^^^ Ouch, that one actually made me wince.

 

I could type out a giant response as to why my build has taken so long, but here's a condensed version.

- Up until a year ago the car was an hour away.
- I paid to have the car worked on. It wasn't.
- Ended up having stock ls6 heads, a machined iron 6.0 block, and a set of 325/50/15s stolen (along with a bunch of parts from my 93)

- I've moved homes
- I lost my old job of almost 3 years and had to sell most everything I owned for this car.
- I was a full time student, working a full time job, and going to BJJ classes 5 nights a week.

- I pay for everything with cash.
- I made 21k after taxes last year. I spent over 9K in parts last year.
- I work a full time job; mornings, nights, and overnights all in the same week. With a different schedule every week. I still have BJJ classes 4 times a week at night.

That's the major points, but others are I have been indecisive and that did take up a lot of time. I have always traded or sold up though into something better. That's how I turned a $1300 set of AFR 205s into my L92 shortblock shipped to my door.

Yeah, it was definetly looking rough. I try to wash it once a year to clean all of the grime off of it. I checked out your thread and you have some pretty good looking stuff in there. You're way ahead of me progress wise though. I'm still putting away with wiring everything. I appreciate the understanding though. For me it has always been, "Yeah, I'm thinking it will be on the road in about six months."

You would be correct and the car consumes the largest part if not all of my income. I went through three years of working $5.50 - $7 / hour jobs to pay for this car. I saved all of my money in hopes of getting something like this and it blew up less than four months down the road. I'll get the damn thing running if it takes me another 3.5 years.

OUCH! I always hate to see things like that happen. A while ago a guy in the Florida section hit a bunch of rocks that fell out of a truck on I10 and had similar damage.

 

I started working on the car pretty early around 8pm last night as I had to make some noise and it worked out really well. I ended up getting pretty much everything I had planned for the next couple days done which I wasn't expecting.

During the day I went to the hardware store again and picked up a 4.5 cutting wheel, a new piece of 1/8th aluminum bar stock, and a new 500W bulb. I started off my night by cutting the head off of the other bolt that is used to hold down my passenger side cover.

After the head of the bolt was gone I just threaded it into the hole and mocked everything up.

I wanted to finish all of the noisy things first so out came the vacuum and cleaned out the cowling.

Looks a lot better.

With the passenger side done I moved onto the driver side. I used a bench vise to hold down the aluminum and bend it. The first attempt didn't go so great and back to the drawing board I went. Attempt 1:

I tried to bend the bottom tab the other way 180* and it just broke like I thought it would.

Attempt 2: Mounted

I drilled a 3/8ths hole through the bracket and body to mount the point closest to the fender. It has an M10 bolt going through it with a washer and wing nut on the bottom. The other side is held in with a 1/4 headed self tapping screw. I screwed the top screw down a little too tight and cracked the acrylic a little, but I think it will be fine once it gets painted.

Here's both covers mounted right at 3.5'' tall off of the frame. I think it looks really good and will look ever better once the edges are smoothed out and the covers painted MTM to match.


Once that was all finished I moved onto wiring up my Autotrix passenger rewire kit. It is all really straight forward, but I had a couple of snags. The first major snag was trying to get the wires though the pass through that the rest of the OEM wiring runs through. Since my 93 is right next to my Formula I couldn't open the door all of the way to make it a straight shot. With the angle I was given I couldn't get the wires through the door without some work. I ended up having to pull the blower motor out which was on my list of things to do anyways and of course it was full of...

Leaves!

Once I got that out of the way here's what I managed to finally jam through the door after a bunch of sweating and bad words:

Other side:


After that it was just getting everything wired up. They provide crimp connectors in the kit and I have to say that wiring this has renewed my hate in them. These were also the first relays I've ever wired so it took me a while to figure out which wire goes where, the colors, and fitting the plug esque things together. Here's the door area finished:


The power and ground wire just ran through the OEM firewall grommet. I have the OEM wires, my 2ga battery wire, and now these two wires going through it. It is getting a little busy:


I ran the power wire through the OEM wire loom as much as I could until I got around the head lights and pretty much said F this as it was getting impossible. I ended up just running the wire behind the loom under the hood latch and taped it to the loom. You can't see anything so it looks like nothing is there. Then, I just connected the inline fuse setup to the OEM power stud on the fuse panel. It was a little pain since I moved the fuse panel, but the largest problem was getting the nut off the stud. Wired:


My battery isn't fully charged, but the window freaking flies up and down. It actually made the driver's motor look like it was dying. It is a pretty cool little kit and for the money hard to beat. The only thing I have to go back and redo is the power wire over the passenger shock tower. Since I plan on doing the wire tuck I would have to undo the fuse end, drag it back across the front of the car, under the shock tower, and then reroute it the way I have it now. I'm just planning on instead cutting the wire and adding a single wire weather pack connector that'll connect beneath the shock tower out of sight.

Next on the list of things to do is:
- Single wire weather pack connector for the passenger window rewire power wire
- BLS HID low and high beam install
- Passenger side wire tuck
- Possibly rigging up a set of OEM C6 low beams as my fog lights

I should get some more stuff done tonight.

 

The past few days have been really productive where as last week was not. I was planning on starting my BLS installation last Monday the 31st, but had one part missing from the box. Then, the next day for some odd reason I woke up projectile vomiting and was disabled with the stomach flu for the next couple days. Brian was a shipping ninja and got me the missing part super quick. By the time I was feeling better I had to work again so on Tuesday of this week I started assembling everything.

Tuesday, was mostly just reading through the directions, getting the old lights out, and the new projectors assembled. I took a couple before pictures of the OEM lights for future comparison sake. My car unless I push it doesn't move so the after pictures will be same spot.

Here are the lows:


Highs:


Once those were taken I started pulling everything apart. In the beginning I just removed the passenger side and then went back to the drivers. It would be easier to pull them all at once. Out:


Here's the projectors in the process of assembly:


I had a couple questions for Brian at BLS and shot him an email. It ended up that my thinking was correct and the lock washers still go on the high beams. Pictured:


After that I just kept plugging away and eventually got all of the projectors together:


With that out of the way the next major task was getting all of the wiring for the kit in the car. The major part of the wiring:


I checked out the installation CD and saw that I didn't really like the way the wiring was run. With my relocated fuse boxes and engine covers I'd have wiring all over the place. I started thinking about mounting the harness beneath the drivers headlight. I got the harness in there and twiddled with it a little before I decided I needed to go to sleep.

More...

 

Wednesday, I picked up right where I left off and spent all night getting the wiring in the car the way I wanted it. The first thing I did was clip the extra wiring off of the HID bulbs. They come with an extra connector that you can use if you're not going to use the BLS harness. I'm not a big fan of extra wiring and weight conscious so in came the wire cutters:


The next step may sound a little odd for working on your headlights, but I jacked up the car and removed the drivers front wheel. I was trying to drill a self tapping screw into the frame through the open head light area and / getting angry / wasting time. You can see the small self tapping screw in the radiator support. There was already an existing hole there that was smaller than the OD of the screw so I just decided to go ahead and use it:




While I was in that area I kept knocking my arm against this damn extra part of the front bumper / fender connector plate. What the hell is this thing sticking out?

I'm thinking about cutting it flat once I pull the front bumper off for some / cutting /

Here is the bottom view of the relay mounted:


This is the top view of the same thing. You can see two of the wires running through the top part of the radiator support. Those are the power and ground wires:


Power and ground:

The ground wire is further away and the power is closer.

Once those were in I found a nice out of the way place to mount the ballasts. Most people from what I have seen so far like to mount them inside of the front bumper support. That's all fine except I plan on removing mine and installing a new setup made out of aluminum. With that option removed I decided to mount the ballast right around the relay on the frame rail. The first time I mounted it I wasn't too happy with the size of the velcro supplied with the kit. I kind of installed it off center and once I stuck the ballast it would rock and potentially make a rattling sound. I don't know if driving the car I would be able to hear it or not so I nixed it anyways. I had some larger velcro that I bought a while ago for my passenger side wiring tuck. Much larger:

I then stuck the whole piece to the car even though it was longer than the ballast. The thing is rock solid and not even remotely going to go anywhere:

Once that was mounted I jammed the rest of the wiring for the passenger side between the radiator shrouding and the wiper fluid bottle. It was a pain in the *** to fit it through there with the connectors, but after some choice words got it through there. I taped it all up to the OEM wiring as much as I could. You can barely see the ends where it runs over the frame rails, but that was impossible to avoid. I had to pull the washer bottle out a little to give myself some more space, but here it is:






Over the passenger side frame rail:


I was planning on mounting the ballast for the passenger side in the same spot as the drivers side, but the horn was in the way. Normally, that would mean it goes in the garbage pile, but I need the horn for those choice 3 honking moments. Instead I decided to make a new bracket to mount the horn out of the way. Anyone remember this old piece of aluminum from a couple weeks ago?

Well, as sure as I thought I was able to turn around and use it. I drilled a couple holes through it as well as my thumb. ouch... Mounted:

Despite it being late I decided to break out the impact on this one. I wasn't going to sit there for 20 minutes trying to tighten it down in a small space like that.


Once the horn was out of the way I mounted the ballast with both pieces of velcro supplied in the BLS kit, zip tied part of the low beam wiring to the horn, and plugged in the high beam adapters. Here's the passenger side all wrapped up:


Driver side all wrapped up. I added a zip tie to the relay. I would hate for that to come unplugged when I was driving for some odd reason:


I went though all of this work for the main reason of keeping everything out of sight and here's the finished wiring. Everything fits beneath my driver side cover and the ground wire will be beneath the lid holder once it is bolted down keeping all of the wiring hidden:


More...

 

With the projectors all assembled and the wiring in the car all I had left to do was mount the hardware and set the cutoff. I had a couple hours before I had my BJJ class so I decided to get the projectors mounted in the car and wired for power. The funny thing about working on cars is that after some time you should come to expect the easiest things to be not so easy and potentially a total pain in the *** taking way more time than you expected.

The first step of mounting the projectors is to slide a 10/24ths flat washer over the oem adjustment bolt. You'd think that should take less than a second to slide a washer over a bolt. For some odd reason the ID of the washer wasn't the same on all of the washers. On exaclty half of them it was off just a little tiny bit, but it was enough to cause it to not want to go over the bolt. You can see in this picture how the washer has removed a layer of material from every thread that it has passed over.

On the first one (the one above) I threaded the whole thing on there by hand and my fingers are still hating me for it. The rest of them I ended up threading it on part of the way, using my impact to thread the bolt into the nut on the car, and squishing the washer to the head of the bolt.

The next snafu that struck me was that when I assembled one of the projectors the projector cover was tightened down too far towards the bottom. It wouldn't allow me to get the long bolt through it when I had it mounted in the car. There just wasn't enough of an angle to get it through the hole. I ended up having to remove the projector from the car, loosen the four bolts, slide it up, retighten them, and reinstall. No bueno:


Bueno :


I figured after that all I had to do was screw down 3 bolts per projector and connect four plugs. In reality, I did, but again that wonderful misnomer came back to bite me. After adjustiing the misaligned projector I went to thread in the long bolt that replaces the OEM springs. Getting two springs on the bolt when you can't see what you're doing at all in a tiny space was the first major pain in the ***. Once I got them on there and jammed the bolt through the OEM hole I couldn't thread the nut onto the end of it. There was just absolutely zero space as the threads of the bolt were all the way to the side of the headlight bucket. I know this is a crappy picture, but it is in a crappy position where you can barely see what you're doing so getting a good picture is impossible.

You can see the way the bucket kicks out a little right near the end of the bolt. I ended up having to remove the other two bolts that I had just installed, jam the bolt through the hole as far as I could and thread the nut on there. This picture illustrates the amount of space I'm talking about:

From the front:


After fighting through the same problem on the other three projectors I connected all of the wiring and checked the headlights for clearance. While I was installing them I thought there was no was what so ever that these things were going to clear, but... They fit with about a hair of space through there. Driver:


Passenger:


I fought with screwing the headlights down by twisting the **** with my fingers for a little while and got extremely annoyed. It would have taken my all day to do it by hand so instead I decided to improvise:

Impact + extension + 3/8ths nut driver = like a champ. I can zip the lights up and down in less than 20 seconds.

With all of the clearances set and the wiring hooked up all I had left to do was reconnect the battery and check them out. This is the light output of just the driver low beam:


Low + High (keep in mind none of these lights are aimed. This is just how they ended up)


Both side low beams:

The light output is absolutely amazing to say the least (There's also a 500W light on in the back ground). My jaw pretty much dropped and after all of the work getting these things in I will say that it is 100% worth it.

I did then run into a couple other issues. I had the low beams on and as soon as I flipped the high beams on my car lost all electrical power. I thought that I blew my main power fuse or that I lost the headlight fuse. I checked them all, they were fine so I went over and checked all of my connections which also turned out fine. I pulled the battery cable and tried to reconnect it to no avail. By the time the power went out I needed to be getting ready. After not getting it to work with the battery I decided to pack up and call it quits. For some odd reason though I left all of my stuff that I had to take upstairs next to the battery so when I walked by I had to try it once more. Upon hooking up the cable electrical power was restored. I flipped the headlights on again, they came on, flipped the highs, they came on, but after a few seconds the lights started to flicker. I made a dash for the headlight switch, but power went out again before I could turn them off.

Right before class I shot Brian at BLS an email asking him what he thought. We thought right along the same lines as a voltage issue. My battery is as far as I know 4 years old and has been sitting in my car the past 3.5+ doing nothing. I think I just ran it dead, but when I hooked the charger up it won't charge over 20%ish. I'm not sure if it is the charger or the battery, but either way I won't be testing the lights again until I can either get a new battery or jump the battery off of my 95 like I did when I finsihed repinning the harness.

The next couple of tasks I'm going to work on in my free time are:
- Aiming the headlights
- Passenger side wire tuck / cutting + resoldering passenger window rewire kit power wire
- Figuring out some sort of HID Formula fog lights

I'm also going to need a lot of help coming up with figuring out how to wire my battery cutoff switch, fuel pumps, and nitrous system together. I really have no clue on that one.

 

I kind of hit a road block where I needed to order some parts to get things done in the right order. I've had a lot of little deliveries come in, but am still waiting on a few parts to get everything started.

I started a new items for sale thread. Support the builds and buy parts at a great price:
https://ls1tech.com/forums/parts-cla...dom-parts.html

 

Work shall commence again tomororw. In the past couple weeks I've received:

- Pioneer AVIC-D3 and all the goodies for it
- Steering wheel control adapter
- 6Litereater double din bezel
- Adapter harness plug

- Battery tray
- Optima Red Top
- Relay for battery cutoff
- Battery cable terminal ends
- Battery cutoff switch and face plate label

- New DRL housings
- Replacement foglight housings (were advertised as 93-97 housings, but weren't)
- Clear DRL bulbs
- 50W reverse light bulbs

- I'm still waiting on my DDM Tuning HID setup for my fog lights, but I knew at the time that it was going to take a while.

I need to go to the hardware store tomorrow to pick up some wiring ring ends, spade connectors, heat shrink tubing, aluminum sheet, and some fasteners. The goal for tomorrow is to get the battery and cutoff switch mounted in the spare tire well to where the factory plastic piece will fit without issues. Keep your fingers crossed as this is the third battery container I'll have tried.

 

These next few updates wouldn’t be coming to you if it wasn’t for 9sec93. I was searching old threads for information on battery relocation wiring. I found an old diagram he put up a few years ago and shot him a PM about how to set it up and a few other odd questions. He answered everything I sent him instantly and actually sent me a direct link to the battery cutoff switch he was talking about.

I bought the switch instantly, and started finally filling out the Jegs exchange form for my Taylor battery box. I ordered a new Optima red top battery, Jegs battery tray, terminal ends, and a SPST relay. The stuff got here super quick and ended up being cheaper than was initially anticipated which was a huge bonus.

With all of that stuff finally figured out I got started on mocking everything up. The battery tray and red top fit in there very well and my plan is to fabricate a bulkhead to make it all NHRA legal. I jammed the tray in there with the battery and tried to figure out how I wanted to mount it to the frame. The tray has four 1-2’’ holes on each side, but mounting it to a rectangular boxed frame was going to be next to impossible. I decided to hold off until I got the mini tubs in the car and had all of the spacing figured out exactly. The plan is to weld two L shaped brackets to the frame. Each L will have two 3-8’’ths bolts per side welded to the L for the tray to mount to. That was the tray will be removable instead of permanently mounted.

I started working on this all Tuesday night after I got home and it took me a while to figure out all of the dimensions of how I wanted to mount everything. I was going to make a trip to ACE Hardware, but they close at 8pm so I had to make an inadequate journey to Home Depot instead… I found most of the things I was looking for and had to improvise on others which didn’t turn out too well. When I got home I started bending up some scrap aluminum I had to make something to hold the battery cutoff switch. I got the thing all bent up and then started looking around for a way to mount the switch. Upon putting it next to the switch I instantly realized that I was supposed to mount the switch 3’’ from where the bracket mounts to the frame. Instead, being a retard I didn’t think about the switch sticking out a ways and ended up with it only being about 1.5’’ away from the frame.

Doh!

I figured I could just bend the mount I was making for the switch back a little more. I ended up making the initial mount out of Aluminum as Home Depot didn’t have any steel plate. This ended up being a disaster that I completely ended up having to redo. Here are some pictures of the debacle:



The mounting post for the cutoff switch is 3-4ths, but I only had a 3-8ths drill bit. I tried to wallow the hole out, cut it open further after that failed, and with each attempt getting more pissed off. It ended up being a disaster and I threw it in my scrap pile.

After that disaster I figured I could just add an extra bend to the bracket that would step it out that extra 1.5 inches.

Getting that bent again I decided to give up and start on it as early as I could the next day.

 

These next few updates wouldn’t be coming to you if it wasn’t for 9sec93. I was searching old threads for information on battery relocation wiring. I found an old diagram he put up a few years ago and shot him a PM about how to set it up and a few other odd questions. He answered everything I sent him instantly and actually sent me a direct link to the battery cutoff switch he was talking about.

I bought the switch instantly, and started finally filling out the Jegs exchange form for my Taylor battery box. I ordered a new Optima red top battery, Jegs battery tray, terminal ends, and a SPST relay. The stuff got here super quick and ended up being cheaper than was initially anticipated which was a huge bonus.

With all of that stuff finally figured out I got started on mocking everything up. The battery tray and red top fit in there very well and my plan is to fabricate a bulkhead to make it all NHRA legal. I jammed the tray in there with the battery and tried to figure out how I wanted to mount it to the frame. The tray has four 1-2’’ holes on each side, but mounting it to a rectangular boxed frame was going to be next to impossible. I decided to hold off until I got the mini tubs in the car and had all of the spacing figured out exactly. The plan is to weld two L shaped brackets to the frame. Each L will have two 3-8’’ths bolts per side welded to the L for the tray to mount to. That was the tray will be removable instead of permanently mounted.

I started working on this all Tuesday night after I got home and it took me a while to figure out all of the dimensions of how I wanted to mount everything. I was going to make a trip to ACE Hardware, but they close at 8pm so I had to make an inadequate journey to Home Depot instead… I found most of the things I was looking for and had to improvise on others which didn’t turn out too well. When I got home I started bending up some scrap aluminum I had to make something to hold the battery cutoff switch. I got the thing all bent up and then started looking around for a way to mount the switch. Upon putting it next to the switch I instantly realized that I was supposed to mount the switch 3’’ from where the bracket mounts to the frame. Instead, being a retard I didn’t think about the switch sticking out a ways and ended up with it only being about 1.5’’ away from the frame.

Doh!

I figured I could just bend the mount I was making for the switch back a little more. I ended up making the initial mount out of Aluminum as Home Depot didn’t have any steel plate. This ended up being a disaster that I completely ended up having to redo. Here are some pictures of the debacle:



The mounting post for the cutoff switch is 3-4ths, but I only had a 3-8ths drill bit. I tried to wallow the hole out, cut it open further after that failed, and with each attempt getting more pissed off. It ended up being a disaster and I threw it in my scrap pile.

After that disaster I figured I could just add an extra bend to the bracket that would step it out that extra 1.5 inches.

Getting that bent again I decided to give up and start on it as early as I could the next day.

 

Wednesday, was the first of my three days off of work so I was mostly trying to get all sorts of other things out of the way so I could spend the next couple working on the car. I did cram in a little bit of work and a very important piece of the reassembly puzzle also showed up.

Obviously, it is a transmission. Try and figure out what’s inside of it. There will be hints, but the first is that it is a Frankenstein creation and one badass transmission.

This was extremely difficult to get out of the tub.


Hmmm… That looks a little different




Hint… Hint… Hint…


Mega Hint… Hint… Hint…

All of the shipping agents who work in my area know my house and the fact that there are large heavy items shipped there all the time. My mailman is actually my neighbor and the UPS guy has been working the same route as far as I can remember. The UPS guy was really cool and helped my drag the 140lb plastic tub into my garage. I proceeded to slice the **** out of my fingers trying to remove it from the tub myself though.

After getting that situated away next to my short block I finished off my running around with the trip I should have made to ACE Hardware the night before. Of course I found everything I needed there instantly and headed home to try and cram in some work on the car before I had to go. I cut the new battery disconnect switch bracket out of a thick steel plate, drilled a couple holes in it, and bolted it up.

I will need to paint it so it doesn’t rust.


3/8ths SS hardware and lock nuts. Behold pictures in daylight.

After getting this all rushed together I had to get going. I decided to call it early, go to sleep, and wake up earlier to get work done the next day.

 

Thursday, I started early and put in a lot of hours working on everything. By night time I was kind of burnt out and didn’t get too much done after that. I started by finally getting the battery cutoff switch mounted in the car. I didn’t think it would be overly complicated, but it turned into a pain in the ***. I had to drill two self tapping screws through the bracket and frame in the tiny space of the spare tire well. There were a lot of bad words said, but eventually I got everything squared away. With the switch mounted I set the red top on top of the old cardboard box that had been holding the old battery and cutting some new cables. Here it is all kind of sitting loosely in there.


I had to make a slight revision to how I mounted the bracket for clearance purposes and nicked the face plate. Oh well…

The plan is to drill a hole through the actual switch, rear of the car, tail light, and running a piece of 5-16ths all thread through it. My tail lights have all sorts of odd internal cracks on the lenses anyways. I am going to keep the one with the hole in it for the track and disconnect in the rod the rest of the time.

Here’s the new battery tray that will be going in the car. You can see the mounting holes I mentioned earlier.


With that stuff all kind of rigged out of the way I started pulling all of the interior panels for a myriad of purposes.
1. Run wiring for the cutoff switch
2. Clean and dye carpet
3. Roll bar installation
4. Mini Tub installation
5. Wrapping panels and headliner in ebony leather

I started with the rear seats and belts then pulled all of the panels, the driver seat, and finally the center console. I was planning on cleaning my carper, but didn’t realize the true extent of how disgusting it was.



Coming out


Emptied out. I found exactly $1.35 in change under the carpet along with a string of broken plastic Mardi Gras beads. I left the door panels for roll bar clearance purposes.

Getting the carpet out of the car in my cramped garage was a battle of epic proportions. It is pretty heavy and very awkward to carry. The main issue was fighting past my roommate’s girlfriend’s bike which the carpet got caught on and is for some odd reason is in my garage instead of hers. I couldn’t set the carpet down as it was caught on the bike so I ended up dragging to bike behind me with the giant roll of carpet for about 5-6 feet until I could detach it from the bike. I set the carpet by the door and promptly and need I say carefully…. relocated the bike out of my way.

Upon inspecting the inside of the car I noticed a bunch of extra wiring throughout the car. Here’s a handful of wiring I found:

Only about two of these were actually attached to something. The others were cut on both ends and just sitting in the car.

Extra wiring ran across the car. I kind of tracked it down to speaker wiring.


This was a little odd though as it was tied into the fuel pump unit:

I’m still not too sure of what all this is. I may luck out and find something like a 255lph pump in my gas tank or it may just be more gay speaker wiring, but we’ll see.

After working on the car earlier in the day and the bike incident I decided to call it a night.

 

On Friday I started pretty early (for me) again. I pulled the carpet outside with the intent of getting it cleaned off and dyed. Cleaning it was much more involved than I anticipated so that’s about as far as I got.

Here it is pulled outside as it came out of the car. Make a special not of the blue stain in the middle towards the rear.


At first I just vacuumed off all of the random dirt, rocks, leaves, etc… off of the carpet. I pretreated the carpet with some Woolite, but ran out towards the end. I let it sit for a little while to kick in. After that I broke out a bucket, giant dairy brush, some Dawn, and started scrubbing like crazy. I have no idea what that blue stain was, but as soon as I started scrubbing it with the brush it started bleeding all over the place. It turned everything it touched bluish.

After these bubbles evaporated it actually stained the concrete blue.

Here’s the carpet completely scrubbed.

I was debating of letting it dry with the soap in it or rinsing it off and applying the dye. I ended up taking a hose to it and rinsing it completely off.

As soon as I hit the carpet with the hole I started seeing all sorts of nasty brown water just pouring off of it. This was towards the end:

I’m really glad I decided to rinse it off.

Rinsing the carpet off though left it completely soaking wet. Thankfully, I live in Florida and it was about 75* out today (jab at people freezing their asses off) so I decided to drag it up on my hand rail to dry.

I won’t lie and say that this was easy. One gigantic piece of carpet plus tons of water equals one heavy *** combination. I decided to leave it sitting up there the rest of the night to drain and dry out. I will mix all of the dye up tomorrow and start going to town on it.

In waiting for that to dry I decided to start on my next huge project of wrapping most of my interior panels in ebony leather that I got from Specialized Stainless. The first step may be the most time consuming and it is sanding everything with 100 grit sand paper. Before:

Like my fancy workspace?

After:

This is going to take a long time.

A little earlier in the day I gave Wolfe Racecraft a call with some questions about figuring out how I wanted to set up my roll bar. I finally managed to sell my Dart heads so I’m going to be buying a 6 point moly roll bar, a couple new seats, and some crotch bars way ahead of schedule. The down side is that the wait on the bar is 3.5-4 weeks for a jig notch piece. I guess I’m going to have to figure out how to do some of the other things that are on my list.

I’m mostly thinking the next big tasks will be wrapping all of the interior panels that aren’t affected by the mini tubs, mini tubbing the car, changing the dash, ECT wiring, gauge overlays, blue bulb parts, double din installation, and gauge / shift light installation. It isn’t much to do by myself having never done anything like this before though…. Wish me luck.

 

Good job man keep it up.

 

^ Thanks! I'm doing my best, but I'm barely scratching the surface of getting things done.

I got a little bit of work done today on dyeing my carpet. I'm pretty much going to call it done although it didn't turn out quite like I wanted it to. It was very labor intensive and dirty work.

I'll let the pictures do the talking. This is the first batch of dye aka dye 1. 2 dry packets of black RIT dye, 1/2 cup salt, squirt of Dawn, and about 4 cups of water:


Dye 1 Half way (wet) vs OEM


Dy1 Finished:


Dye 2 = 2 Plastic containers of liquid RIT black dye, 1 cup of salt, and enough water to mix it all together.


Dye 2 slowly drying vs. Dye 1


I wasn't getting the dark results like I wanted so the last batch of dye aka dye 3 was: 2 solid packets of RIT dye, 1 liquid plastic bottle of dye, no salt, and the rest of dye 2 to mix it all together. It came out super black, but the results...

Dye 3 Finished:

On this round I started using the large dairy brush that I used on the carpet to scrub the dye deep into the fibers. This made a huge difference in how it came out. I wish I had done this from the beginning as I feel the results would have turned out more to my liking. I finished the third round of dye by the skin of my teeth. I completley ran out of dye with about 18ci left to go and my last squirt bottle top died with about a quarter of the carpet left to go. I ended up having to start pouring the dye on the carpet lighting and then scrubbing it vigorously to get it to even out.

This is the aftermath of this process:

1. Tons of clogged or broken squirt bottle tops


2. Black hands and feet


3. Black legs


In hindsight I wish I would have worn gloves in performing this task. After taking two showers and washing my hands multiple times most of the dye is gone, but not all of it. The dye made all of the cuts on my hands look really odd and the outline of my nails even odder. The girl who I handed my debit card to when I went to get food earlier tonight seemed disgusted by my troll hands. I was kind of running out of time to get it finished so the last picture is kind of shady. I'll get a better picture of it tomorrow once I vacuum it off once more.

 

On a quick note, that battery switch looks like a scary car fire waiting to happen. It's not supported well enough from what I saw in the pictures, and I'd be worried about it bending and shorting out against the body.

 

I noticed that as well. The weight of the switch is too much for the aluminum and the way it is currently mounted. I'm planning on having two tabs / arms welded to the bottom of my battery box. Those two arms will reach over to the switch and I'll be able to insert bolts through them to support the switch bracketry.

 

I got a little bit done today. I'm slowly chipping away at things. Recently, I've been kind of feeling like I'm not getting too much done, running into issues, and needed some motivation. I opened my garage up and started gathering the random things that I was going to need for the day. Living near the beach is nice in some aspects, but it others it completely sucks.

That's my shifter handle that I've had for a few months in my closed garage and a can of MEK that's probably 9 months old. My brand new battery box that has been in my garage for less than a month already has rust on it. I took it outside today to prime the thing to stop the rust. Any bare metal in my garage is fucked. It has to be painted, oiled, or WD40ed to survive any period of time. Seeing all of this kind of annoyed me even more.

After dealing with the rusty crap I started dragging my carpet back into the driveway to finish drying completely. Upon inspecting it I thought my carpet kind of turned out like ****, but I was 100% completely wrong.

Here's what it looked like when I pulled it back out into the driveway today:

Not exactly like I was hoping.

I noticed that when I set it down it looked like a giant dust cloud came off of it. My thoughts were that it just got dusty from sitting under out steps. It was still a little too bright for me to go out there then and mess with it as I'm pretty burnt from working on it the other day so I waited for the sun to go down a little. Fast forward a few hours, out came the same dairy brush I'd been using, and away I went scrubbing. It ended up that the nearly 2 cups of salt I used to help the dye were still in the carpet. I spent about 20 minutes brushing as much salt out of it as I could and here's how it came out:


Close:

The color is kind of washed out as it is in direct sunlight, but it came out black. Not as completely dark as I wanted it, but way better than I anticipated after yesterday's disaster and seeing it this morning. It still needs one last good vacuuming done to get the rest of the salt out and some random leaves off of it.

Inbetween working on the carpet I decided to actually try and wrap one of the interior panels with the specialized stainless interior kit before I spent all of the time sanding everything. That way if it turned out like crap or I didn't like it all of my interior panels would still be usable. I had quite a few snags as you'll see below, but I have to say the results blew me away. It was a little tedious getting everything right and time consuming, but it was completely worth it.

I finished sanding the back edges of the panel and cleaned it off with some MEK / paper towels. I laid it out on the floor and cut a nice piece of ebony leather off with some extra space on the edges or so I thought...


DOHT 1. Too short.


DOHT 2. I laid the panel upside down when I went to cut it out. It ended up working for the passenger side kick panel, but I had to cut another template out.


DOHT 3. My younger brother came looking for me and decided that my roll of leather was a perfect place to leave his panda prints.


After cleaning the leather off I made a few extra cuts for other interior pieces out of my earlier miscut and set them aside. With one properly sized template cut out I finally got to work. The kit includes directions for most of the panels on how / what order to glue them down. Here is the start of the driver kick panel:


I had to use my heat gun a generous amount to stretch the fabric over turns to keep it from wrinkling up. Here is the top side completely set:


This part was extremely difficult to get right. The 90* angle right into the texturing was a battle. I honestly messed it completely up the first time and had to peal it back to start over. Here it is done correctly:


To put it lightly I think the wrap looks fantastic. To compare a stock 13 year old beat up panel to one wrapped isn't even a comparison of the same caliber. The wrapped piece blows the stocker out of the water. I still need to wrap the edges, poke some holes for the attachment screws, and the hood latch release, but I'm stoked. Seeing how my carpet turned out well and the interior panels turned out fantastic so far I'm pumped to get working on everything tomorrow even though I may not have too much time to get things done.

My only concern is that I may not have enough material because of all of my retard cuts. I really hope there is enough to get the sail and rear panels finished, but we'll see I guess.

 

Loving the panel wrap. Looks fantastic. Keep up the good (hard) work. Can't wait to see the finished product!

 

Ask and ye shall receive...

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I got a little bit of work done of Friday. I mostly just finished up wrapping the driver side kick panel, did a little work on my 95, and started sanding some other panels.

More picture talking:

Before I cut the hood latch opening and poked the holes for the fasteners.




These were the only two areas I wasn't super happy about. It still turned out fantastic though:




Wrapping the edges and the back was extremely difficult and time consuming.


Cutting the hood latch opening didn't turn out quite like I expected. When it is installed though you can't tell, but...


I wanted to snap a couple pictures of it in the car even though there isn't much else in there.






I plan on getting some more done tomorrow. Progress has been kind of slow as wrapping the panels has a lot of prep work and actually wrapping the panels is really time consuming.