Paint 'er, I barely knew 'er!

Those short updates were nice weren't they?  Too bad this one is long overdue, which means it's also long.  Relax, crack a beer, brew a pot of coffee, crack another beer (preferably a cold one, with the boys), and get ready to dive into a rather large update.  

Since we last left our hero, a new brake setup had just been installed, but not thoroughly tested.  All the hot new body mods were installed, but not painted.  The car was drivable, but not complete.  

First, my stereo.  The OEM headunit (with CD!) has never worked on my car since I bought it.  All the fuses were there, nothing seemed out of place.  I went to replace the headunit awhile ago and came to a startling discovery.  All 90s Toyotas run the same simple wiring harness, right?  Well, not your fully loaded 1993 MR2 Turbo with Premium sound!, it had an amplifier to power not only the speakers, but headunit too, along with subwoofers behind each seat, and 8 total speakers!  I gave up trying to make sense of the very strange OEM wiring harness after about half hour of screwing with it.  Not having a stereo sucks, but it's low on my priority list.  So for the time being, let's ditch the OEM unit.  

We're gonna build a block off plate!  The headunit is stupid heavy, like 8+ pounds.  Measure the size and cut your plate of scrap.  

Using blocks of wood and c-clamps, you can build a very crude metal brake.  simply hammer the sheet metal to form your 90 degree bend.  

Drill some holes, mount the brackets, and finish it off with a tiger disc on the face.  Viola!

Fitment, not perfect.  Good thing it's not permanent.  Lately on drives I've been using my portable bluetooth speaker linked to my phone... maybe I'll make it a real solution.

Ok, let's paint this crap!  Remember how we just got it all fitting nicely?  Well, take it all apart again!  It's easy when the front bumper was only held on with 4 bolts (out of the 1038394).

You like sanding?  Totally, no one does.  But if you want to be a cheap ass and paint your own parts, you have to learn to love it.  Here I had to clean up the gap line between the hood and replica fenders.  They were real wavy.  

It's funny how pictures made the car look really "clean".  What does "clean" even mean anymore?  There's a lot of real ugly 6 color stance crap cars out there and everyone calls "clean", I don't get it.  /end rant.  This is a close up of the bumper as I started sanding.  Spiderweb cracks and rock chips everywhere.  The entire front clip looked like it had been driven through a sandstorm (go ahead, play the DaRude hit).  

Here's the typical sanding prep work gone into a part.  You can see all the rick chips on the left headlight cover.  Everything was sanded from 220 to 320 grit.  Fingers went numb, air compressor got a work out.  Don't try this kind of prep work without a DA sander, it'll take you forever.  

Another thing I wanted to clean up was the open vent area behind the front quarters.  It looked unfinished, and a bit too raw for me.  I didn't want to lose it's function of venting wheel turbulent air, so I picked up some hexagonal mesh to cut and fit into place.  I know, the Fast and Furious chicken mesh is kind of tacky too... but this stuff is somewhat more tasteful.

Build a cardboard template first.  Trimming and fitting via scissors is a lot easier than cut off wheel.  

Transfer the shape over, and now you can cut.  

Bend the inner part and glob it in with fiberglass!

Hey, that looks pretty decent!  And hides the all-thread mounting bracket.  

To finish it off, hit the backsides with some flat black.

For another little freshen up, the wiper cowel got a clean up and restoration.  Not sure how long it'll last, but better than painting it and having it flake off in 4 months.  

Next I wanted to clean up the front part of the sideskirt where I had cut off the lower quarter panel attachment.  I have some plans for the raw unfinished gap between the fender and skirt, but that's another chapter.  This is just to keep things a bit cleaner since the front tires were kicking all the rocks and pebbles into the sideskirt.  

Are you following along with the fabrication of ghetto homemade parts?  Cardboard, cut, bend, repeat.

Bent into place for fitment with the previously mentioned c-clamp and wood block method.

Riveted in!  Jesus these sideskirts are pathetic.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Next, the gurney flap needed some more attention.  I trimmed the lower part of it to better match the Autopista spoiler underside, and filled in the unneeded holes.  

Also fit the upper part of the spoiler much better.  No more ugly gap.  It's not waterproof, but rain and water can enter here and drain down the bottom.  Works for me.  

Next up, the Border hood.  A time ago this hood was re-clear coated.  The end result could've been better.  Fisheyes.  Lot of them.  They happen often with clear coating carbon parts, the epoxy resins are still offgassing, and when covered with clear coat, reject it.  It also could've been contaminated air lines, water in the paint, bad weather, almost anything.  The only way to get rid of them is to sand down and either try to polish, or re clear the hood again.  Since the black SW20s are really a 1-stage paint, I was hoping to just get away with buying the black paint (I'm cheap, remember).  The means we need to try sanding the hood down and polishing it to see if we can get rid of those ugly fisheyes.  

While it doesn't look bad in this pic, there were hundreds of fisheyes all over the hood.  Pictures always look better than real life.  Works for cars, and the tinder profiles you were just swiping right on.  

Here, the hood was sanded to 1000 grit I believe.  I started with 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1500, 2000.  Lots of elbow grease.  

After 2000 grit, the hood is almost matte.  Kind of cool actually.  But we want the shine.  

After 3 stage polishing... holy crap!  Looks great doesn't it?

Cock. Sucker.  I had sanded through the clear coat entirely is some spots.  Leaving these different sheens showing through.  Also, the light reflection shows lots of scratches still coming through.  Well, the experiment didn't pay off.  Project cars... way she goes.   

$75 later, I picked up some clear coat and started sanding the hood again.  This time 800 just to scuff for the clear.

Yes, I spray with a $15 Harbor Freight gun.  Yes, I know I'd get better results with better tools.  No, I don't care.  My last car was painted entirely with a $15 gun, and many thought it was a $6000+ paint job (it wasn't).  

That's a little nicer.  I did get a little trigger happy with the gun which resulted in some sags.  After wetsanding and polishing they're mostly gone.  It's a track car, not a show car.  

After a couple more beers worth of work, it looked pretty good!  Passable for sure.  

So, all of the sudden it was 5 days before my scheduled track day.  Crap.  Lots to do.  After hustling to get all the body parts (something like 14 parts now!) fully prepped, they were all now sanded to 400 grit, and I was happy with the body work.  

So, automotive painting.  It's kind of a black art.  You can research it until the cows come home and pick up some awesome tips, and some terrible ones.  You learn the most from getting out there and doing it.  There's a lot of ways you can paint and get great results, kind of like skinning a cat.  

The biggest threat to your garage paintjob is just that, your garage.  Automotive paint is stupid finicky about contamination.  Dust, bugs, weather outside, temperature, humidity, dust, and more dust.  There's lots of ways to fight it though.  I set up my garage as a one way air moving booth.  It's crude, I know.  Behind me in this picture is the one window in the garage.  It's open, but I'm using a furnace filter to filter all incoming air.  The garage door is open enough for a box fan to fit, and the rest of the opening sealed off by plastic.  The hope here is to create air flow through the garage to help control paint and dust in the air, and facilitate the drying process.  But again, it's ghetto.  Here's the first batch of parts awaiting primer.  

My last automotive painting job, I used a hi build 2k primer with pretty good results.  The biggest drawback was the primer was grey, and when the anything got a small rock chip, it showed very easily.  I wanted to try an epoxy primer to seal the parts better and the fact that it was black helped with any future rock chips.  The epoxy primer drawback is... it doesn't fill anything!

Don't forget to prime/paint your hardware.  No one likes the raw screw.

Here was one of many examples of a scratch showing through.  Ugh.  Epoxy primer isn't really sandable either, no forgiveness.  I guess that's why on most high end paintjobs, they epoxy prime AFTER the high build primer.  So, another $50 later, I picked up some high build primer.  In grey.  Again.

The results were much better.  It filled the small cracks and scratches.  It would need some sanding again, but sands very easy.  

Here's the leftovers of another 5-6 hours of sanding.  Luckily you can buy 400 grit DA discs for the flat parts, but most of my parts were hand sanded.  Once this was finally done, it was time to paint.  Just as the rain started outside too.  Rain is not good for a garage paintjob.  Ideal conditions are 70 degrees and 50% humidity.  It was 55 degrees and 75-90% humidity when I started... but had to be done for the track day.  Nothing like stressing out over a relaxing hobby!

Hey, that looks pretty damn good!   Well, it did.  But I definitely made a lot of rookie spray mistakes in my haste to get it done (basically spraying WAY too much paint).  It was also midnight and I had been going strong for over 8 hours by now.  

Like these runs.  I had quite a few.  Luckily since this is single stage, I can sand and buff those out.  Just takes more elbow grease...ugh.

The obligatory is-my-wife-reading-this-blog-there's-parts-in-the-guest-bedroom? pic.  

The second batch of parts being painted the next day.  The spoiler and gurney flap actually turned out pretty bad.  All the other parts are salvageable.  In fact I'm running the spoiler right now (as you'll see) but it needs a repaint when I can dedicate some time to it.  

Here we are, time to assemble everything.  My favorite part of a build, when you get to see it come together piece by piece.  I wanted to give the paint a week to cure a bit before colorsanding and polishing.  And let's be honest, I was OVER sanding at this point.  

Hood pins back in, hood on, and headlight covers back on.  

By the end of the day I had the front end fully put together.  I skimped the photos because I was tired, had a 4 beer buzz, and was in the "let's get this done" mode.  But yeah, looks legit eh?

Next day, skirts and side vents on.  Dang that 24 year old paint looks pretty good eh?  Next, rear flares!

I wanted to give the rear flares a more profesional look.  Since the car is black, I went with a black trim tape to help the fenders fit just ever so slightly better.  Afterall, they were made for a completely different car.  This is some 3M trim tape.  I don't have the part number off hand, but it's pretty easy to find googling "3M trim tape."

See?  Looks less half-assed.  We only go full-ass here!  You can also see some dirt in the paint on the flares.  So, still some half-ass.

Those some child-bearin' hips!  I bet you're frothing at the mouth for full pics.  Well, if you follow my instagram (apex.attack) you've already seen some teasers.  Before I show them here, we have some plain ol' boring maintenance to take care of before track time.  

First, my $20 ebay catch cans' time was up.  I don't think it ever caught anything, except bad looks.  I had a better replacement anyways.

RacerX, seriously, impressive.  

The quality is pretty unreal.  It weighs a bit more than my ebay unit... but this will actually work!  Micron filter, mount bracket, everything needed.

Best install picture I took since I was in a hurry.  Impressive piece for sure.  

Next up, a boring ol' oil change, and fuel filter change.  Not much to see here.  Except.

Factory fuel filter?  Could it be the original?  160k miles on it?  Definitely time to swap!  I will swap in another Toyota filter soon, but was in a huge time pinch for the track day.

So, the car is together, in time.  I'm fried mentally.  It's driving well, I'll be ready.  But that's the next post.  Which will be VERY soon since I've already edited the photos and am uploading footage now.  Seriously, I'm going to start writing it now, expect a new post within a day or two.  I promise... just like last time.  I don't want to leave you empt handed, so here's the car in paddock.