1986 Toyota MR2 - We’ve got a damn great hump...

I dunno, I see some wood, I see a box, I think we're doing something I understand. But no, it's back to dB, Hz, crossovers and I'm lost again!

Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me,

Ah, don't remind me. How is it that you spend all year getting the hang of being whatever age you are and then, suddenly, you have to cope with the fact that you are another year older? It'd be better if you got older gradually wouldn't it?

Anyway, you don't want to know about that. You want a photo of my first car.




Good isn't it. A Corolla KE30. The photo was probably taken about 1990. It was hard to keep that car in one piece. The rust was unbelievable. If you got a stone chip it'd put tentacles of rust out under the paintwork. That said, other late 70s cars were as bad. I think steel was just particularly rubbish back then.

What? You don't want photos of my old car either? Well what do you want?
Ah, the ghetto blaster… You want to know what the massive ugly ghetto blaster is really for… Ok.

Regular readers will remember that some years ago I built a sand blasting cabinet out of a large plastic box (because I was too tight to buy one). It looked like this…




The only thing that caused me some bother was the dust extraction. Eventually I came up with "The Chimney" which plugs into my woodworking dust extractor. Dust gets sucked out but the blasting media is too heavy and falls back into the box.

The only problem is size. It's perfectly small as it packs up and I can store it in the loft of the garage - but it's too small to get any bigger parts in.
This for example…




…Isn't going to fit.

So the sensible option is to just ship the wheels down the road to a nice place that will make them look like new and send them back. So we'll not…. (See what I did there?! Wheel - We'll? Oh never mind.) ...So we'll not be doing that as we don't do "sensible" here at Sweetpea Towers.

What I want, what I really really want is a large, flat packable sand blaster, using as much stuff from the little one as possible.
(I thought those were good lyrics for a record, and I tried to get the Spice Girls interested but they just couldn't understand. Kept rambling something about 'a Zigazig Ahhhh'.)

So the speaker holes get gloves installed.




The gloves are from Screwfix and cost peanuts. They were perfect in the little box but too short in the big one. So they got extended with some sacking from a one ton bag and gaffer tape.

The chimney from the old box gets reused.




A hole in the top for dropping things in.




It's designed to take the lid off the other box so I don't need to worry about another glass viewing panel. And the blaster from the old box goes in.

The transformation from ghetto blaster to sand blaster is complete!




Good.
Take one scummy wheel - Like this one perhaps…







…And start work.
Oh, I even put a light in it. Proper posh.




It was going well until the gaffer tape failed.




Need a quick redesign there methinks. The job is going well though.




And look, a manufacturing date.




Slow work though. The compressor isn't really big enough for this job and you need to keep stopping to refill the blaster's bottle with bead. But that does give the compressor a break.

Zigazig Ahhhhh.

Try evo stick or other such contact adhesive on the gloves / sleeves - Bostik 2402 two part to be superb but thats probably a bit much.

Nice work. I've just tried my Lidl sandblast gun on one of my corroded Wedssports and was surprised at how well it did the job. Shame I've put it off for two years and now haven't really left myself the time to do it!

Hello all!
Thanks for the birthday wishes! We were actually in France with Mrs Sweetpea's parents. (They live there.)

On the gloves front, I actually stapled the arms to the gloves and taped round the inside to seal them. But I'm thinking of a new plan... Thanks for the ideas though.
Another little problem is that I intended to run a small bead of silicone round the joints in the box just to seal them. I forgot. So it's leaking bead onto my bench. Need to sort that...

I've got one wheel in primer now. Photos coming soon!

Seb, Your wish is my command!



The Gospel according to Portia - Verse 1, Chapter 1.

In the beginning James created the small sand blaster.
And James saw the sand blaster that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
And so it came to pass that James thought he'd build a bigger sand blaster.
But, to be fair, the bigger one had a few problems…

First of all the glass bead escaped from the bottom where the panels screwed together. So I ran a very thin bead of silicone in the joints.




Just enough to stop it leaking - remember I want to flat pack it at some point in the future.

The second problem is that the gloves fell apart.
Yer see they were too short for this box so I'd extended them using some sacking from a 1 ton sand bag. I'd gaffer taped it all together because gaffer tape is indestructible as we all know.




Well apparently not. Initially the glove fell off the extension sleeve. So I stapled it back on and retaped it.

But then, as you can see above, the seam along the length of the extension came apart and I started getting blasting media into the fingers of the glove. Bit annoying…

By far the best suggestion to sorting this was to buy a pair of vets gloves. But I couldn't do it. At least in part because every time I used the blaster I'd imagine that I was James Herriot with my arm up a cow's ar$e. I think I'd actually have to do cow impressions while cleaning the wheels. Moooo!

So instead I sacrificed a pair of trousers - the knee was more hole than knee so they were no real loss. A section of leg was cut out and, get this, hand stitched to the end of the glove. Yes, I'm an idiot. I admit it. Who in their right mind would hand stitch a trouser leg to a rubber glove? Only me.




Got to say, it works really well. So comfortable to use compared to the sacking version.


First wheel blasted...







Sweet! Paint department next...
I needed a way of supporting the wheel at a sensible height, by something that didn't need painting (say, the centre hole), and, preferably I should be able to spin it round.
A great deal of thought and many ideas came forth. Invariably they were rejected as they involved things that I didn't have and couldn't be bothered to go and buy. Eventually I used the table saw and sander to make a scrap piece of wood into round boss with a taper that fitted the centre hole of the wheel.
This was bolted to the top of a long piece of threaded rod. The bottom rests on the garage floor where it can turn (no bearings needed). And to hold it up, a bit of metal from the scrap pile which is clamped to the bench. Like this…




Cheap and dirty… But enough about me and back to the wheel…

Here you go, wheel in primer…







In the next exciting episode I'll explain the pain and anguish I've had deciding what colour to paint them, and revealing the end result of the first, fully painted and clear coated wheel.

James

More importantly don't forget to paint the tyre well

Some alloy wheels can be quite porous and you really don't want to go to all the trouble of blasting, priming and then painting and lacquering to find that the tyres go down slowly with no apparent leaks.

A little paint or lacquer provides additional sealing keeping air inside the tyre where it needs to be.

Experience is what you get when you don't want it.................

Really nice work with the blaster, those wheels have come out looking so smooth its making me think whether its really worth me persevering with the sandpaper on my wheels...

So this car (at the moment) is supposed to be a restoration.
So I want the repainted wheels to be in the original colour. But how am I going to match the colour. Well it's not impossible. I could just buy a few tins of wheel paint until I find the right one. I did actually find a web site that sells 'Toyota' paint - supposedly in the right colour.

Thing is….

As much as this is supposed to be factory standard… I, er…. Well, you see, I quite like the wheels on my Lexus. They are silver over black. They don't really stand out unless you look at them but they do look special when you notice. Understated but classy.

So could I do that on the MR2's wheels? Using rattle cans? Hmmm, not sure I could. Not consistently anyway. Also the Lexus has wheels with spokes. The MR2 has quite full wheels so I'm not even sure it'd look right. But I would like something a little different.
Since the car is black it could easily take wheels that are slightly darker than stock. But not too dark 'cos then they'd be noticeable. Understated but classy remember…

Decision made then. Not standard. Not silver over black 'cos I don't think I could pull it off. But a shade darker. Probably metallic.

But now I'm back to square one. What colour exactly?
So what I did was take the centre cap to Halfords and compare it against the cap colours on the tins of paint. Which is a problem because the cap colours aren't accurate. Halfords must have series of sticky labels of varying colours and use the closest one to the colour of the paint. But you can't actually tell the colour of the paint.

Take a punt and see if it looks ok then. I randomly settled on a Vauxhall colour. Astro silver metallic.




Looks ok I reckon.
Here's a picture of old and new.




The new is darker and a bit more grey. And, being metallic, it sparkles a little in the sun. But not so much that it'd stand out on the car.

And here's the old cap on the new wheel so you can compare the colour.




The clear coat (again a Halfords paint) isn't too glossy. That'd annoy me elsewhere but, again, I don't want them to stand out too much so I'm happy.
Pleased with that.

James