Photos Unboxed: Inching Forward On The 86
With all this COVID 19 stuff, I’ve been going through all these photos recently, finally having time to sort them out and upload them on the site. One thing I’ve noticed is just how little time I have these days to do articles on the website.
When we are shooting the vlogs, I find myself taking less and fewer photos too as we are distracted at the moment. I’m glad I shot these various progress images which span about three months.
I’ve always loved photography; there’s something about the frozen image that sucks me in. The vlogs are a total contrast to the style of my photos, but I’m ok with that. I try to recreate the goofy energy that exists between all of us when we are doing this stuff in real life.
We had just recently sanded the arms, the axle and got the rest of the bits sandblasted. I chose not to get the stuff powder-coated as these items would be wear and tear, and I didn’t mind them getting a little beat up over time.
We used an Epoxy primer, the very same stuff we had used on the shell, the main reason for this was the fact we had a ton of it leftover from the car. A hard-wearing industrial black paint coated the axle, pedals and lower arms. It was giving all these parts a fresh coat of paint. The rusty misery is starting to disappear.
Bryan helped me strip down the brake callipers, and I prepared them for paint. We bought a new seal kit and sanded the pistons to try to get them into the best shape possible for the refresh,
In these photos, we had just picked up the new roof, which took quite a while to find. I was super relieved to source one and was very eager to see Barry swap it out. Its been almost two years since all this stuff went down and it’s nice to look back over these images, the nervous feelings are still very fresh!
While we were in turmoil with the Trueno, Bryan was putting fluids into his Charmant and getting her ready for the first drive. This car was in a much worse condition than my 86, so I used to use this as inspiration.
That look!
Because I’m going for a very minimal look with the engine bay, I decided to remove the battery tray; Flip agreed to help out as I was afraid to drill through the wheel well.
I always wondered what happened here in the Toyota plant; the floor panel is shorter too short and doesn’t line up with the interior quarter panel. Toyota added these little bits of metal to fill the gap, and they are a familiar spot on the 86 for rust.
This EK civic bonnet has been crucial to the 86 build. Over the last two and a half years, we’ve cut a ridiculous amount of pieces of it.
Looking back on these progress photos, it reminds you just how far we’ve come with the build. Bryan helped reassemble both callipers with fresh Toyota seals. Let’s hope they work when we the time comes.