1986 Toyota MR2 - We didn’t see it… Right?

Or Waggoner for the American market!

I’m totally sure they are not.....

As an orangutan I appreciated the remarks about knuckles dragging and high heels. Great idea, got to get me some heels......

Nick

Hopefully you can find a fix for those plastic bits, I always dread removing any plastic trim for this reason! Anyway the amount of effort, that you've put into it so far is amazing. Nice to see a 80s classic, being saved

Thanks pabblo! I've already started putting it together again. I'll write something up later in the week.

I'm guessing the plasticiser leaches out in the heat and there isn't a lot you can do about that. It's going to be an increasing problem for our hobby in the future. The obvious solution would be 3D printers but the beds on domestic machines would have to get a lot bigger and the finish a lot better to be able to do it. And I suspect a lot of trim has compound curves that wouldn't sit on a flat 3D bed at all well. Poor thing would spend half its life printing the scaffold rather than the part.

georgeb, I remember you talking about your chap. I can't remember if he was bonding the broken parts back together with fibreglass as a strengthener or making a complete reproduction part. I thought it was the latter?

James

Bumhats indeed - have a look on www.croooober.com/en/ for jdm parts - they ship worldwide

He did both. The instrument surround was in about seven pieces, he repaired that one beautifully. A work of art, hard to know where the old bits finish and the new bit begins. The carpet trims were either smashed or missing completely, he remade those. To be fair, I jumped on the back of an order he was doing for someone else for the latter, so he had full originals to work from.

I really should stop reading adam73bgt's thread and explain how I’m going o fix some of this broken stuff.
I seem to have a respectable pile of it.

Start with something easy, the roof spoiler.

The mounting tags had broken off a rail that was somehow fixed to the top of the spoiler. I’m fairly sure it’s all stainless steel and had originally been spot welded. My plan was to plug weld them back on with the MIG. But to do that I needed to get the rail off the plastic spoiler.

A bit of firm but gentle persuasion with a couple off screwdrivers and it came off with a few frighteningly loud cracks. I think it had been glued on with a pretty solid adhesive in a few spots.





Next I used the finger sander to clean up the mounting areas and drilled through the remains of the old spot welds in the tag.





It’s all pretty thin and in a couple of places it had left a hole in the rail too. So to avoid more bother I used a bit of flattened copper pipe to suck the heat away and for the weld to sit on.

And buzzed it together.





I’ll be honest, I made a slightly better job of one than the other but they are both fine. Neither are coming off.

Because the welds are mild steel I thought a bit of paint for rust protection wouldn’t go amiss so it all got blown over with etch followed by black.





And that’s how it is now.

I’ll probably glue it back to the spoiler top with some blobs of my favourite neutral cure silicone sealant. Hopefully that’ll stay put but still allow me to get it apart if I bust anymore of them off in future.

Good! That was easy. What next?

I'd be going for Sikaflex :-)

But then I dislike having to fix stuff twice

Gotta admit he's actually very resourceful and quite inventive but don't tell him that