Lucky's Series 3

[myatt1972]

semi enabled.

Its good but didn't have that effect on me

[Lucky]

Finally managed to buy the car of my dreams. Well, one of them. The rotary car of my dreams, then.

...well, one of them


can you tell what it is yet?

[KiwiDave]

Welcome to 2016 Nik. It's been a while mate. Now, as you're handy with a camera and photo trickery, it could be a SA rendered to a certain scale. And it has Japanese alloys. And the wing mirror .....

Well, it's my favorite color for a SA. Feel free to string me along for as long as you wish

[Lucky]

lol, OK then

[codge]

'Tis crack detailing for a Matchbox / Corgi Nik.

[KiwiDave]

It's the wing mirror that still bothers me ... hmmm ... I'm saying AutoArt as a starter for 10. But what's with the wheels? Those aren't Campagnolos

[Lucky]

Woah, seems it's been a while Must be time for a wee update then.

....actually, in my defence there's not actually too much to update y'all on. Couple of reasons for this, mostly really boring about how real life has got in the way of cars and such over the past year or so. But mainly, it's because the poor li'l FB has been (mostly) uncomplainingly plodding along in daily driver capacity since Japfest last year. And the reason it's had to be reliable and dependable whether it liked it or not was mostly down to the FD disgracing herself.

At the end of three (yeah, just three ) laps of Silverstone the damned thing belched out a massive lungful of oil smoke from somewhere undiscoverable. It made it home but the next day wouldn't start and so a quest to uncover what was wrong with her was undertaken. And the deeper I delved, the more I found wrong until it ended up with "well, since I've got it so far apart it seems a shame to waste all that work" and figured I might as well go the whole hog and, for example, get some paint on the engine bay where it had bascially been baked off by 24 years of rotary turbocharged goodness... and before I knew it, I was left with this...




and a kit of bits that covered quite a considerable square footage...



....which somehow needed to be fit all back into a car that no-one could ever accuse of being exactly spacious. Like, how the smeg did all that go in there in the first place?



...although to be fair, I might leave the spacehopper out Anyway, this has been going on for a good few months and I still haven't got it all back together yet... the weather hasn't helped over the last few months, and Christmas and all that malarkey... so the poor ol' FB has had no choice but to be used. And used. And neglected

However, it wouldn't be exactly accurate to say I've done nothing to her just because her stroppy younger sister has been hogging the attention. Start small...



the horn button getting wedged in and then self-destructing totally when I blew up at some Audi-driving cocksocket was the excuse I needed to a) fix the horn button and b) fit a small spacer I'd had lying about a while in order to bring the (flat) Nardi wheel out a bit from the stalks so it sits at the same sorta position as the original Mazda wheel did. And while I was doing that it seemed rude not to fit some nice titanium bolts. It also meant I could lose the annoying Nardi horn trim ring thing.


Next, wheel arch liners. Dunno if I mentioned it, but one of the most irritating things about being hit by some random fool in a Corsa worth less than my shoes was that the shop who did the repairs managed to lose my wheelarch liners. Like, how is that even possible? Anyway, they proved nigh-on impossible to source replacements until the excellent Gernot from Austria (of this forum parish) popped up with some good quality ones for sale. So amazing as it sounds, the closest 2nd hand liners to the UK had to come from the land of Herr Dr Porsche. Who knew.



there were a few bits of the inevitable wear and tear that needed to be sorted out before boshing them onto the car. The unavoidable end result of screwing bendy plastic things onto rigid metal things using plastic clips and metal fasteners, I guess...



I managed to effect some repairs essentially by using thin alloy to sandwich the original plastic of the liner. This meant I could re-created the missing bits, strengthen the cracks and it'd be robust enough for rivets not to just pull through the plastic



and it's not as if they can be seen once they're on the car, so it didn't need to be pretty. Just as well...



Of course by now the car had done a fair few miles with no liners and I guess it was inevitable that some corrosion had set in. On offering up the new liners I found quite a bit of smeg that needed sorting. The drivers' side was OK (mostly because it was a new wing, replaced after the accident with Moron Boy). The nearside was a bit worse off





It was annoying, but I suppose could have been a lot worse. After all, as we all know these cars dissolve quicker than an Alka-Seltzer if you let them get away from you. It didn't look tooo bad to me, which was just as well cos I didn't have time for a long protracted off-the-road clean up marathon



the best I had time for was to whizz off all the rust I could, treat it with convertor and slap a load of our ol' favourite POR15 on top. And to be fair, it did take quite a lot of wire brushing...



but it's amazing what a good couple of coats of POR15 can hide



that'd have to do for now. And yeah, you just know that's going to come back and bite me in the arse sooner or later, don't you?

So, on to another fairly minor little job, but one that I felt needed to be done. Some of you with long attention spans might remember I bodged *ahem* adapted an FD engine brace to counter some of the engine rock'n'roll that arises from the slightly sketchy engine mount strategy of the front-mount cadle thingy. Well, I finished it off in a bit off a hurry and ended up amalgamating the original FD-mount bracket onto a rushed-together home-made brackety bit;



I was never really happy with it, mostly because it went from a gurt thick 6mm bit of steel to a fairly flimsy 3mm bit which also needed loads of extraneous fasteners to hold it all together. In short, not a great engineering solution. So, a stupendously heavy half-metre length of 5mm angle steel was purchased (I figure it's always good to have plety of leftovers, never know when it'll be useful for something ) and a replacement bracket roughly carved out via the magical medium of angle grinder



I even managed to enlist the aid of my little helpers (inexplicable headgear slightly justified by the fact it was cold in the garage) to drill the holes



and the Boy was even persuaded to help out a bit with some of the flap-disc shaping of the rough bracket. He preferred the drill press, though. Never saw him concentrate on anything so furiously, he even steamed up his glasses



and eventually we had a replacement one-piece bracket that might resemble the black brother of the New Shmoo (ask yer dad) but was at least a lot more aesthetically pleasing than the first attempt



Lovely. Even better, the steel was thick and durable enough for me to drill and tap a thread into it to accept a fastener for the cable guide clip that previously had required a bolt and nut to fix it.




So, on to the next one. Weeee-eee-ee-e-l-l.... not sure about this. So much not sure that I've been vacilating almost constantly ever since buying these in. Ummm... dunno.






....really not sure. Undecided, you might say




Can't quite make up my mind

[KiwiDave]

I've really missed your updates Nic.

[A7RXY]

Looks good ..... Love the pit crew ....

Dibs

[ian65]

bloody hell, you don't believe in doing things by halves do you? 
At least your FB is a well sorted car, it wouldn't stand up to the daily grind otherwise.
Did you get to the bottom of the issue with the FD?