Before we can paint the engine compartment, we needed to layout where the hardess, cables & lines are going to be routed.
The fisrt thing in prepping te engine compartment for paint was to weld closed the small holes from the spot welds we drilled out. Then grind & sand those spot welds. then cleaning the compartment & hitting it with sanding paper & 3M pads to scuff the surface.
In the meantime we were also custom bending & connecting the hard lines for the P.S. rack.
Final preping for primer. We're going to paint the on the EOM front bulkhead & on both sides of the bulkhead cover.
The on Friday, just before we left, we shot the primer....
Right now we're shooting the color in the engine comartment.
We painted the insides of the frame rails Gloss Black & then masked them off & painted 2 color coats, 2 pearl coats & 2 clear coats.
Then removed the masking.
Let's see if we can see the Pearl with the camera in the sunlight
Ok, back to work
Putting black edge trim around the bulkhead cover.
Putting insulatin on the front bulkhead (before installing the bulkhead cover). Also routing some wires that will be hard to do with engine in car.
Front side of bulkhead cover ready to go on.
Install
As you may have noticed by now, the color theme for this car is Pearl White & Gloss black. We've removed all of the brake lines & wire brushed them & painted them gloss black. It's all in the detail. We'd be getting hate mail if we didn't.
Also, the chrome interior trim pieces came in from plater.
Damn, I can't help but wonder what all this "detail" is going to cost in the end.
You know, that's really the question. & it's a question on both sides of the equation.
For the owner, where do you draw the line?
You just painted a complete engine compartment, do you want everything in that compartment to look as good as you can? For example, the brake lines were in real good condition. They just had a little surface rust on the coils. Do you just put them in or do you wire brush & clean them & paint them?
For the builder, there are 2 questions, 1) If we don't clean & paint it, will the owner be mad when he sees it? or 2) If we clean & paint it, will the owner be upset that it raised the total cost?
These kinds of questions come up 50 or more times in each build. If we contacted the owner ecah time something like this came up, we'd spend as much time discussing it as we would spend doing it.
In this case, it was an easy choice for us because the fluid in the brake system was real bad & we wanted to clean out the insides of the lines anyway.
In this engine compartment, we had the same types of questions on the charcoal cannister & the fuel fill pipes. Do we leave them dirty or with a little surface rust or do we re-burb them?
The good thing about building a 2nd. car for someone like Troy & Lisa, is that we already know that Troy wants stuff done right.
Our biggest worry, is that we miss some detail or opt not to refurb some detail. Then a year after the car is done, The customer calls to point out that we spent all that money & you didn't refurb the dumafliggie up under muffler bearing bracket.
Ok guys Lisa has a question, should we have Archie paint the front compartment pearl white to match the engine compartment or just leave it stock (black). IMO I think it will look odd black
Edit: forgot to ask , Archie any pics with the engine in the car?
[This message has been edited by troyboy (edited 10-29-2013).]
Originally posted by troyboy: Edit: forgot to ask , Archie any pics with the engine in the car?
Yeah, I thought I sent you some pics but guess not.
Here we are putting the engine in the car for the last time.
Then we are working on making as many of the connections from the engine assembly to the chassis.
Here we are making up the AN lines & fittings to connect the fittings for the transmission cooling lines. We also did the same type of fittings for the fuel lines etc.
We wanted to get the car on the lift, to get to things up under the car, so we put the wheels on.
The stance is not too bad. The rear is adjustable with the coil overs we have on the car. And after the car settles down on the suspension, we may want to put on a set of Rodney's 1" lower ball joints. We'd like to drive it before we do that.
On the lift to continue assembly
Front suspension.
We painted the old trunk heatshield (with some high temp paint) & mounted it to the new trunk floor.
At this point we have all of the cooling system & pipes fabricated & connected. We also have all the new hardlines isolated & secured. We have the exhaust system installed. And everything else we can do under the car right now is completed.
Except for the engine wire harness, ECM & TCM all of the connections needed in the engine compartment are also done.
The pictures I took of a few of the above items, like the exhaust & cooling system connections, didn't record properly on my camera. So I'll have to take some more pics the next time we get the car up in the air.
We also have widened the front mount battery tray for the chrome Optima battery hold down & are installing it today.
We have installed the new headlights you bought.
And, we are finishing up the wiring for the tail lights.
Unfortunately Archie has informed me that the front compartment is already reassembled with the funky old black paint and at this point it would drive my budget up quite a bit to redo it in white. Any bets as what will happen before this car comes back to NY. . Unlike the choptop this is a one trip build and needs to be as compleat as possible before the trip home, good thing I have a auto storage unit near your shop . Sorry Archie but you should know me by now, so she can rest up in the storage unit when we complete phase one and redo the front compartment before we ship it home.
PS my motivation:
quote
Originally posted by Lady Lisa:
As far as the front compartment is concerned, my vote is WHITE.
[This message has been edited by troyboy (edited 11-01-2013).]
Troy...a perfectionist like myself! You know you are going to have to get the front painted first...or it will drive you crazy!
quote
Originally posted by troyboy:
Unfortunately Archie has informed me that the front compartment is already reassembled with the funky old black paint and at this point it would drive my budget up quite a bit to redo it in white. Any bets as what will happen before this car comes back to NY. . Unlike the choptop this is a one trip build and needs to be as compleat as possible before the trip home, good thing I have a auto storage unit near your shop . Sorry Archie but you should now me by now, so she can rest up in the storage unit when we complete phase one and redo the front compartment before we ship it home.
I'd almost completely forgotten about this build. I'm glad to see the light at the end of the tunnel, that is gonna be one suh-weet Enterra when it's all done.
Troy, glad whatever the situation was is resolved and you're back, I'd noticed some disappearing posts and was legitimately worried about you dude!
We've been putting the body together for the last time & working on wiring the door panel controls.
Someone had been asking about the mounting of the seats.
We had the drivers seat out to get ready for the carpeting & to remount the seat controls & here are a few pics of the seat mounting.
We had to put new mounting bosses on the floor.
Seat controls remounted to the front of the seat.
I think that I had already posted that we had swapped in a set of the dual pop up lights.
When we installed the hood we found the most unexpected thing.
The Enterra hood is a fiberglass outter shell & a fiberglass inner shell & uses Fiero headlight doors. When we installed the hood, we found that Enterra had made their hood with the headlight doors 1/2" closer together than stock Fiero headlight door.
We couldn't raise the headlights with the hood on. We had to modify the headlight mountings to move them inboard to where they didn't hit the hood as they were going up.
Why Enterra would make them a half inch closer together, I coldn't tell you.
We made a lever for it & mounted Lisa's new shift knob.
We drilled holes to bring the power mirror wire into the car & did a bunch of wiring work on the PW's, PDL's & Power Mirrors. The power mirror control was bad but we got another one in today. (we'll try is first of the week)
We also got the front compartment battery tray & chrome hold down all done.
And Then Guess What
Cleaning & scrubbing a couple of times over....
Cleaning & scuffing up the plastic parts
It looks like the girl is getting a new dress put on....... don't look under that skirt.
Great minds think alike, when I did mine, I also had to modify my front mount battery box to get the billet Optima hold down to fit. Nice quality product and gives the front compartment a little bling. -Jason
Great minds think alike, when I did mine, I also had to modify my front mount battery box to get the billet Optima hold down to fit. Nice quality product and gives the front compartment a little bling. -Jason
Nice , I like your hold down tray. Who is your Billet tray made by?
[This message has been edited by troyboy (edited 11-11-2013).]
Nice , I like your hold down tray. Who is your Billet tray made by?
Thanks! I bought it off from an ebay company called Wieland Custom Machine the user name is guyincognito2. They sells all types for different Optima bats. I wanted to get one from an off road company (their customer service sucks so I won't mention their name) that had a really cool logo, but their shipping price was more than the tray. -Jason
[This message has been edited by Fierofreak00 (edited 11-11-2013).]
........ 
Methinks you've set the bar too high. lol
.JPG)
