Wheel arches sandblasting

As promised in the previous post, I wanted to show You what I've done to the wheel arches.

First everything was sandblasted. You can get the idea in the next pictures.

Then, all overlapings where there were welding points were sealed of with Terroson 53 with a brush.

After a 2-day healing period, I decided to put a special black coat of Alkyton color to it. This color is usually used to paint the engines and to seal and protect them from rust. If it is good for engines then it's probably good for the arches as well. The paint is very viscous and usually put on with a brush which I did. Nearly one week later I had a look at the arches and I was really stunned by the outcome. A very nice and even coat of black paint which should give me a very long protection from rust. As it seems it will protect from stone chips and hits as well. We'll see.

In the meantime, while I was painting the arches, my girlfriend was busy painting the front crash bar with the same color. I'm not very satisfied with the outcome of this as the sand blasted surface was not very optimal but for a part which is not visible from outside, it should work. Unfortunately no pictures of it yet.

Anyway, during the sandblasting process, I have finally managed to remove all the Brunox stuff from the car as I was not satisfied with how slow it is hardening and that after 3 or 3.5 months it was still not paintable.

After the removal, I have cleaned all these sandblasted areas with the silicone cleaner used by professional painting workshops and covered those areas with the 2k-Epoxy ground in order to avoid any possible rust generation. Pictures will follow...

And I am very proud that with a little help from a friend I have finally managed to get the gold reflective foil for this car. It will cover a part of the firewall on the exhaust side, probably my new carbon separating device (separation of the engine bay from the air inlet) and the area over the gearbox. Was not very cheap but it was worth it and I think it will look amazing. :)

Long time no hear part 2

One of the next big steps was to have the doors put back on the car. 

So after the prime painting the parts with the 2k-Epoxy ground I have covered all the important welding joints with a kind of silicone sealing which is used especially in the car industry. It was Terroson 9100. There is also Terroson 9200 which is the same product but it is black.

 After this, the hinges were also treated with Terroson and the doors were put back onto the car.

Just a word of advice here: You need 1-2 additional pairs of hands to put the doors back into the place. My girlfriend helped me, but even with her extraordinary help we needed to use the car jack to put everything 100% together.

To align everything properly, You need to close the door and make the first alignment so that the clearance between the door and everything else on the back is correct. After that i have tightened the bolts and put the fenders on the car to see if the clearance to the front is correct. After this, remove the fenders, open the door carefully, unscrew the two lower bolts going into the body of the car and lift the door slightly higher than they will be after closing them. I found out that this step is needed as the door is very heavy and after opening it it has no more support at the back and due to the weight lowers itself between 0.5 and 1cm. You can clearly see it by closing the door.

After this tighten all bolts and everything should be in perfect order.

 

The final part was to paint the hinges in the color of the car after a healing period of 2-3 days for the Terroson. I wanted to have it in the outside color as the hinges will be slightly visible from inside of the car after opening of the doors. After two coats of KH0, i have applied another 2 coats of clear coat. The outcome is not the best one but it doesn't have to be perfect.

Finally, after I found some small rust bits in the wheel arch I decided to remove the front suspension and the suspension frame. Nearly 30 minutes of work alone, but moving everything around is PITA if You're alone.

The reason behind removing everything was that since I want to do everything properly i also wanted to remove the found surface rust! At first I wanted to do this with the angular grinder, but after two minutes of overhead work which caused severe pain in the shoulders and hands and the disability to access all corners i decided to switch to centrifugal grinder which, I found out after few Minutes of work, was a bad idea as well because the grinding paper was ripped off by the sharp edges.

So, since I still had the sand blasting material and tools in the garage I decided to give the wheel arches a proper sandblasting! The good thing about this was that on the same day I will get to sandblast the rust treatment in the engine bay as after 3 months of waiting this treatment still wasn't dry and ready to be painted. More on this in the next post :)

CYA

Long time no hear

Hey ho!

I'm back again with alot of job done in the meantime.

Firstly, I finally mounted the TOMEI sump baffle into the oil sump. Unfortunately, the oil seal that I ordered nearly 2 months ago (and offcourse allready paid), still hasn't arrived. I also don't have any status on the part so it might take some more time.

Finally, after a long wait as I wanted all parts send together, they arrived few weeks back. It was actually two packages that looked the same. It was like Christmas. Seats, Clutch, Oilpump, Waterpump, all sealings and so on and so on.

Put the clutch on the scales to have a comparison to the old one. However, I just need to weight the old one :)

A few weeks later the Tomei pistons and conrods arrived. Shouldn't have been necessary in first place, but since the car was not in a promised state, I need to make the first oversize on my cylinders and rebuild the whole engine! At least now I don't need to worry about my power level and threshold and about opening the engine again next year as this time everything will be done properly.

Since I have changed my mind and decided not to go on with the R35 GT-R brake setup, I have traded it in for  a Stoptech brake setup. However, this setup doesn't have the M12 bolts in the front but M14 as it comes from an R34 GT-R. Therefore I needed to enlarge the mounting holes on the wheelmount. This was done on a milling machine. The hardest part was to properly fix the wheelmount so it wouldn't move as I want the holes to be as straight as possible.

And then finally, I was able to mount the front brake system to the car and take some pictures from the side. I think it looks great and exactly as I wanted to have it - black.

 

And one with the wheel on it :) I really can't wait to see the car finally put back together completely and drive it for the first time after everything is finished.

 

Futher on I risked and bought two CUSCO Bride Vios Seats for the car. I'm not really sure if those are street legal in Austria, but apparently I will find out some day. However, even with the seats I have noticed that the distributor I bought them from doesn't have a clue about the stuff and only want's to sell stuff without really listening to the customers.

In the beginning I told him how tall I am and that I don't want to sit very low as I want to see over the steering wheel. However, he assured that the seats are high enough and would be perfect for me. Now, guess what... Correct, they weren't. They were about 5cm to low (in the highest position on the rail) so I couldn't even really see over the steering wheel. After some time consuming measurements and calculations, I have found the perfect side wall for this seat and rail so I will be ordering it very shortly. Another investment which could have been avoided! Thanks!

Anyway, I have noticed one other thing about the combination of the Bride seat rail and Bride seat, which really left me stunned.

If You mount this seat to the lowest hole in the front and the highest hole in the back, then the seat cannot be adjusted in his front to back position because it is not possible to actuate the handle to unlock the positioning mechanics. Brilliant. At least I would have suspected that with two products which were "manufactured by the same company" the compability would be given.

Also, the quality of the rail welding is as if a 7 year old kid with no experience would have done it. So much for a high quality product.

In the future I will probably rely on European products.

 

More news in part 2...

Painting the rocker covers and the rest of them

On Sunday I have finally decided to paint all the covers for the engine. At first I wanted to put them into an oven after painting of all 3 necessary layers, but after waiting for weeks to be able to get to an oven, I decided to do it at home and not waste any more time on waiting for someone not reliable!

So, few weeks back I have given the covers for sandblasting. Unfortunately at this time I didn't really knew the real difference between sandblasting with sand and with glass beads.

So the covers were sandblasted and therefore the surface was not as smooth as I would have liked to have it. But I thought I'd give it a try and cleaned the parts prior to painting with a silicone remover which has done a pretty good job in the past.

So, my decision was to use a VHT wrinkle paint in Black. Actually I wanted it in a special grey which is used for the Omori Z2 engine but VHT wrinkle was at this time available only in black and red. Also, a very big thanks goes to Denis (Tranq) who has kindly donated 2 black color spray cans and 2 red color ones as I would have not been able to organize those in Austria since the UK guys are not allowed to ship it and shipping from the States is ridiculously expensive. Unfortunately, with the last coat of the last part I ran out of the color so my painting of the inlet manifold will have to wait until I organize more cans from Tranq :)

Hovewer, the process was as described on the can or here: Build Threads

My steps were:

1. Sandblasting the parts
2. Cleaning them with silicone remover
3. Preheating of the parts (not necessary, but since the parts were under 10°C i decided to do it)
4. 1st layer horizontally
5. 5 Minutes break
6. 2nd layer vertically
7. 5 Minutes break
8. 3rd layer diagonal
9. After that You need to have a lots of nerves or a good helper (thanks LiZ) and one heat gun per person to apply heat to the finished parts. I started with 300 °C setting but soon after I realized that this'll take too much time to get the job done so i set up 600 °C and gave it a go. And it worked. You only need to be patient and wait for few minutes and wave the heat gun around the whole parts. Take care not to stay long on one spot as people are describing that it'll sligthly burn the coat and You can start from the beginning.

 NOTE: The available room for this job was far away from clean and dustfree. And I have noticed dust particles on the parts after step 2 but it was already to late as i started spraying. All surface inperfections which were produced during sandblasting were covered by the three coats and allthough after the third one I was thinking that it looks like shit, the result was absolutely amazing. Also, the dust particles are somehow moved from the part surface to the coat surface during the process so after the paint has dried you can easily remove the "painted dust".
NOTE2: please take care not to leave any valuable stuff in the room during this process as the dust during the process is really aggressive and it will fly through the room and stick to everything in the way. Fortunately for me, my cellphone was (even though 2m avay from the painting surface) easy to clean!
NOTE3: please make sure that You paint with this paint in a room which has enough air. The best thing would be to stick to the description on the can and to paint outdoors. I was stupid enough to paint indoors and opened the window very late so I had serious headache for the next 2 days. So take care guys and girls as this paint really is dangerous!!

Now for the pictures:

After 1st coat (as You can see the surface really looks shitty at this stage):

Long after heating of the last coat:

Now, there is something which I have noticed and I don't really know how to avoid this, which is the bends and curves. Still, I'm very happy with the results:

Next thing is to organize more color and to paint the intake manifold, the twin turbo pipe and probably to try and see the effect on the heat shields of the turbos. Especially to find out if it can take the temperatures :)

Until then, stay tuned!

Cheers,
RoB

Some new parts from ISA racing and fitting the new brake system pt. 2

Since my last post, I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine who is a very talented electrics engineer and does a lot of stuff for different OEMs like e.g. wirings for their cars or programming of some stuff. However since I have posted the following picture he has strongly advised me to exchange the plug on the fans to a connector due to the current flow direction.

Anyway, I'm going to change this as soon as possible.

During the weekend my father has visited me to help me finally finish the car and we moved a big step forward.

The rear brakes were uprated and done very carefully and properly. In order to minimize my efforts, I have cut the heat shield behind the brake disc to fit the new disc as I really didn't want to remove the whole wheel hub as it would have taken a huge amount of time to do so.

I also put a primer on it and painted the front plain black. Just because I wanted to do it, not because it needed to be done!

Futher on, all four sides were upgraded with braided brake lines from Nismo. It was a pretty straightforward job to do so. Unfortunately, I only have a picture of the rear lines but You'll get what I mean :)

Next thing was to exchange the front upper camber arms as I got adjustable ones from Cusco. The same thing was done for the front tension rod as it is recommended to have a fixed tension rod with no rubber bearing as otherwise you will ruin the camber arms pretty fast because they would need to take all the shocks from the street.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to mount the new front brakes because the bolt diameter is 14mm and the standard size is 12 mm. Therefore the hole needs to be made bigger. Since all of my drills accept borer up to 13 mm and I therefore only have a maximum sized borer of 13mm, it was not possible to do this. This will be done ASAP.

Good news is that I have received my mocal oil coolers for the transfer box and the rear differential but I will wait until putting it on my car as I have a lot of other things which need to be prioritized.

Finally, I'm still waiting for my parts from Japan which should have arrived few weeks back already and I really don't know what's happened with them. Without that stuff I cannot proceed with the engine build up process.

Cheers, keep on reading!

Some new parts from ISA racing and fitting the new brake system pt. 1

Hi all!

Last couple of weeks I was busy rearranging my garage, making some space for the stuff I'm waiting for and basically cleaning of some parts.

Last week my ISA racing order (at least a part of it) arrived (within 2 days from Germany to Austria).

It included 2 SPAL fans for my new radiator, fan mountings, Aerocatch bonnet locks, and some small pieces needed to finish the car.

So on Sunday, I was busy finishing the stuff which I could finish.

First thing on the list was to fit the fans to the radiator and to fit the superseal connectors to the cables as I'm fan of those! Here's the result:

Next thing was to fit the new water temperature sensor into this hose adapter. I know, it's a 5 minutes job, but it still needs to be done! The reason for the water temperature sensor is that I'm going to connect it to a programmable micro sps which will monitor my temperature and switch the fans according to my programmed limits.

Further on, I have finished wiring of my reverse and fog light as few months back I didn't have the correct pins for the connector. Now this is done as well. No pictures as there's really nothing to see :)

I also started to remove the rear HICAS cylinder as i will fit the dummy pipe instead. I really don't like it if "something" interferes into my driving. The dummy pipe came from whiteline and was originally painted silver with a clear coat on it! Not to forget, that the silver paint was cracked under the clear coat after the delivery! So, as this was bothering me and as I want nearly all parts to be "under the radar" i stipped the paint off (awful job for this geometry) and painted it matt black. Results will hopefully be seen in the next post.

I also started dismounting the HICAS arms but I had to find out that I didn't have suitable tools for this as I need a 30mm wrench. This will happen during the upcoming weekend!

However, the most motivating thing for me was to remove the rear brakes and put on the new ones. As it was late already for a Sunday evening I only got to mount the passenger side rear brake without the braided brake hose. Anyway this was a very motivating moment for me as I saw that finally something is moving on and things are getting done. Hope that within next two weeks the engine bay will be painted andthat I can finally start assembling the car back together!

Cheers,

RoB