First jewel

Yeah, this is a bit strange coming from me. I rarely think about the beauty adders. The Subaru is the dead give away. However, for this car my opinion is exceptionally different. This toy is not an everyday car. It's unique. It's got too much "me" in it. So I put everything I like to see in cars into this creation.

Rule number one: the brake calipers have to be red. I tried to reason with my wife about this. She couldn't care less about calipers but I insisted. So she came up with "make them black" and "who looks at those anyways" answers. At that point, I figured out I was right and she was wrong and went with the obvious red. As if there could be any other choice.

I know it's March April now but I started this earlier. It was cold out there. The fingers get frozen quickly while holding metal tools or parts. Thankfully, it is not much effort to take the calipers off the front spindles. So here they are in my basement getting worm.

The only tedious part of the process is to get the calipers extremely clean. Otherwise the paint finish would not last. I tried some simple things first: degreaser and brake cleaners. While it's not entirely useless, it does not bring the calipers to the ready state. Some elbow greasing with a wire brush showed good signs of hope and the rotary tool came to mind. A set of various wire brushing bits and 30 min with the tool resulted in a very attractive results.

The shiny caliper has been cleaned compared to the untouched one on the right. Some time later the second one got the same treatment.

This is an almost ready state. I would only apply some spray cleaner right before laying paint. It should degrease as well as get the last dirt and dust off. I went with VHT products. The reasoning was simple: G2 paint is hard to get here in Canada, Duplicolor got some positive and not so positive reviews, VHT has shown good results. I also have to admit that I did see their advertisement at the Toronto Motorsport Park which did contribute to my decision. I also did use their product for exhaust on my Subaru, so I am not entirely new to the brand.

VHT offers the complete solution for caliper painting. Just read up their website http://www.vhtpaint.com/products/caliperpaint/. I did get their cleaner and paint. I skipped the primer and clear. I noticed that the product number on the clear is in the same pattern as the colours. That made me think that there's nothing really special about the clear but ... well clear. On the other hand, the primer might have been a good idea in the retrospect. I will definitely try to use it when i'll get to the rear calipers.

So one fine day the calipers came out of the basement and the spray of red paint was applied. The sun was shining and the calipers were magnificent.

As you can see the paint on the first coat did not quite cover the caliper uniformly. That's what made me think that primer might have been a must. Later, after 2 more coats the calipers were covered completely but not smoothly. The reason for that is that I suck at painting. On the bright side the paint smoothed out itself after about an hour and made me feel better. The next step would be to bake them. VHT requires their paint to be cured.

I had to stick them in the oven. To prevent any sort of chemicals ending up in my food later, I went for baking bags.

Next step is the oven

And they came out looking HOT but with some imperfections. I saw same brake fluid leak damage and some paint peeling off.

So there's more work to be done. I went back to clean up the spots that were in need of help and re-splayed the calipers again. I am not sure that VHT caliper cleaner is a good thing now. They are ready for the second trip to the oven now but would have to wait for the rears to be ready. I want to put them in together.

I guess this is to be continued ...

Warning: The following content may cause temporary speech impediment

This is somewhat special moment. I just got the first 4 boxes with Factory Five logo on them. Inside of those I found these:

And just to put it in perspective:

These are WIDE. In fact, when I pulled the front ones out of the box I've mistaken them for the rears. However, when the rears came out it all became clear. 

Here's an interesting thing about the wheels. They are actually drop shipped by the original manufacturer to the Factory Five customer. So, there's a shipping fee. The fee is usually high for customers in US but for Canadians it's extra high. For cases as such we have cbi usa. They will receive the package for you and allow you to pick it up some time after. A friend of mine was actually doing his run to pick up his parts and brought my wheels with him. Perfect timing. Many thanks to my buddy too.

Now all I need is the rest of the boxes and a trailer load. Which should be coming soon. :)

Santa got a new order

Christmas is a bit different for kids and adults. Kids get to write a letter to Santa, wake up on Christmas day and find the present under the tree. Where as I had to write a letter, provide the credit card and schedule a pick up date way past Christmas. But the heck with that! I am not complaining (the taxes are excepted). The order is in and the little elves at Factory Five are hard at work.

Well, there's not much else to report. We got snow, meaning we are well into the hibernation season for the project. I am planing on doing some minor prepare, clean and paint jobs for donor parts but with out the heater in the garage nothing exciting is down the stream.

April is the tentative time for the pick up of the kit. It takes Factory Five some time to put the kit together and also the Transportation Canada to approve the import. Also there's hope that the weather will be warmer.

For now: Happy New Year everybody!

The dusk of Mustang

It's getting really hard to tell it's a mustang at this point. Some people can't tell the generation of the mustang. Moreover, these are the part buyers, the enthusiast who know their mustangs. The car is light. In fact, it's stopped being a car. Now it's just a shell. I am actually glad that I went with a donor build. This way I got to play with Mustang too. Sure getting all the new and shiny parts is nice but different. Well, that's my opinion for now at least.

The next step is to send the Mustang left overs to the junk yard. That presents the first challenge. How do I get this thing out of my garage if it's missing wheels. I also exaggerated my strength. I pulled out my engine crane and hooked up the rear of the car. Then I when on to lift the front and no dice. The car is still heavy enough. The next challenge is finding somebody to take this shell. I called a couple of car disposal companies and none of those want to take the shell. Autowrekers would take it but at my expense. Some metal recyclers would take it but for free. So after a quick Kijiji search I found the right guy. He offered me $40 for the shell. :) Hell, it's more then nothing. As a bonus, he gave me some tips on how to get the car ready for the pick up.

My dad came up with a perfect solution for moving the car out problem. He sources some dolly wheels and a thick 3' x 6' plywood. We screwed a 2x4 down the center to strengthen the structure and attached the wheels at the corners. With the engine crane we lowered the car shell on our new dolly and carefully rolled it out the garage. I left the crane attached to take on some weight. I had no faith in the dolly.

And I cheated too, if you look closely you can spot the jack under one side. The car did not rest perfectly on the dolly so the jack kept the unsupported side up. So what do I know, the dolly held up and the car made it to the outside. I really like that crane so why not to use it at every chance.

And just like that, the dolly comes out and the plywood goes under. Time to call the scrap guy over but that for another day. That means I can take some trophy pics:

Once again I had to bust out my engine crane to move the shell over to the first garage stall. It would have been very difficult to load the car from where it was originally placed. I also did not want to get the driveway damaged by unnecessary dragging. The scrap guy was running late so it got very dark. I had nothing better to do so I ended up taking to may pictures. I can almost make a time-laps video.

He was pocking jokes at me saying I would start crying over this car and that's what all those pictures are for. He then came to a reasonable conclusion that I had to gather Facebook material. The guy was nice, friendly and cheap. He only gave me $30 after he realized that the car was too stripped down and he would not be able to make much money on it. Frankly, I just needed it gone. So long Mustang!

I did not get attached to that car at all since I never actually drove it. So even after owning one, I still don't know what Mustangs are like. :) Easy to take apart but that's all I learned. Well next steps are less applied. Now I need to wait for the Factory Five to post a special on the kits. I did miss Black Friday deal already. I suspect next one would be around Holidays. Time to cleanup garage ...

Fear this

See as a kid, I had an accident when I was playing with gasoline. I had a jerry can open and an open flame a garage. Guess what: I was blown back 3 metres and lost the skin on my face and most of my hair. That incident kind of thought me to respect fuel and fire. In fact, when I did my fuel pump upgrade on my Subaru I did that during the winter when it was -20 C outside. See, I read somewhere that fuel does not evaporate much at that temperature.

Oh well, getting on with it. I mentioned before that I could not get the fuel lines to "quick" disconnect. Previously, during the engine pull, I used a tin can and tin snips to cut out a peace of tin. That peace I would wrap around the fuel line and push it into the quick disconnect. It worked for the fuel rail. Here I was faced with 3 connections. Two at the inline fuel filter and one after the fuel pump. They just would not want to play with me.

Luckily, I know a buddy who has a set of those fuel line disconnect tools. I borrowed the tolls and disconnected the lines. All but the one past the fuel pump. I think there's enough dirt and dust in there that would not let me slide the tool inside. It's still November in Canada, so let's wait for the worm weather to come back to finish that off. There a few nice plastic mounts that hold the rails to the body. I took those off too. I may reuse them on the cobra. With the lines disconnected form both ends and mounts removed the lines simply fall on the floor.

I helped them to the shelf.

Fuel tank is the fun part. First I disassembled the filler neck and unhooked all the hoses around. Surprisingly there's no complexity to that. As a matter of fact, the filler neck simply slides into the grommet. The fuel tank is strapped in with two metal straps. Before undoing those make sure you support the tank some how. I used the wood and the jack but once the straps were loose the tank fell down from my support. No harm since everything was disconnected and there's a plastic protective cover. The only difficulty I faces was draining the tank. I did not spot any drain plugs. So I simply tilted the tank and poured fuel from the filler neck grommet. I had my dad hold the funnel and jerry can. Make sure to use some sort of filter if you are planning to use the fuel. There were some debris on the tank even after brushing it off and wiping it with a cloth. It is definitely a 2 men job. The tank with fuel is not light and is hard to aim at the funnel. I topped off my dad's car after we were done. That's it. The fuel system is off too.

For the next couple of days there was a strong smell of gas in my garage. Even with the fuel tank openings tied off with a plastic bags. I think it's from the fuel lines and some spills that I had. I hope the smell would go away after some time.

Live axle drops

As I've mentioned in previous post. I gave up on the brake lines and moved on to the rear end. To be 100% honest I gave fuel lines a crack too but those did not want to cooperate without the the proper disconnect tool. More on that to come later.

Rear axle is held in place by many bolts. I have previously taken out the springs and the main struts. But there are all the arms left in place and some other shock looking linkage. As with the rest of the jobs, I don't see any challenges. In fact, it was somewhat smooth. Get a plank of wood. Put the jack under the diff with wood in between. Jack it up to loosen the tension. Undo all the bolts on the arms at the unibody end. Some of the arms will simply come out others will need a bit of persuasion. In my case, one of the bushings got squeezed due to the deformation resulted from the accident. So that joint point required much more wiggling and and 2x2 persuasion but it did let go. In fact 2x2 fits nicely in between the body and the lateral arm and was very instrumental.

Here's the fun part. After all that wiggling and last arm disconnected the axle rolled down the jack. It did not fall and break anything but gave a clear indication how heavy it is. Truthfully, I was not expecting it to be that heavy. However, my jack was pulling a wheely at that moment. The fact that it ended up on the jack actually worked out well. I simply pulled the axle out on the jack. After my back refused to lift the axle. I got my engine crane out and strapped the axle in. Voilà!

That's the last major job completed. Next one up is the fuel system.

Small thing but took long time

It is a bit hard to justify removing wiring harness as a precursor to rear end job. However, hand brake removal makes more sense. At least so at first. Frankly, the hand brake only has 2 cable connection and wiring harness has 2 ABS sensors ;). But who cares, I am here trying to postpone the heavy lifting of the rear axle. So hand brake comes first.

The hand brake is a no-brainer. Undo the handle nuts. Unhook the T connector. Fish the cable through the hole and put the thing on the shelf. Done! Well, there's still those two cables going from T connector to the actual calipers. Again, unhook the cables at the caliper end. Undo a couple of screws that hold the mounts to the unibody. Fish the cables out of the body pockets. And you should be almost done. The tricky part is that last bracket. You see, the other ends of the cables are snapped into a bracket that is welded to the unibody above the drive-shaft. The cables have a funny clip that holds them in the bracket. The clip is round with 3 barbs evenly spaced around. The challenge is to get all 3 barbs squeezed and push the clip out form the bracket. Due to the location of the bracket there's not much visibility of all 3 barbs. I was able to press at most two of them but one was always left out. The fact that the two ends are next to each other just reminded that there's twice as much frustration. I even used my creativity and strapped a hose clamp around the barbs but the clamp was not strong enough to squeeze the barbs too. So after a short while I gave up and decided that I need more "POWAA"!

Yep, I took the grinder to it. It did not help at all. So I had the bracket hanging on the cables. I could not see all the barbs but still did not lucky freeing the cables out. In fact, I gave up and moved on to the axle that day.

I came back to take the cables out about a week later. It's still in Canada and still November. But fear not because I got this:

I found I had that from long time ago stuffed with other junk I have never unpacked after the move. It's obvious that heater did nothing but thankfully we were still getting around 10 C degrees out here. In fact, the temperatures were starting to drop off and that motivated me to finish the job.

This time however, I sought advise from community. I can't remember the exact forum but it's out there. And here's the trick that makes the impossible possible.

And just like that the bracket let go of the cables.

See no need to cut and break stuff. Once again I've got frustrated, done some stupid things and solved nothing. In the retrospect, it did feel nice taking a grinder to the car. :)