Dash Progress

I found a scrap of old automotive carpet at my parent's shop, Town and Country Campers. After a little vacuuming, it actually cleaned up OK. We're going to vinyl over the carpet, so who cares what the carpet looks like.
I had some spray adhesive in the garage, so it was used to glue the carpet onto the dash.

After getting the carpet on, it actually turned out OK. We decided to skip the vinyl and just leave it as carpet. Furry dash anyone?

We wired up an old toggle switch that was laying around to control the radiator fan.
Cleaning up the hatch prior to paint.

BBQ black paint going in the hatch. It looks much better than the OEM color.

The doors needed something, so we cut door panels out of scrap particle board. They will get painted black.

Painting the door edges.

We don't have time to watch paint dry, a heat gun speeds up the process.

Radiator bracket in place.

Z-bend in the bracket to clear the sway bar.

The Radiator is in!

It took a little work to figure out how to connect the civic radiator to the engine. We ended up using the old lower hose and the elbow that we cut off the old radiator as our new upper hose system.

The finished upper hoses. Lucky for us, the previous owner had two hose clamps on every hose connection, so we had plenty of clamps.

The lower hose set up, it just clears the motor mount. Hopefully it won't rub!

more dash progress

I spent some time cutting down the foam and sanding it. The cracks are filled in pretty well, now I need to find some scraps of something "soft" to hide some of the imperfections before we put down the scrap vinyl.

Dash and door pulls

Since the event requires that the car have a dashboard, we decided that the old, cracked dash needed to be cleaned up. Here are a couple before shots:

Since the edges were curled up, we trimmed them back, which makes it look it worse.

Great Stuff? We'll find out after it hardens. We'll trim it back and sand it down and recover the whole thing. In theory, this should be an improvement.

Anyone want a muffin top?

I had an old camping strap with a cracked plastic end on it. It was the perfect candidate for door pulls straps. The strap before:

The new door pull loops:

Pictures of our progress

After removing the stock radiator, we realized that we might need the tee that is in this elbow. Out comes the cut off wheel!

How many redheads does it take to put a civic radiator in an rx7?

A free 240sx fan fits our radiator perfectly. Scrap metal straps make good fan brackets.

No more heavy air pump on the engine...

No more radiator in the car!

2 months to go...

Another slow update on our slow progress… the steering rack is in, no more slop in the steering! We were able to drop a good bit of weight out of the car by removing the stock (HEAVY) exhaust, and a majority of the AC system. As you can imagine, the car is a bit loud without any exhaust. We’ll be fabbing up some sort of exhaust out of scrap parts, it probably won’t quiet the car down too much!

The radiator was leaking so we ordered up a new aluminum radiator, see pictures below. We mocked up the mounting brackets for the radiator out of some scrap steel and we’ll get those welded together this week. Once that is in, we’ll be able to drive the car again!

We also found the two mystery bolts that were keeping the dash from coming out of the car. With it removed, we will be able to hopefully smooth it out and cover the cracks caused by years of sun exposure.

We haven’t made too much visible progress and time is quickly becoming an issue… the event is only two months away!!!