Sorry for the lack of updates lately! Partially it's because i started a new job on 10/5, but also because i've been cramming as many car related events as i could into the past three weeks. On the plus side, i have lots of new photos to share, so let's get started!
The weekend after i "finished" my car, i got in touch with my good friend Ted who owns the yellow RE FD. Originally we were planning a short drive to Round Valley to help break in my car and build up my confidence in the car to make sure everything was ok, but at the last minute, we decided to crash a Nissan meet 35 minutes away from my house. Ted had some friends at the show already who promised to save us some spots so we headed over. Naomi wanted to join us so we took her along for the first drive out of our town. Needless to say, i was super nervous the whole time. Ted asked me to lead since he knew i would drive real slow. Luckily we made it to the meet without any issues!
When we arrived, amidst a sea of Nissans was a lone white FD waiting for us to join him.
The meet had already been underway for a while, so we didn't waste any time and started checking out some of the cars right away. There were a nice selection of cars on hand and this row of S14s were some of my favorite:
After walking a little further down, we came across this deadly looking R35. This is not a car i would want to bump into on the free way that's for sure!
I was also happy to see some classics on hand as well, including this classic Z
and this not quite classic yet, R33
We were expecting another friend to arrive, Darren, the one with the itasha S14 drift car, but even after making our rounds, was no where to be seen. Until, we look down the street and lo and behold there's a bunch of guys rolling the carpet queen down the road like he was some kind of royalty
Turns out his fuel pump was acting up so he didn't want to start the car, although, later on he did figure it out and was able to fire the car back up. As a side note, i gotta say, Darren is one of the nicest people i have ever met since Ted introduced me to all the local car people. Even though i've only hung out with him a couple of times and hadn't seen him in months, he treats you like you're his best friend. Definitely a great guy to be around.
Along with Darren was this purple Supra that looked like it meant business. Another car i wouldn't want to bump into on the freeway.
I didn't stay too long and had to leave first because it was the day before i started my new job and wanted to make sure i got some rest before my first day. Although it was short, it was nice to see some old friends and meet some new ones as well. It's good to be back.
Here's a shot that a local photographer took that came out pretty cool. That's me sitting on the curb and that's Ted sitting on the ground with Naomi behind my car.
And of course, i had to take one of my little princess to commemorate our first real drive in the revived REsuper7
Originally i was just going to do one post to cover all the events i've done since i finished the car, but after i started collecting pictures i realized it would be foolish to even try. Instead, i will split them up and dedicate one post to each, so stay tuned for more updates!
It's hard to believe that exactly 11 months after i wrote my most difficult post, i can now make this post to announce that REsuper7 has officially been REborn!!!! ☆ミヾ(∇≦((ヾ(≧∇≦)〃))≧∇)ノ彡☆
But before i unveil the fruit of my labor, i'd like to finish going through the final stage of the build process. Although i've been harping on and on about how i rushed through this build in order to get it done by the end of September, that doesn't mean that i didn't try to improve the car over the previous build. In fact, there are a few things that really bothered me with my last build that i've corrected this time around. One of those things was the gas cap. As good of a job i did last time with making sure the gas cap lined up perfectly with the fender flare, i couldn't get the door to open all the way, and it rubbed the fender pretty hard if you tried to push it open further. This bothered me especially because i was worried it would damage the paint (dip), so this time around i made it a point to figure out a way to get the door to open all the way without rubbing the fender.
Although you can't tell in the picture, i actually had to drill new holes to push the left side of the door where the hinge is out even further to give it the extra room it needs to swing open all the way without rubbing. Although RE雨宮 provides a bracket to bump out the hinge, no amount of adjusting will allow it to open without rubbing (trust me, i've tried every possible angle). With the new holes drilled, it now opens all the way! Woohoo!!
And magically, with some adjustments, it still closes flush. Here's a video showing the fuel door. If you can't already tell, i'm pretty proud of this feat.
With the door jambs and fuel door done, it was time to move on to paint. First, i decided to paint most of my carbon parts with anthracite grey plastidip. I did it for two reasons, 1. a lot of the carbon parts i'm reusing from the crash were scratched up. Since i didn't want to spend too much time refinishing the carbon parts, i decided to just dip them for now to cover up the scratches. When i have more time, i'll see if i can repair the cracks. 2. I wanted to protect my non-damaged carbon parts from rocks and other road hazards. Doesn't hurt to try and be consistent with the colors either.
With all the carbon bits painted, it was time to prep the car for paint. After seeing so many RE雨宮 FDs in Japan with painted AD9 hoods, i decided to give it a shot as well, but with a slight variation. I figured why not show a little bit of the carbon weave underneath, so i taped off the vents so they would remain carbon after the hood was painted. I also took the liberty of installing my Aerocatch hood pins, Ready Go Next CTA3 air ducts, and the RE雨宮 AD9 hood carbon add-ons.
Here you can see the cutout i made for the RGN CTA3 air ducts. I didn't cut the hole as big as the air duct itself because i didn't want to cut into the skeleton of the hood. Despite that, i still think the added vent will improve underhood cooling. And here's the hood taped off ready for paint.
And here's the rest of the car ready for it's final transformation.
The new dip spray that i got was supposed to be a new formula that had better coverage than the previous one and didn't require a base coat, but after having used it, i feel like i got better coverage with the grey basecoat that i sprayed the first time around. This white still came out pretty thin. I ended up using all three white gallons that i had just on the car and didn't even have enough to spray the headlight buckets and the wing. As a result, i had to order another white gallon just to paint the wing...
And it's a good thing i did too, because for some reason i had to use about 2/3 of the white gallon just to paint the wing!! I don't quite understand why it took that much dip, but it did, so i'm grateful i had the extra gallon. Here you can see one of the main benefits of dip. Since it's peelable, i didn't need to tape off the wing mounts to paint, i just had to peel the paint off the mounts after i was done.
I had originally thought that once the paint was done, putting everything else back together would be a piece of cake...boy was i wrong. I spent a good two days and countless hours just getting everything back onto the car. With every little thing i did i felt like i was fighting fires because the dip was peeling from rubbing against parts as i installed them. The worst were the two doors. Despite working perfectly before paint, once they were painted, they started rubbing and peeling some of the paint away. I didn't take that many pictures during this last stage as i was just focused on getting it done ASAP. I did want to share a close up of the wing stand and the new carbon cover i made though. It actually came out better than i expected.
And without further ado, i present to you Phoenix 7 aka REsuper7 REborn!!
Before i could take it out for it's maiden voyage i had to do a couple of things, 1. clean the windows, and 2. make a bracket for the front license plate (I got tired of being scared of getting pulled over for putting the license plate in the windshield).
The windows were filthy having not been cleaned in the years before i took ownership, plus all the dust and overspray from the work i did in my garage. Here's a quick look at what i was dealing with.
To tackle this problem i bought a Griot's Garage random orbital polisher and some Driven Extreme window cleaner. I gotta say, i am quite pleased with how it came out. I didn't think it would be possible to clean all the gunk off the windows, but it worked as advertised!
Since before the crash i've been procrastinating making a front license plate bracket. I even got pulled over once last year specifically for having my license plate in my windshield. Luckily the cop let me go because it was just down the street from my house. Not wanting to deal with that again, I went ahead a made bracket. While i was at it, i created a steel bracket for the Takata x Speedhunters tow strap that i've had for almost 2 years now but never installed. Although i hope to never use it, i think it should hold if i ever do.
The only reason this set up is possible right now is because i don't have dual oil coolers. If i ever go that route, i'll need to rethink my setup. Oh well, i'll cross that bridge when i get there.
For it's maiden voyage, i took a trip down the street to fill up the gas tank. Perfect opportunity to snap the obligatory gas station pics.
And here's a quick shot of the interior and the engine bay.
I LOVE the fact that when i pop the hood and open the doors i no longer see RED, but just nice plain white...what a relief. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the trunk, but at least i open the trunk regularly so it's something i can live with for now.
So after 11 months (technically only 9 months of build time since the first 2 months were for mourning), REsuper7 is finally back. It's still kind of surreal to open the garage and see my car put together again. I thought i'd never see the day i actually got my car back, but now it's here, and i can't be any more happy with it than i am, despite all its flaws. The only thing left to do now is slap some stickers on and enjoy! ☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆
As i mentioned in my last post, i'm in the process of transitioning to a new job at a new company. Luckily, i was able to get some time off in between so i made a vow to myself that i would finish the car before i started my new job so i don't have to worry about the car once i do. So without any further delays, i'm going to jump right into it because i have A LOT to cover.
After doing an initial test fit of the body kit, i wanted to paint the doors and the door jambs, so on my first two days off from work, that's what i did. I had a friend of mine from church come over to help me tape up the doors.
The paint came out OK for the most part, but i had a few runs in the clear coat. Unfortunately i didn't have the luxury of time to fix all the mistakes if i wanted to reach my goal so i had to move on. The doors came out a little better then the jambs, but also not perfect. After installing the door cards, i realized i taped up more than needed so there was still some red showing on the very inside of the door by the hinges. Again, i didn't have the time to fix my mistake so i ended up using vinyl to cover it up so i don't see any red. But other than that, the paint came out decent.
My replacement midpipe also came in so i took out the pipe that was rubbing the driveshaft and installed the new one. Nothing special really, but looks decent enough.
The muffler itself is a little bigger as well, so hopefully it helps keep the noise level bearable so that if/when i decide to take the car out at 5am, i don't disturb my neighbors.
Next up were the lights. Since my last set got destroyed in the crash, i had to order a new set. Not wanting to mess with the housings, i decided against reinstalling my HIDs from the previous kit. After searching Amazon.com for new bulbs, i settled on a pair of LED headlights that look similar to HIDs. They weren't much more than a new set of Halogen bulbs so i figured why not give it a shot. I haven't really had a chance to drive with them so i don't know how well they perform, so i'll provide some feedback on them later on.
Here's a picture of the bulb. It's plug and play so modifications to the housing or wiring harness, not too many additional wires. Nice and clean, just like changing out the light bulb.
Remember back in April i started working on the GT2.5 wing but never finished? Well it was finally time to complete that project. I started by finishing the mounting bracket to secure the stand to the trunk. I dug up my third and last prototype bracket that i made and decided to just run with that design, so i went ahead and made another one for the left stand.
I painted them black but never took a picture of them. I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out. Not too big, yet more supportive than the GT2 wing stand (IMO). I also made a backing plate for the wing stand out of a thin carbon fiber sheet. I think it came out quite nice.
I used a spray-on adhesive to secure the carbon backing to the stand, but since the top and bottom of the stand are secured with bolts, even without adhesive the backing wouldn't fly off.
In my next post i'll be covering the last and final stage of the build...the paint and putting everything back together. Stay tuned.
After i got the engine running, i had to sort out a couple of things before i could attempt to drive the car down the driveway. First was the leaking oil cooler lines. Luckily, the only thing i needed to do was tighten the fittings a little bit more and the leak went away. The other thing i needed to do was fix the the midpipe that was rubbing against the driveshaft. Knowing that no solution i concocted would give me the confidence i needed to drive the car long distances, i decided to just order a new midpipe from RX7store.net. In the meantime, to be able to test drive the car, i made a makeshift bracket to push the midpipe down enough so it doesn't rub when the driveshaft starts spinning. Once those two things were fixed, i took it out for it's maiden voyage which Isaac helped me capture with my phone:
And here are some pictures from the same day to commemorate this special day:
After a couple drives up and down my street, the car went straight back into the garage in preparation for the exterior transformation. To be honest, i didn't feel quite ready to move on to the next phase of the rebuild. It almost felt too sudden to be on the last phase of the build, but since i wasn't planning to drive the car in it's current condition, i had to move on.
First up was fitting the widebody kit. I pretty much followed the same procedure i did the last time i did the install, although there are a couple of small differences this time around. For one, this time i decided to cut more off the rear quarter panels. The last time i did it, i didn't cut enough and ended up with some rubbing issues, so not wanting to make the same mistake, i made a much larger cut this time around. After reading multiple build articles on Speedhunters and seeing them use an air saw to cut the fenders, i decided to buy one as well since i didn't have a great experience last time with the Dremel Saw Max. The main benefit of the air saw is a much cleaner cut, and the added benefit is you're putting much less heat into the material you're cutting. Here's the air saw i picked up:
In the end, i'm really glad i bought the tool because it was a joy to use in comparison to the Dremel and it really made the cut SO much cleaner! This is probably my new favorite tool. Here's a picture of the cut:
Like last time, i'm still not quite sure how to seal the two pieces together. Ideally, i should be welding the two parts together, but i don't have a welder, so for now, i decided to just push the inner fender up and leave some material for sealing up later on down the road. I might do what Speedhunters did and cut an opening then weld in a new piece to fill the gap.
As with a lot of things i passed over, i will come back and deal with this later one. To make that possible, i decided to forgo riveting the rear fenders like i did last time and picked up some stainless steel security torx sheet metal screws.
And here's the widebody bolted up.
There's a still a few brackets i need to put in, but i've gotten most of the big cutting parts done, including the fuel door section. Next up was lining up and fitting the front bumper to the fenders. The initial fitment was a little disappointing. If i'm honest, i felt like the first bumper i got was much better fitting than this one. At first i thought i wouldn't be able to get it to line up without a lot of modification. Luckily, after i started working on it, it didn't take too much effort to line it up and in the end the fitment is pretty much the same as my first bumper.
Quite possibly one of the most exciting parts of the rebuild was the radiator/bumper fitment. The first time around, one of the things i liked least about the build was how the radiator fitted in the front bumper. Not only did i have to spend a good amount of time cutting the bumper/undersweep to fit the radiator, the radiator actually sat much higher up.
BEFORE
AFTER
You can see now the bottom of the radiator sits underneath the lip of the bumper/undersweep which means i didn't need to do any cutting to fit it. One of the things i was worried about was bolting the bottom of the undersweep to the car. Luckily, the undersweep was flexible enough that i could get it to bolt up without doing anything additional cutting like i did last time.
And here's the front of the car with the hood thrown on for a quick photo:
It's hard to believe that after 255 days, i'm finally approaching the light at the end of the tunnel. Although i'm close, i still have a lot of work to do, including fitting the headlights, install the rear wing, paint the door jambs, and paint the kit. It just so happens to i'm changing jobs for the first time in 8 years, so i'll have 2 weeks in between jobs which i'm hoping to dedicate a portion to completing the car. I really want to have the car done before i start my new job so i can focus on work rather than trying to finish my rebuild. Gotta keep my head down and keep chipping away.
I'm pleased to report that on 8/27, the engine started for the first time since it died after the crash at NJMP on 11/1/2014! All the work i've been doing on the car for the past 9 months was all leading up to this day. I'm glad to say that all my fears of the engine being damaged or me not installing something correctly were unfounded (so far at least...i still might find some issues after i start driving it...but hopefully not!).
But before i share the video of the first start, i'd like to fill in the gaps since my last post. After i finished mounting the radiator and the intercooler, i noticed that the radiator wasn't completely level, so i had to readjust the brackets as well as make a new bracket to make it more even. Honestly, it probably wouldn't really have made a difference in performance of the radiator, but it was definitely an eye sore for me. After the vmount was done, i made a new bracket to mount the AST closer to the coolant filler neck. I previously had issues with the coolant level dropping at the filler neck despite the AST being completely full. I suspected that it had something to do with the way the AST was mounted, possibly because it was lower than the filler neck so it wasn't able to properly separate the air from the system like it's intended purpose. When it came time to fill the coolant, i tested its functionality by filling the coolant from the AST and confirming that coolant flowed back up to the filler neck before overflowing out of the AST. I didn't take any pictures of the AST mount because it's pretty ugly and i plan to create a better looking mounting solution sometime in the future.
After the vmount and AST was done, the last piece of the puzzle was finishing up the exhaust. As i previously posted, i had purchased a new Vibrant resonator/muffler to replace the hi-flow cat that i had, with the main reason being i no longer had an airpump so the cat was pretty useless. But after removing the cat, i found out the material in the cat had completely broken apart so it was doing more harm than good because it was most likely limiting or at least disrupting the airflow. Here's a picture of the old cat next to the new muffler that's going to replace it.
I went back and forth between finding someone to weld it for me and buying a welder to try welding it myself. In the end, to save time, i decided to just take it to a local shop to have them do it for me. The welds they produced weren't spectacular, but at least it shouldn't leak. The one nice thing they did was spray the pipe with some high temp coating, but honestly, i doubt it'll last a couple hundred miles before it starts looking terrible. Either way, it's not something easily visible anyway so it doesn't really make a difference as long as it performs. Here's the pipe ready to be bolted in:
With the exhaust done and out of the way, the final step before attempting to start the car was to fill the car with all the necessary fluids. The first thing i did was drain the gas from the tank and poured 5 gallons of fresh 93 octane in. I wanted to make sure the car had the freshest gas possible when trying to start it for the first time. Then i moved on to fill the transmission and the differential with Mobil 1 75w90. Next was the power steering fluid. After filling the reservoir with oil, i noticed a constant drip on the the a/c compressor below. I initially thought it was leaking from the tube and proceeded to try and replace it, but after taking the tube off, i noticed the reservoir was actually cracked pretty badly. Luckily, i had a spare one from the motor i pulled out of the donor car. After swapping out the reservoir, i filled it with oil again and confirmed the leak was gone. Lastly was the engine oil/filter and the coolant. For the coolant, i filled as much as i could, but in order to properly "burp" the system, i needed to start the car. Before attempting to crank the engine to life, i wanted to prime the oil a little bit first, so i went ahead and pulled the fuel pump relay and cranked the engine a couple of times. Once the oil was primped, i popped the relay back in and settled myself into driver's seat (oh, i forgot to mention i also reinstalled both my seats back into the car as well) to prepare myself for the moment of truth. I knew the first few cranks wouldn't do anything because the fuel system still needed to be primed as well. But to be sure, i got out of the car after a few tries to confirm the fuel pressure was building, and it was. Then i got back into the car and crossed my fingers. I'll let the below video tell the rest of the story.
When the car came to life at the third attempt, i was so happy i almost started crying. It was a HUGE relief to hear the engine run for the first time after so many months, not to mention, hours and hours of work. Despite the long road ahead to actually completing the car, i felt a great sense of accomplishment. After letting the car warm up completely (I let it run until the fans came on at roughly 85C because i wanted to make sure the fans worked), i shut it back down to do a full inspection. The only thing i noticed was a small oil leak coming from the oil cooler lines. My guess is because when i went to remove the lines during the first tear down, i had unscrewed the fittings as opposed to removing the quick release clip, so the fittings probably needed to be tightened down. At least i hope that that's what the problem is. I guess i'll find out the next time i go to start the car.
Next steps are to get the wheels on the car and back onto the ground so i can drive it out of the garage and down the street for a quick test. Also, i need to reposition the car in the garage for the next phase which is all the body work that needs to be done. But before i can do that, i need to fix the steering alignment issue. For the longest time, i could not figure out why i couldn't get both wheels straight at the same time despite using up all of my toe-in adjustments on the tie rod. I just assumed that there was something wrong with my steering rack and/or inner tie rods. I did multiple measurements, even removed both tie rods to see if they were sized differently (they weren't). I even contemplated shortening the inner tie rods, but that would've been a really desperate last resort type option. In the end, i found out the steel arm on the passenger side wheel hub that holds the outer tie rod link was actually bent. I never suspected anything was wrong with the passenger side because after the crash, the passenger tie rod was in good shape, whereas the driver's side tie rod was completely bent to hell. Again, luckily i have spares from the donor car and will need to swap it in. The only sucky thing about this is that removing the wheel hub means removing the ball joints, which means messing up the ball joint boots and needing to replace those again. ARGH! oh well...you do what you gotta do...at least i got the car running again! ヾ（〃＾∇＾）ﾉ♪
Making Up Lost Time 
