Matt's JDM Levin project

[emtea]

I didn't take too many sorry.. there was about 5 or 6 panda cars at the show.. heaps of photos on the page on facebook if you have it.. search "All Japanese Day & Classic Day (Brisbane) Japanese Vehicle Shows"

[emtea]

been back at work and waiting for parts to arrive / or in some cases be found and purchased, so updates have slowed a fair bit... decided to get stuck into the rust and see how bad it was:



I actually expected it to look worse once the paint & bubbles were removed...

went out and saw a mate at JFAB engineering and got him to weld a new bit of metal in to the worst area..

first step was to cut a clear section to work with:



which looked like this once done:



incidently, I think the reason why these hatches rust is that hole you can see in the 2nd photo there.. I assume it's supposed to act as a drain, but I think when driving it has the opposite effect and water actually gets blown into the hatch via that hole.. then the water gets trapped and the hatch rusts from the inside out... most of you probably knew that already, but I always wondered why

once that section was clear with nice straight lines a new piece of material could be cut and shaped:



then it was welded in and ground back to smooth:



pretty happy with the result, JFAB's attention to detail was excellent... just needs a bit of fibre fill to get it back to the right shape and fill in the 2 small holes that weren't worth welding...

[emtea]

not much of an update, been very busy with work and family commitments so haven't had much time to work on the car.. still haven't finished the rust repair from the previous post but hopefully will sort that this weekend...

had a few parts arrive in the last couple of weeks - some misc screws and hand brake button from amayama, speaker trim that was missing thanks to Chris from SA and my china steering wheel spacer arrived ex germany.. not sure how that works lol..



changing from the drift button to the normal hand brake button was super easy, and can change back just as easy if I ever want to:



suits me better I think...

trim piece installed was another 5 min job and makes the car feel more complete:



haven't fired up the stereo yet though to see if the speaker sounds better but I'm hoping that with something to push against it will work better than when it was dangling from a zip tie.. lol

steering wheel spacer... thought that was going to be a 5 min job too, but the bolts they supplied for the 30mm spacer were too short:



with the thickness of my old school wheel it meant that there was 1-2 threads max coming through the spacer.. not enough to even grip the steering boss, let alone feel secure.. so a trip to the bolt shop and $3.65 later I had some M4 45mm bolts, then it was a 5 min job:



photo isn't the best, but you get the idea.. haven't driven it yet but the indicator feels ok (just) and I can see the top of the speedo and tacho now so I think it's going to work out ok...

[emtea]

so I "finished" the rust repair on the boot.. I say "finished" because I'm not happy with it and will need to look at it again... basically I rushed the prep and the painting to try and take the car to a happy laps event at lakeside.. which I couldn't run in anyway because of the roll cage.. I tried to pull the cage out by myself, but with the wheel arch bolts it's more of a 2 person job, as you can't get a ring spanner or socket onto some of the bolts inside...

a couple of photos:


took the fuel filler flap off and went down to local super cheap and matched the colour as best as we could.. seems to be a renault colour "azure blue metallic"... I'm terrible at painting and with the rushed prep the end result is not photoworthy, but I'm pretty sure the colour was right...

hadn't driven the car for about a month, so put the battery on charge on friday night to top it up and sunday morning got up early to go for a drive up to the hills:



generally felt pretty good, the steering wheel spacer has put the wheel in a better spot for me and the overall driving position is more comfortable... car could really use a wheel alignment and a tune though.. hesitation at about 5k is still there... also I think my throttle cable might have been sticking a little towards the end of the run, not sticking on, but sticking closed..

not sure what's next for the car.. there's a few things on the list all competing priorities.. biggest problem at the moment is a lack of time to work on it...

[4doors]

Hey it's looking good Matt!
I can't believe you're still driving around with those tyres though... haha. Maybe replacing them could be on your list somewhere.
Also, how to the brakes feel? They looked quite serviceable to me when I had the wheels off, but could do with a freshen up eventually. I guess driving would help them to blow the dust off.

[emtea]

thanks for the support Andy, felt a bit annoyed at myself that I rushed the finishing of the hatch...

yeah the tyres are definitely on the priorty list... the rears where on the wrong sides for the directional tyres, so I swapped them over and saw how bad the inner camber wear is.. I've done maybe 500k's in the car since getting it registered, all in the dry so it hasn't been that bad... I've been putting it off as I'm hunting for set a wheels I like, and having trouble making a decsion.. I guess because so many wheels suit the ae86 it's hard to choose just 1 set... also have been tossing up sticking with 14's or going to 15's...

the brakes feel ok, I do want to check that the slides are working perfectly, but in general they feel like they are stopping the car ok.. I didn't push it too hard on the down hill though... and as people keep telling me, you don't need to brake too much in an ae86 lol..

[4doors]

No worries Matt.
I like looking for wheels. Here what I've found:




Not sure on your budget or how far you're willing to travel for them. And yes, if I were you, I would go with 14".




But these are pretty cool for 15":

[emtea]

I have an overall budget for the car, but hadn't set a limit for wheels yet... I was debating getting these from kyusha garage:



but hesistated because of the tyre choices for 14's... might see if they are still available...

[4doors]

Not sure what size tyres you want... but what about these? Or this size anyway.

[emtea]

that size should be fine.. I guess I was looking for something in an RS3 sort of class as that's what I'm used to running, but maybe it's overkill for a car as light as an ae86...