Suki - DaveR's ongoing single turbo project

How did you make the seat delete? Cos that looks extremely cool!!

Is it properly functional? Doesnt wobble around with the coilovers at all?

Thanks! I certainly like it - the rear seats in a Supra are slightly less than useless really and I'm not running a taxi service anyway, hence why I went ahead and did it!

It doesn't wobble around or rattle or anything like that. In essence it's a piece of 5mm MDF cut to shape and covered in acoustic carpet, braced with a length of 50mm wide, 2mm thick stainless steel and bolted to the stock rear seat mounting points. Nice and rigid!

I can't take the credit for the idea, if I'm totally honest. I adapted the design slightly, but I used the guide in post 12 of this thread from this very site. I found it was necessary to bolt the stainless steel brace to the MDF for fitment as otherwise everything was too fiddly to assemble and then use the stock mounting bolts as they were designed rather than as "hooks" for the MDF (which is why mine has 4 bolts showing clearly), but otherwise an afternoon's work will see you with a very simple, smart seat delete.

Thats great dude well done makes it look ten times better in my opinion! Might have to start researching this seat delete business!

Yeah go for it. Most of the materials are readily available, the only 'X factor' I encountered was getting hold of the strip of stainless steel, but have a look around and I'm sure you'll be able to find somewhere that can sell you what you need.

Good luck and don't forget the pics!

No updates for a while - mainly due to the fact I've been working ridiculous hours recently (think 5AM to 10PM at least 6 days a week and you're in the ballpark... ) and haven't so much as unwrapped my car let alone drive her...

I replaced the - not surprisingly - completely flat battery the other day (for free, seeing as it was still under warranty by 3 days - result! ), but that's about it.

However... I'm now on leave for 3 weeks - - so the updates can continue. With any luck my DASH2 carbon pod will be ready sometime in the near future so I can get that all squared away. I also have an SRD engine bay box winging its way to me to cover up the ABS pump and I intend to spray the fuel tank cover and finally get around to creating a headlight air feed for track days. Today I'm off to Whifbitz to pick up a new oil catch tank, which will also serve as the journey to warm up the oil ready for a change. There's nothing actually wrong with my existing oil catch tank (For Sale thread to follow soon ), but I like the idea of filling the currently very empty-looking space between the inner wing and brake master cylinder and simultaneously clearing the clutter from IVO the air filter.

Anyway. Pics to follow!

Good luck on the air intake mate. A LOT of work goes into it. I'm still in the process of making mine. So far its about 15 hours and about £70, and I got the JSpec light for postage cost! My advice for it, is try and make it as simple as possible

Good luck on the air intake mate. A LOT of work goes into it. I'm still in the process of making mine. So far its about 15 hours and about £70, and I got the JSpec light for postage cost! My advice for it, is try and make it as simple as possible

Roger, will do! My plan is - I think - a fairly simple one anyway. Basically I want to cut the whole rear of the light leaving only the mounts, remove the insert and then cut an aperture into the lens with a Dremel. Add a touch of filler for neatness, some mesh to protect the engine and some paint to bring it all together and it should be job done. How hard can it be...

I've finally managed to have a "car day" today, which I've thoroughly enjoyed despite now having no skin left on my knuckles... but also

My trip to Whifbitz resulted in me leaving there with a bundle of shiny new carbon goodies as well as the planned-for catch tank and a slightly lighter wallet. Paul gave me a hand fitting some of it while I was there and I got the remainder fitted up when I got home. Pics - and less cryptic details ( ) - to follow shortly!

Some random "car at Whifbitz" shots:

Hi mate, ive just read through this entire thread and had no idea of the work thats gone in to this! That bay has changed so much it looks stunning. Done a good job on this very impressive results too

Thanks bud! More to come...

As promised, the first pic of the carbon goodness now adorning my car:

(Yes I know my interior needs a good clean... )

For anyone intending on purchasing a set of these (apparently this may well be the first set fitted to a car in the UK, based on Paul's sales records... ), unlike the stock sill guards which fix on with a series of clips, these carbon ones need to be stuck on. This is of course no problem as they're not exactly load bearing and you can't tell the difference once they're on anyway, but the mould has been taken - very accurately - off the top of the stock part to get the shape right, meaning that there's a gap between the underside of the trim and the car itself where the space taken up by the clips hasn't been accounted for. Again, if you are prepared for this it's not a problem - you need to find something to build up the underside so that it sits flush with the car and so that the adhesive - whatever you choose to use - can do its thing. Paul very kindly supplied multiple layers of strong exterior double-sided tape (the padded stuff you can use fo fit number plates) to build up the required size.

On further investigation I think this may not have worked as well as we'd first hoped. I'm going to re-address this today, probably with a thick bead of silicone adhesive under the "horizontal" part of the trim and a layer of the aforementioned tape on the "vertical" part. I think that makes sense...

Anyway, more carbon to follow...

As I said in a previous post, I wanted to fill the gap between the inner wing and the brake master cylinder so decided to buy one of Garage Whifbitz's oil catch tanks designed to do just that.

Having collected the parts, I discovered that there is a requirement to drill the bolt hole on the mounting bracket. In case anyone encounters a problem when attempting to do this, here's how I fitted mine:

1. Cover the mounting area with some masking tape.

2. Offer up the catch tank and draw around the mounting bracket with a sharp pencil (for accuracy).

3. Mark the location of the threaded bolt hole onto the masking tape. As you can see, when I did mine I realised that the hole wasn't suitably central on the bracket.

4. The previous discovery allowed me to offer up the catch tank for a second time to make sure everything still fitted with it moved forwards slightly. I then re-marked the tape accordingly.

5. Carefully remove the tape from the car and stick it to the top of the catch tank mounting bracket, ensuring the lines you drew earlier line up with the edges precisely.

6. For reference, the bolt has a 6mm thread (see step 8).

7. Drill a small (3mm) guide hole in the centre of the bolt hole marked on the bracket.

8. Drill a 6.5mm hole with the smaller hole as your guide. This being slightly larger than the bolt allows for a bit of "fudge factor" when it comes to fitting.

9. Remove all the tape, clean everything up and, once you've very carefully chased out the threads on the car (you can use a stock bolt, a 10mm spanner and some WD40 to do this just fine) bolt the catch tank into place. I needed to raise mine up slightly - hence the large washers you can just see underneath - to allow for my throttle cable to be routed with no kinks since it's the stock one running to an aftermarket plenum.

10. Fit the supplied silicone hose and freshly lubed-up K&N filter, sit back and admire!

As promised, pics of my other carbon trim pieces I picked up from Whifbitz yesterday. To go with the door sills I also got hold of a steering column shroud and a replacement FMIC slam panel.

Firstly the steering column shroud:

This doesn't look 100% yet simply because a) I haven't got around to cleaning my interior yet and b) I'm still waiting on my DASH2 pod to be made so my dials are currently sans-cover, looking a bit tatty. You get the idea though...

If anyone intends to fit one of these, by the way, be advised that you will need a pair of slightly longer self-tapping screws than the stock ones to hold the two pieces together.

I paired the FMIC slam panel with my alloy radiator one from SRD. I think it makes the front of the engine bay look more complete than it did before:

Happily, once the fixed mounting screw for the stock expansion tank had been cut off (any excuse to get the disc cutter out ), this part bolted on with no fuss whatsoever. I took the opportunity to refresh the bolts with some shiny allen head type ones too.

Since the weather finally cheared up a bit today as well, I took the opportunity to re-polish my cam covers and plenum. The winter had taken its toll, tarnish-wise, on these parts (less so the turbo compressor housing happily), particularly the cam covers. I thought this was going to be a five minute once over with some metal polish (I used T-Cut metal restorer, in case you were wondering...) but it turned out to be 2 hours of graft...

I'm not 100% happy with the results to be honest, but I think the only way to improve on what I achieved will be to get hold of some variety of machine-polisher (I did everything by hand earlier...). But what sort of Guardsman would I be if I couldn't make things at least a BIT shinier?!

Here's a work in progress shot showing everything stripped away to allow me access (spark plug cover, strut brace, throttle cable, catch tank plumbing; I removed the vac hoses for the brake servo and cam cover from the plenum when it came to polishing around those parts as well). You can see the tarnish on the turbo side compared with the much shinier intake side:

And everything polished as good as I'm likely to get it with reassembly started too:

So here's my engine bay as it looks right now :

(Better pic to follow when I remember to have more than just my phone with me... )

I'm waiting on the arrival of a clear cam pulley cover from America (thanks eBay! ) and one of SRD's engine bay boxes (in polished alloy) to cover the ABS pump, etc over the other side of the bay from my new catch tank. Hopefully that will help the symmetry somewhat.

I've just updated My Garage entry as well.

Looking good Dave, nice work on the polishing

Looking good Dave, nice work on the polishing

Thanks bud. She's getting there!

Additional: The eagle-eyed amongst you will have perhaps noticed that I removed the engine crane hooks during the polishing process. I was going to spray and refit them but actually I prefer the neater look of them just being removed. They're staying in the shed, then!

Having just arrived back from holiday and feeling rather more jet-lagged than I would like, I decided the best thing to do would be to try to stay awake for as long as possible, thereby restoring my body clock to normal UK timings. And what better way to do that than by tinkering with my car...?

Seeing as my shiny new polished SRD engine bay box was waiting for me when I got home, I thought I'd start there.

The kit came with everything that was needed foir installation, with the exception of a set of instructions... There's only one bracket, so it would seem really easy to fathom, but it turns out the ABS pump (onto which said bracket needs to be fixed) has more random threaded recesses than you may think! After a spot of measuring and a bit more offering up, I figured it out and thought it might be helpful to post the WIP pics. I'll copy this onto Lee's original thread too.

So...

Step 1. Remove stock 10mm bolt from top of ABS pump housing and fix 90-degree alloy bracket onto it using the supplied (longer) allen-head bolt with a crush washer.

Step 2. Offer up the engine bay box and loosely thread the supplied counter-sunk bolt / washers (order - bolt, metal washer, plastic washer - shown in pic) through the side into the threaded portion on the previously installed bracket.

Step 3. Using the third (larger) allen-headed bolt, attach the outer edge of the engine bay box onto the inner wing of the car. Tighten everything up once it's all in place.

Step 4. Give everything a final polish to remove your grubby finger prints and admire...

As you can see (most clearly in pic 2) I trimmed the forward lower edge of mine in blue silicone to match my engine bay.

I had been a tiny bit concerned that my visualisation would prove to be wrong and that having only one of these fitted would look odd, what with the lack of symmetry. Happily, I rather like it - there's enough going on over the other side of the engine bay with the polished oil catch tank & brake fluid reservoir cover and the turbo heat shield that everything ties together in a form-following-function kind of way, albeit a very shiny one! To be fair, ANYTHING is better than looking at the frankly hideous ABS pump.

There's more to come, but for now comments welcome as always.

Today's job has been to fit my new clear cam pulley cover from the nice folks over at Kinz Import on eBay to replace my open-fronted stock cover.

To make sure I wasn't going to be trying to fit a dodgy part (as, sadly, eBay is often known for... ), I removed my stock cover and tried a test fit. I was actually hugely impressed with the quality and fit of this part, despite the low (

As you can see, unlike the eBay listing, the cover came marked as GReddy. Even the box said GReddy. Do GReddy even make these? I'm not sure they do (especially for the price I paid...), but it looks quite smart so I'm happy enough!

Anyway. Seeing as the test fit was successful, I turned my attention to chopping the front off my stock spark plug cover, which started the process like this:

I even bought a Dremel especially for this purpose (as well as for some future polishing... ).

Initial Dremel-ing done:

A bit of tidying up, again with the Dremel:

And after a hand-finish with a file and some 240-grit wet and dry on a sanding block:

With the parts ready to slot together, I tried another test fit. My original plan was to get these two parts mated together as well as possible and then bond them into one using some glass fibre and filler (I'd always intended to spray the rear portion of the clear cover anyway to achieve the same visual effect that I created using the cut stock one), but actually I think it might be useful access-wise to have two separate parts. Plus, if I ever decide to change the spark plug cover for a billet or carbon one, I won't need to re-cut this one. Win-win...

As it goes, I think I did quite a good job for my first time with a Dremel:

Since I was happy with the fit, I prepared the spark plug cover for paint with some white spirit and re-sprayed the front in Plasti-Kote pacific blue:

Paint dry, I re-fitted the cover:

To be continued...

Continued...

With the stock spark plug cover completed, I could turn my attention to the tricky bit - spraying the rear portion of the clear cam pulley cover...

I started by giving the whole thing a thorough clean with some hot soapy water and allowing it all to dry. With that done I carefully rubbed down all the parts that were going to be sprayed with some 240-grit sand paper:

After wiping down with white spirit, I began masking off all the areas that are to remain clear starting with the inside to prevent any overspray ruining all my hard work:

Then I very carefully masked off the outside areas, making sure the edge lines were exactly where I wanted them:

The spraying commenced... First coat:

After three coats, the spraying was complete:

Aaaaaaaand the moment of truth as the masking tape came off:

For the first time EVER, I literally couldn't be happier with the job I've done with this! It must be all down to the masking tape I used (which I bought specifically for this job), as I usually do nothing differently apart from use cheap masking tape. To that end, the Duck Tape masking tape I used for this job can get a free plug!

Very carefully so as not to disturb my fresh (and frankly perfect! ) paintjob, I re-fitted the cam pulley cover to my car:

Pat on the back time!

So here's a pic of my newly up-to-date engine bay.

(iPhone so excuse the quality - better ones to come...)

There's more to do (a spot of detailing, some polishing, etc) but she's definitely improving ready for JapFest and the other shows this year.

Seeing as I've been making good progress with my engine bay box and cam pulley cover (still SO chuffed about that one!!) I thought I'd continue the motion and get some other jobs done as well.

First off was painting my fuel tank cover, which was looking a bit tired to say the least. In fact when I actually took it off I realised it was in a much sorrier state than I first thought... It was also full of 17 years worth of stones:

The visible portion looked like this:

I decided not to be too concerned with the finish and to not spray the inside of the cover at all because I reckon I'm going to need to replace this part in the relatively near future. I sanded it down with my drill and the appropriate attachment to remove most of the flaky stuff and then gave it a good wipe down with some white spirit:

A couple of coats of satin black Plasti-Kote later and it was looking MUCH smarter:

No pics of it fitted yet, but watch this space.

To anyone reading this who plans on doing the job themselves in the future, be advised that there are a total of 6 bolts holding the cover in place (as well as the plastic strip with push-fit plastic screws holding it onto the bumper), with two of them at the extreme rear underneath / inside the bumper. These are accessible with the bumper still in place, but they're a bit fiddly. Be warned...

I also took the opportunity while the rear of the car was jacked up to remove my rear wheels and give them a really good clean before treating them with AutoGlym wheel sealant. I also painted the sidewall lettering white again to match the fronts (I replaced the rear tyres over the winter since I originally painted all of the lettering and haven't had a chance to do this yet). I'd forgotten how mind-numbingly painstaking this job was...! I got there in the end though...

Before re-fitting the wheels, I gave my K-Sport brake calipers a thorough once over and applied some WaxOyl to the exposed portion of the brake line just before the banjo where it joins the brake pipe. I'd been advised to do so last year on my MOT (as in "advice" not "advisory"), not because they were particularly dangerous but just because they were looking like they might be if I wasn't careful. An ounce of prevention an' all that...

No WIP pics, but the end result (sans-tyre dressing, seeing as the paint is still wet) looks like this:

So far so good! Although I did skip lunch. I'm now quite peckish...

Looking good mate! Is she putting in an appearance at Bluewater on friday??

Looking good mate! Is she putting in an appearance at Bluewater on friday??

Possible... I start back at work on Saturday (great eh... ) so I'm undecided.

Possible... I start back at work on Saturday (great eh... ) so I'm undecided.

Do it!