Kirk's Ride...

[Stunin_Stud]

I saw someone with your tail lights and they reded them out with red vinyl, it actualy looked cook with a silver car and gave the light a Carrera Gt look. 30 bucks for a roll if you want to experiment.

but Kirk
I wanted to ask you this earlier but I forgot. how did they match your paint? did you give them something or did you leave your car at the shop? I gave them my side vent and the paint matched but it was slighltly lighter than the actual car( no one notices it but me and it bugs me)

[Kirk]

Stud, thanks for the suggestion on the tail lights.

As for the paint... well I was going to do the bumper myself with a buddy's paint rig. I took the whole bumper to a shop to have the paint matched. They did a great job. But then when spraying the primer I found out that the paint equipment was not going to give me the quality of job that I wanted. So I broke down and took it to a body shop that used the same paint system as what I had purchased. They then used my materials to paint the car and to adjust the tone if necessary. They had the car on-hand for the match. They painted a part of the old front bumper and a section of the front fender to check the color match and then just cleaned the paint off when done. I'm not sure if they had to adjust the color or not, but the match came out pretty good. It's still not perfect and probably wouldn't be unless they blended it in with the surrounding panels. But it's good enough for me and I'm pretty discerning.

I think I'm mostly happy because I took the time to really discuss it with them ahead of time and make sure they understood fully what my standards were and what my expectations were. They then worked to do the job to those standards and I was happy. Whether with painting or managing people (I'm an engineering manager) I think that's half the battle towards getting good results - just making sure people understand what's expected of them when doing a job. Now that's not to say that they can't still screw it up, which may be what happened in your case. But if you've clearly spelled out your expectations ahead of time and they don't do it right, then that's when you say, "Nope, that's not good enough, do it again (at their cost of course)".

[Kirk]

I like shinny stuff. I think it comes from my days of owning a cruiser motorcycle and the chrome addiction that many cruiser riders fall into. So I've got some dabbles of chrome on my ride, like wheels with a polished lip, a chrome license plate surround, clear/chrome tail lights, and lots of chrome bolt covers inside the trunks.

So when I recently took the lower stress plate off my car to change the transmission oil I decided to clean it up a bit. Lots of bits and pieces of the suspension are aluminum which can polish up pretty nicely to a chrome-like shine. Well... here's what I ended up with. I know it will get dirty and won't last, but I don't care.... it's shinny.

Parts sitting in the sun:


Installed on the car:



Kirk

[blinkwatt]

Kirk what did you use to clean them? I have to install the Bristol bar and that stuff has to come off anyways,might as well clean them.

[Kirk]

Originally Posted by blinkwatt

Kirk what did you use to clean them? I have to install the Bristol bar and that stuff has to come off anyways,might as well clean them.

It looks like the underbody parts may have a waxy kind of undercoating. I thought it was totally unnecessary here in beautiful, sunny California. To get the majority off I used a razor blade and very carefully scrapped it off. Then I used some paint cleaner and a green scrubbie pad (for washing pots and pans) and scrubbed the rest of the stuff off. You have to be careful though as even the green pad can scratch the aluminum and fine scratches won't give you a good shine when you're done.

Kirk

[Franco]

Originally Posted by Kirk

I like shinny stuff. I think it comes from my days of owning a cruiser motorcycle and the chrome addiction that many cruiser riders fall into. So I've got some dabbles of chrome on my ride, like wheels with a polished lip, a chrome license plate surround, clear/chrome tail lights, and lots of chrome bolt covers inside the trunks.

So when I recently took the lower stress plate off my car to change the transmission oil I decided to clean it up a bit. Lots of bits and pieces of the suspension are aluminum which can polish up pretty nicely to a chrome-like shine. Well... here's what I ended up with. I know it will get dirty and won't last, but I don't care.... it's shinny.

Parts sitting in the sun:


Installed on the car:



Kirk

Hi Kirk, your car is starting to excite me more than your assistant
On a serious note did you think of clear coating those aluminum parts so they shine forever.
Love your ride

[Kirk]

Originally Posted by Franco

Hi Kirk, your car is starting to excite me more than your assistant
On a serious note did you think of clear coating those aluminum parts so they shine forever.
Love your ride

Thanks Franco! YES, I definitely thought about clear coating the aluminum parts. I'm going to see how long they last with just the waxy coating of Mother's Polish on them before I go that route. I garage my car and usually just drive it on Fridays and weekends. I also live in sunny California so the car never sees snow and seldom sees rain. So the parts may actually stay pretty nice for a long time without the clear coat. We'll see and if I need to paint them I will. That's an easy project. Thanks for the suggestion!

Kirk

[Kirk]

I've got one of the front coilovers in and will get the second done soon. What a royal PITA. Running remote reservoirs without quick disconnects is no fun, but do-able. It doesn't help that there is very limited info on the web. I'm waiting on upper spring seats for the rear, so those won't go in for a couple weeks or so.

After using a jig saw and several Dremel attachments I enlarged the hole above the front shock enough to allow the reservoir to pass through. Now it's mounted in the front trunk next to the battery. I'll clean up the install with the nice brackets to make it look better. The reservoir has a valve on it where you can adjust the nitrogen pressure between 150 to 250 psi. The nitrogen pushes on oil inside the reservoir that then creates oil pressure inside the shock. This is basically a way to increase the oil capacity of the shock without making the shock itself bigger and without increasing the mass of the moving shock. Pretty kewl...

Here's the reservoir mounted:



Here's the shock mounted. You can see the reservoir hose behind it that runs to the bottom of the shock. The lower helper spring keeps the main spring in place, even at the extremes of wheel movement. There's a bump stop under the dust shield. Gotta love those big Porsche/Brembo calipers too.



The camber plate is a Schnell piece that gave me TONS of front negative camber plus a solid mount at the top instead of flexible rubber.



Kirk

[kabel]

^awesome, they look even better installed. And yes Kirk's "assistant" is very nice indeed, but she is not a permanent installation on the car now is she?!