REsuper7のブログ一覧

Well today, i finally sold 1 of my 4 cars, a 2003 Toyota Camry LE. Here's one final picture of it before it goes home with it's new owner.



This was actually my wife's car (妻の車) from before we got married. She had bought it from her mom for $10k in 2004 when it was practically brand new. She drove this car up until 2008 when we bought the Honda Odyssey in preparation for Isaac's arrival, then i started driving it as my commuter car for the past 6 years. So in reality, i actually drove the car the most during our 10 year ownership of the car. I had been meaning to sell it since we got the Mercedes back in January, but with the car being snowed in for months, and my being lazy, i never even got around to listing it for sale. Randomly, some guy came to the house yesterday and out-of-the-blue asked us if we were selling the car, which, of course we responded, YES! So today the guy came in the morning and haggled with me on the price of which we ultimately settled at $2800. Honestly, my only goal today was that he bought the car. I didn't really care how much i got for it, i just wanted it gone, so i happily took his offer, but only after making him think i accepted it reluctantly. I felt kind of bad because i didn't even have a chance to clean the car since i was holding off until i was ready to list it...which is probably why i never listed it; i was just too lazy to clean the damn car.

Anyway, the timing could not be more perfect, because i just found out a couple of weeks ago that my dad wants to give me his 2011 BMW 335D!



He bought the car brand new back in 2011 and has only since put 19000 miles on the car. He recently moved to Taiwan as part of his retirement, so the car has just been sitting in his garage. Now that my parents are set on staying in Taiwan on a more permanent basis, they're starting to get rid of the things they don't need, but my dad is really attached to his car (he's a car nut like myself) and he can't bring himself to sell it, so instead, he decided to give it to me as part of my inheritance. Cars have always been one of the ways my dad and i bonded since i started working on cars with him at a very young age. As far back as i can remember, as long as my dad was in the garage working on cars, i was usually out there with him, helping him out, although, i'm sure i was of very little help when i was younger. So despite never having really been interested in BMWs, besides the M3, i do think this car in particular is something that will be very special to me for a long time. I just hope i can do a good job taking care of it. Here are some additional angles of the car





Now that i'm back to having 4 cars again, i need to decide whether or not i should keep the Mercedes. My mother-in-law, who sold us the car to begin with, has graciously offered to buy it back from us if we do decide to get rid of it. I know my wife isn't willing to sell the car except back to her mom since that was the last car her father bought before he passed, so if we wanted to get rid of it, this would be our only option. Me, on the other hand, i still really like the Mercedes, so getting rid of it is a difficult decision. Actually, as far as looks go, i think i prefer the Mercedes over the BMW, though just slightly, but that goes for both interior and exterior. But on the performance end, the 335D vastly outperforms the C300, not only in power (265hp/425tq vs. 228hp/221tq) but also on gas mileage with the 335D averaging over 30mpg and the C300 around 22mpg (observed by me). So if i was forced to choose between the two solely based on the car's attributes, the 335D would be a no brainer. Luckily, i'm not forced to choose between the two...at least not yet. My wife is pressuring me to sell the car back to her mom, but i'm still debating whether or not i want to. I know 4 cars is kind of excessive, but hey, it's good to have options! We'll see in a month or so what i decide then. As of now, i haven't even gotten hold of the BMW yet (end of this month), so i'll still be driving the Mercedes for now.

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.