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| Ronnie came over today. We put my old TRD rear springs in his car. He wanted to use them while he's saving up for the rear coilovers. Why not? They were just collecting dust in my garage... I'll eventually sell them once I get the front ones out of my car - which I hope is this coming weekend. |
- posted by //Ender-DI @ 12:58 AM
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Whoa... looks like it's been a while since I posted in here. I swear I've posted since May 6th. =P
Well, I finally put the carbon fiber hood on the AE86 and dropped it off with Tim Wehe (T3's mechanic) and Robert Webber of Altered Egos paint.
But before I go on, I must say that while the fit of BTunedGarage's CF hood is nice, it wasn't a direct drop-in. The holes for the two safety hooks near the hinges were not drilled - so you could mount the hood, but not close it. And then the hole for the hood prop wasn't drilled either. What a pain. So I drilled out the two hook holes for a rough fit and figured I'd work on it once I got the car up to Placerville.
Getting up there was SUCH a horrendous task. With the aid of my friends Earle and Vernon, we trailered the AE86 up to Placerville. Unfortunately, I came down with food poisoning about 20 minutes into the trip. Seriously, that had to be among the top 3 of the sickest times I can remember. I spent the entire trip semi-conscious in the corner of a 6cyl single cab old Ford F150, wedged in with 2 other guys (and Vernon is huge), going about 52 miles an hour for the better part of 8 hours just on the way up there. The truck could have gone faster, but anything over 55ish, the trailer would start fishtailing. Which we got pulled over for at one point. That was a 45 minute delay when we found out that the driver had a suspended license due to bad paperwork at the DMV. Then the entire night consisted of projecting various bodily fluids out of me. I couldn't even keep water down. Then there was a major detour all the way over to the BAY AREA on the way back. I was so miserable. It took me 2 more days before I felt better.
Anyway...
Once up there, Tim went to work on the car figuring out exactly what was wrong with it. I get a call a few days later saying, "dude... your engine's fine - it pulls like crazy! You don't need a new one." Turns out that there were just a bunch of little things wrong with it that made it run as badly as it did (and have as bad emissions as it did). So over the next few days, he kept driving it around slowly shaking out every problem he could find. Now the thing runs like a dream. Then, being the exhaust expert he is, installed the 5Zigen Border III exhaust. But it apparently fit like crap so he modified all the exhaust hangers to make it tuck as tightly against the car as possible. Man, it looks great now. Not to mention just how smooth it sounds. Exactly the sound I wanted. Absolutely NO farty Civic sound. At all. I couldn't get over how nice it sounded.
On the weekend of the 12th, I went back up to Placerville to go check it out and install new headlight buckets. The ones I had were really... REALLY... beat up. Better to just replace them. I found a really clean set from a purple/maroon SR5 in the junkyard. Way cheap and looked great. So I took them up there and installed them that weekend.
Oh! This is going way back, but for all the nay-sayers on Club4AG - the headlight-to-grille brackets ARE different between zenki and kouki models. HAH! Told you! There was a reason I couldn't get my zenki grille to mount right on my kouki headlights and it was because the brackets. are. different! LIKE I SAID! hahaa...
Back to my story... Once I got up to Placerville I realized that I had forgotten the door hinges that I snagged from the same SR5 for my driver side door. My door sags by almost an inch when open. Oh well... Robert says that it'd be best to get a clean driver door from the junkyard while we're at it. It would take WAY too long to fix that door... better to just start fresh. While I was at work on the AE86, I also touched up the hook holes needed for the hood. Gabe had his dremel handy so I went to town on the hood. Now it closes nicely.
Also, on that trip to the junkyard for the headlight bucket and door hinges, I found a lot of other good stuff. I finally found the clean set of rear SR5 arm rests I needed for my black/dark grey SR5 interior conversion. Granted, they were dark maroon, but nothing a little black vinyl dye won't fix. I also found a mint condition black dash and rear seats out of a GTS. I ended up trading the dash to Gabe since I'm starting to rack up a bill with him. =)
I think I'm going back up to Placerville again next weekend, but that's tenative at this point. I'd like to work on the Corolla a bit more and get Tim to make a custom exhaust for the S13.
Hrm... I think that's just about everything that's happened since the last update. *whew* |
- posted by //Ender-DI @ 1:05 PM
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