaker back in ,i figured id make a pod like speaker grill thingy , so out with the paper and card board and came up with a very basic shape to start with , could have left it at that, but oh no we have to go and get funky chickens happening , try and keep up here it gets a bit fiddley,haa, ok heres the basic shape cut out off some ply with a hole in the middle for the speaker , but also just beneath that hole it is resessed so the height of the speaker sticking off the door,wont interfer with the grill thingo.....

relating to the interior , was the speaker set up, i couldnt realy paint inside the doors until i set up the speakers ,well i could but I'm trying to do as much finishing off work then paint ,that way I'm not chopping up freshly painted stuff making a hell of a mess so ,the idea was to figure out how I'm going to mount the speakers , also how i used to have front speakers was sitting on fibreglass pods, now these are fine for that job, and kinda look pretty cool , but i found i would continuly kick the pod since it stuck out very far from the door, so had to come up with a slim line version to do the same thing i guess, in the end as per usual i ended up with a slightly complicated way of doing things , but at the time it seemed the best answer to the problem,kind of went with it, but it certainly was alot more work than realy was needed, ahh well its over with now, but if i was to do it again mite have spent a bit more time researching and thinking of a prefered option over what i did, so basicly ,the speakers needed to be hard mounted as close to the door as poss, and a cover had to be made to fit over the speaker, which lead to another small problem,i realy don't like all these wierd ass looking speaker grills there making these days, spider shapes and wheels and wierd ass s#$t, i just wanted something clean and tidy looking, less tacky sort of thing , thats when i decided to design and make my own speaker grill type pods , this turned in to a lot of crazy work that i probably didnt need to do lol,any way never mind, after figuring out where i wanted the speaker on the door, cut a ruff hole for it .... next i was left with a hole but not the most solid area to place a speaker, so designed and cut out , a steal plate for the speaker to be secured to .... then grinded back the primer around the plate and welded it into place..... next step was to grind back and make smooth and flush my unbeilevable welding !!! all in place now ,a few holes for the speaker screws and the speaker now fitts the door in position with a good solid mounting area... then i wanted to seal up the repairs and bare metal etc, so masked off the area, a bit of sealer here and there, and was ready to get primed up ....

another small thing was the rear muffler ,had to do a very ruff test fit, this thing is huge, probably far to big for the small rolla but its kinda grown on me and ,being a variax muffler I'm able to shut the noise down a fair bit apparently ,which should help with the vic roads epa tests /bastards , but this thing had a straight pipe hanging off it and I'm a big fan of dump tips so chop chop with the straight and tacked on a dump tip , deffinatley the look i was thinking off, ,but dam this thing is huge ! hahaha :P

after assembly of the the ash tray the heater control panel,cluster, and gauges etc it looks like this , at this stage I'm quite happy :) :dance: then for a lil touch of pimp my ride styles i changed all the lights to blue, i actualy customed the heater control lamp to hold an led, and also the ash tray light got rid of the green plastic and replaced that peice with a clear piece (of a cd case) and then another blue led , i like it ..... this one is abit blurry but thats good, you can't realy see my terrible efforts at recovering the dash pad, tho i did spend about 5 hours recovering the thing it was just realy hard and didnt come out as good as i hoped,i ended up using dark grey micro swuede which I'm also using for my door trims , just to be differnt, the very hardest part was the (bendy dip down part in the middle ,bending fabric into a shape like that just dosent like to go, any way thats how it ended up and thats how its staying ....