What have you done to your car today?

I have spent the entire last week working on Heathers dads 2004 ford truck. I put over 15 hours into it on saturday and sunday. I cant believe how rusty this thing is. I had to weld new metal into the entire bottom of the driver door over 2 feet long, welded in new rocker panel pieces, and new cab corners. Plus the entire hood is loaded with rust bubbles and other paint problems.

Spent the weekend finish sanding all the metal bodywork and fiberglassing. Then Ssunday I primered all the spots with Mar Hyde primer. Last night I sanded all that off then sprayed the base coat. Then finally around 11:30 last night I finished spraying the clear coat to try and blend it into the existing clear coat.

Today I plan to wet sand and buff out everything. Plus clean and vacuum the interior along with cleaning everything else. Hopefully it will be very close to matching the original paint job. I just cant believe how rusty this truck was but thats just how it is in Michigan.
 
Well, I've only technically had him 48 hours, and I took one of those days off...

marvinstripping.jpg

Weight-saving goodness!

Other than the driver's seat (so I can move him about), there's no trim of any variety between the dashboard and boot latch save for the carpet which is fastened in a couple of places under the dash.
 
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Famine
Yes. The red one is a 1998 model and is one of the last batch of V6s Mazda UK brought over (I'm only aware of one newer one - by one day). The white one (called Marvin by his previous owners) is one of the 250 SE editions.

But I'll be doing this with it:



Yep. The supercharged, Miller cycle V6, to be more precise.

I've stripped much of Marvin's boot now, up to the rear seats and taken those extremely heavy badges off :lol: There'll be a little pause in events while I can get a couple of patches of the leather repaired and maybe dye the suede to match the unnamed red car, then I can transplant the seats (and put red's driving seat back in Marvin so we can move him about).
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:drool:

And, internet cookie for me :sly:
 
I think those spark plugs I installed are killing my car. Earlier today, it was really slow to get up and go (this was after being parked for maybe half an hour; getting there it seemed fine). After turning the vent fans off, and turning the car off for a little bit a couple times, it seemed to get back to normal, and stayed that way until I left for work. 5 hours later (no driving), it took maybe 5 seconds to turn the engine over, and the check engine light came on. Arriving home, I sat with the engine running for a few seconds and it sounded like it was dying. Kind of a rough idle, not quite in rhythm (misfire?), and there was some decent vibration. No daylight to look at anything now, so I'm having my more experienced friend help me look at it tomorrow morning. Hopefully we can figure it out and not have to pay so much to take it in.
 
Perfect Balance
You can adjust speedos?
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Well, not the speedo itself. But when you change the tires around and they don't match OEM tires. It can get a bit off. Depending on the tires. It could be far off leading you to get tickets. I know for my car. I'll have to get some gear switched in the tranny for the new tires that are going on.. Eventually.
 
Yeah. There is a little gear that you adjust that sets the speedo back to something accurate. I'm almost tempted to buy a new car, swap out the speedo gear for something that makes the car think it's going a lot slower than it is and get a GPS then you could sell your car with much less mileage and get more money for it than you would.
 
bergauk
Casio, are they the same size as the OEM tires? Or is she gonna go get the speedo adjusted?
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They're only 1.7% larger diameter than stock, it'll be slightly out, but she should be ok. From memory the new size is 230/50/R18. Size wise they look heaps better being wider, as the old ones were 190s. Though these ones come outside the guards by 1mm. Anymore and they'd be illegal.

Perfect Balance
You can adjust speedos?
Click to expand...
Philly
Yeah. There is a little gear that you adjust that sets the speedo back to something accurate. I'm almost tempted to buy a new car, swap out the speedo gear for something that makes the car think it's going a lot slower than it is and get a GPS then you could sell your car with much less mileage and get more money for it than you would.
Click to expand...

Yeah, apparently if you really care you can change the gears or something, though it's more expensive than getting a GPS unit.

Though, I don't know if all modern cars are like my Saab, but my speedo is electric, and can have the ratio easily changed by getting the mechanic to connect to the cars software, input the new tyre size, and viola! It's done.

If your VW if the same as my Saab Philly, when I had an issue with the Speed Sensor earlier in the year, my Speedometer stopped working, I could still drive and the tachometer still worked so I could kinda judge how fast I was going from that, but my odometer didn't go up cause it thought it wasn't moving anywhere! I probably did 1000km on it without it registering as mileage.
 
Cyborg - Check your gaps.

mustangGT90210
:drool:

And, internet cookie for me :sly:
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Apparently it has never been done before because it's not as easy to source the engine, not as easy to fit, doesn't quite fit (90 degree instead of 60 degree vee, extra pulleys [and how!], taller engine), needs a piggyback ECU if you have a manual gearbox and is running at pretty much the most amount of power you can possibly get out of it.

But I like a laugh and I don't really want any more power than that - it is, for all its goodness, still FWD and you'll start to hit the law of diminishing returns where you need massive power increases for tiny performance increases (and driveability losses). I think I'll be just nipping on the boundary between a driveable, useful amount of power (I've seen quotes between 215 and 235hp for the Miller) and spinning it away pointlessly. I'll have some track-biased road tyres helping me keep the right side of the boundary.


Plus a supercharger whine :D
 
Philly
Yeah. There is a little gear that you adjust that sets the speedo back to something accurate. I'm almost tempted to buy a new car, swap out the speedo gear for something that makes the car think it's going a lot slower than it is and get a GPS then you could sell your car with much less mileage and get more money for it than you would.
Click to expand...

On a lot of new cars it runs off the wheel speed sensors...

Unplug them after 30k miles... Golden. XD
 
Rotary Junkie
On a lot of new cars it runs off the wheel speed sensors...

Unplug them after 30k miles... Golden. XD
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Except you won't have ABS or traction control, the PCM will log the lack of input, and it will light the check engine light.
 
Famine
Cyborg - Check your gaps.
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The gaps aren't quite as tight as they should be, but the plugs that came with the car were worn to hell and it ran relatively fine. I think we discovered the problem though, and I should have recognized this before. The car started out slow, like it was starting in a high gear (I experience this all the time in GT! :dunce:). From what we could tell, it was stuck in second (maybe I should have mentioned it was an auto?); but there was no upshifting at all after getting up to speed either, and the engine pretty much stayed at about 2.5K rpm. After changing the tranny fluid and driving around for a few minutes, it feels like all's well again. But things went "normal" for a bit yesterday, so I'll see how it goes and change the fluid again tomorrow or the next day, just to make sure whatever crap was in the transmission gets flushed out.
 
CyborgGT
The gaps aren't quite as tight as they should be, but the plugs that came with the car were worn to hell and it ran relatively fine. I think we discovered the problem though, and I should have recognized this before. The car started out slow, like it was starting in a high gear (I experience this all the time in GT! :dunce:). From what we could tell, it was stuck in second (maybe I should have mentioned it was an auto?); but there was no upshifting at all after getting up to speed either, and the engine pretty much stayed at about 2.5K rpm. After changing the tranny fluid and driving around for a few minutes, it feels like all's well again. But things went "normal" for a bit yesterday, so I'll see how it goes and change the fluid again tomorrow or the next day, just to make sure whatever crap was in the transmission gets flushed out.
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Better change the tranny filter, too, if you haven't already; that way there's nothing that can sneak back into the system.
 
And in the meantime, drive without speedometer, ABS, and traction control and with the CEL staring you in the face.
 
Duke
And in the meantime, drive without speedometer, ABS, and traction control and with the CEL staring you in the face.
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Yeah, you wouldn't want to do that indefinitely, not for the safety aspect but for annoyance. When my speed sensor broke, every minute or so, the warning chime sounded, and my dash was ablaze with warning lights. Also my cruise control didn't work.

But what was kinda funny was my fuel economy read-out and distance to empty, which were obviously getting very confused by all the fuel it was using while not doing any distance. :lol:
 
Duke
And in the meantime, drive without speedometer, ABS, and traction control and with the CEL staring you in the face.
Click to expand...

Maybe it'd be worth it when you suddenly have an ultra-low mileage car when it comes time to sell.
 
Duke
And in the meantime, drive without speedometer, ABS, and traction control and with the CEL staring you in the face.
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The scenario was already that the speedometer would be "replaced" by a GPS unit's speed readout, and more than a few people I know have zero issues driving around without ABS (and have not gotten in accidents because of a lack of ABS either).
 
Whew! I finally finished up her dads 2004 Ford truck last night. That was easily 50+ hours of labor to repair all the bodywork, weld in new metal, primer, base coat, clear coat, wet sand and then buff it all out.

Had a tough time blending the new clear coat into the old clear coat but I just had to buff the heck out of it. Finally melted the 2 together and it turned out very good. We even decided to clean the interior and everything else while I had the truck. I am sure they are going to be very happy with it. 👍
 

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