The Resurrection of a Coupe

[Toxocara995]

What follows is the story of redemption and repentance.

I was a pretty late bloomer to the car scene. I didn't really start to show interest until I was 18 when one of my buddies at the time was really trying to get me into Civics. I eventually got a terrible NA Miata as my first real project and quickly got out from under it and into a 1993 240 hatch. This was in 2016 and it was my baby. I was gonna change the world with this thing.




It was a bone stock automatic. Completely unmolested, had everything. Full interior, I mean everything. I live in Indiana but it was a Florida car. The guy I bought it from was ex-military and he moved back home to Kokomo where I scooped this baby up for $3k. He said that he bought it for his wife and she never drove it. It had 120k miles on it. The only issue was that it had a weird stumbly idle. I barely knew anything about cars at the time. I had only really changed an alternator, some shocks, some shotty wiring jobs, you know, the early highschool kinda shit. He told me he thought it was a fuel injector, gave me one with the car, and sent me on my home where I stalled at every light because of the idle. With a massive smile on my face the entire way of course, I had a 240.

Well one week to the day after I bought it, I left college for the weekend and went back home to pick up a manual transmission from a friend and put it in the hatch. On my way back to campus, with an hour left to go, my automatic decided to have 5 neutrals. Absolutely blew it's guts.



Turns out that the idle issue was the trans slipping and catching over and over again causing the engine to surge and it finally went the way of the buffalo. With the new trans in the hatch. It was fate.

This was trial by fire and I got to work gathering the rest of the parts for the manual swap and devouring all I could find on YouTube and this very site.






Rural King axe handle shift knob baby. Necessity is the mother of all invention. It was actually kind of nice. My roommate at the time kept it for a future car because he liked it so much. XD

I did a lot more to it, little things anyway. And then I started to ruin it. I went full "race car bro!" on it. I was making friends with drift kids and wanted to go slide. After putting some arms on it, bushings, and powder coating the stock wheels bright green, yikes, I went to a few track days.

Pictures courtesy of my good friend Bill.





I still had no idea what I was doing at the time. When I took the car to get aligned, with fully adjustable arms, and the tech asked me what specs I wanted, I said, "Uh idk, just put it all at zero" so needless to say the car handled a little odd on track. Who knows what he actually set everything to. XD Regardless, by my 3rd event, I was finally able to consistently take one corner at a time, still couldn't transition though. While I was in line at grid, it had started to sprinkle a bit. Just enough to get the track wet and stay wet. I had a passenger with me and I said to him, "it's crazy they're letting people out on the track, someone is gonna crash"....

This was at the Indianapolis Speedrome. It's a small oval track completely surrounded by a concrete wall. I believe it has a very subtle bank as well. Not a great place for beginners since the consequences of a spin out are pretty high. Especially one who just jinxed himself at grid.





I'm sure you already knew what happened. I spun out on the first turn with enough speed and bad luck to essentially throw all the momentum of the car backwards and into the wall. I bent a frame rail, quarter, floor pan, hatch, broke lights, bent seat rail, and busted the engine and trans mounts. Absolutely thrashed the thing in one swoop. I wasn't really prepared to crash. Just told myself it wouldn't happen to me. HA! So I was pretty devastated. I didn't really have the mindset or skills at the time to realize that while it would never be pretty again, the frame was barely tweaked, new mounts are cheap, and I would have been a bash bar and some fiber glass quarters away from getting back on track. I think because I still just didn't have a ton of experience in the car world, I thought this chassis was dead and gone and I parked it at my buddy's shop until I figured out what to do with it.

It was now 2019 and I knew that I had committed crimes against car culture by ruining what would now be a $250,000 car on BringATrailer. And the only way to make it right was to bring a nearly dead chassis back to life. To save a pour soul destined for the crusher.

I had a first gen Forester at the time, manual. It was actually a super nice car that I dearly miss, but who cares about a freaking Subaru, I needed another 240. I had about 3 dollars to my name as I was finishing the last months of grad school so the Forester was going to be my bargaining chip. Prices were already getting pretty high for s chassis, and I had a sin to clear myself of so I was looking at the bottom of the barrel for someone willing to take a trade. After almost taking an offer for a car that had fuel leaking into the frame rail for so long it had rusted through (yeah idk either man, Facebook marketplace amiright?) I found this sad little guy.







I knew I had to bring it home. With a flip of the Autozone switch and a press of the eBay button drilled into the dash, the single jingle whimpered to life and oil jumped out of the valve cover held down with only 2 finger tight bolts. I'm not sure if my tears were from joy or the oil smoke coming off the manifold, but I had a massive smile on my face as I drove it up the ramps onto the trailer.



This build isn't quite finished, but it's getting paint in March and going to it's first event in April. I have nearly 6 years of off and on work to post here with something like 500 picture to sort through. I've always wanted to post a build thread here. I hope you all enjoy!

[Toxocara995]

The plan was to do a shell swap. Gut the new turd, fix the rust, and take all the good stuff from the white hatch. I wasted no time getting to work on this thing. We brought it home and pushed it off the trailer that night. The plan was to get the car running, driving, and in primer by the end of the summer (no shot in hell that was happening). Ordered the cheapest eBay exhaust I could at the time, because I had convinced myself that was the only part I would need for the entire swap, and by evening the next night, it was a gutted shell on four stands. The natural habitat of a Nissan 240SX.






There's some kind of symbolism about rebirth here, I'm sure of it.



While I'd never done any kind of rust repair and I barely had any welding experience, I did just use a college loan to buy a new Everlast MIG and build a fancy welding cart.



I'd watched enough YouTube to know that I needed to stack tacks to try and prevent warping and that was about it. While I'm certainly not proud of the craftsmanship at this point, I am still proud that I went for it and didn't let my lack of experience stop me from gaining experience in the first place.







While it's not pretty, we did put rust neutralizer on just about everything, painted or POR15'd anything that was bare, and burned it all in. I didn't know anything about cavity wax at the time, and it's been nearly 6 years, so I'm positive surface rust formed inside of these long ago, but, c'est la vie.

It is probably worth mentioning that I was still pretty tore up about crashing the white hatch and had vowed that this would be a STREET ONLY car so I would never crash again. I had hopes of doing a full restoration (to the best of my abilities anyway).

After making very little headway, graduation came and I moved to a suburb west of Chicago for work. I slapped the subframes back in the coupe to get it rolling and moved shop.

[Toxocara995]

About 4 seconds after I started rolling in my new big-boy-job paychecks, I started buying shit. I found a "barn find" 1973 Datsun 620 in southern Indiana for $1500 bucks.



The guy was the second owner, though he had it since '75 and his son had started working on it in the 90s and then went to the military. And there it sat until I scooped it. Thankfully I was smart enough to put it under a tarp and not touch it until the 240 was done....for now anyway.







The garage at the new place was huge and I could bring both cars in at once which made life so much easier. I love this picture. It's so iconic for me.



Basically all of the subframes, control arms, and brackets got sanded, cleaned, and POR15'd. If I had to do it all over again, I'm not sure that I would use POR15. I'm sure it will be fine, but I think at this point I would just spray an automotive base on the big stuff and sandblast/powder coat the smaller stuff. It would have been less work honestly and I think it would have been better off. Regardless, this subframe goes hard.





Pay no attention to the Energy Suspension subframe bushings, it actually got OEM replacements from Megan Racing. Turns out you're not supposed to cut the cups out for the NRG ones. Oops.



I don't even recall what color I thought I was going to paint the car at the time, I think it was going to be some kind of purple. I change my mind on paint every week. But I knew that I wanted a contrasting bay and everything was already out of it. BAY PAINTING MONTAGE!







I used a few cans of oven cleaner, got some chemical burns (don't spray that shit into the wind kids), laid down some 1K SEM primer, poor man's metallic, and SprayMax 2K Clear. I cannot recommend that clear enough. It is EXPENSIVE but if you can't spray with a paint gun, it's the "same thing" and is great for small stuff. The spray paint and primer never really "hardened" because they have no catalyst, I think, but the clear on top did. So it made a mostly durable combo. Idk that this was really much cheaper than just buying and spraying actual automotive paint products, but at the time, I didn't even have a pancake compressor and didn't know my ass from a hole in the ground so I'd call it a success. Do I still like that color though...?

The floors got a similar treatment. Some dry ice and a few hours picking wires out of my clothes and skin, and it was ready for primer.










The engine got a bit of a freshening. Basically all the easy to get to seals and gaskets, removed the upper timing chain guide, painted the valve cover and exhaust manifold, the works. I should have done the timing on it, but it's only at 120k miles, not horrible. If everything goes to plan (HA!) then I'll get around to it this winter. Please don't let that be foreshadowing.

Also, since I had two cars, I cut the rad support out of the both of them. I made the cut about three inches wider overall on the hatch so that I could slip fit it onto the coupe. I welded some nuts underneath, and now I have a removable rad support that looks totally stock unless you really look. Hope that made sense.




Remember when I said I was making big-boy money and started buying shit? Well these arrived, and then I placed a big order with Touge Factory.




BONUS ROUND:
My job at the time was a bit of a joke and I had too much free time and too many shopping carts so this happened.



Rust repair on the tow rig.





And here's what the previous owner of the coupe did with my old Forester.

[Toxocara995]

At this point, its now March of 2020 and the pandemic is about to hit full swing. I hated my job, had started dating a girl back home, and had planned to move back soon anyway. Before shit really hit the fan, I packed shop, and moved back home. The coupe was now going to it's 3rd garage. The hatch came too, but I had already gotten all that I could out of it. After unbolting literally everything I possible could and stashing it somewhere, it got cut up and scrapped. I look back on this moment with a fair amount of regret. So much more could have been saved and sold to someone who needed it. But I did at least save the shock towers and sold those to a guy years later.





Shortly after scrapping tons of useful panels for beer money, my Origin Labs kit came in. Racing Line front bumper, +55mm front and rear Type 3 fenders/overs, and I can't remember what type the skirts were. I didn't like the rear bumper options from Origin at the time, and the plan was to keep the stock rear and run valences. Looking back on this choice in kit and overs really, really makes me see how much my tastes have changed. This was 5 years ago as of writing this. And I see how much my tastes were completely influenced by others. No doubt they still are to a degree, but my pallet is much more refined and I'm more thoughtful about what I like instead of just following what I see on YouTube. If I could go back, I would have probably tried to find stock front fenders and went with a much more mild rear over. And I probably would have bought less aggressive front aero and skirts. But I have them already, so I'm going to rock them until they explode.



Everything that follows in this post happened over 3-ish years. Which is to say it barely got touch. Between covid, swapping careers, side work, getting distracted with the Datsun for a year, and renovating a house, it was never a priority.

This isn't a 620 build thread, so I won't get into it, but after about a year's work and a few grand. It was running and 99.9% finished. It had no power and would overheat. I got fed up and sold it out of frustration only for the new owner to text me a day or two later to tell me I just had my timing way off and now it was perfect. I will always regret that sale. Don't be too cool to ask for help people. Be better than me.




The plus side of selling the truck, was that I now could afford the 3 piece wheels I thought I had to have. And my god did this end up being another lesson. I tend to be hasty at times and learn the hard way in everything. I found these Modena Autostrada's in the Ukraine shortly before the war broke out.



While they were super mint, they were a horrible offset (and size-ish) for what I already had. They were 16x7.5 and 16x8.5 staggered with nearly flush offsets. Meanwhile I had +55 overs front and rear on my car. They are also a 2 piece wheel and not a 3. Which I did not understand at the time. I bought some super large sidewall Michelin Pilot Sports to fill in the wheel wells.




Looking at it now, they actually fill it out pretty well. I could have dropped it another inch or two and it probably would have looked steezy tbh. However, as the car sits today, with spacers, it's pretty close to a -30 offset. These wheels were like +45. New lips and barrels were waaaay out of my price range and I didn't like the idea of running nearly 80mm of spacer. And while I still think that is probably a bad idea now, tbh, I wish I had kept them, ran dummy spacers and hard to find tires until I could afford new lips/barrels, and just kept a few wheel bearings on hand. I lost a ton of time and money on these wheels but I learned a lot about planning ahead and wheel fitment.

Powder coated, polished, sold, sad.



Quarters cut and side markers deleted. I hammered the inner wheel well to stretch it up to the outer, then welded and ground it down. I wouldn't quiiite do it like this again. And if you do, I would either not grind it smooth, or make damn sure that you are getting great penetration. I have a feeling this seam will crack someday.







Remember that cheap ass eBay exhaust I mentioned in the second post? Well it's back. In another case of "I've already got it, so I'm gonna run it til it explodes" I slapped on my ISR test pipe and then tried to put the exhaust on but really just swore and stood back to admire how poorly it fit. The solution was the most bastardized exhaust that may have ever been on an s chassis. I cut and re-angled every flange on the thing, scalloped some pipes to get it to clear the rear sway bar, put a J-pipe in it to hopefully prevent any inevitable drone, cut the tips off, stuffed the silencers into the muffler, welded them in, and then welded mild steel kick up tips onto it that prevent the bumper from coming off and have already rusted because they're mild steel dummy. While it must be wildly restrictive, it actually sounds alright....at idle....in the garage. I haven't really driven this thing much yet okay.






And here it sat until late 2023 when we went full steam ahead again.

[Toxocara995]

After about a billion life changes going on back to back to back, my fiance and I got a dog. Best shop dog ever.



I was already starting to slow roll back into working on the 240 when I really started to think about drifting again. I've kept in touch with my old drift buddies from college all these years and one of them wanted to get back into the game which got me thinking, "Man I wish I could afford a drift car, but I've already got this project I need to finish". It was at that time I started to stare at my bastardized, poorly repaired, practice girl of an S13 with Fortune Auto coil overs, ISR arms, and Energy Suspension bushings all around...





Yeah, so, we're sliding it now.

While this will inevitably mean it's gonna get smashed up, I'm kinda okay with that. The amount of change in my tastes, skillset, tools, experience, etc., since I started this build is crazy to think about. While I'm not a perfectionist, I do aim for quality, and while everything I've done up to this point was as quality as I could at the time, looking back now, it's rough. It's great for a drift car, but not for some full resto street car. Going drifting with it means that I can make it 100% good enough and I can cut that last 20% out of the build and just enjoy the damn thing already. Once this thing is on the track, I'll look into a vehicle that I can try to make "perfect".

Anyway, started with a radiator overhaul. Over a year ago at this point, I took this poor ISR radiator to a local fab shop to have a bung welded in. (At the time, I didn't know how to TIG, now that's what I do for a living, go figure). The guy should have had the balls to tell me he wasn't capable of that kind of work. Don't tell someone you can do something you can't, or at least let them know you're practicing.



I dropped off the rad and the bung and this is what I got back. It looks like he MIG welded it and ground it down. I'll never know what he did, but it leaked from the welds. Since the car wasn't on the street yet it went on the back burner, but now that I decided to get back to work, I was gonna take a crack at it. I had been practicing steel TIG, but aluminum was a lot harder but we got it, and no leaks!






It's a thermostatic switch so I don't have to toggle on my electric fans. If this set up ever fails, I'll honestly probably go back to a clutch fan. From what I understand at this point, clutch fans work shockingly well and electric fans are largely an unnecessary complication. At least with a stock KA. I'm sure if you're pushing crazy power or have packaging constraints, they have a legitimate application.

Let's get that body kit installed.




And the front fenders fit like shit.



This is my first kit install, and these are authentic Origin fenders, so I thought they'd be pretty good. Everything else has been, but these front fenders ain't it chief. My buddy suggested that I just use them like over fenders. Cut the jambs and edges off of them and bolt them to the OEM fender. Mind blown, that's fucking genius. Only issue, I didn't have OEM Silvia fenders and if I did, I wouldn't be cutting them up. But I did have the really shitty fenders that came on this car the day I bought it. I mean, they're for a pop up front but....



A little cutting and they're basically OEM.

A lot more cutting and they'll do.






I would actually really recommend this method for the most part. It really helped straighten everything out, and it let's you get OEM panel gaps. the only problem was that I could not get the lights to sit worth a damn in the fiberglass mounting locations. So I cut them out and decided to figure something else out.

At first, I was going to try and imitate the way the headlights would have been bolted to the stock fenders.




This didn't really work very well. Mostly because I was too careless with where I made my bends. But it also had the disadvantage of tying the headlight location to the fender location and since we are dealing with some seriously creative fenders here, that wasn't ideal. Having the headlights bolted to the fenders is also likely to increase the odds of breaking them if I ever bash a fender so I decided to bolt them straight the the core support.






Effective, if a bit simple but wait a second what about the corner lights....



Fuck. Ain't fittin' no plug in there. Luckily for me, I was going to 3D print an adapter to use 194 LEDs. We can debate if I'm just making too much work for myself to get around a problem that I created but we already know the answer, I don't want to make a third bracket, NEXT!

If you thought that the headlight brackets were a bit odd, the corner light mounts are just gonna make you mad, and I'm right there with you. The fiberglass mounting locations were unusable and now cut out. And in order to get the corner lights to sit in the fenders nice-ish, the ball stud would no longer come close to going into the socket. The third mount up top that bolts to the top of the headlight was also shy of reaching. Some of this may have been from my creative fender surgery, but regardless, I had to fix it. After thinking too hard for not long enough, I bent some little tabs and welded them to back of the fenders, drilled through the corner lights to put a bolt in the wrong way and yeah I'd rather not talk about it. XD This is another reason I would like to get OEM fenders in the future. Hoping that J-Replace or another company makes some reproduction units someday.




Regardless, it works.






At the time of this decision, I was going to paint the car white and gold two tone. I bought some brass bolts and finish washers and polished them all up to be the hardware to hold on the kit. I really dig the exposed hardware look. The body in now already full of rivnuts, so I will absolutely be running some kind of hardware, but I may swap to stainless or anodized depending on final paint color. I change my mind so often, I won't know until I squeeze the trigger for base. XD




And we finally took the first drive!

https://youtu.be/4k3oXwLVD_o

[thermogod]

YES let's go. new build threads on Zilvia in 2025. awesome stuff so far...following

[Kylerkickass240]

fun read. really enjoying the relatability and down-to-earthedness of this thread

[Danb]

Just finished reading through everything, you've been making progress and good job so far. I see myself in some of your sections where i went through some of the same processes and learning curves in the earlier years. One thing i can tell you from my experience from currently being in process of finishing up a 6 year coupe build myself is consistency is key to getting it done. Make it a goal to finish it and stay consistent with it!

[PoorMans180SX]

Okay okay, I'm feeling it so far.

[Toxocara995]

Originally Posted by thermogod

YES let's go. new build threads on Zilvia in 2025. awesome stuff so far...following

Thank you! I've been using Zilvia for years and years and I know its not really what it used to be, and might not be around forever. So I want to contribute something while I can and try to keep it going for a little while longer.

Originally Posted by Kylerkickass240

fun read. really enjoying the relatability and down-to-earthedness of this thread

Thanks man, that means a lot.

Originally Posted by Danb

Just finished reading through everything, you've been making progress and good job so far. I see myself in some of your sections where i went through some of the same processes and learning curves in the earlier years. One thing i can tell you from my experience from currently being in process of finishing up a 6 year coupe build myself is consistency is key to getting it done. Make it a goal to finish it and stay consistent with it!

I couldn't agree more. Thank you for the inspiration! I hope your build is coming along nicely too. DM me some pics or a link to your thread if you have one!


I'm stuck home with flu or covid or something, and have no energy to get into the shop so I'll cook up the next post for y'all.

[Toxocara995]

"Pictures that go unbelievably hard for $1000 please, Alex."





In this post, we get more than one kind of new wheel. The first being the English Wheel....

Back when I got the coupe, it had the sunroof hole, but no sunroof.



No worries I thought, I'll just put the sunroof from the hatch in it. Well for anyone who didn't know, they are not same. At all. So after selling all the hatch sunroof stuff, I thought about it and figured I really didn't want a sunroof anyway. Slick tops just look much more clean in my opinion and it's one less thing to leak and worry about.

I spent a few years doing autobody and restoration work so I figured I could metal shape my way out of a sunroof. I spent a load of time studying at YouTube University and went down to Harbor Freight to get myself an English Wheel. If anyone is interested in the craft, Karl from Make It Kustom, Cornfield Customs, and Wray from ProShaper Workshop are all incredible teachers and a wealth of knowledge. All YouTube channels btw.

I didn't have a buck to work from, so I did my best to approximate the shape of the roof with 3/32" TIG Filler rod and tacked it in place.




There was lots of stooping down to this view since the curve was soooo subtle.


I cut and laid out the guide lines on the panel for wheeling.



The purpose of the grid pattern is to help with this type of low crown panel. The idea is to wheel even pressure and amounts in the center, then move out to the second zone and the center, then the third plus the first two, etc. Cornfield Customs explains it very well. Since there is so little shape to put into a panel like this, its very easy to mess up and considered one of the more difficult panels to make. So of course it was the one I decided to start with.

After a while of wheeling with almost no pressure, so I didn't over shoot it, I was getting somewhere. You can see in the picture with the yard stick sitting on it how much crown there really is in the panel. However, I started to get a bit of a bulge at the edge of the panel which means I likely stretched the edge when I shouldn't have and created too much surface area. Trying to chase that out ended up ruining the panel.






Having learned a lot by making that interesting piece of scrap, I cut out another panel to try again, but decided it would be a good idea to move to another, easier, project before coming back to it.

It was also time for the other kind of new wheels. 18x9.5 +22 Kansei Astros in silver. I'm running 235/40R18s on them so they have a nice bit of stretch. Don't worry, spacers and lowering come later. Fitment is life.





First tiny little skid.
https://youtu.be/KmBOgPdIhDo

Anyway, next wheeling project. I still had the stock rear bumper and no valences. With the skirts now mounted, the height difference between the rear quarter and the skirt was astonishing to say the least.




These days I have more time than money and I'm happy to spend the time making what I need instead of working for somebody else to pay somebody else for what I need. That said, I don't think I'll run these forever, but for now, I present the all aluminum 50 Cent valences.









The first side took me about a million years and I did most of it with a hammer and dolly. After I got the shape I liked, I made a template and did the other side completely on the wheel and it took like 30 minutes maybe. I wish I had kept a bit deeper of a curve in them, but they do very well for what they are. At a quick glance, they just look like the stock body was stretched down a bit. I'm not sure how much I like the look from the rear, I think it needs some kind of a lip or something. But like I said a few posts ago, my tastes have changed dramatically over the years and if I could, I'd redo all the aero. So I'll run it until everything is haggard and then try again with something fresh all around. Perks of it being a drift car I suppose. XD

[Toxocara995]

So this whole time I've just been a big phony and I've been running 4 to 5 lug adapters. Well knowing I needed to run phat daddy spacers, I didn't want to compound on top of the adapters. At least I have that much sense. But keeping in theme with "why buy what you can make", I thought about somehow turning my 4 lug hubs into 5 lug. I'm a welder/fabricator by trade and half the shop I work in is also a machine shop. So I figured I could probably build up the extra material on the hubs, and then have the guys in machining face everything off and re-drill them. The way the front hubs are designed, this would have been a pretty tall order and I thought it was best to just get the GKTech hubs. The rears however, they actually looked pretty simple.








I took them to work, blasted them, threw them in the crazy style preheat oven, and then blasted them with 1/8" filler rod. Now I know they look like hell, but we weren't going for beauty here. Just wanted lots of extra material where it was needed, good penetration, and no cracks or defects. Far as I could tell, I achieved that, but after asking a lathe operator if he could do it and telling him "there is no deadline, just when you can", it never got done. Now they overwork the shit out of those guys and it was a favor, not a paid job, but I'd be lying if I wasn't super disappointed that after a few months, he had only faced one side of one hub. I would LOVE to get my own lathe and mill, and someday I WILL have them, and when that day comes, I'll grab these bad boys off the shelf and finish the job myself just for funzies. But that's not gonna get the car driving now. So I finally just pulled the trigger on a used pair of S14 hubs.



They look like they came out of the ocean, but they we're "only" $100 bucks shipped. I've got new studs and bearings for them already and they're going to get blasted and painted. They'll be fresh to death before they go on the car.

I'd say about a year ago, I started seeing a ton of people using 3D printing in a variety of different ways to make car parts. This sent me down a rabbit hole learning about 3D printing to find that it's not just barely functional hardware to print trinkets with. It's at the stage where it's nearly an appliance that works on demand. 3D printing is cool, but if you can't make your own designs, it's not that cool anymore. So I guess I had to finally learn how to use CAD. God I love YouTube University. Anyone can teach themselves anything these days.

Before I could afford my printer, I started learning CAD making very simple mock ups when building anything, basically using it like you might use graph paper. Well I needed a tube bender, and I had a full sheet of 1/4" that I had purchased for another project and had never been used so long story short, I did some digging to find the measurements of a JD2 Model 32 bender and took the design ideas of a homemade bender called the AW180 and designed my own bender made of sandwiched 1/4" plate. I had to call in favors from a buddy with a plasma table and my mom's fiance to machine some stuff. Waiting so long on everyone meant this bender has been a back burner project off and on for the better part of a year, but I'm about 2 hours away from it being finished as I type this. I just have to stop having covid so I have the energy to go out and weld.







As soon as I do the first test bend, I'll elaborate a bit more on it, if it works. I have learned so much by making this thing, and seeing as I haven't even used it yet, still have more to learn, that I wouldn't go back and do it any differently. However, JD2 sells the Model32 for a very reasonable $400ish bucks and I could have added hydraulics in an afternoon. At the end of the day, the only real advantage my bender theoretically has to the OEM is that mine should be able to bend tube 190* without stopping to reset. It has been INCREDIBLY time consuming and probably didn't save me much in terms of cash, but all the experience was worth it. If you're reading this and thinking that some venture is too crazy to start, just do the damn thing. You'll learn something to make the next crazy venture that much easier.

Anyway, I'll update this when it's done and I plan to give out all the cut files for free. It needs a fair amount of tweaking and simplification tbh, but I'll let the next guy spruce it up.

One day I was out in the shop and just needed something fun and fast. A little instant gratification for my millennial ass. (Aye, yo) I knew I was gonna street drive this thing to the track and had originally thought about putting a roof rack on it. I mean try to tell me this doesn't go hard. Go on. Try.



But then I remembered that I'm a pack rat and I saved a busted hitch off of a Jeep I took when I was still doing body work, and I also had a luggage rack that my old roommate had left around for years.







I think it's pretty self explanatory what's going on here. XD The stock bumper bar is pretty thin, so I did weld a large piece of 1/8" plate to it and then welded the receiver to that, and in the front. I don't think I'm pulling any trailers with this bad boy, but I'm sure it'll hold a jack and a few wheels/tires. At least it should for a while. Someday when I go to a tubular bash bar, I may incorporate this idea more elegantly. As for the license plate, I'll probably just weld up or 3D print a little plate mount that slides into the receiver when I'm not big riggin' to the track.

Sometime in September last year, I finally got my printer and immediately needed to test it out. I designed a 20mm wheel spacer so I could test fit my wheels before spending money on a real spacer and wishing I had purchased a different size. (The white spacer is 3D printed, the black is a GKTech one I already had)






I had no illusions of this spacer really holding any weight, I figured I'd just jack it up from the LCA to see what the ride height would look like. But after I got my use out of it, I slooooowly lowered the car down and to my mind blowing astonishment, it held the weight of the car. Now mind you, that it was only for a minute or two with the jack just barely under the arm should it fail, it was printed almost solid in the threads, and because it was bolted on (with like 2 ft/lbs) all of the load was in shear. I think all of these things worked in it's favor as it was printed in standard PLA which is strong, but brittle. I tried to use the spacer again at a later date and barely snagged a stud with the wheel and it snapped clean off. XD I do think that if you printed these with the intent to press actual studs into them, and for the love of god don't tighten them down to much lest ye spin a stud and go straight to hell, they would probably work incredibly for mockup. Just no driving.

You know what makes a 3D printer even moooore versatile? A 3D scanner.

Like it or not boomers, this is modern hot rodding.



The first thing I wanted to use this new power for was a replica of a Hippo Sleek light up Silvia grille. For those who have never seen one, observe.





Those things seem to go for like a grand, if you can find one. So instead of paying way to much for one of those grilles, I paid way too much for a stock big letter grille on eBay to scan and measure from.



Now 3D scanning unfortunately isn't good enough to just scan, and then print a perfect copy of. Really what you end up with is a accurate enough skeleton to build a 3D model off of. And man alive if you want to speed run learning Fusion 360, go design a Silvia grille. I've got days worth of screen time and thinking into this thing.

Prototype 1:





Prototype 2:

Screen recording of Fusion looking at the scan and model:
https://youtu.be/UcG6c5g5I0M








And prototype 3 is nearly done. It's the first "final draft" if you will. It'll probably be the one that I run on my car, but I know it won't be the final version. Thankfully though, I think it will only need a few minor tweaks instead of a massive redesign. This final version is printed in fiberglass reinforced ABS and will hopefully actually hold up to road use. I plan to clear resin cast the "SILVIA" lens and fog the back of it to defuse the light. For anyone that may be wondering, yes I do plan to sell these and at a fairly modest price as well. I may even sell the files to print your own at some point. While the final fit and finish will be perfect once it's painted and on the car, there are still just too many little things about this manufacturing process that I think will hold it back from feeling like a "legitimate" product which is why I will probably set the price pretty low. Going forward, I want to experiment more with resin casting and composites. Maybe one day I'll make a carbon version or something and then sell it at a premium. I'll update this in a few months when they are ready to sell. Please let me know if you have any interest!

[Toxocara995]

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.

[Kylerkickass240]

Originally Posted by Toxocara995

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.

best paragraph in this entire thread. "My stars and garters" <3333; my grandpa used to say this. He was chock-full of idioms and funny sayings like this. I don't think I've ever heard anyone outside my family say this ^__^

Also, those metal valences you made are friggin sick as hell!! They look awesome, very 'oem+', which is always good. This is turning into one of my favorite build threads, keep up the ingenuity and creativity my guy.

[Izento]

Gangster thread. Glad to see the youngins contributing.

[axiomatik]

Awesome thread, lots of work in here, and some great writing. I'm slowly piecing my coupe back together after pulling the engine to paint the bay, then moving and getting bogged down in house projects. It's been way too long since I've driven it, and I don't have nearly as much work in it as you.

[PoorMans180SX]

Nice work with the hood. I feel like bodywork is one of my big weaknesses and a skill I need to acquire if I'm going to continue enjoying these cars hah.