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This past month has been crazy! I don't even know where to begin. I guess i need to catch up from where i left off on my RE雨宮 Transformation. After i finished installing the body kit, i started making preparations to paint the kit. So the first thing i did was remove all the parts from the car, then i prepped my garage for paint.

I set up all the pieces on various tables and wet down the floor to reduce, as much as possible, the amount of dust getting kicked up into the air and onto the paint:



Here's my car, sitting outside on the driveway looking like a monster:



Here you can see how much the wheels stick out without the rear over fender on:



I also went back and JB-welded the inner and outer fender together to ensure they stay together. Then i used body filler to fill in the holes and cover up the exposed metal to prevent rust. I know it looks like crap, but at least it's protected.



After getting all the parts situated and stable, i began by spraying the primer which was relatively easy and came out fairly good. I actually ran out of primer, so i had to make a trip out to the paint supply store to buy more primer and more paint, which i later found out to be a waste of money because i only used the primer and not the paint which is $150/quart versus the $20/quart for the primer. Anyway, here's the bumper after spraying the primer:



After the primer was the basecoat which also came out decent, but again, i probably should've sprayed it a little thicker



Where i really messed up was the top coat which is essentially a hue to give the red a slightly different shade and more depth. This is where i was supposed to try to get the paint to match the rest of the body. Unfortunately, due to my lack of experience, i couldn't figure out how to match the paint, which is what ultimately screwed me over in the end, but i'll get to more of that later on.

Of all the steps for painting, spraying the clear coat was the hardest. The parts looked nicer after the clear coat was sprayed on, but there was too much texture in the finish because i sprayed it on too thin.



I thought i could just wet sand it smooth then polish it, but what i should've done was sand down the clear and respray it. After wet-sanding all the pieces down, i went ahead and installed everything back on the car with my plan being to polish and finish the parts while they were on the car. I also took this opportunity to install the rest of my RE雨宮 AD-GT kit add on pieces:



I didn't realize when i ordered the rear super canard, but it's actually designed for the AD-GT I kit, not the AD-GT II kit. I had to modify the canard in order for it to fit the AD-GT II kit. You can see the white area at the top of the part is where i cut the tab off.



After i got all the pieces on the car, i realized what i had been dreading since the day i decided to paint these pieces myself...the paint didn't match!!! ARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ

Here are some pictures of the car with the mismatched paint.





Since i hadn't driven the car in months, after i got all the parts on, i decided to take it out for a quick spin and fill up some gas. This was a good chance for me to see if the gas cap opened far enough to get the nozzle in. Luckily it did! At least one thing worked out through this whole mess of a project:



The body kit isn't very shiny because i didn't bother to polish the parts after wet-sanding because i knew i would have to respray the whole car. Unfortunately, respraying the whole car was cost and time-prohibitive at this time, so i had to find a cheaper and less time consuming way to get the whole car in one color, that's when i decided to give plastidip a shot. Plastidip is a peelable paint that requires minimal prep work (no sanding), is easy to spray, is cheap, and is easy to change colors or remove completely when you get sick of it. I figured i would use it as a way to hold me over for now until recover (financially) from this project to get the whole car professionally resprayed in vintage red. I'll get into that last phase of the project in my next post, so stay tuned...

It's been a busy two weeks since i got my shipment of RE雨宮 parts. Since my last post, i've done the following:

Cut the drivers side fender to accommodate the rear over fender. This side was much cleaner than the passenger side since i had a little bit more experience and knew what i was doing this time.


Cut the fuel door and fitted the new door to the old one. Here you can see where i had to cut part of the body to fit the bracket for the new door. It took me a while to figure out what i had to do while i was trying to decipher the instructions that came with the kit. I was surprised when i was able to read a couple of words here and there that actually helped me figure out what to do.


Here's the fuel door mounted to the supplied bracket


Here's the new door skin mounted to the modified old door.




And here's the new fuel door mounted to the car with the fender. I know it looks really ugly here, but i do plan to sand it down a bit and paint it so it doesn't have that green body filler color. Funny thing is, when i first applied the filler, i was a little over zealous and applied too much which ended up making the door really heavy. When i realized that the door might not be able to open being as heavy as it was, i quickly started scraping away as much filler as i could before it hardened. Luckily, i was able to remove a decent amount so that it wasn't so heavy anymore.



I was able to get it pretty flush, but i think it could use a little more adjustment to be 100% perfect


The fuel door has definitely been the hardest part of the install. I'm just glad that it's over with now.

After i finished with the widebody, i started working on getting the undersweep to fit. Since i trimmed the bumper to clear the radiator, i knew i was going to have to trim the carbon undersweep as well, which i was really reluctant to do. But having cut so much sheet metal off the car already, i think i had finally accepted that to complete this build, modifying parts to fit was inevitable.

Here's the trimmed undersweep. Luckily, you can't really tell where i trimmed unless you inspect really closely.


I also had to cut a big rectangular whole on the underside of the undersweep in order to clear the radiator fans. My first cut ended up being perfect, and now the fans have somewhere to vent the hot air. The only thing is the left fan touches the undersweep slightly when spinning, so i'll probably have to trim a little more once i take everything back off.

Now that i had the full body kit installed, i could finally fit my wheels. As expected, i had to readjust the ride height and the alignment completely. I first started off resetting the ride height at all corners. For some reason, the driver's side rear was perfect, so i ended up setting the other three corners to match. Even the camber on that side was good, so i did the same with camber. Here's a picture of the suspension compressed to see how much clearance i had with the rear fender. Not much is all i can say!


I ended up setting the camber to -2.4 degrees at all four corners which seemed to clear the fenders quite well. Next up was setting the toe. The front wheels' toe settings were obviously screwed up because i could visually see the passenger front wheel pointing inwards despite the steering wheel being perfectly straight. After i measured it, i found out it had 25mm toe in, when it's supposed to be 0 - 2mm toe in. I used the string method to help me measure the toe settings.


And lastly, to finish off the install portion of this build, i installed the rear wing. I gotta say, it was a little bit harder than i expected. Turns out, there's two skins, so when you drill from the outside, unless you drill through the second layer of metal, you don't have access to mount the bolts for the screws. To make matters worse, i ended up breaking two of the bolts that came with the kit, so the install took a little bit longer.


Once i got everything mounted, i took a step back, and to my surprise, the wing looked A LOT smaller than i had anticipated! i was actually really shocked. I almost wanted to stop right there and order the RE雨宮 GT-II High Mount wing. The wing looked so small (at the time) that i thought perhaps i had gotten the low mount wing instead of the high mount. Even when i compared it to pictures of my old RE雨宮 GT-II low mount wing, the GT-III high mount looked low, so i started doing some research and found out i did indeed get the high mount. Alas, i figured i'll just live with it for now, thinking in the back of my mind that i can always switch to the high mount wing at a later point in time. One side note, it wasn't the width of the wing that i thought was small, it was the height of the wing that bothered me. I bought the wing knowing it wasn't as wide as the GT-II wings by design to be street legal in Japan, but all the pictures i saw made it look as high as the GT-II high mount, so i was expecting something higher. More on this later.

Once i got everything bolted on the way it would look once it's done, it was time to take a test drive. I was particularly excited about this part because i wanted to know if my alignment settings were ok because i've never done my own alignment before. I was mainly concerned about whether or not the car would track straight. So this morning, when the rain stopped, i fired up the car and started reversing out of the garage. As i was maneuvering the car around, i started to hear some crunching and cracking. I quickly got out of the car and started inspecting the front bumper and undersweep. Eventually i found out the tires were hitting the front bumper when trying to turn from lock-to-lock. I ended up shutting the engine off and taking out the dremel, and proceeded to trim parts of the front bumper and undersweep off so the wheels could clear. By this point, cutting up the car didn't even phase me anymore. I eventually got the clearance i needed and reversed the car out of the garage. This was the first time in 3 weeks that i had the car moving on it's own power, so it was nice to be able to drive the car again. I also took this opportunity to snap some pictures which i'll share at the end of this post.

During the test drive, i was really excited when i let go of the steering wheel and the car continued straight. Granted, that's probably not the only way to gauge whether or not the alignment is good, but at this point, it was good enough for me. I hope the tire wear is decent as well. The other thing that really surprised me was the wing didn't look nearly as small anymore. I'm not sure if it's because i finally got the car out of the garage so i could see it better, or if it was because i got used to it, but either way, the wing looked exactly the way i imagined it to look when i chose to buy it. Also, it's definitely higher than the GT-II low mount wing because when i was driving the car, i had perfect visibility to the cars behind me, where as with the GT-II low mount wing i had on my previous FD, the wing would block a good chunk of the cars behind me. Needless to say, i'm very happy with my decision to go with the GT-III high mount wing. My favorite part of the wing is that it really makes the car look wider. Besides that, during my short drive around the neighborhood, i didn't really hear any scraping which was a good sign. When i got home and went to pull into the driveway, i noticed some scraping at both the drivers side front and the passenger rear, so i plan to do a little bit more trimming before i start prepping for paint.

Here's the clearance of the rear while pulling into the driveway


And the front


I've made pretty good progress in the last two weeks, but i still have a long road ahead of me before i actually finish. Once the clearance and suspension issues are sorted, i need to:

1. wash the car
2. wipe down the body work with wax and grease remover
3. apply filler to areas that need filling
4. sand the body work down up to 200 grit
5. remove the body work and repair small cracks at connecting points with more filler
6. sand down the filler so that it's smooth
7. wash the body panels one more time with wax and grease remover
8. air dry the panels to make sure they're 100% dry
9. spray primer
10. sand primer
11. spray base coat
12. spray top coat
13. spray clear coat
14. sand clear coat
15. install body parts
16 buff and polish body panels

wow...that list is making my head spin...oh well, there's nothing to do but just put my head down and tick each one off one-by-one.

In the meantime, here are some photos i took with my D300 to show the completion of Part 2.

Hooray! My RE雨宮 parts finally arrived after 3.5 months of waiting!! Considering how momentous the occasion was, i prepared my camera when the delivery truck arrived and snapped some pics of the boxes being unloaded...i know it's a little ridiculous, but hey, cut me some slack, i waited a whole 3.5 months for these parts!

Here's the delivery truck backing onto my driveway with my precious parts inside



On the boxes are labels that state, "do not rest boxes on its side", and of course, here they are, not just laid down on their side, but on top of each other!



I immediately opened each box and checked for damage before signing off on the packages. The parts were wrapped extremely well with bubble wrap, so there wasn't any damage. Here are the four massive boxes holding all of my awesome parts



I inspected each part to make sure i got everything i ordered and also to ensure there was no damage.



And here's Isaac posing with the GT wing, the one piece he's been asking me to install since i got the car!



Unfortunately, the joyous day was slightly marred when i realized they delivered the wrong canard. I ordered the canard that was specifically meant to be used with the N1 undersweep, but the one they delivered was a just a generic canard that didn't have the side piece that attached to the undersweep. Bulletproof Automotive, the company that helped me import all the parts, was gracious enough to expedite an exchange, so i'll be shipping the canard back to RE tomorrow. I should get the replacement part back before i'm done installing the kit, so i should be good.

Since i had removed all the existing parts earlier, i was able to start fitting the parts onto the car the same day. The front fenders bolted onto the car easily, then i started fitting the front bumper, which required some cutting to fit properly because the bottom of the radiator extended too far out. It's unfortunate, the main reason i converted to a vmount setup was so that i wouldn't have to cut the RE雨宮 bumper when i finally came around to installing it. Luckily, i didn't need to cut away too much material, but the fact is, i'll have to cut away parts of the carbon undersweep as well which is sad. Oh well...it's sort of too late to swap out my vmount for another design where the radiator didn't extend out as far.

Here you can see the little notch i had to cut to accommodate the radiator.



After the front bumper was settled, i moved onto the passenger-side side-skirts and rear fender. The parts lined up really nicely right out of the box, but to make it perfect, i would need to do a little bit of cutting.



Here's another shot of the front. The parts really do fit awesome with minimal modifications. Another reason why you should always buy authentic products from the original designer/maker.



Probably the most dreaded part of the whole process was cutting the rear fender. The whole point of the widebody kit is to extend the fenders outward allowing you to run larger wheels and tires. Since the rear was only an over fender, to really make use of the added width, you need to either roll the fenders significantly, or cut away the fender. I didn't have a fender roller, which meant it had to cut the fender. In the end, cutting the fender is really the only way to maximize the amount of space gained with the over fender, so i think i made the right choice. As much as i prepared myself for this moment, cutting the fender off was kind of heart-wrenching, but i knew that this was the only way to properly complete my build so i had to continue. I had to keep reminding myself of my commitment to the build. In the end, the cut came out relatively clean and i managed to hammer the inner fender up to meet the new edge of the outer fender.

Here you can see where i cut the outer fender



After removing the outer fender, i cut slits into the inner fender and hammered the inner fender up to close the gap between the two.



Once the two edges met again, i cut off the flaps. Now i just need to use some JB weld to weld the two lips together, then use some body filler to fill in the holes and prevent rust.



Luckily, once the over fender was on, you couldn't tell how much "damage" was done to the fender and it looked like new again. With the fender cut, i could now mount my new wheels onto the car to get my first preview of what the car will look like when it's finally finished.



I was surprised by how much room i had at the rear with the new fenders, so i took the one inch spacer i had in the front and moved it to the rear.

Here's the rear wheel without the spacer.



And here's the rear wheel with the spacer.



Here's another angle of the rear wheel with the spacer.



As for the front, i have no idea how anyone could fit a 295/35 tire there because even with a 265/35 tire on a 18x10.5 inch rim, i have barely enough clearance. Granted, the car isn't level and i still need to dial in some negative camber, but still, i can't picture fitting a 295/35 at the front. Oh well, i still have time to play around with the setup in the future when i actually decide to go wider.

Here's the front wheel. You can see how much it sticks out.



And here's one last pic of the passenger side of the car resting on some ramps.



It looks like i still have plenty of room to lower the car more, but i'll work on those adjustments after i've got the kit fully mounted to my liking. I'm halfway done with the driver side as well, but i still need to cut the driver's side fender and also figure out how to mount the gas cap. Once that's done, i should be able to set the car done and really figure out what kind of alignment changes i need to make as far as camber goes. Considering it's only been 5 days since i got the parts, i think i've made pretty good progress so far, not that i'm in a rush or anything. Actually, i plan to really take my time with this kit and make sure it fits exactly how i want it, so there are no regrets after i get around to painting, because i don't don't want to fool around with fitment after i paint the parts. I'll start another post after i make some more progress.

Since i was in 高等学校 i have always wanted to learn how to paint cars and car parts. I think mainly because that was when i had my 1995 Honda Civic Si that was black and i wished i could paint it a different color, like red. I was also into body kits at the time, and i wished i could just paint the parts myself rather than take the car to a body shop to have them paint the parts for me. Unfortunately, i never got around to learning for many reasons including cost, location, knowledge, etc. However, since i got my new FD, i've been going back and forth between having a body shop paint and install everything, or finally learn how to do it myself. My thought process went from finding a body shop to paint and install everything, to my doing the install myself and just having the body shop paint the parts for me, to just painting and installing everything myself. I think the turning point was back in February, when i remove my headlight housings so that i could find a body shop to repaint them and repair some holes for me. I figured i would use my headlight housings as a test run to find a good shop that i could ultimately have paint my body kit when it arrived. Here are what the housings looked like when i first removed them. Notice the right housing has holes in it that i was looking to patch.



Here's アイザックくん and ナオミちゃん helping me with the disassembly of the headlights



They actually did a very good job taking out all of the bolts for the brackets



So one day, i made some calls and brought the pieces to 3 body shops for a quote. The first shop wanted $500 to repaint just the housings!! So i quickly left there and went to a second place, and they quoted me $250, which was far more reasonable. Then lastly, i went to a third shop just for comparison purposes, and they quoted me $200, and they happened to be the closest one to my house so the next day i dropped off the housings along with the paint code. At the time, the quote i was given was under the assumption that it was a 2-stage paint, meaning just base coat and clear coat. It was only later on that i found out the OEM Vintage Red color was actually a 3-stage paint due to a top coat required between the base and the clear coat, which i know would've easily bumped the cost of the job above the quoted $200. But anyway, about a week after i dropped off the parts, i called the body shop to see how things were going and to find out when i can expect to pick up the finished parts. Shockingly, the owner of the shop told me he hasn't even touched the parts yet and he doesn't think he will be able to get to it for another 2 weeks! (´⊙ω⊙`)！That's when i started thinking, if it's gonna take this guy 3-4 weeks to paint two small headlight housings, how long is it going to take him to paint a full body kit, 6 months?!?! So i told the owner that i was just going to pick up the unfinished parts and find another place to work on them, but in reality, i was thinking that it was finally time for me to learn how to paint. The last thing i wanted was to wait an additional 3-4 months to get my body kit on after having (or continuing to have to) wait 3+ months just to receive it. Plus, i knew that i could live with my own mistakes knowing that i can learn and try again to make it better, but i couldn't live with other people's shoddy work that i paid good money for and waited months to complete. So for the next month i started doing research and buying parts and supplies to paint myself. Luckily, the weather was still freezing, so it's not like i could paint right away anyways.

As they say, when it comes to painting, the key to a good paint job is all the prep work leading up to the paint. So the first step was to sand down the housings and fill the holes that i wanted to get rid of.



After about 2-3 days of repairing and sanding (i work slow), it was finally time to prime the parts. I took about a day to prep the garage and get all of my spraying equipment sorted. Since it was my first time painting, i had to familiarize myself with how the spray gun and the turbine HVLP system worked. The first coat of primer went on pretty easy. It was nice to finally see the parts in a uniform color even if it was just a primer grey.



I ended up doing a second coat of primer because i sanded through the first coat on some parts. Next up was the base coat, then the top coat to color match. Here's the base coat layer before the top coat.



Honestly, i didn't know what the heck i was doing. I just sprayed the top coat on top of the base and hoped the color matched the existing paint. Luckily, i think the color came out pretty close, so i was happy.



In the end, i wasn't ecstatic about the results, but for the headlight housings, i think it was good enough. I didn't even bother sanding the clear because behind the lens cover, you couldn't really tell anyway. Here's a comparison showing the difference in color before and after:

ビフォー


アフター


As you can see, the red from ビフォー doesn't actually match the color of the car. It also helps that i bought new lenses for the headlights so they look much newer in the アフター picture.

My experiment with the housings is a little inconclusive due to the fact that the shape was so three-dimensional as opposed to a flat surface, so the technique required is very different than it would be for painting a bumper. I think with a little more practice, i should be able to do a good enough job with the body kit that i can install it without feeling too badly. And here are some shots of the headlights back in place:







I also finally got around to installing some of my RE雨宮エンジンドレスアップ parts like my radiator caps and my oil filler cap





Only 2 more weeks to go before my body kit arrives!!!!!!!

It's been 2 months since i ordered my body kit and as of now, there's still no sign of it showing up any time soon. I'm hoping it'll be here in the next month or so, but in the meantime, there's still a few things i need to take care of. This past week, it was time to finalize my wheels and get them ready for installation, once the body kit arrives that is. My friend who helped me order the tires had access to a professional tire changer/balancer, so instead of paying $100 to have someone scratch, i mean mount, my tires, i decided to just do it myself and take the blame if they ended up getting scratched. So last Tuesday, my friend was planning to change a few tires for himself and some others, so i took my wheels and tires and tagged along. In total, we changed about 14 tires. Luckily, we were able to mount the tires without any drama and best of all, no scratches!

Here's a picture of the garage


Here's a shot of my precious TE37's on the tire changer:


Besides not having to pay someone to do the work, the best part of doing it yourself is learning new things, and in my case, was how to properly balance a wheel. Granted, the machine did all the work, but it was fun learning how to use the machine and see it in action:



After about 4 hours of tire changing, we finally got all 14 tires mounted and balanced. Unfortunately, i forgot to bring the tire valve stems that came with the wheels, so i ended up using valve stems that my friend brought, but it turns out his valve stems were much taller than the ones that came with the wheels, so i couldn't use the special valve caps and covers. Oh well, i guess i can always swap the valve stems at a later time.



Now that the tires were installed, i could finally get around to painting the letters on the sidewall, but before i get to that, i ended up trying out a new Volk Racing sticker color and I really liked it, so i ended up switching all the stickers again!



And here's what the wheels look like now with the updated sticker and the sidewall letters colored in:



Painting the sidewall letters in with oil-based pens took much longer than expected, but in the end, they really add some nice style to the overall look. Here's all four wheels finally done:



Unfortunately, as i mentioned at the beginning of this post, my body kit isn't going to arrive for another month, so rather than storing the wheels in the closet, i figured, why not leave them out somewhere so i can admire them, so i found the perfect spot for them



1 more month to go! (i hope...)