Viszaly's blue MR2!

[Viszaly]

Hi all,

To save updating the introduction thread or anything silly, thought I'd post updates on what I'm doing to the car here. To start off with, here's a quick picture of my MR2 a few hours after getting it home:



Feels like bit of a bargain as I mentioned in the intro thread, £650 for a 78k mile car with intact precats. New handbrake cables fitted, new cat fitted and supplied with new pads, discs & braided brake hoses, as well as an old set of rear calipers to rebuild, plus a spare set of OEM wheels with brand new T1Rs. Roof's tatty though.

I had to start by stripping out the interior, in part to fix the soggy carpets that leaving the windows slightly open for the last few months had caused, but also because I'm planning on making this in to a slightly less practical, more ridiculous, but faster car - so parts had to go. Once the carpet had been taken out, cleaned etc, I put everything back in the car with just the basics remaining.



While I was here, I noticed the entire shifter assembly has quite a bit of wobble, so I've ordered a short shift kit & new metal bushings to hopefully firm up the shifting a bit.

Next up was removing the rear bumper to take out anything that didn't specifically *need* to be there, heat shields and such. This didn't save nearly as much weight as I expected, but every little helps as they say.



With the rear bumper off & seeing a few other people's cars, I've become keen on a bumper cut to take out the old, broken side pods and take a bit more off the car. Decided I'm going to take the bumper back off again soon just to make sure the crash bar etc look a bit tidier than they do now.

Next up I decided to have bit of an easy day. I stripped out the frunk plastics & alarm etc, then thought I'd give the headlights bit of a polish up. Picture is halfway through or so - I managed to remove the yellowing from them, but even polished up they don't look perfect. But neither does the rest of the car.



Today I got cracking on removing the subframe & rear arms. While they're intact, the rear arms have paint flaking off them and the subframe, while intact, looks pretty naff - if I'm wanting to cut the rear bumper, that's going to have to be tidied up! No photos here as I ended up not being able to finish the job with the two center bolts stuck as stuck can be. Little odd as the rest of it came apart pretty nicely. While I'm on the back end of the car, figured I'd look at poly-bushing the arms and giving everything a sand down & coat of hammerite to keep it healthy - but that's a job for another day now.

Outstanding jobs for the short term:
Re-tap subframe bolt holes - they're fine, but after a few finger turns they get extremely tight and I don't want to risk any possible cross threading
Order new wheel nuts - old ones just look rough.
Use a ball joint splitter or something to take the rear arms off the subframe to actually get it out
Get my creature comforts back in the interior - nicer steering wheel etc.

Longer term objectives
Better pads & discs
Find a solution for the front end aero - splitters etc
New shocks & springs/coilovers
New wheels & more appropriate tyres
Polybush the car (had a quote for the rear polybushes @ £165 delivered, so they might have to wait!)
Replacement ARBs
Bucket seats
Cage
Harnesses
Hardtop (got one lined up though!)
2ZZ conversion


Edited because I'd used my old forum name in the title - which I must have registered long ago and forgotten the password for!

[Chilli Girl]

Looking forward to hearing how you get on.  Good luck with it all.

[Chriss]

Looks like a nice project, I really like blue in these and it wont eventually go pink like all Toyota red cars. A hardtop will transform the car, good luck.

[Chilli Girl]

Looks like a nice project, I really like blue in these and it wont eventually go pink like all Toyota red cars. A hardtop will transform the car, good luck.

They only go pink if you don't ever polish/wax them. 

[Viszaly]

I've been thinking on this and I honestly don't think I'll keep it blue long term. As much as I like it, I either like my cars to be monochrome with bright details or very bright. As my other car is a very bright blue/turquoise, I quite fancy taking this one to be monochromey - much like my SW20 which was exclusively white & carbon.

White or a satin grey is currently taking my fancy.

[Ardent]

Do like that blue, but if its going
the satin gets my vote.
The white I would need to see.

[Viszaly]

Just been massively let down on the hard-top. Thought I had it reserved but apparently not - not keen on sticking with soft-top so might be an early end to this project with the general cost of hardtops elsewhere