Car-ma, Shiny?

So Saturday decided to take care of some little stuff & look at the hachi roku. First off to finish bleeding the brakes. Some more kroil & pounding with deadblow mallet got the crusted on wheel loose. Here’s what the before and after looks like on one brake.

Pretty icky, and while I was at it, bleed the clutch. Equally icky! That done, moved the car out into the driveway (it started on its own! Or rather I should say its own battery but under my control, unlike the Obake FX) to wash off the accumulated grime of spending a week at sea. Oh, and here’s a tip for all vehicle owners, especially if you park outdoors a lot. Make it a habit to occasionally check inside of your fenders. You’ll be surprised what a rat nest you can have in there! And if you don’t take care of it and clean it out, it clogs the drainage and promotes rust. Have fun, you’ll never know what you’ll find in there. I don’t know how the heck this got in there! Thankfully that was about all the surprises in there. So after all this, I washed the car. Um, no miracles here, if anything I’d almost say it looked worse!

So I move the car back into the garage and start puttering around. I look for some of the easiest of the offending bits to take care of. There’s the cruise control. No one on Oahu really needs it, and this one doesn’t work anyway. And it’s kind of ugly looking like an afterthought. The actuator thingy is cobbed on here with a single bolt so I chopped what remaining connections there were & pulled it out. That was quite satisfying and I decided to call it a day.

Sunday: Today get off to a lazy start. It’s well into the afternoon by the time I go outside to look at the car again. This time I attack the ugly cable pulley doohicky for the throttle and cruise control. I’m sure this is causing much of the wierd throttle feel. Unfortunately, unhooking this, the throttle cable is much too short to go directly to the throttle body. I take out the cable from the cripled FX, but discover the firewall mounting bracket is totally different. Curses, looks like a trip to Toyota parts. But with that fiddly thing out of the way, I take out the battery and some other bits to get an easier view. Geeze, looks like oil filter change is going to be more of a pain on this car. I think the oil leak is power steering fluid. There’s goop covering wires & hoses in the vicinity, and I notice this engine doesn’t have the oil cooler hooked up so that elimantes that potential leak. So p/s hoses get added to the shopping list.

I’m not inspired to get any more greasy now, so I decide to experiment with the paint. I decide to try some Mothers aluminum polish on the headlight cover. I know it’s metal polish, but I’ve used it to buff out scratches on my parents cars and polish plastic lenses. It’s polishing compound, it ought to take off some of the oxidized paint. So I go at it with the Mother’s. Lo and behold, this time it almost is a miracle! Check this after three passes of polishing. It’s a bit of work, but it’s also kind of addicting to see something so dull and sad looking to become somewhat shiny! There’s hope yet to resurrect this paint into something not as embarassing. While doing this I take a close look at the paint. I do believe it has been repainted once, with same red. Whatever, I guess that means I can polish with vigor since the paint should be pretty thick. I may actually consider getting a power buffer/polisher. It took a good amount of work to get this far: