Restoring a vx - Page 3

GasSavers_TomO · 03-03-2009, 09:44 PM

Thanks for the update! Just let me know if you would like a helping hand and I can come over.

hondaguy72 · 03-04-2009, 10:19 AM

I will take you up on your offer sometime!

suspendedhatch · 03-06-2009, 09:02 AM

I launch the springs by temporarily mounting them to the upper perches in the rear, sitting inside the hatch, and popping off the top nut. The spring shoots downward and you have the unibody shield between you and the possible loss of an arm.

I picked up some stock spring/struts from the junkyard on half-off day. They only charged me for the struts so they came out to $7.5 a piece! Unfortunately though one of the struts was blown and the other two don't seem to be damping very well (rebound extremely slow). So I may get some KYB GR2's or something.

But I'll have to find a spring compressor and not amputate an arm in the process...

hondaguy72 · 05-14-2009, 11:45 AM

Sorry for the lack of progress and pictures, but not too much has taken place. I've installed the fender and front cover for the trip to my body man. The newly installed O2 sensor is a perfect fit and the car is running like a top, at least around the neighborhood. Once fully warmed up the idle is a bit choppy, but I'm expecting that to clear up when I've run a few tanks of gas through the car.

hondaguy72 · 07-26-2009, 06:57 AM

Finally, the car has moved to my bodyman's shop. The car was placed on jack stands and the wheels are off to paint. The rear quarters are in tough shape and need to be replaced. We marked the quarters for cutting.

Here are both sides cut.

The passenger side inner lip was rusted too far to be useful, so it was trimmed and cleaned. A new inner lip needed to be fabricated. We cut some 20ga steel and bent a 1" by 1" L channel. Here I am forming the lip with a shrinker/stretcher.

The trailing arm bushings and upper control arms were in poor shape, so out go the old.
Here's a picture of the new control arms with the rear out.

My body man made short work of cleaning up the areas where the panels will meet the quarter. We used a pneumatic stepping tool to make a low ridge where the panels will fit. Here are the areas ready for panels.

The new metal will be mounted with a 3M product #08115 known as panel bond.

hondaguy72 · 07-26-2009, 07:01 AM

On the first ride out with the car the hood latch failed and allowed the hood to fly up, break the old windshield and ridge the roof. To take the ridge out I'm using a body spoon and hammer.

Since the incident I've installed a new hood latch so that never happens again. More shots to come of the body work in progress by next week end.

hondaguy72 · 08-16-2009, 06:06 PM

More pictures to come of the body progress. It's getting very close to being mint. A while back I had the wheels sandblasted. I've finally had the tires removed (which will be replaced with some LRR tires). After checking around for a good deal on powder coating I finally gave up. Either they were too expensive ($200 plus for the set) or three hours away round trip. I settled on the cheap way out, painting. It does not mean that the results are not good, though. I chose Duplicolor's wheel coating in stock silver. I was really torn between going with graphite or stock silver. Silver is what I chose, to stay with the original intent of the project. Here are my results.

Two of the wheels had pretty good size bends which I was able to straighten with a body hammer and dolly. No cracking was evident after the work. Even though the sandblasting took off most of the poor finish and road tar each wheel still took a good half hour of sanding and cleaning. The bead area on three were pitted pretty badly but sanding them took most of the pitting out. Total costs were; removing tires $20, sandblasting $80, sandpaper and acetone $6.50, primer and paint $25. The Duplicolor cans are quite large. I only used about 1 and a half for all wheels, inside and out.