With motivation at a high with an impending start and possible drive on the horizon, some evening activities have been taking place as per my previous post.
This week, I have been mostly focusing on... the headlights and clutch master cylinder. (something for fans of the Fast show there)
As the wife was out , I decamped to the kitchen once more and started with digging out the headlights and seeing what I had to play with... remember these?
After deciding at the time that the original frames were too far gone I managed to get some second hand replacements from the early celica guru that is Bob Clark down in Bristol, he also sent me a set of replacement headlamp bowls as well and upgraded H4 lights.
The intention was to swap the various clips and bushings over from the old to the new... however the truth was that most were so rusted up or just plain tired I didn't see much point. So I ended up wrapping everything back up and hitting the net to order some more from some far flung part of the world. That'll have to keep for another eve.
Next up, the clutch master cylinder mentioned in my previous update. but before that some much needed shopping...
That should do it!
Before I packed the master cylinder away at the weekend, I dismantled it and cleaned it up as much as I could with various wire wheels and cleaner. However there were some stubborn bits that I couldn't get to which required fluid to shift that I didn't have to hand. After the above spot of retail therapy, it was out with the brake and clutch cleaning fluid.
I ran this through a few times and pumped the cylinder. After a few flushes through I started to see the grit and general gunk coming through... no wonder it wasn't working!
After a few more goes and ensuring that it did draw fluid down as expected once more, it was a quick clean of the reservoir, seals and cap and we were left with this ready to be assembled and refitted.
Saturday morning started with the usual shenanigans of moving the car from its resting place to where I needed to work on it, now considerably harder with its lump of an engine back in the front! However it served a purpose as with temperatures below zero it warmed me up nicely
Finally we were where we needed to be:
So onwards. The plan was to carry on with the previous weekends activity and get everything plumbed and wired back up where possible. Starting with the heater matrix, which involved a contortionist act in the passenger footwell with my lower back resting on the top metal edge of the sill ...it hurt... a lot...
But finally I got all the clamps and hoses tightened and the covers reattached - hateful job!
Next was to align and fit the front radiator, the only issue being that in order for it stay in position, it required attaching to the front panels... which were not on the car.
I've mentioned previously that I managed to get some solid replacements from the land of Oz, well they have since been blasted and given a good dousing in etch primer ready for reattaching to the car. Using them to fit the radiator was quite a good test in itself as it would help me line them up ready for reattaching onto the wings and lower front subframe.
So on they went
There was a little bit of distortion in places from the blasting process but nothing that can't be remedied with a dolly and hammer. On the whole though they fitted as expected, and with a bit of jiggling the bolts from the battery tray lined up as well. Happy days!
As my hands were starting to seriously feel the cold by this point, (warming them on a halogen work lamp only lasts for so long!), I decided I'd quickly bolt the front end back together ensuring that the front wing holes lined up with the new panels and the lip spoiler also lined up as expected.
Thankfully everything was spot on so the panels got a tack weld in a couple of places just to hold them in position.
I was going to fit the exhaust headers, but after seeing the state of them I decided they would get cleaned and painted first. There was only one thing left to do... fill it with fluids and see if there was life in the old girl.
I'll just leave this here...
Sadly despite my best efforts the clutch master cylinder still didn't want to play ball, but I've managed to track one down so that has been ordered, assuming it arrives in time I may have a special birthday treat coming up next weekend!
Bit of a belated update as things have been somewhat busy of late.
Last weekend was a bit of a write off on the car front as birthday surprises courtesy of my wife and friends meant that I was kept well away from the workshop. This was probably a blessing as the replacement clutch master cylinder I ordered frustratingly didn't appear until the Monday anyway. That said I did get some nice pressies to fill the new tool chest which will no doubt come in very useful over the coming months
So although no playtime on the weekend, I did have a bit of spare time during the week, so one eve I started reassembling the upgraded headlights. I'd already ordered the replacement screws, springs and grommets I needed so when I had 5 mins one eve I started assembling:
...alas I didn't as get far as I hoped as the replacement grommets didn't fit in the holes that I needed them to.
This is what they looked like originally:
You might just be able to make out in the pic above that the replacements are completely different. So without wanting to butcher the newly painted frames or spend hours slicing and shaping the new ones to fit, I decided I'd try another route from another supplier I've found, if they're still no good then I may just use nuts and washers as they'll do the same job of being able to offer adjustment.
Saturday 4th finally bought some time to get over to the car with the new clutch cylinder, along with a newly acquired tool for the collection
Tools, tea, parts and motivation... check
Time to fit the new cylinder, but first the threaded lug needed to be swapped over from the old cylinder to new, a job I thought was going to prove troublesome, as it happens with a squirt of deblock oil and the two nut technique it unwound relatively easily. so with that swapped, time to get it bolted in.
Hmmm the reservoir looked a bit too white and 'new' for my liking... easy enough to sort seeing as I'd spent the time cleaning the old one up
Much better!
Once I'd contorted myself into the drivers foot well enough to tighten everything up, I noticed that the push rod from the pedal was too wide, meaning the split pin wouldn't locate, so this came off and was matched to the same gap as the old with a bit of gentle persuasion
Time to break out the new eezibleed kit ...except none of the caps fitted the reservoir top, without a fitting top you have no pressure, and with no pressure the kit won't function as intended.
Frankly I couldn't be bothered to fashion some kind of clamp and membrane to cover the reservoir, so it fell to the trusty method of a length of wood, the seat ratchet mechanism and much rolling around for me pushing pedal, locking seat in place, reaching under car, undo bleed nipple, tighten bleed nipple, crawl back to release seat, depress pedal... repeat as necessary etc.
I got there eventually and after a quick tidy, a check of fluids the car was started, trailer moved out the way and 1 year, 5 months, 22 days and 1hr.52 minutes since I was first presented with it, the car moved under it's own power for the first time... ironically in reverse. Much tea was then consumed in celebration - One happy boy indeed!
There's a long way still to go but it felt like quite a milestone has been reached.
That's a lot of 'Likes'! Thanks for the positive comments too, always helps the motivation and is good to know folk do read my ramblings from time to time
It's been a bit quiet of late since the cars first drive, in part I've been distracted with other things, namely training for the Tunbridge Wells half marathon this weekend and ultimately Brighton Marathon on 9th April. However a bit of an incident on Sunday while out training, namely rolling my ankle quite badly and having to walk/hop the 4 miles home (carry a phone kids!), resulted in minimal car time over the weekend and a trip to A&E on Monday. Yup it was as fun as it sounds...
Thankfully no bones broken but I have managed to tear two tendons and rip the ligaments from the bone, so no sport or gentle running at all for 2 weeks and no heavy training for 8-9 weeks... no marathon for me in April then! Needless to say I'm a little cheesed off as it was such a stupid lapse of concentration. Will spare you the pictures but suffice to say my ankle is currently slightly ballooned and many colourful shades at present!
As with many things in life there is a silver lining, that will be in the form of less time training and more time on the cars over the coming weeks, small consolation at present but perhaps it will prove to be no bad thing in the long run.
Despite the above I've been doing the odd job, I carried on with the trial assembly of the headlights:
The second attempt at finding some grommets failed miserably so rather than butcher the light frames I decided that nyloc nuts and washers were the way to go (excuse the non-painted and polished frames at this stage!).
Things roughly together but you gives the idea of how they go together:
Next battle was with the fog lights... nice and grim from coatings of waxoyl and goodness knows what else over the years
I eventually got them prised apart - really not pretty inside either!
I think the lenses are saveable but may keep an eye out for the housings as they've been painted before and really not too sound. If anyone knows of any for sale I'd appreciate a heads up.
This also brings me onto the front indicators. I know the car has had a knock (or seemingly several) in it's time as various front brackets were bent and twisted when I removed them from the car, the front panels that I've since replaced had also seen some 'action'. Unfortunately this has resulted in once of the indicator housings being broken at some point and its 'plinth' being snapped off.
Bit frustrating as I'd never noticed this before and I have seen some for sale but didn't think they were needed... oh well. So again if anybody has some or spots any for sale a heads up would be appreciated.
No car time this weekend as will mostly be involved with the half marathon still, but hopefully things will resume properly on the 25th.
You'd have been better off breaking it that doing the ligaments. Did mine when I was about 20 playing football then about 4 more times in the next 8 years! Seriously weakens the ankle.
Not a bad idea that, not some thing I'd ever considered and I happen to know someone with access to a 3D printer as well... might have to set him a challenge
Well things have not quite been going to plan since the aforementioned ankle injury, seemingly there's a fine line between ensuring I'm resting it enough (I'm really not!) and trying to still feel like I've achieved something in my weekends. Saturday involved dealing with the aftermath of storm Doris...
Yeah dealing with that was never going to help recovery! By the evening I was paying the price with my ankle the size of a tennis ball once again so into a bucket of ice water it went.
Sunday morning came, and although I was never going to be able to do a massive amount, I decided I'd try to get my mojo back by getting the Celica out and focusing on a few smaller details. Starting with piecing together the front of the car.
There were a number of reasons for this, firstly so I knew how things went back together before they got painted, a reminder of what I had, what needed to be sourced and what needed to be straightened... Unfortunately the car has had a couple of decent front end shunts in it's life, resulting in several of the brackets being bent and fatigued and the inner O/S wing being slightly bent back leaving a finger sized gap to the front panel (sadly no pics as I was just cracking on). So before I took the panels off to fix the issues and weld them in for good - it was time to get its face on.
The first mojo boost was the car starting almost on the button, no easy start required, just a pull on the choke, turn the key and job done. Sounds so trivial but little things like that are always welcome in my world.
First on were the bonnet hinges, filler panel brackets, closely followed by N/S headlight I'd built up at home, so far so good.
Then a bit of an issue with the O/S headlight cluster meant I needed to strip them down, clean up a couple of spare bowls and give them a coat of paint. So while they were drying on went the bumper brackets and polished bumper.
Bit hard to tell from the photo but as suspected the bumper brackets were well off, twisted to the left and slightly different heights. So they came off got straightened and the bumper safely wrapped up again. This all took a fair amount of time which meant the replacement bowls were soon dry.
Finally after a bit of rebuilding I got the second headlight cluster on - it almost had a face!
You can see in the background the filler panels I was then going to fit but simply ran out of time so that's how things finished. Not masses achieved in the grand scheme of things but a few things discovered and confirmed.
Alas I didn't get any close-up shots but you may just be able to see that the filler panel brackets are pretty twisted and bent. Next job will be to fit these panels and straighten the brackets before removing them all for painting. Those in the know will see that the centre support is upside down in the photo - after a revisit to some of my shots when dismantling this has now been turned the right way up!
Finally one last result of the day, while rooting around in the car I found an old carrier bag with a couple of exciting finds that I'd completely forgotten about - the missing side indicator from one of the front wings that I thought I never had along with the missing piece of the front indicator plinth I discovered had broken in my last update... looking back they were there all along in this picture:
Muppet! Now just to work out how to put the two plinth pieces back together, they're chrome plated so possibly steel but probably cast aluminium so may need a specialist repair - any pointers for someone in he South East appreciated.
Safe to say a little day of tinkering over things has bought the mojo back... I even found myself browsing the web for inspiration on the final paint job - may be a little optimistic at this stage!
I then came across an old Viz badge which summed things up perfectly for me at that point...
Just found this thread after following a link from elsewhere, and this picture had me in bits I'm sure plenty can relate to your quote above!
Great cars these, I'm partial to a nice bit of far eastern metal myself.... thin and rusty as they are!
poor quality steel + no underseal + trip over on the deck of a boat = Rust from brand new! atleast that's true for the Datsun's, I'm assuming the Toyota's are much the same.
Thanks Ant, prop seems to be okay so far but if it needs to come off again for any reason it's good to have a recommendation.
Another weekend with little progress on the Celica sadly, mostly this was due to helping a mate with tidying his toy prior to sale.
What I started with wasn't pretty - hard to see thanks to the colour and light but the paintwork certainly wasn't at its best.
Plenty of greenery growing where it shouldn't
So I dug out all of my detailing gear and set to work
spending multiple hours getting rid of this
and with a bit of foaming, washing, claying, polishing and waxing later it ended up like this
Needless to say I slept well afterwards, that and I hurt in places I'd long forgotten about.
Annnnyway, knowing that was going take up the majority of my weekend I decided to book Monday off work to sort a few jobs at home and do a couple of bits on the car if time allowed (as it happened it didn't really).
I did however manage to get the last of the donor celica parts car into storage away from the elements
While there I picked up the celica bonnet as I wanted to get that on to check wing alignment ahead of fixing the front panels. Seemingly not too bad was the answer
Bit of adjustment needed but it'll do for now. Did remind me how crusty the bonnet is though - another thing on the job list! The car now reminds me of some poor extra from one of the transformers movies...
In other news I actually found some indicators for the car with some unbroken plinths for sale in Ireland, got very excited as he was also selling some other hard to find spares... agreed a price but when asking where to send the money was met with the response that he'd decided to sell them to someone else... as you can imagine I wasn't best pleased - AR$E! . The search continues...
Never one to like ending on a negative, after much fettling by my metalworking perfectionist other half as she want happy with prior efforts, I also managed to get the front panel welded on to the a35 so it's starting to look a little more respectable... be warned - for the first time ever on this thread I am actually in the next photo!
Grill and surround also fit! (very loosely positioned here!)
Well I thought it was about time I gave a little update... or lack of. Sadly things have just been too busy on all fronts. Hoping to get back on all things Celica in early May.
As a little taster of what's been going on:
In a mad moment of man maths and with the intention to reduce the fleet... I bought another car... well tank...
Figured it would mean I still have a tow/parts collection vehicle while being nice to burble about in... yes it has 4.4 litres of JLR's finest... which means the truck and BMW are now for sale
Both are fantastic bits of kit for their respective purposes, genuinely sad to see them both go.
Went on hols, visiting various parts of Normandy that viewers of Quests' Combat Dealers will be familiar with.
Also went to the Practical Classic restoration show for much needed mojo boosting, have subsequently come up with a plan for the MG BGT, to allow me to focus on the Celica. A shell dolly was subsequently purchased
I've also been busy with the little Austin
and just so the celica wasn't completely left out... it got a new knob... and a couple of stickers
, I decamped to the kitchen once more and started with digging out the headlights and seeing what I had to play with... remember these? 
, I decamped to the kitchen once more and started with digging out the headlights and seeing what I had to play with... remember these? 
. T
