Getting stuff done

So, I got the car out. We did a small "quick fix" paint job on the rear fenders, they look bad in real life. We got the bucket seats and racing harness fitted and they are awesome. We also did a rear strut so we could attach the belts to that. I also assembled the interior to a point. I didn't assemble the driver side fully since my speedometer wire broke. Also they stopped making them so I'll have to make some calls to find one.

I'm also planning to take the car to Dyno. I think there's some timing problems in the engine, I'm not sure, but sometimes it just feels funny. It will give me a peace of mind and also tell how much of the orginal 129hp there's left. I was also distressed about the blinking "check engine" light, I used the cars own diagnostics system to find out it was only the lack of speedometer signal that was haunting.

I still have a lot of bodywork to do. The door arches are ready for sanding, I just hate to do that. We fixed some bad grounding wires at the rear while assembling the rear lights.

We went on Saturday to a little Finjae meet in Jyväskylä. It was fun, though I wished my car was in better shape. There were a lot of cool cars to see there.

I took a picture of my rear bumper and my brothers Carina II project rear bumper mold. :D

Ill take more project related pics later now that I remember what to photograph


I uploaded few clips from Ahvenisto 2.5 also.

Update

Saturday went in a rally practice at Saukkola EK (thanks to J.Säteri) and Sunday was Mother's Day.

There's some progress I've made. I got a new stainless steel muffler too. :D

Starting to look good now, more sanding and then paint. :P

Thats the sheetmetal work I did yesterday.

It turned out quite well, It still needs sanding and paint and painting prep.

Almost ready fender.

I finished that too already, again I forgot to take pics :D. When you really get in to the work you forget about everything else. Well I'll try to remember nextime.

Yatta

Holaa. Ok, this post contains 2 days since I was too tired last night to write.

So, I started with the rust from the back first removing the rust. Then fabricating from the prebend sheetmetal (thanks to the guys at Fomek, we used 1.5mm, since its the same that the floor is made of.

Then my dad starded on the fabrication for the rear fender arches. Yes, you heard me right, I'm not going to do them :D. I'm sticking to places you wont see from the outside. ;P

That's sum proper Japanese rust fixing. :D

The door arches had similar rust problems on each side so I started to fix them. Also, I needed to do quite lot of metal work on some parts.

My dad made great progress with the fender and made it look quite nice, still need little more work. I also made progress with my door arches, but I forgot to take pictures.

Progress

Ok, since I still haven't got my rear fenders I started to fit the bucket seats. The first obvious thing was that I had to get rid of the orginal rear seat mounts.

One of the driverside seat mounts was in dire shape. Two of the point welds were broken.

I also noticed that because the floor wasn't flat, I couldn't really lower the seat as much I as I wanted to. So I decided to cut a hole in the floor and refabricate a part of the floor to be lower.

I got the desired result and I did the same thing on the passanger side. Now the only thing to make are the attatchmets for the seats and then they are done. I'll do that later and concentrate on the rust problems next.

First Day

First what I’ll do is to dismantle the interior, rear bumper and sideskirts. I started from the rear bumper, since I wanted to see what was under there :P and ofc I removed the spoiler (something I’ve been wanting to do a while now).

Spoiler was attached with ordinary screws just drilled in to the back hatch. Nasty looking, luckily the holes hadn’t started to rust yet. I was fairly lucky with the rust in the rear as well. It hadn’t spread much except to the rear corners and then gone to the rear fenders.

After I took off the sideskirts I found a surprise. It was the most amazing way I’ve ever seen to fix rust. Someone of the previous owners had taken a sheet of stainless steel and attached it with duct tape. I'm not kidding. :D

Then I started to take apart the interior.

After that I did some preliminary fitting of the driverside bucket seat. I got 2 Cobra Imola 2 seats for the car, with 6-point racing harnesses. The "floor" needs some fitting work to get the seats as low as possible.

The Beginning

Ok, this is my first entry. I thought I’d tell you first a little about my car. It’s an '83 Toyota Sprinter Trueno, chassis model AE86, manufactured in Japan and later brought to Finland. I’ve always wanted an AE86 because of its reputation of having a great chassis and engine. In Japan it’s know mostly as a drift car and earlier as a race car. In Finland it's still know as a rally car and still been driven in its own class.

Here’s my car as it was when I bought it. I knew the rear fenders needed work and that under the rear bumper was a lot of rust damage. The engine, clutch, gearbox and LSD all seemed to be in good condition.

So, a little more information about my Hachi:

Firewall ID codes:

F Trueno
C Coupe
M 5 speed floor mounted manual
Q GT, GTV
F Twincam, EFI (high performance)

(decode from www.aeu86.org)

The Hachi had some aftermarket kit in it also:

TRD Front and Rear, stiffness adjustable shocks
Japanese Aftermarket Exhaustmanifold
2.25'' Exhaust by Martelius
Cold Air Intake
Momo wheel and spacers

Obviously I wanted mine for everyday use and for track. First time I drove it I just fell in love with it and can’t really bring myself to make it a full on track car.

I’ve now driven it on track and it’s worked perfectly. The few flaws I noticed were that I couldn’t really get a good driving position since I wore a helmet. I had to sit really back and so forth. I couldn’t really steer very well from that position.




So the first part of my project will be to:

Fix the rust, fenders, rear.
Fit bucket seats and 6 point harness.
Remove the fugly TRD N2 type rear spoiler.
Fix the damage from the rear spoiler attachment.