6G Celicas Forums

DO IT BOX!!!

Nice work Malpaso! I really love the style you are going for this year. Some very nice editing too, especially the photo-extension for 4-eyed-freak! Shame that a couple of the nice pics dropped out though, but there is still a great selection.

Nope Then you can't do this....



I sold some Celica parts to somebody who lives in Maleny (he is converting a '96 to electric using AC motors).... he paid a delivered price so I figured I'd take a run up Mt Mee and deliver them personally! (Mountain run with somebody else paying for fuel, yes please )

New shell is looking good (y)

I have been a bit quiet but have been getting stuff done….

So the weekend before last I did the soft top install. I knew that it was going to take a while, but 2.5 days was much longer than expected! My old top was perfect when I went and inspected the car in March, but having only done 3000km in the past 3 years, it was only a few weeks of daily use before it fell apart. The vinyl is just rotten, all the rubber seals are wrecked and the stitching was falling to bits inside…. Repairing definitely wasn’t an option.











I bought a Robbins Streamline replacement top in the Stayfast Canvas. This should be quite a premium top; look good, be quieter inside and last well. I was tempted to play it safe and get black, but I don’t plan on having any other black accents on the car, so I went with a dark blue to complement the paint. I bought it from a seller in the USA and had it shipped here through the eBay Global Shipping program. It ended up costing just over $900 (when the dollar was at around 0.73).

The first day (afternoon) we got the frame out of the car and stripped the old vinyl off the frame. Spent a LONG time cleaning the drains… they were both completely blocked…. It took several goes of hot water and poking and prodding to just get a thin wire through the passenger one.





The second morning we had a look at the frame and found a few rust spots on it. I don’t plan to ever have this soft top out of the car again, so we got out the grinder and cleaned them up, treated the rust, then primer and a quick coat of black spray-paint.



Second afternoon was installing the Robbins soft top on the frame. We took everything inside to make it easier and followed the instructions step by step. This would have been easier if the instructions included all of the steps! Argh! Because of that, we wasted a lot of time trying to run tension cables through just after we had riveted the canvas over the mounting points. Also had to go out and find a suitable contact adhesive.



On the third day (long weekend) we put the assembled top back into the car. It was a 33 degree day so we gave in and set up a gazebo It was quite fiddly getting it all back together. My driver’s side latch broke too when stretching the canvas shut (always very hard when they are new) which was quite annoying.





I didn’t put the interior trims back in (except for the seats ) because I wanted to make sure that everything stayed dry after a few days of normal use, and the material hadn’t quite stretched in the right places (more later). So I was roof-up for a week (drivers latch wired shut ) whilst the material stretched into shape.




This weekend I almost made it to dodgy day out at Magpie’s place (a DIY mechanic day with a bunch of MX5 club people around an hour from me), but a friend ended up coming over instead and we just played MX5s in my driveway instead. It was time for my car to get some low back.

I hate raising/lowering my coilovers (have to unbolt and twist the whole bottom section on the Tein Flex), and I was lucky enough to have my good friend Richard ‘volunteer’ for the job

Whilst he was doing that I had a go at a quick headlight restoration on his car using baking powder made into a paste and then some fibreglass polish. Before and after (the driver’s side was worse originally);



We had my wheels off anyway, and Richard wanted to see what white wheels would be like on his green (he has stock NB8B 16” wheels like mine had);





As soon as Bathurst finished on Sunday I went out and spent a couple of hours playing with the tension on the roof before I reinstalled all the interior bits and gave my car a wash. Then I spent an hour pulling the dash cluster out of my sisters Barina SRi because of a flickering bulb (Opels are a pain to pull apart!) and then gave it a good wash too (The first wipe of her car put more dirt on my cloth than my whole car.... including the wheels).

By this stage it was about 11pm and I headed out to get a few quick pics to show of the low and new roof. I set myself a 5 min radius to find somewhere new to take some night shots and this is what I came up with;





White wheels on a dark car are really hard to photograph at night!!! It wasn’t long there before I got kicked out by security wanting to chain up the car park so commuters don’t use it in the morning (next to a bus station). It was already after midnight so I gave up on flashes and just pulled into somewhere with a big floodlight and took a couple of quick shots from the rear;







That last photos shows the biggest problem I am having with the top. I’m not sure why, but it doesn’t feel square. The passenger side is MUCH less tight on those rear corners near the straps (the whole way up)… this is also leading to a gap between the fabric and the edge the black edging. With this how it is, instead of the bulk of the water flowing off over the edge of the roof down into the door openings to drain off, it all flows down into the rain rails and has to go down the tiny drains. Also, it will only be a matter of days before my drains are clogged if all the leaves can go straight down when I’m parked.

I spent a couple of hours on Sunday redoing the tension on the bolts that hold on the base of the roof to try and distribute the tension better. I did it the Robbins way, and a few different custom methods which managed to reduce it (to what you see in the pic) but it is still an issue. Going to get in touch with the supplier to see if they have any suggestions before I try and rig up an extra support to hold the canvas out to the rim.

Another gripe I have with the Robbins top is the quality of the rear 'glass'. We did the roof install onto the frame indoors on some clean lino. I was generally pretty careful to have the tracing paper under it, but when you are flipping it back and forth you sometimes forget. I have a few decently noticable scratches in the middle of the 'glass' from it rubbing the lino under its own weight (no pressure). You will notice the quotes on glass because no proper glass product I have ever dealt with is that prone to damage.... it is supposed to be hard wearing.

In any case, after a week with the top stuck up I really enjoyed driving home topless the last 2 nights!!!

Or your brother just made it up... knows where to hit to make it hurt

Wow, looks amazing!

Very funny story too

White with a black roof always looks good! Nice work

Reminds me of this;


Your wheels look good too!

Idea..... take it! (Or something else boring worth what yours is) Who cares if you like it or not, just make sure it is mechanically sound and nice enough to sell quickly. Then they can take your very hard to sell car that needs work and you can sell a normal car instead that won't give you so many headaches.

I can't remember the exact, but it is bigger than that. They don't dentre properly on the MX5, been meaning to get some hub rings.

They are used, so it is possible that the previous owner has used them on a Celica and had hub rings pressed into the wheel itself? I know we have had wheels before that hub rings had accidentally got stuck in there from previous owners.

Somebody didn't read the description Solid line the whole way looks great on the NA, but looks wonky on NB because of the curves in front of the rear arch. Also, my planned side skirts will come up into that space and I don't want them to clash.

So the repairs are finally booked in..... first available booking was in December!!!! I was going to be heading overseas during that week so they managed to 'squeeze me in' the week before...

In the mean time I have been doing some photoshop mockups of what side stripes would look like on m car (I plan to get some net year). Don't forget that I have the white wheels now too, so it should tie in nicely I've been through a few iterations now but I will save you from the boring bits and just show you the most recent ones:



Background: because if the curves behind the door, if you put a straight line all the way to the rear arch it looks wonky in any photos. Also, I plan to get side skirts eventually that flick up at the end and would look funny on top of a side stripe, so I decided I needed to design one myself to finish on the door instead.

I had the idea of the flag type thing as another way to fade it out. It works well on some Porsches but I'm not feeling it on the MX5.... the door is a lot closer to the back wheel on our cars which is probably part of the difference. My top 3 of this lot would probably be 1,4,2. I think bringing the edge in allows me to not 'close' the top line and gives it a very clean look (when I had it going to the end of the door it looked very incomplete).

Thoughts welcome!

Went to a couple of car events in the last week, lots of MX5s... no Celicas though

I will be lowering the car this week (stuff waiting til December for the repairer ), and replacing the soft top next weekend.

Woooo, I have 16x7 RP01 on my MX5 right now!

Box.... new car......

Very nice

Haha, 52mm clock insert.... love it when companies plan ahead for you

So I'm a couple of updates behind here, to steal directly from my post on another forum;




So after that I took it back and the guy who did 'quality control' was a joke. In hindsight, I shouldn't have let him near my car at all but I guess I was just in shock so I didn't stop him. The marks in the paint were rubbed out with the inside of his t-shirt (without any cleaning or lubrication), he vacuumed the drivers footwell and kind-of cleaned that door (just a wipe with a wet rag I think), and he refused to do anything about the overspray residue inside the door because 'look mate, it just rubs off with my hand... nothing wrong here'.

On top of this, he also thought the repairs were fine and refused to book in any corrections unless they were forced to by the insurance company.

I got a call on Friday about the wheels too, they were finally back (conveniently after calling and asking questions on Wednesday.... its been a couple of weeks). However, they were pricks and said they couldn't find time to bolt them on the car until next week sometime, but I could come and pick them up and do it myself today. The shop was virtually empty when I got there - I have never seen a tire shop so quiet.

But they are on!!!



There were more marks on them now - I think the powdercoating must have been very soft.



I wish I took my proper camera with me - I just went out for a random drive - I wasn't expecting to end up somewhere good for taking photos

I also installed my automotive plus number plate bracket that I got for $15 delivered to my house from a local forum member a couple of weeks ago.

Before:





After:



No more screws sticking back into the bumper.... I already have a dent and horizontal depression from somebody hitting the number plate back into the bumper at some point. The new one is mounted from the bottom instead. Also, since I have a slimline number plate it lowers it a fair bit and shows off the nose of the car more - I like it



Also showing off my new number plate frame, since the repair centre lost my last one. Insurance should be picking up the bill, and I get a bonus rear one since they only sell sets! (I only had an outside frame on the rear before).



Also, my Robbins canvas soft top arrived last week. I pulled the end of it out of the box to check out the colour....... I like it





I've been completely out of action for the past 1-2 weeks with the flu, and this is my final semester of Engineering at uni so I am going to be crazy busy for a couple of months catching back up and finishing everything off, so I may be running outside with the rolls of sticky tape every time it rains for a little while yet, until I can put a weekend aside for the install.



GOOD NEWS! (10th September 2015 Update)

Faith in my insurance restored. I went to the Repairlink today to have my repairs assessed. They were very pleasant to deal with, and within seconds of looking at it the assessor agreed that it wasn't even close to a match.

This image probably gives you a better idea than the ones I originally posted;



The assessor wasn't impressed by the texture and when considering repairs he was worried about how high their cutoff line is.

I showed him the photos that I posted up here showing the general condition of the car when I picked it up and told him that I REALLY did not want my car going back to a SMART repair centre. He jumped in straight away and asked if I had a place in mind - no questions asked. I didn't have somewhere off the top of my head, so he recommended a place in Moorooka (BCM Body Repairs) that has contracts with Mazda Australia and they send all their tricky Mazda repairs there. He said if anybody was going to make it right it was them, and they gave 'fair and reasonable' quotes which was good enough for AAMI.

I also told him about them losing my number plate protectors and he just shook his head. He happily took my receipt and bank details and said I should be reimbursed in the next couple of days. I also said that I was a bit worried because I did not have hire car coverage - the initial repairs you can pay for your own hire car and lodge a claim with the insurance of the person who hit you directly, but I obviously couldn't do that now. He swithered for a second before saying he would organise a hire car free of charge when my car was ready to go in for the repairs!

He emailed me the details of the shop and I headed straight over for a quote. They were also pretty nice. It was a pretty experienced guy doing the quote - he also agreed that it was a poor job and that on top of what we noticed, it looked like a lot of the under guard plastics had clips going into nothing underneath (i.e. they put broken stuff back, just for show) and that he suspected they also damaged my IL Motorsport side markers and glued it in to hide it. He said that since the last job was blended into the door (just before the mirror, from my spying on the initial quote at SMART) they have already filled a lot of the dimples of the stone guard on the door. If we just fixed the guard and did the same thing the act of blending it into the door again would level out the stone guard to almost nothing and make the problem worse. So now instead of a simple quarter panel replacement the entire stone guard on that side of the car has to be stripped off and replaced. There are two upsides of this for me though; firstly I will have guaranteed consistency of the stone guard on that side of the car. Also, for about $100-200 extra out of pocket I can get that whole side of the car repainted which will mean no ugly blend marks in a few years when things start to fade and it will also get rid of the couple of door dings and the petrol drip mark on that side.

So after 3 trips to one repair centre, 1 to the assessment centre and another trip to an independent repairer we are finally getting somewhere!

I am pretty happy now that I am going to get a quality repair, with minimized additional disruption to my life. Perseverance is key.



PSA: SMART Repair Centres (Suncorp / AAMI Customers)
Everybody I have ever spoken to has had bad things to say about these centres, and you can obviously see the absolute carelessness they displayed towards my property (and me!) in their treatment of it and the quality of repairs. The body shop I went to this afternoon spends a lot of its time just fixing SMART repairs (as I walked in he said, 'ah, another typical SMART repair'). Upon investigating my vehicle and noting the many flaws in the repair he also remarked that this was one of the best SMART repairs that he has seen (that wasn't sarcastic). He pointed to a 12 month old Mazda 3 hatch behind us that had a door and guard replaced by a SMART centre and he was now carrying out $10k of repairs to make it right again.

But what can you do? I knew all of this before I went in for repairs but I wasn't given a choice. I investigated my PDS at the time and it basically said that you can get your own quotes and wait weeks for external assessment but they will still go to their cheap dodgy place for one too and take the cheapest quote. My assessor basically said that although it will seem like the world is stacked against you, and the people on the phone will try and make you go to SMART over and over again, it is still your choice. He said that no reasonable assessor that worked there would deny a 'fair and reasonable' quote from external shops. You may not get the exact one you want, but avoiding SMART and going to a reputable repairer was always an option if you pushed hard enough.

The other option of course is to get a decent insurance policy with clearly defined choice of repairers. This is easy for most people, but for a 21 year old like myself options can be limited. That said, I'm shopping around!

Yeah, it has never looked as low as it actually is, but you get a bit of the rally look with the spoiler and the car always looks really clean and well done. The fact that you always have nice photos also helps

Your car is one of the few that I've liked without side skirts..... But it looks even better now!!!

Wow its been a while since I read this thread. I'm caught up now - fantastic progress. It would be faster if you stopped when parts had been refurbished rather than rebuilding them to at least new standards, but that level of dedication is going to make this car truly a sight to behold when finished, and for many (many, many, many...) years to come.

And of course, congratulations on the dad news! Exciting times

Good luck, and I really hope that nothing gets in your way from finishing this!

Edit: Also, have you looked much into the new alarms yet? I was looking at doing a Viper PKE with remote start in my MX5 early next year.

..... but I like it

There is somebody in the UK I think that has recently made laser cut brackets (that he is now selling) to directly fit aftermarket (bi-xenon?) HID projector units into the JDM projector housings. It is apparently a bolt in procedure with the parts, and you get a better quality light output designed specifically for LHD.

So, I guess I owe you guys a bit of an explanation! Most of you will have seen around the place that I have taken a new direction.

So what happened?

I went crazy all-in with this car…. I had amassed thousands of dollars of parts and I was going for more (on top of buying a whole car in Japan to chop up, I was looking for a set of Evo 9 MR leather bucket seats, C-One CF hood etc on top of the huge selection of parts I had). Really, I needed somebody or some event to snap me out of it, and that came in the form of my friend (who was going to facilitate and probably do most of the engine swap with me) having to move house with no more garage. I had a small window (up until Easter) that we could still make it work, but with basically a blank cheque-book and 6 weeks of searching in Japan no suitable donor cars came through the auctions.

I did not see value in paying a shop to do a BEAMS swap (would be $2k+ labour), so I started to weigh up my options. There was nothing wrong with the current engine, it was still a nice car, but I did want a bit more. With the rare parts I had on order, plus the cost of the swap, plus the cost of painting the Celica when it was done, and the residual value of the car…. I had a lot of money, and a lot of options. I could have waited another ~12 months and continued with the original plan, but I was already getting itchy feet.

So I started selling off the swap parts, and other parts I had around the house or on the way from Japan. I did make sure I did install the spacers for a couple of months so that I could experience the ‘finished package’ and get some photos though (Unfortunately the exhaust was already gone before these pics).











My full exhaust system (hurricane headers, custom 2.25” piping and Sheepdog by PROF JDM muffler) lives on in JFXtreme007’s Celica, along with my coilovers, whiteline sway bar, Cusco 4pt under brace, spacers (he already had the same wheels), hood struts and C-One cooling panel. Tigawoods got my ORC Ogura lightweight JDM flywheel. A cool guy in Sydney (not sure if on 6GC though) got the C-One exhaust I was importing, somebody in Coffs Harbour bought the TRD quickshifter and TRD front strut bar. The person with the white ST204 that bought Ryan’s 205 hood bought my JDM side rain visors, TRD door strikers, Endworks cluster and aluminium door sills. Somebody who is getting a ST205 locally soon bought the Chronos and the JDM floor mats, and the Superturismos went to a random in Adelaide. Oh, and of course RabidTRD got the euro risers.

You can probably guess where this is going….. I was selling the Celica.

I actually bought a new car back in March (hence you will notice my personalised plates have been removed for most of the last photos, except where staged). However, I didn’t actually list the car for sale until late July because I was removing a lot of parts, and waiting until after my mid-year exams to do it. I left most of the cosmetic goodies on the car to enhance the sale; projectors, SSIII front and TRD rear splitters, SSIII grill and crystal indicators. The vinyl roof had to come off though, which was a MASSIVE PITA…. Took a good couple of days.

Here are the photos I used for the ad;

















And some interior shots after I took everything out…. Which I took so late I only sent them to one person, they never made it on the ad Also taken on request late one night, so I didn’t really get to clean it either.

















On Saturday the 29th of August 2015, I met the new owner and signed away my Celica.

Fear not, it is going to an enthusiast though. I sold the car to a young lad from Mackay, who currently owns a different 6th Gen Celica, but he liked the look of mine so he is trading up. He is still on his Learners permit, so this will be a nice car for him to finish learning in and then take on the world when he gets his full licence.

I haven’t yet told him about this thread and 6GC.Net, because I didn’t want to rain on the excitement of a new car purchase by showing off all the parts I had taken off and sold already. I did however have to have an awkward conversation when he sent me an email asking me if my Celica was the one doing skids in the review on Youtube (Richard On Cars Toyota Celica), which was my friend using my car for a few weeks when I was living in California in 2014

I am still in contact with him though, so when the time is right and he is finding his own way with the car I’ll point him in this direction.

So what about me?

Well I started shopping for a Mazda RX8 back in February – more than BEAMS power, leather / luxury interior, 6 speed manual, RWD + LSD, sporty looks but still pretty practical. It was pretty much perfect…… but then I drove a Miata.

It just felt like nothing I had ever experienced before – simple, tiny and AMAZING fun. It was the opposite of pretty much everything I was looking for – it was hideously impractical and it was only a tiny bit more powerful than the 5S (but less torque!)…. But I had to have one.

I did a lot of research into all of the different models available and the NB8B came out a clear winner for me. Entering my final year of university, I needed something that I knew would be reliable. I wanted a clean, fairly low kms car with good paint (NOT SILVER! ). The car was to spend most of its time commuting, so safety in the form of dual airbags and ABS were highly desirable.

So at the start of March I flew to Sydney to buy a late ’00 midnight blue NB8B model with the 6 speed manual. It was a single owner car with 65,200 kms!!!

1

2

3

4

The road with the Miata (MX5 here) hasn’t been exactly as smooth as I expected, but I am absolutely loving it and modding it like crazy. I am saving up for a couple of months in Europe at the end of the year now, but I hope to do some racing in it early next year.

Its already got a shorter rear dif, Torsen LSD, shoft shifter and new Tein Flex Z coilovers, plus some cosmetics.









Its been temporarily raised to deal with some body work (not my fault -.-), but this is how it is sitting now;



You can follow more progress on the MX5 in my off topic thread;
http://www.6gc.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=95671

I have ABSOLUTELY LOVED these past 3 and a half years with my Celica, and I can say with HUGE confidence that this is due to the amazing encouragement, support and inspiration hosted through 6GC.Net. I have made some amazing friends, met up with 6GC people interstate in Aus and internationally in California. I learned a lot from you all, I hope I have given my fair share in return, but most importantly had an amazing time.

This is likely the end of my Celica journey (maybe a ST205 could happen in a few years, but I'm not making any promises), but I hope to pop back every now and again to keep up to date with everything and let anybody who still cares know what is happening on my end.

Before my big post, I promised you pictures at the end of last year and never delivered!

From my teaser you should have noticed that I met up with Rentaspace (Ryan) from Sydney (we have met several times in real life when I have had to fly to Sydney, but I have always flown). With him and his girlfriend up in Queeensland on holidays it was only right that we met up and took some photos.

The first meet was accidental – I was about to head out for the afternoon and MarbleFlame (Ben) had been to my place a few minutes earlier to pick up my spare PROF JDM ST202 muffler (he is also from interstate, about 5 hours away). Ryan decided to swing past before our meet the next day, and Ben saw him driving past and pulled a U-Turn and followed him back to my house. And there you go, a mini 6GC meet was born!







Ryan’s girlfriend also had the life scared out of her when we noticed that she was standing about a foot in front of a giant (harmless) snake in the neighbours front yard



They next day we went on a Brisbane Celica Club cruise, organised in Ryan’s honour (the perks of running the club ). This is where Ryan swapped out the ST205 hood to a local member (the other white ST204 – this car is where a lot of my parts went to, but has since been sold).













Another day on and we went and did our photo-shoot. I thought we would head out into the industrial side of the city to get some interesting backdrops, but we didn’t end up finding anything suitable (and had some cops tail us for a bit too ), so we just found a random shopping centre.















And finally, a couple of random shots from when we drove out to Dalby to launch a weather balloon into the stratosphere with electronics we designed through the Electrical Engineering Student Society that I help run…. On the day we had 3 4WD light trucks, and a Toyota Landcruiser Prado carrying people around out-back…… therefore I decided that a lowered Celica would be the perfect lead retrieval vehicle! (some skids were had in the gravel )





Big post coming.....

Need to see the new pics!!!