This is how the car sat at the beginning of December 2024.
Even though I had been taking bites out of this elephant all year, I was starting to feel like the build was dragging out again. After all, it was at the beginning of 2024 that I said I was going to go drifting with my old friends, and it still wasn't road worthy. Time for yet another fire under the ass I guess.
I looked at my short list of big tasks and then got ahold of my buddy who does paint for a living. I scheduled a date with him in March to get the car in for paint. (I ended up canceling this appointment early in January because I decided I really wanted to try painting myself, but the ass fire is still lit, I promise. You wouldn't believe how hard it is trying to work on a car with the smell of burnt cheeks in the air but we're making it work) Anyway, I now had to get a bash bar made, front bumper mounted, figure out a hood, and do something about that sunroof. Then body work and disassemble the entire car. In 3 months. No sweat.
Since I was already working on a 3D printed solution for the grille, why not 3D print a hood? Okay so maybe not the whole thing, but just enough to fill in the headlight bucket holes and extend the front just a hair.
Idk why I thought it was a good idea to take a picture of the screen instead of a screen shot, but this is all I have laying around. You'll forgive me I'm sure. <3
I scanned the front of the car and the underside of the hood and then hopped into Fusion to fuck around (poorly and slowly) with the Form tools to design panels that could be bonded and then molded to the pop up hood to make it into a Silvia style hood. Yeah, it wouldn't be quite the same because it wouldn't have the center bulge, but it would have done the job and looked fine I think. However, I didn't get any further than that picture above when I was scrolling Marketplace while pooping one day and....oh my stars and garters. Is that a slick top coupe roof cut for sale an hour away for $150 bucks? I don't think I even pulled my pants up, and I know I didn't wipe, before I was in the truck hauling my ass up to Indy to get this roof.
Now I know this hauling setup might look sketchy, but don't worry, it is.
Not only did I get a great solution to my sunroof delete, but while I was there, I was talking to the guy about my plans to modify my hood into a Silvia hood when he said, "do you want a hood?" to which I said,
He went behind a shelf and dragged out the worst condition OEM Silvia hood that anyone has ever seen and said it was free if I wanted it. My brain was already racing with ideas and I scooped it stat.
Now it looks bad in these pictures, but it looks mint compared to how bad it really was. He didn't tell me much about it, but he said that it had flown off of a car and he just put it behind the shelf after that. I didn't ask him to elaborate but looking at it, I have some ideas? So it got the "weight reduction bro" treatment at some point and the skeleton had been cut out of it. Well most of it anyway. The latch striker had also been cut off because it had hood pins at some point and those have never failed before or anything. But curiously, the holes for the hood pins had been booger welded up. So with no striker for the OEM latch and no holes for hood pins, I'm not sure how this thing was ever held down. Or how it flew, not up, but OFF of the car it was on. Regardless, it was full of small dents, big dents, red dents, and blue dents. It definitely flew up it a windshield at one point because it was creased badly in the center and the back corners were bananas. I was pretty sure I knew what I was gonna do with it, but I let it cook in the corner while I got on with the roof.
After Christmas, my sister and I spent waaaay too long, like 6 hours, pulling the glass out of the car. The windshield was already badly cracked so we practiced on that. We were using the piano wire method, picked up the tool at church, I mean Harbor Freight. By the time we got the quarter glass out, we had the hang of it and the rear windshield came out quick and easy. Knock on wood, we didn't break anything (on my car anyway).
Pro tip to anyone trying to pull coupe quarter glass without fucking up the rubber molding. 1.) Don't use the piano wire method because I definitely murdered mine. 2.) If you can, maybe get one of those sawzall attachments the pros use that is basically a putty knife and be careful. With a sawzall. Good luck. 3.) You can actually take a utility knife, some plastic pry tools, and the piano wire to get it out safely. Use the piano wire around the B pillar area where there is no molding. Then, from the inside of the car, slide the blade between the body and the glass and slowly cut the adhesive while you apply super light pressure with the pry tool. I was able to get the quarter glass almost entirely out, except for a small bit in the bottom corner by the C pillar where I got hasty and shattered it.
The upside was that the molding was still intact! So after picking out all the glass, I had a mint molding. Luckily I had both pieces of glass from my coupe intact and didn't need the ones from the roof cut. I had planned to save the glass out of the roof cut and sell it to someone who could of used them, but after shattering the first attempt and desperately needing the molding more than the glass, I removed the other side with a hammer and saved the molding. Sorry whoever needed a passenger side quarter glass. The windshield on the roof cut was already busted, so I didn't have to be delicate with it either.
I didn't take hardly any pictures of this process until the end, at the time, I didn't know I was going to be writing a build thread. But I went about this swap ever so slightly different than a lot of people might. Really, just regarding the spot welds. In my time doing body work, I found that the best way to get through spot welds to remove a panel is with one of these guys.
It's a thin belt sander. I like air tools, but I have an electric one as well and it works great too. You can easily grind down the spot weld just until you see the metal on the other side and stop. Now this is going to totally mangle a panel that you plan to reuse, but since I wasn't going to use the old roof, and I can grind out the back side of the welds of the new roof, what I was left with was a roof skin that had no holes in it, so ideally, I could spot weld it like factory instead of plug welding it and spending forever grinding those welds back down.
Unfortunately, that's not really how it went down. I don't have a true spot welder that applies clamping pressure and then welds. I have a TIG welder, a modified #5 cup, and a YouTube video I watched one time. The premise is that you just blast thin sheet metal with a short burst of high current to fuse the pieces together in one spot. And that actually works amazingly well on a bench with flat, clean sheet metal. But on compound curves in 35 year old Japanese sheet metal it doesn't work as well. The two main problems are that if there is ANY gap between the two pieces of metal, instead of a weld between two pieces of steel, you get a hole in one.
And even better, when you try to do the same thing when there are 3 layers, any paint or sealer in the layer you never removed erupts into your only remaining $10 gas lens. I'm not mad, why do you ask?
So in the end, I had to drill holes and plug weld it all anyway, but now we know.
When I had the roof cut on some saw horses and really cleaned up for the first time (it was outdoors and raining when I bought it) I realized the paint had really bad orange peel and was probably repainted at one point. When I had it upside down to grind the spot welds, I saw two really bad peaks that I couldn't find on top. I smell filler.
Being a former body guy, I couldn't leave well enough alone for the bastardized drift car could I? Nah I had to rip open that can of worms and I ground the whole thing back to bare steel where I found sooooo much filler. Best I can tell, a reasonable sized tree limb had fallen on it at one point and nothing was pulled, just filled. I'd be lying to you if I said I made it perfect, but after hitting it with a Magnum Sharpie and a body block, I found all the lows, heat shrank (shrinked? shrunk?) a bad oil can, and hammered out most of it. I'd say it was maybe 80%? 100% good enough for sure. Then I bent the supports back into place so they actually made contact with the roof skin. I cleaned all the steel, sprayed it with weld through primer, put some Noise/Vibration/Harshness (NVH) material between the support and the skin, and then welded that bad boy on.
I seam sealed everything that needed it as well, though that doesn't seem to be in these pictures. Ope. The entire roof if still going to need a skim coat of filler on it without a doubt. But it should be more like 1/16" or less instead of 1/4" or more. For a drift car, I am beyond happy with it.
HOOD TIME!
So my thought process .002 seconds after ole boy even showed me the hood was that while the skeleton was fucked, the skin was all there. Sure it was beat to shit but it's just metal, you can beat the shit back out of it. And while the front of a pop up hood and a Silvia hood are different, they're mostly the same right? I mean they fit between the fenders and windshield the same. So the skeletons have got to be pretty similar too yeah? So what if I just peeled both hoods like a grape, grafted the front of the Silvia skeleton to the back of the pop up skeleton, smacked the Silvia skin around 'til it at least had a face for radio, hoisted the lot into the heavens and hoped for the best?
My old and sad pop up hood.
Weight reduction bro.
Now to prep the Silvia hood.
The hood had been painted in the past as well and while the paint stripper took off the "new" paint, it didn't hardly touch the oem paint. Which was a bitch of a bummer because I spent $20 on the stuff. However, I think it was my fault. While the can said 15 minutes, doing some research after the fact, it seems like if you scuff everything with 80 grit, and let it sit for an hour or more, it'll do wonders. But since mine didn't I spent another $10 on a 4 1/2" paint strip disc at Lowes and that was heavenly. Still took me an hour probably to strip that whole hood, but compared to the way I stripped the roof, it was incredible. I bet the roof took 5 hours or more.
Now on the pop up hood, I just ground the edges down until I could peel off the hemmed edge. With that gone, the only thing holding it to the skeleton was NVH and old panel bond. They put up almost no fight and the skin came right off into the scrap bin. However on the Silvia hood, I wanted to reuse that hemmed edge when I reskinned my make shift skeleton (starting to feel like Ed Gein with all this talk of skin and skeletons). That meant I couldn't just grind it off, but I had to carefully bend it all back far enough to pop the skin off. I don't know how much sense that made, but if you go look at the underneath of your hood or doors or trunk of any car you own, you will see that the sheet metal from the outside has been folded over and around the structure on the inside. This is how they make these panels without welding them together. That fold, the hemmed edge, is what I had to peel back.
As always, I learned how not to do it so that I can do it better next time. I modified a paint can opener thingy to a shape that worked fairly well. Basically I had to hammer it under a corner and pry a little at a time to get it started. Then I modified some pliers to get under the slight opening I had created and really pull it back. While I wasn't suuuuper concerned with making a little bit of a mess, the panel needed tons of work anyway, I made a lot more mess than I was hoping. I put loads of tiny peaks in the hood all around it, but eventually I got the skeleton and skin separated.
A quick sanity check to make sure the pop up hood fits into the Silvia hood and we're golden pony boy.
It's a bit hard to see what's going on here since I didn't take enough pictures, but basically I cut off what I needed to support the front of the Silvia hood, cleaned everything up, epoxy primed it, and plug welded it in a few areas.
Then I moved on to repairing the skin. I'll be honest, I really phoned this one in. This thing was ROUGH and we were in uncharted waters already. I knew it was going to end up with a healthy amount of filler regardless, so I dollied out the worst of it, did some more heat shrinking to remove an oil can, and ground down the booger welds that were filling in the hood pin holes. The welds were bad enough that after I ground them flush, there were some pin holes through the sheet metal. Normally, I would have welded them up. But it had been ground thin by the last guy, and now slightly thinner by me. Not to mention that welding in the center of a giant, mostly flat, sheet of steel like that would have made more warping to work out. So while I'm not proud of it, I left the pin holes. It got epoxy primer on both sides and in the holes, plus it's gonna get a little fiberglass in it before it gets filler. It's a drift car, it'll be garage kept, it'll be fine. Will those holes still haunt me until my dying days? Yes.
With everything ready to go back together, I put down some panel bond on the edge of the skin and NVH material where it went from the factory. Since the Silvia hood has that big bulge over most of the center, the pop up skeleton didn't really mate up to it. I basically just whacked the center of the skeleton with a rubber mallet a few times to get it to meet up with it in the center, if not 100%. After I got everything in place, I got to hammering over the hemmed edge. I think I took a few years off the usability of my wrists, but it came out great.
Thankfully in the process of hammering over the edge, I not only got rid of nearly all of those little peaks I put into the steel when I peeled the edge back, but it also really straightened the whole thing out since the pop up hood was already straight. There are at least two little peaks that I missed that I'll have to just whack down and fill. But this hood is going to have a healthy amount of filler anyway. When it's all blocked down and painted, only a keen eye looking at the underside of the hood will ever know it isn't a mint factory hood. And I made it from trash. I'm pretty proud of that if I'm honest. Couldn't stop looking at it when I finished it up. First time it ever had the correct hood on it in 6 years.
And that was just the other week. Since then I have been working on the latest prototype of the grille and assembling the tube bender. With this last entire weekend wasted do to dying of covid, I haven't done much. But as soon as I am healthy, I'll be back out there finishing the bender and making the bash bar. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated. I have a drift event scheduled for April 5th I believe. Maybe the 15th. We've got this.