1986 Toyota MR2 - get kicked into the weeds.

Before I forget I really should put proper grommet things on the passenger side light relay box. And to screw it to something.

When I had a look this box was sitting on top of the wheel arch liner under the light. Significantly the wires were pointing backwards so there was no way water could get blown into this one. It’d be dry and toasty inside…
















Or possibly not...


Sometime later it’s rebuilt and sealed up.





And now it’s back on the car bolted across the light motor.

I must look at them in a year or so and see if they are full of water again.

Morning af1!
One sitting!? From the beginning!? I was about to ask if you were mad but, since I'm currently reading 160 pages of somebody restoring a WW1 truck on HMVF, I'm in no position to be critical.

Thanks for your comments, it's nice to know people are still finding this thread and are interested in it.

I haven't heard of the girl on the roundabout in Canterbury. I'll have to see if I can find out about that. I treat it with a little more respect these days. If I'm being honest I suspect the problem was partly me learning how to drive an old car again. My last saloon car was no sports car but it was terrifyingly capable. Fat tyres, proper suspension, stability control. It didn't matter what you chucked at it, it simply did what it was told and brushed it off as if it was nothing.
The MR2 with it's 30 years old suspension and relatively skinny tyres isn't like that. It has limits and I think I found one that rainy day. Mind you it's much better now it's on better tyres and it'll get better again when I get some new dampers on it.

DAB. Hmmm. Don't get me started! DAB has been a bit of a disappointment to me. The test transmissions were actually in the early 90's in London but the uptake was painfully slow. The first test receiver was a bay of equipment in the back of a minibus. A lot of the major hifi manufacturers don't really care about it. One even said that it was dead and they were abandoning it a while back. I think they may have gone back on that now. My 2014 car was the first to have DAB as standard - 20 years after it was available. The bean counters crippled it by reducing the bit rates so it sounds terrible and having most things in mono for Gods sake. Talk about going back to the 40's and 50's... Even now the coverage isn't good enough. And then DAB+ came along. The digital compression methods available in the early 90's were quickly overtaken so they had to introduce a new one to get more stations in (and maybe to make it sound a little better).
DAB was a brilliant idea and a fantastic technical solution considering when when it was developed. Shame nobody wanted it.

You got me started didn't you!

James

With regards to the above comments on fiberglass sills. I am not suggesting for a moment that you attempt this process on your mudflaps but it reminds me of a story a friend told me about while working on the construction of the spaghetti junction in Birmingham back in the 1970s.
A colleague of his had a Wartburg Knight that needed new sills.
So he had a carpenter make some suitable shuttering/formwork and the filled the void with concrete.
Apparently when cured he covered it with underseal took it for MOT and it passed.
It didn't do much for the performance, but it apparently improved the road holding no end!
I have no idea if it's true or not but it made me giggle!

Yesterday was supposed to be colder but, I thought, ideal for sanding and oiling the drive gate. Not a small task ‘cos it’s a fair chunk of wood. As it turned out the temperature was perfect for such work. The wind wasn’t. Especially as our flowering cherry was out and the wind would have blown bits all over my sticky oil finish.
Since bat flu hasn’t got me yet and it’s too windy to be outside I guess I’ll just have to work in the garage. Shame.

The next job on the wooden mud flap is the raised lettering. My plan is to take a fibreglass mould of the originals and use that to make fibreglass positives that I can bond to the wooden mud flaps. This is new territory for me and, strangely, I’ve been rather dreading it. I don’t really know why ‘cos I normally relish trying something new and don’t mind making a mess of it. It’s all learning after all.

Anyhoooo.

One original mud flap with genuine Toyota lettering to use as a plug. This got 3 coats of a PVA release agent.






Next I mixed up a bit of gel coat with a tiny drop of black pigment so I could see what I was doing.





This was left to go tacky like what the internet says. If I’m honest I thought it’d cover more evenly but I don’t know if this is a problem or not. And if I hadn’t tinted it I’d not have known anyway.
I failed to get the fine woven matting that Darkspeed suggested but I did get a very fine stranded stuff.





Two coats of that went on.





And finally one coat of the heavy stuff for a bit of strength.





The fine stuff has a reasonable finish. Good enough for the wheel side? Don’t know. I’ll see.

This has all gone off by yesterday evening. I was really tempted to try and demould it but I’m going to be a good boy and wait a while.




I have now done enough fibreglassing to be able to give you one piece of advice. If you are mixing up small amounts of resin don’t use an old yogurt pot.





The resin desolves them!
The bottom of a plastic milk bottle seems to work though.

While I had some resin mixed I covered the wood of the mudflap too. I’m hoping it’ll soak into the MDF a little to toughen it up.





That’ll need a coat of body filer next just to get final finish.
I did realise that I’ve mucked up with that lower mounting point because there is no way to mould it. I’ll explain more another day.


And lastly, the next bit of fibreglassing that I want to try is to make a new one of these.





It’s the ‘eyebrow’ from in front of the light. It has quite literally fallen apart and I’ve glued it back together again. It’s very brittle now so I need to replace it somehow. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible to make this from fibreglass. Or sensible. But that’s the plan at the moment.

Wish me luck!

I know of someone on the arsebook groups who has made the eyebrows before out of fiberglass and I believe carbonfibre.
From what I have seen they got mixed reviews with regards to fit and durability.
Good luck with it but if it doesn't work out I'm pretty sure I have a few sets in the seemingly infinite boxes of parts I keep aquiring.

martin42006, I'm really not sure the eyebrows idea has a hope in hell. It's way too fine for my skill set at the moment and is probably the wrong material. Still, if you don't try you don't know.
I know I could get replacements (and may be sending you beer money eventually) but we are back to the old problem that they are all 30 years old and probably all in roughly the same condition.


Darkspeed, I'd seen mention of tooling gel and now I know what it is! Thank you!
If you PVA and then wax don't you work the PVA off? I'd imagined it to be one or the other.

So the idea is to fix the letters to the wooden plug and they become part of the mould. The reason for taking a mould off the existing mud flap and not cutting them out of MDF is two fold.
Firstly I get the size and font correct without having to think about it.
And secondly - practice! Which I need a lot of.

Permission to be smug allowed with that result

You should be smug that came out really well - excellent work