Time for an update, work has been quite slow on the car and I didn't get that much done over Christmas mainly due to the very poor weather.
In the last couple of weekends though I have managed to get a fair bit done.
Closeup of the PS cooler shows how badly rusted it had become:
Gearbox cooler bracket was pretty far gone as well:
The bumper support bar also showing corrosion:
So there has been a lot of time spent with the wire brush, drill, derusting solutions, acid etch primer and paint to get lots of stuff looking alright again and hopefully fine for another few years of service. The PS cooler I replaced with a good second hand item as I felt the original was too badly corroded.
As I am replacing the passenger wing, whilst I had it off I addressed any corrosion present and then painted and used a brushable seam sealer to hopefully limit further corrosion for a good while, to be fair there isn't anything more than a bit of surface rust but I felt it worth doing.
After a good while in an electrolysis bath and another bath of the Deox C the gearbox oil cooler bracket was looking much better but lots of the strength had left the part - I think the rust was holding most of it together, my brother in law is building a car basically from scratch and has become quite handy with the welder lately, so I had him weld a strengthening strip onto the bracket:
You can see here how much of the original was left:
The bracket was then painted with acid etch primer and then several coats of matt black to finish off:
Much better
I had a delivery from CheapToyotaParts of a few bits including my shiny new chargecooler radiator:
All the fins are straight
the same can't be said for my old radiator where at least 1/3 of the core's fins were compacted together from bugs, it will be interesting to see if there is any temperature improvement with the new radiator. Also of note is that the radiator does appear to be totally new including the end tanks, there was some suggestion it might be a recore that arrives but it does not appear to be.I also fitted some ducting to direct air from the bumper up into the air box, I have had this for a while but hadn't got round to fitting it hopefully this will make a slight improvement as before the OEM airbox was sucking air from the engine bay due to my having removed the resonator box a long while ago:
Finally I purchased some Nimbus heat shield material in order to try and makeup a nice looking heat shield for underneath the chargecooler. I have come to dislike the standard method of lagging with silver backed material as it looks nasty in my opinion and also usually starts to degrade with the heat over time and looks even worse. I used some cardboard templates and then got busy with the tin snips. I am not fully happy with it yet but I think its coming along and looks a bit smarter than my previous lagging effort. The material is also reputed to be a superior insulator so we will see what my chargecooler improvements yield shortly.
The top edge needs tidying up to make it neater and to try and achieve the OEMish look I am after.
This weekend I'm planning to get most of the rest of the car back together so another update soon.
