carbonboy Posted February 25, 2011 Author Report Share Posted February 25, 2011 Airbox suits well, how up to date is this thread? At this stage of the story I'm up to about 12 months ago, a bit more to go to catch the thread up to date. I figured if I was going to start a thread on my ride, I'd best start at the beginning & that would be...2008...I think...when I bought the Twin Cam. Sorry if its a bit of an epic bore, at least I'm not copying my notes straight from the diary I've kept :P While I was still lucky enough to have been working with carbon fibre I had also knocked up a mould for the hatch spoiler (no photos atm). The plug for & the actual front bumper lip to replace the cut-down Cressida plastic item. Mould for bonnet Laminate layup, good fun on a warm evening as I was mixing the epoxy resin in buckets so had to seal the tops & store them in the fridge between layers to stop the stuff exotherming on me. Making a tool that was capable of the high temperature cure cycles of pre-preg material was financially painful so I went with a wet-layup method using a vacuum pump to ensure as void-free a laminate as possible. The normal skeleton thats under the bonnet panel was incorporated into the laminate design, not sure how it would go pedestrian crash safety-wise but I don't drive on the footpath so not relevant :wink: A bit sticky coming out of the tool but that was prob due to me not preparing the small repairs I'd had to do on the tool properly. Test fitment on car, came out nicely! Original bonnet weighs 14.5kgs....this little baby tips the scales at 4.5kgs so after final fitout & paint a touch over 5kgs is the target. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trev Posted February 25, 2011 Report Share Posted February 25, 2011 At this stage of the story I'm up to about 12 months ago Ok, body work looks great. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carbonboy Posted February 26, 2011 Author Report Share Posted February 26, 2011 (edited) Here's where the story has some more bad news :( After the 2010 GOR cruise it had come to my attention that despite the replacement doors/guard being installed things still didnt line up quite right & no matter what I did the drivers door still rubbed on the edge of the guard whenever I opened the door. Upon closer inspection/comparison with parts car I found the door frame/A pillar was rather twisted/distorted, residual damage from the incompetent moron in the Mirage :o Not being a professional panel beater/repairer I saw that this was a problem that I was highly unlikely to rectify successfully. At this point I remember sitting down & having a long think about it all (plus a few beers, well QUITE a few beers). :guiness: Things are slightly fuzzy at this point but this is something like how the thought process went: *Looks at Sudi* Hmmm, quite a bit of rust in all the usual spots plus the panel/chassis damage... *Looks at Parts* This car must've been garaged, bugger all rust & things are pretty darn straight... *Looks at Sudi* Mechanicals are all new/less than 20,000kms old... *Looks at Parts* It could do with a new paint job... *Sanity kicks in briefly* I don't have a vast array of painting experience, mostly high-build 2pack primers but man have I done ALOT of sanding & prep-work for painting... *Ego kicks sanity's arse* You can do it man, see what you're capable of & save paying someone to do it for you! :blinks: :excl: :blinks: So the plan was born, strip Parts of every nut, bolt, clip & pin, get rid of rust, respray, install mechanicals & basically have a brand new AE82. Closest thing to a new car I'll have owned :laff: A 4AGTE/4AGZE upgrade was contemplated but having just started the first year of a apprenticeship at this stage it was a dream that'd have to wait. Yes this is a 3yr old girl helping us yank out the windshield, we start 'em on Rollas young around here :P (especially when the father's trying to get her to be a new Ford Mustang fan *shudder*) Victory with removing the wiring loom!! Apparently its no longer my project but my dogs kennel... If you don't like sound deadener as much as I don't, dry ice is the bomb!! There's a thread either here on RC or on Toymods on how to do this so I need say nothing aside from it works & kicks scraping/chemicals into the dirt! Just a few hours work & 12kgs of sound deadener goes into the bin... I figured I'd need/like a way to be able to move the chassis around at any given point so I knocked up a buggy for it to sit on. For about $200 inc beers after construction it has been well worth it, gives me enough height to be able to crawl underneath too. Edited February 27, 2011 by carbonboy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
67Rolla-Ken Posted February 26, 2011 Report Share Posted February 26, 2011 I love this thread... much shorter waits for updates when it's all already happened. :lol: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carbonboy Posted February 27, 2011 Author Report Share Posted February 27, 2011 I love this thread... much shorter waits for updates when it's all already happened. :lol: If only I could do the work as fast as I type in this thread :no2: The car itself isnt finished yet so it will slow down a bit once I've caught up to current progress. Speaking of which, I'd better get my bum moving to it & keep on sanding/shaping bog! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carbonboy Posted March 8, 2011 Author Report Share Posted March 8, 2011 (edited) Rightio...now that the sound deadener was gone it was time to start playing with some serious chemicals :dance: Here's a tip though: if your car does not require going back to bare metal, don't do it! You're merely vastly increasing the amount of work required :blush: I'm the pedantic type, anything that was 20+ years old had to go. That meant any spray putty, body filler, paint, primer etc that was present was about to meet a methanol bath following by a pounding with various grades/shapes/sizes of wire wheels on both grinder & power drill. My attempts to contain the dust from grinding...epic fail LOL Rear end all naked Chugging through the roof section And down the C pillar... Front end stage 1 Guards...(took some time out to knock up a pair of panel stands for myself, fold up when I don't need 'em too) More guards New upgraded grinding booth as Blue Thing finally dragged out of the shed, was fixed up & made to run. Then some idiot gave it a RWC & rego so it could be my new daily hack! Considering I'd just spent 5 months riding a pushbike (registered Twin Cam needed new fuel pump, new rear tyres plus more to get RWC, was a 1st year apprentice at this stage so $$$ were bloody hard to come by. The old Blue Thing was cheaper to fix) 45min (was 60min but nailed it down as I got fitter) to work @ 7am 5 days a week (through a Melbourne winter I might add!) this was extremely welcome, I had thighs of steel but having a heater for those cold mornings is bliss! Vicroads, Vicroads, Vicroads... Things may seem a little muddled time frame wise at about this point... I was going through a few tough patches (well about 8 months worth) where I basically didnt touch the car, didnt think about it & came within a hair of just getting rid of it all when (with help from people close to me) I finally managed to work my way through the issues that had been bothering me & got back into it. This time I'd lost however was going to come back & bite me in the ass with a vengence... :( Edited May 17, 2011 by carbonboy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carbonboy Posted March 9, 2011 Author Report Share Posted March 9, 2011 Not completely neglecting the project build at one point I purchased a set of AE101 JDM front struts complete with hubs & brakes. There's a thread floating around on ToyMods which had caught my attention regarding brake upgrade options for the AE82. The option I chose is probably the pricer & more complicated option but the way I figured it was, once finished I'd have brakes designed for an 1150-ish-kgs car on a sub-900-kgs car :wink: After much mucking around (parts guys really DO give out fake/made-up part numbers, feels good to catch them out by showing up at their shop 15min after getting off the phone) I got ahold of some caliper rebuild kits so set about pulling them apart & painting them before putting them back together. Getting twin pistons out of their bores takes a bit of fiddling about with an air compressor & a block of wood but it was managed. Everything checked out okay, no scratches/wear marks on the pistons or the bores so off to be prepped for paint. don't quite know why yellow except I had some laying around needing to be used or thrown out? Does red make you stop faster too? Just as I'd managed to kick my butt back into gear (roughly August last year) it turned out that my landlords were deciding to get divorced...meaning the house I was living in was about to be sold :bash: :bash: :bash: Long story short, by the time I found a place to live (i.e is available ASAP & within my price range) I had about 6 (working week) days to move everything before I had to be on a bus to Adelaide. If I was not on that bus, after she was married my older sister would have come over here & killed me for missing it. :eatlead: :jason: :pulp: :blazin: :guns: So after after discovering that the new place was a.....shoebox in comparison to where I had been living I set moving stuff to my parents garage/shed & two mates sheds after I had ran out of room. The joys of moving a disassembled car & all its bits, a non-running complete car & its bits along with all the usual household stuff :'( Oh & my boat too, that was a pain! *Note to self* Build a boat trailer!!! Obviously I made the bus on time...just! I was just starting to pack for the weekend about an hour & a half before my bus left, most of that spent trying to find things! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
parrot Posted March 9, 2011 Report Share Posted March 9, 2011 Currently my favourite thread! Especially love your little girl getting stuck in there. She and my 6 year old would get on real well, especially if she likes Zhu Zhu pets, dancing and Mighty Beanz as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carbonboy Posted March 9, 2011 Author Report Share Posted March 9, 2011 Currently my favourite thread! Especially love your little girl getting stuck in there. She and my 6 year old would get on real well, especially if she likes Zhu Zhu pets, dancing and Mighty Beanz as well. Cheers! :y: I get asked "why do this to a Corolla?" alot, my answer now is "why not?" :cool: Not my little girl (thankfully lol) she belongs to the guy in the photo giving me a hand to remove the windshield without breaking it...we failed...miserably! :laff: But she seemed keen (strongly insistent?) on helping me "fix" my car so what could I do? The hard part was finding something where she couldnt injure herself too badly, she's a bit on the accident prone side even now :P A mad keen Dora the Explorer fan & from memory the fav toy/s atm are her marbles. My housemate's child likes my car but admits she's not interested in helping me (usually involves actual work & like, effort) & gets told to bugger off when I'm playing with power tools or funky chemicals. Paint stripper + lack of sufficient ventilation = $h1t I nearly fell over, time to take a break! Still trying to get more photos to upload from dodgy memory card so next update is a work in progress! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carbonboy Posted March 10, 2011 Author Report Share Posted March 10, 2011 (edited) Yay! memory card decided it wants to be read now! :dance: The next task after the car was stripped was to break out my old mate, polyester body-filler! Well okay, BOG. :wink: I still don't quite known what possessed me to do this but I took to all the seams on the body where metal overlaps metal & just put a small cove of bog in there. This was so the paint would just flow from one piece to the next without the small gaps that had irritated me previously, hopefully it'll look just that little bit cleaner/smoother. Interior was done also as the only things left in the cabin wil be: front seats,dash,centre console, front door trims. So with a lack of carpet to hide stuff I took the time to make sure it'd look nice without it. No bogging needed on ceiling thank fork as grinding overhead hurts after about 5min >| Nice shoulder workout tho! Where the backseats will not be. Drivers footwell Hatch area. Found small rust spot in front of rear wheel arches (both sides) that turned into big rust spots the more I ground away...Gave them a good hit of phosphoric acid then washed them out & used Metal-Mend to fill up the hole. Got a bit carried away, the tail lights will cover most of this.. But if you think thats bad, I also did all 4 wheelarches...yes they have plastic bits that cover them so at least I didnt do the spot welds!! :wink: Wire wheel for angle grinder before & after shot I decided at this point that the battery was going to be moved to the boot as I had stripped alot of weight previouslt from the rear end & have discovered that it can get a little bouncy-skippy when running less than 1/3 tank of fuel. Hopefully the addition of a little ballast will help settle it down a bit. Before you see, now you don't! Prep for primer continues, anything rusty gets ground, hit with rust converter, washed, then everything is ground/sanded, bogged, sanded again, dusted off, prep-washed & ready to roll. Edited May 17, 2011 by carbonboy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carbonboy Posted March 10, 2011 Author Report Share Posted March 10, 2011 Okay ran out of room for photos in the last post so I'll continue on here :rolls: Front strut tower. Where steering arms go. Previous stuff looked brushed on, it'll look much nicer now when I have to drop my gearbox to change the clutch :lolcry: It occured to me that (of all the moments to think about this, it's when it's too late) while sanding away at all this bog that there was the possibilty of the body flexing & cracking the bog-work... :blinks: :blinks: :blinks: I put myself into a rather healthy state of denial about this & decided that I'll cross that bridge when & if I come to it. It could happen, it may not, moving on! Here is where the project hit another snag... I was lucky enough to be able to score a few weeks off over the Christmas/NY period so I set about working full-time on the car. Because of the chaos of moving house (rapidly) & just alot going on in life I'd barely been able to touch it previously & sections I had stripped were now no longer a shiny silver but a nasty rust brown. :bash: My new neighbours however did not share my enthusiasm for power tools nor panelbeating works (a few minor dings needed a tap or three). This was brought to my attention by a phone call (I apparently ignored their letter which I recieved the next day) from our local council who were informing me that a formal complaint had been made & that I must cease activities immediatley of face a $600 fine :wtf: I checked up on their legislation, deciphered it all down to basic English & found that (long story short) technically I was not allowed to be doing what I was doing. I had managed to keep within the hours set for noise limits in our area but what I was doing & what I was doing it to being unregistered meant that I now had a dilemma. I'd had that suspicion but it appears that the old "polite knock on the door & ask to keep it down a bit" concept is dead :scarymovie: This was about 2 weeks into it all. :finger: A few phone calls later & I had myself a truck, some mates for labour & more importantly, a place to take it to!! :angrybird: We made sure to check with his neighbours first about whether making a bit of noise in the shed would be an issue; one lot just didnt want to be woken up early or kept awake late at night & the other ones just asked "what kind of car?". They were surprised when told a Corolla hatchback was the car in question but confessed a love for old Dattos so not sure whether to trust them :harhar: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carbonboy Posted March 14, 2011 Author Report Share Posted March 14, 2011 Just as a by the by, I kinda had to earn the space for my car...This involved climbing up & cutting down a willow tree...with a freakin hand saw! Why didnt we just shell out $100 to hire a chainsaw? We were both povo at this point :sob: So once my rent was paid (tree = dead) & the car was settled in, work resumed. What had annoyed me the most was that I had recieved that friggin phone call from the council the day before I was going to prime the interior! So given that it had the least amount of work involved to get prepped I got stuck in to the interior. All the bog in the seams was sanded by my fingers with a bit of sandpaper wrapped around them. I could've made sanding blocks but with the amount of shapes/curves involved in the interior I'd spend more time making blocks than sanding. Yes I now have some serious callouses on my fingertips & there were days where I had to stop because I'd almost worn my fingernail completely away, but being able to feel what I'm doing made the final results come up pretty good (I think anyway). The previous owner appeared to have had a weird habit of slapping screws into the floor pan in various locations. In total I filled 24 non-factory holes with Metal-Mend! Note that the spare wheel tub is not done, this is because of some serious rust that is to be cut out & good metal welded in. Since the house move/s my plans of doing things in an order went out the window. You get used to it I guess lol. Besides, more priming to do on other bits so it could wait. Previous owner had liberally applied some sort of rust preventer (?) goop inside the cavity of the C pillars, getting my hands in through those holes to get rid of it all/paint prep it was a painful (& slightly bloody) process but I managed. Clearing out the drain holes was difficult as it had all pooled there & blocked it up...kinda defeats the purpose of these drain holes no? My mate who I bow & worship to for renting space in his shed to me for my project, giving us his biggest smile! Occasionally offers help too, which is appreciated but being the anal bastard I am, all the bog shaping/sanding is done by me alone. The way I figure it is I know how I want it & if it comes out crap once the primer goes on I have noone to blame but myself. He's slightly pedantic too so we have an understanding :wink: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trev Posted March 14, 2011 Report Share Posted March 14, 2011 Looks good mate. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carbonboy Posted March 15, 2011 Author Report Share Posted March 15, 2011 (edited) Looks good mate. Cheers dude, comments like that make my fingers/hands hurt less lol. I think I went a bit hard at it yesterday, managed to dislocate my index finger (on my left hand fortunately) by getting it jammed in a hole where the wiring loom goes while sanding. Couldnt get the bugger back in so off to the hospital it was, only a 2.5hr wait instead of the usual 4-ish which dfunkt has encountered in the past. It sucks not being able to take codeine, doctors advice was to take panadol but they don't do much so scotch it is! Have been practicing away with the oxy set getting the hang of welding 1mm steel panel material, previously the thinnest I have welded is 3mm. I'd give an internal organ for a MIG welder but seeing as it'd cost about $1200 to get a half decent one its just a dream. 1mm steel CAN be butt welded using oxy, its just bloody hard to do without either blowing holes in it or pumping too much heat into one spot causing it to distort big time. Have managed a few small successful runs but still need to work on the flame size/techniques a bit. Edited March 15, 2011 by carbonboy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DKG779 Posted March 22, 2011 Report Share Posted March 22, 2011 Tremendous effort so far, I bet you won't be parking this one in a shopping centre carpark. I look forward to following the progress as I have a white AE80 hatch also that is a gunnado project. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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