I no expert on painting but often had issue with lacquer doing this and actually hate the stuff now as its often messed up what looks to be a really nice paint finish upto that point!, from research ive done it seems to be generally because of a few thing like... too cold or moisture in the air so where are you painting it ?  if its outside or in cold/damp shed/garage that could be your reason ?  trying warming up the room before spraying it on and keeping it warm.

Quote from: thetyrant on April 15, 2020, 10:48I no expert on painting but often had issue with lacquer doing this and actually hate the stuff now as its often messed up what looks to be a really nice paint finish upto that point!, from research ive done it seems to be generally because of a few thing like... too cold or moisture in the air so where are you painting it ?  if its outside or in cold/damp shed/garage that could be your reason ?  trying warming up the room before spraying it on and keeping it warm.

I've been experimenting this morning by leaving the can out in the sun for a while and spraying a test bit of plastic and I got a smooth finish, so I tried the lights and, using it at closer quarters, got a better result.

However, it seems that the problem is now the surface prep. It's had so many failed attempts, that previous problems are cropping up in the finish. I'm just not capable of sanding it down well enough by hand because there's a fair number of layers on there. So I've ordered a load of sanding discs for the drill. Once it's back to lens rather than shoddy lacquer, I can have another go.

Ok sounds like your heading right direction, make sure you dont go too far with sanding and damage/wear through the lens!

Ive seen sone videos on line of people using heat on the lacquer after its gone cloudy and been able to get it clear again, risky on a headlight though as you might wreck it if you go too far.

Quote from: thetyrant on April 15, 2020, 14:55Ok sounds like your heading right direction, make sure you dont go too far with sanding and damage/wear through the lens!

Ive seen sone videos on line of people using heat on the lacquer after its gone cloudy and been able to get it clear again, risky on a headlight though as you might wreck it if you go too far.

Fingers crossed! I'm determined because I've never got the hang of spraying and there's some other areas of repair I'd love to have a go on with the car. This has been a really good learning curve so far and, if the worst happens, I can get some more second-hand headlights I suppose!

I like to put my cans in some hot water for a few minutes before I use them. You can either use hot tap or an inch or two from the kettle. It increases the pressure and improves the flow of the paint.

I sprayed my other car wheels over easter and had the can in some boiled water and the can was so hot it was almost burning my hand so the can wont explode!

Quote from: Topdownman on April 15, 2020, 20:40I like to put my cans in some hot water for a few minutes before I use them. You can either use hot tap or an inch or two from the kettle. It increases the pressure and improves the flow of the paint.

I sprayed my other car wheels over easter and had the can in some boiled water and the can was so hot it was almost burning my hand so the can wont explode!

Warming it up certainly helped a great deal, so I'll give your idea a go next time!

Taking a break from the misery of headlight renovation (it's not going well let's face it), this morning I tackled a nicer job!

A while back, I fitted a Kenwood DAB stereo in the Custard Tart that I'd bought second-hand. Because it wasn't new, it needed a DAB glass ariel. There's quite a lot of conversation about the glass ariels being pish, but I'd fitted one in my old Subaru Forester years ago and it worked perfectly for years until I moved the car on. As long as you do them properly (and I've seen more badly fitted ones than well fitted ones), they do the trick. Also, they are cheap and cheerful as long as you get the unbranded ones. They look the same and they fit the same, so I ordered £11 of Amazon's best rated one which duly arrived in a few days.

Fitting these is commonly agreed to be a bit of a pig in a Roadster because the A-pillar trim sits underneath the soft top latch. The latch is held on by two torx bolts that Toyota felt necessary to glue in;



Apparently you can remove the trim without removing the latch, but mine wasn't budging and it's said that putting the trim back can be frustrating. With this in mind, I dug out the bits from my old impact screwdriver and found a suitable T40 Torx bit. Smaller torx bits seem to fit, but will round out the head meaning you'll likely have to drill the bolt out - not ideal! A T40 fits perfectly.

I fitted this to my trusty Lidl ratchet (surprisingly good tool considering);



...and grunted away carefully. Because of the thread-lock, these are flipping difficult to shift, so you have to be super careful to put steady pressure on them and keep the ratchet at a 90 degree angle to the bolt head. Slow and steady does it!





With this removed, the trim is dead easy to pop off;



Now I could get to the windscreen frame, I could start feeding the ariel wire down to the stereo. Luckily, this feeds straight down the side of the dash to the floor;





This kick panel at the bottom also acts as a handy storage for the surplice length of wire!

With this done, I started preparing the windscreen and surround for the ariel. The instructions give you a height from the top of the windscreen that the ariel should be at. Unfortunately, to completely follow the guide, the grounding strip would be exactly where the courtesy light connector clips to the surround (typical), so I had to position it a bit lower. Once I had a clear idea of where it was sitting and where the ground-strip would sit, I removed a small area of paint to give it a really good connection;



I carefully cleaned the glass with some white spirit and then dried everything off. Then it was time to stick it down which you have to do really carefully. I peeled the backing behind the plastic box off and folded the backing over. This meant I could get the box exactly where it needed to go before I tried to stick the thin ariel down. Then peeling from the bottom and using a cloth as I went, I stuck the rest on;



Ta and indeed da!

Next I hooked the other end up to the head unit just to check it was working correctly. I managed to fluke the connection into to the back without the faff of removing the stereo again!

Aaaaand;



We have a result! Even down the side of my house which is an FM dead spot, it picked up many, many stations with crystal-clear sound quality. Really chuffed!

Just needed to refit the pillar trim and cable tie the wire carefully under the dash. All done in about an hour!

So that's all done, ready for a time when we can actually drive it again!

*As a side note, I've done this post using a method of hosting the images directly from Google Photos. While I can see them, if you can't, can you let me know? Cheers!

Images work fine, nice work on the aerial.  I fitted mine by prying the trim out, and I think cutting with a Stanley blade where it meets that latch.  I couldn't get mine to shift and didn't want to risk rounding.  My signal has been fine (for the 2 weeks I could drive the car) since I ditched a 5v dashcam and went to a 12v.

I did notice that the adhesive for the 'box' had eventually come away from where it's meant to be mounted after a couple of years, but just pushed it back down and seems to have been OK.

Quote from: Bossworld on April 25, 2020, 16:32I did notice that the adhesive for the 'box' had eventually come away from where it's meant to be mounted after a couple of years, but just pushed it back down and seems to have been OK.

Yeah, I can see from the outside that the box is stuck around the edges, but the middle isn't. Not a lot I could do about that as it's the curvature of the windscreen. Does the job though!

Cheers for the confirmation on the images - Google really don't want you to embed things, but there's a site you can put the link code in and it generates an img tag for embedding. I'm running out of free space on Flickr!

Lockdown, Cornavirus, stay at home! Lots of free time! Do all those jobs that you've putting off!

Hmmmm....

Now I'm not going to complain. I'm lucky in that my job has been affected very little and I'm still in employment. The only difference is that I'm doing it from a stool in the kitchen and I've become very proficient in using Microsoft Teams. I'm a good boy and only ever turn the camera off when I need to have a cheeky vape or pick my nose.

But! The free time that we're all told we've been having? PAH! Two kids, two dogs and a job where every project in the organisation filters down to me has meant that time is probably more sparse now than it was before. Home teaching while trying to sound like you know the ins and outs of the transparency consent framework 2.0 puts a dampener on your MR2 tinkering dreams.

So because of that, the bucket has sat down the drive without a face and gathering spider webs. Every time I walk past it I feel guilty. But that has been the case since April. Today, shockingly I had 1 1/2 hours free to poke at it.

Now the last time we left it, I was having a nightmare trying to do the simple job of restoring the headlights. It's fair to say that it continued to go poorly in that respect. After weeks of trying to get them back to something approaching decent, I copped out and grabbed a decent pair of replacements from Dick Sloan. My old ones ruined by my own hand... Live and learn... I am rubbish at bodywork of any kind and lacquer is not my friend.

I looked at the sills behind the front wings again and realised that I'd never be able to home fix it to an acceptable standard. Not that this car will ever be a show queen, but I'd find the fact that I'd failed to do a decent job even worse than looking at the rust that's there at the moment.

So I decided that I'd put everything back together and look at the possibility of getting a professional to sort it. With the lack of commuting costs and not going out all the time, money could be put towards it.

Today I started putting it back together, but not before sorting the rusty patches on the front bumper bar.

It's had a few smacks in the past which means the paint has been compromised and the oxide had gotten a hold. Only surface rust, but the bumper was off so now was the time.





I gave it a all a scrape off to reveal the full extent of the surface rust and a scrub down with some wet and dry ready for rust killer.





This was then given 2 coats of Hydrate 80. Tomorrow I can give it a few coats of Hamerite.

With a a bit of time still free, I fitted the replacement lights. Dick had said that they were in 'reasonable condition' and they where cheap, but they polished up fairly well. There was some bobbins with one of the sidelights, but some WD40 contact cleaner and a new bulb sorted that. One bonus was that the new headlights came with a set of uprated bulbs, so I'll take that as a saving!

All hooked up and working and the bucket has started having its face replaced!



So that's all in this impressively boring update! Stay tuned for more insomnia-curing posts!

I carried on a little with the bucket today. First I gave the bumper bar a lick of paint;



Then I got curious. As my front wings have started crumbling at the bottom, I wanted to see if the sills beneath were as frilly. If so, there'd have to be a difficult choice to make about its future. After scraping away at the two bottom bolts that hold the wing to the sill, they miraculously came adrift really easily. I mean around a clearly rusty area, you expect at least a fight (rounded or snapped head/stripped thread/minions from the underworld/snarl beasts from the Nth dimension  - that sort of thing), but no, out as clean as you like!

The wing is scrap, so I gently folded the bottom section out of the way and was greated with this;



Moss, earth and crumbly metal - lovely combination.

Word to the wise - remove your wheel liners and clear this section out unless you want this sort of rot! Something I've never done myself I hasten to add...

Anyway, after a quick scrape around on the sill corner underneath, it seems that, while it's far from good, it's also not bad. It's all very solid with just some heavy surface rust. Hopefully the other side is the same;



As I mentioned in my last post, it's not something I'm confident in doing myself to any standard that wouldn't result in it looking like a horror show at anything under 30 feet, so I may get some quotes in for this area to be sorted and painted along with some replacement wings sprayed up to match, along with the front bumper which has always been a differing shade of silver to the rest of the car in some spots (and I scrawped it twice a while back).

It'd be great to get this done, but obviously cost is the key thing as the car is worth around 36p and a can of Tango.

Lee, I really enjoy reading Bucket's threads but sad to see your latest find.  Hopefully fixable and not too costly - Bucket's worth it

Oh it'll be fine. I've been expecting a lot worse but I knew it was there and would need attention. Least the structure is still solid!

Quote from: The Arch Bishop on July 28, 2020, 21:48Oh it'll be fine. I've been expecting a lot worse but I knew it was there and would need attention. Least the structure is still solid!

This is pretty much what I found under my front wing as well.
I wire wheeler it back, kurusted, primed and painted.. should hopefully do the trick. Just need to do the other side now! But yeah.. definitely something to have a look at every couple of years.

The bucket has a face!



I finished work yesterday afternoon and tossed the metaphorical coin on whether to;

A. Have a cold beer
B. Refit the bumper

Now usually it would 100% be A, but I realised I still had a month of insurance on the bucket and, with the car currently SORN, I could start the tax neatly at the start of the month.

So for once, scrabbling around on the drive won and I set to it. It's not a hard job other than lining all of the mounting holes up with the under-bumper plastics and not long after, the bucket's full visage was back in place.

Also worth noting is that I painted the rusty horns in Hammerite satin black as before, they grinned through the front bumper like rotten teeth.

With the excitement of having an MR2 back on the road for the first time since lockdown started, I thought I'd give the car a good look over to see how all these months of sitting down the drive had taken their toll.









The inside also looked like Miss Havisham's wedding;



So, it was time to break out option A. Glug glug glug...

This morning dawned decently sunny, so after taxing the car (yay!) I set to giving it a clean up. Underneath the tree pollen, seed cases, spider webs and general detritus, it wasn't too bad. Worst was the already faded roof. After giving the car a wash down and a dry off, I dug out some vinyl and rubber care spray and set to the seals and then the roof. I'm not a big fan of the shiny sticky look for plastics, but the roof really was letting the side down, so it was scrubbed over with the stuff and then buffed off a few times.

In progress;



And done;



It does look a bit 'wet', but I expect it'll wash off in the first rainstorm anyway. For the time being, I's better than the faded slightly green mess it was before!

So all cleaned now with spiders evicted and the inside vacuumed. Looks pretty good again!









All done - just need an excuse to go out in it now!

Quick trip to the local supermarket reacquainted with the awesomeness of the Roadster! Everything still works well so the lay-up doesn't seem to have had any noticeable side effects.

A long while ago, I noted that pictures in this thread were only ever taken on the driveway, so here's some I snapped while out. Phone camera so not top quality, but decent enough.

A long old update.

Due to the plague, the custard tart has done exactly no miles this year. When the insurance came around, I cancelled it. When the tax ran out, I SORN'd it. With other cars in the household and my daily commute reduced to stumbling down the stairs each morning, it just didn't seem worth the expense.

It had, however, made it onto the drive where, while the garage was quietly being filled with tat and junk, it sat there gathering grit, moss and steel-cable quality spider webs.

However, after deciding that the slow creep of displaced household items and jumble would not stand, I cleared the garage and set about doing something I'd been wanting to do for years - painting the inside.

Our garage has a history, so I'm told by the neighbours. During the Great Storm of '87, it folded like a pack of cards and had to be rebuilt. This was done I can only assume, by someone who'd been described mortar over a crackly 1980's phone line. It seems to have consisted of sand..... and that's it. For this reason, anything put in the garage tends to acquire a fine film of grit over it, which is not ideal for storing a car. So I splashed out on a huge tub of Dulux and spent many days sealing the bricks with thick, sticky paint. Three gruelling coats later and a trip to the tip, it was ready;



So with that done, I needed to prepare the tart for its upgraded digs.

it was my birthday a month or so ago, so I'd gone a bit nuts one new stuff in readiness. Some new clay bars, a snow lance for the pressure washer (with foamy stuff) and a Ryobi One buffer.

I booked today off work and set about the car. Now for most of the cleaning processes today, it was the first time I'd done them, so when I got to try out my snow lance, the results worked were not so much 'naff club foam party' and more 'children's party bubble-blower';



I'll up the concentration next time!

Still it did the job well enough and after a pressure wash off, we had slightly less dust and grime.

Next off was a hand wash and dry (old skool) followed by a full claying to get the ingrained stuff off. The paintwork was then smooth as an otter's pocket.

So on to uncharted territory. Well sort of, I have used orbital buffers before but it was under supervision of a friend who is very big on detailing. His kit was mains powered and many hundreds of pounds where as mine was a battery powered £55 quid thing. However, when I said what I was doing and what I should buy as a cutting compound, my detailing friend recommended Autoglym SRP (which I already had plenty of) on the basis that 'you can't get into any trouble with it' and 'it makes shiny.'

The tart didn't need any aggressive compounds anyway as the paint is in pretty good nick, but knowing that SRP DOES NOT COME OFF PLASTICS NO MATTER WHAT, I ghetto-masked off anything likely to stain;



I had a load of Brew Dog boxes due to a beer binge recently so they were employed as well;



And then I could crack on with the Ryobi;



I'll be honest that I wasn't expecting much from this being battery powered, but I really like Ryobi stuff and it didn't disappoint. You've not going to be sanding off deep swirls with it, but it's plenty powerful and even with my 'beginner' 1.5ah batteries, it did a really good job and sped up the preocess no end! It certainly did a far better effort in less time than I could ever do by hand!

It did a great job and before long, the car was polished and buffed off (it comes with an application and a buffing pad). Highly recommended and I promise I'm not on commission (the drills are beasts as well).



Final bodywork job was to apply a decent wax to seal in the shiny goodness. I use Collinite 476 wax as it gives a good shine and seems to last for ages, but it's in a tin so not really practical for use on a buffer. However, because the body was so smooth, it didn't take long to apply a layer. Then I could use the buffer to take it off with. Again, this saved a tonne of time!

The results were really good;







So with the garage cleared and the car cleaned, the stars were aligned and in she went;



But as the final luxury, I'd also bought a nice small Cosmos cover so that, next year, I won't have to clean the fly and spider plop off it!



And we're done!

But's that not all for the tart! I think I've uncovered a little bit of history from her past.

My phone has one of those aggregated news feeds based on the interests that I churn into Google. A few weeks ago, one popped up as a 'in case you missed it/' It was an article produced by Evo magazine back in May for the MR2 mk3. I scrolled  through the pretty good article looking at the pretty recycled press pictures of Roadsters when they were new. It's a fairly standard procedure to roll out these images for features on older cars. It was only towards the bottom of the article when I noticed that there was an image of a yellow face lift MR2, which I'd told is a rare old bird.

I did do a double take;



This is not me driving in the picture.

It seems that the tart did some time in the Toyota UK press fleet which explains the amount of options spec'd on it and also the early 52 plate for a face lift car.

The same image features on Auto Express for a few articles.

So that's a bit of providence for the tart!

What I'm quite annoyed about is that back in June, I had a PM on here from matmr2 saying that he had images and some history on it, but stupidly, I didn't see it until July. I did rely but they haven't replied, so if you see this, please get in touch as I'd love to know more!

Back to the bucket, things are not great. On my list to fix are;

- Windscreen wipers are shot (easy)
- Rear caliper still binding to get a decent handbrake (not too bad and I have a new caliper ready to go on)
- Replacement headlight are waaaaaay too high (I did thing they were the best headlights ever until people started flashing me and I realised I could spot low-flying planes with them)
- Nasty rattle under throttle load (I think the exhaust is leaking somewhere rather than anything catastrophic)

Work to do!

Anyway, if you read this, well done for sticking with it!

Really good looking car!

Yes agreed, great looking Lee, you've done a brilliant job on tart!  My previous 2 Chilli was a 52 Reg facelift too.

Great to see custard tart's superstar history. If you are really interested in her past DVLA can send you a copy of everything they have on her - from original registration onwards. There's a form to be completed and an admin fee but they are really helpful if you give them a call.

Did it for mine - creating a history for a cherished car us a valid reason for applying.

@The Arch Bishop said:
"Nasty rattle under throttle load (I think the exhaust is leaking somewhere rather than anything catastrophic)"


Not spoken about on here so much these days but the general rattle on OE exhausts is the heat shield on the main cat.

Great work. Love the tart!

Do you think it might be possible to install one of those DAB aerials onto the flip up wind deflector?
Just a thought while mulling over a headunit upgrade...

Quote from: The Arch Bishop on September 11, 2020, 20:30But's that not all for the tart! I think I've uncovered a little bit of history from her past.

My phone has one of those aggregated news feeds based on the interests that I churn into Google. A few weeks ago, one popped up as a 'in case you missed it/' It was an article produced by Evo magazine back in May for the MR2 mk3. I scrolled  through the pretty good article looking at the pretty recycled press pictures of Roadsters when they were new. It's a fairly standard procedure to roll out these images for features on older cars. It was only towards the bottom of the article when I noticed that there was an image of a yellow face lift MR2, which I'd told is a rare old bird.

I did do a double take;



This is not me driving in the picture.

It seems that the tart did some time in the Toyota UK press fleet which explains the amount of options spec'd on it and also the early 52 plate for a face lift car.

If my memory serves me well, Evo ran the yellow car as a long term test car - the driver in that pic was one of their journos or photographers or something.

Lovely car btw! And great work keeping the bucket alive

Quote from: Roj on September 13, 2020, 22:15If my memory serves me well, Evo ran the yellow car as a long term test car - the driver in that pic was one of their journos or photographers or something.

Lovely car btw! And great work keeping the bucket alive

Your memory serves you extremely well as it happens! Your post made me go and have a research for old editions at or around 2003, and sure enough, I eventually found the following;



This is an extract of EVO issue 57 (sadly I can't make out the write up from this tiny image) from this page here - https://dust-caps.com/p/evo-57-ferrari-challenge-stradale-t350c-evo-viii-clio-v6-vx220-turbo-carrera-gt

And looking around that time period, it seems it popped up first in issue 52 Feb 2003 and was on the fleet until it had an end of term report in issue 63 Jan 2004.

If anyone has a copy of 52, 57 or 63 that they could send me an image of, give me a PM!

Nice one roj!

Quote from: paulj on September 12, 2020, 11:23Great to see custard tart's superstar history. If you are really interested in her past DVLA can send you a copy of everything they have on her - from original registration onwards. There's a form to be completed and an admin fee but they are really helpful if you give them a call.

Did it for mine - creating a history for a cherished car us a valid reason for applying.

I may get around to that - thanks for the tip!

Quote from: Joesson on September 12, 2020, 11:38@The Arch Bishop said:
"Nasty rattle under throttle load (I think the exhaust is leaking somewhere rather than anything catastrophic)"

Not spoken about on here so much these days but the general rattle on OE exhausts is the heat shield on the main cat.

Oh it has plenty of that as well, but this is very different - more of a tapping I would say but not road speed or engine speed dependent.

Quote from: iffyT on September 12, 2020, 12:58Great work. Love the tart!

Do you think it might be possible to install one of those DAB aerials onto the flip up wind deflector?
Just a thought while mulling over a headunit upgrade...

It might work of a fashion, but the instructions are really specific on installation and you need to have the copper tab firmly attached to the body as a ground. Whenever I've seen people complaining about DAB reception using these ariels, it's usually because it is badly fitted!

So all great stuff finding out about the tart's history, but not a lot of fun on the bucket side of the camp.

Yesterday I set about fitting the new caliper in an attempt to finally get a decent holding/non-binding handbrake. This is the last non-new part of the rear brakes that was left. I've fiddled with the rear brakes on my MR2s so much now I can remove them in my sleep, so off came the old caliper and on went the new one;



This was quick, but bleeding them was slow as there was no one about to help. Eventually, my neighbour returned home so I tapped him up to help. The caliper bled up nicely so I wound in the piston then out by 180 degrees, fixed the caliper properly and the engine started. Then I slowly pumped the brake pedal 20 times, turned off and hooked up the handbrake cable linkage. Back in the car, I adjusted the cable by the handbrake so that there was 7 clicks to full on position.

Pleased with progress, I tested that the other wheel was locked which it was and went over to the other side to check the new side - merely a formality surely? Well no - nothing at all on that - I could spin the wheel without any bother.

Maybe I've gotten the sequence wrong? Unhooked everything, adjuster backed right off and caliper/handbrake linkage back off. Piston wound back in and then out 180 degrees once more, caliper reattached, this time, cable hooked back up before pumping the brakes and then adjusting. That'll be it... Nope - still nothing on the new caliper.

Really adjusting the cable so that there's very few clicks just about gets it to start engaging, but you can still move the wheel by hand.

One more try and the same result.

So I'm flummoxed. It's not like I haven't managed to do these in the past - the handbrake in the yellow car is actually very good indeed after I changed the cables - I dare say you could pull a skid with it, should you be so inclined! But this one you can move by hand if you give it a shove.

So to recap, it has 2 new cables, 2 new calipers and new brake pads and still it doesn't work.

I mean it HAS to be something I'm not doing right, right?

I feel I should stop typing now.... I can feel the anger rising again!

Anyone got any ideas?