techboy

I can tell from the pic it's nice and deep ... assuming a double deep? Mine is also double deep, but I have 3 cars inside and a "workshop" in what is essentially the other bay. I would really love to build a pole barn with a loft so all the parts can go into storage in vertical space and keep the garage "clean" more like yours, but I don't have the land to do it. We all have dreams I guess. For now I have to work with what I got and remind myself my first had a narrow single car garage that I couldn't open the drivers door all the way and now I have what I have.

Car looks great Prelude! I love the garage too. My garage is always a complete mess b/c I'm always building a motor, restoring a car, or something. Someday I'd love to just stop - clean everything up, and just have a clean, organized garage without parts all over the place.

I was so excited about these as well. What a bummer. Thanks though for sharing on here for everyone so we all know to be wary.

Picked up Direzza DZ102's from Tirerack for the fronts. Haven't decided what I'm doing on the rears yet.

I could have just slapped the starter back on the car, but I wanted to take some time and disassemble it and clean it up a bit and hit it with some fresh paint. Got it installed in the car.

Working on getting more things installed in the engine bay. Got the new battery tray in place. Made up my own union block for the battery connector. This car was missing the OEM connector. Mad it out of some laser cut plexiglas, a bolt and a nylon lock nut. Got the resurfaced exhaust manifold installed. Got the alternator installed, along with an AC delete bracket. Picked up a power steering pump rebuild kit from Gates and rebuilt the pump (I'm thinking I'll do a separate write-up on how to rebuild one of these someday). After the rebuild, got the pump installed on the car.

Here we go ... moment I've been waiting for. Picked up the wheels today. Let's pull the bags!! Needless to say, I'm pleased with the outcome. They did a great job.

While I'm back home getting this engine bay buttoned up, it's time to send the SHP wheels out and get them freshened up. The car came with 2 SHP's on the front when I bought it, but I had to track down 2 rears. I managed to track a set down, but all 4 need to be refinished. You can see the bend in the lip on this front wheel. Time to drop them off at a local wheel refinish shop. This particular shop actually machines a fraction of an inch off for a new factory finish. I'm choosing black over the OEM gunmetal for the insets. I have a friend from the board here, Project87, who also used this shop and had his wheels inset with black and I feel in love the first time I saw it, so I'm stealing the inspiration. They said it would only be a week or 2 till they'd be done. This is a shot of Project87's wheels from a recent show. Got all 4 in the truck.

There was one oversight on my part when I got this interior ... I could have just painted it black and called it a day, but, I really would like to switch back to the tan someday, so I didn't really want to do that. Was able to get my hands on a black set. Had to pull the drivers seat and the door sill again to get to the levers. It's held in by two 10mm with the JIS screw heads. I have a JIS screwdriver and the one still stripped trying to get it out, so I replaced them with standard 10mm bolt heads. Was a little bit of work for simple thing, but much better. 😁

I previously had a Trilogy fpr that wouldn't hold pressure. I took it apart and it looked fine, but it wouldn't hold. I ended getting a Spa Turbos fpr and it's been working great so far. I wouldn't be surprised if it's that. Do you have a stock one you could put back on?

I dont think I've ever read BaT comments before. I usually just drool over pics. Lol.

Several of us were watching that car on BaT. Pretty good pick up - it looked good in the pics. If you want more power there's a couple routes you can go. Convert the car over to MPI and Megasquirt has been very popular - however it can be tough to find the parts to do the conversion and does require some customization. If you want to just keep the stock setup you can do some research on MAF-T tuning. The other thing you can do is an engine swap if you're so inclined. However, before you do anything go over the car completely and do any routine maintenance that needs to be done. As I'm sure you are well aware, these cars are old, a rare bird, and have very little support (other than this community/other owners). So make sure the powerplant is ready to go before you start trying to make power. Welcome to (or back to) the club. Lot of great people and knowledge here.

So it took a couple of dates, but I finally got a couple of friends together to get this motor into it's new home. I'm so excited to get this ..... in here .... Here's what the car looks like right now: First let's get some motor mounts in place. Engine on the crane. Got the flywheel mounted back up. Transmission mounted up. I've used the "scoop" method a few times to hook the engine/trans into the car. It seems to work well for me. Here we go.... There she is ... now I'm starting to feel like I'm making progress. Here's a straight-on shot.

Next thing I'm going to tackle is something I've honestly been completely avoiding ... the inner fender liners. These things are in rough shape. They are covered in years of road grime and tons of overspray. I don't even know if I can make them look good again. But we're going to give it a shot. I'm going to go at it with a gasket scraper, some Purple Power and a still bristle brush. After a ton of work and time ... 1 done. Now tackle the other. All things considered, not too bad.

Now we can also get that freshly powder coated timing cover back on and swap out the oil pan for the new one. I was able to slip off the timing cover without removing the head and untiming the engine. Really excited about the blue. It's gonna look so good with the car. Now it's time for the new oil pan. New gasket first. Pan torqued down. Lastly, we'll get the water pump installed. We're all ready now to get this in the car.

I'm getting very close to the point where we can put the engine in the car for the first time. For those of you that have been following this build you know that I previously rebuilt the G54B in my Conquest and will be transplanting that engine into this car. I pulled the engine a while back and have it sitting on my stand. There's a few things I need to take care of though before I drop it in the Starion. First, I'm pretty sure I have a slight exhaust leak, so we're going to resurface the manifold. Removed the manifold. Here it is off. You can see where it was leaking. Some time on the belt sander ... needs more. There we go, that's much flatter. Gonna heat wrap it while it's off too.

That plug is notorious for leaking on these cars. If you get a small mirror and hold it by the firewall you can see the condition of yours. It's really hard to get a visual on otherwise.

At that price, it wouldn't take much to make that into a show worthy car. Undercarriage looks fantastic and a good degreaser and some touches in the engine bay and you'll be ready to roll. And the mileage

Good catch Tex!!

I would start by replacing the valve cover gasket and the half-moon on the back of the head. The VC gasket is pretty straight forward and you should be able to do that without too much trouble. The valve cover itself is only held on by the 2 large bolts in the middle of the cover. DO NOT over tighten them when you put the cover back down or you will crack it. Also, get a can of CRC brake clean and try to clean up all the residue oil in the places you are describing above. Then, monitor things from there. If you continue to see oil you know you have additional gaskets that are old and tired. If so, go to the oil pan gasket next. This one is also not too difficult to replace, however (a little hint) I find it MUCH easier to remove the pan if you undo the sway bar links so you can drop the sway bar out of the way. That way the pan can drop far enough to aviod the pickup tube.

While all this stuff has been going on, I've been waiting on my powder coater to wrap up a few things I dropped a little while back for a gunmetal grey spray. He called, it's done. So I picked it up. OIL PAN. BATTERY TRAY I also pulled my timing cover off my engine b/c years ago I had it powder coated wrinkle red when I didn't really have a vision for this particular restoration. Now that I'm into this and the car is blue, I wanted to tie a few engine components into the blue, so the red timing cover was not going to work. So, I had the cover stripped and coated in a blue.

While I was concentrating on the exhaust shields and hangers, I figured I'd spend a little bit of time on the muffler as well. I'm planning to run an aftermarket exhaust since most of the piping was in pretty sad shape, however, I want to retain the OEM look so I'm going to funnel it back into the stock muffler. Due to some rust issues, I had to track down 2 of these to make one and weld them together. Used some Mother's to polish up the tips. For now I hung it back under the car to get it out of the way.

I wanted to clean up all the exhaust hangers, brackets and shields as well. I just went over them with the wire wheel to get the dirt and grim off and then hit them with primer and a high-heat silver paint. I started with the hanger brackets. These are the exhaust heat shields that run the length of the car underneath. Now we can start installing things back under the car. All new hardware was used to reinstall.

Now it's time to get back to work on the engine bay. I felt like with all the work going into the engine bay, there were some other pieces in the bay that could really use a fresh coat of paint - like the cross member and surrounding parts. Sorry these pictures are so grainy. Most of these pics were taken pretty late at night in the garage cranking on this thing after work.

I'm not ready to put the full interior back in yet, but I figured I could at least get the carpet back into place. I took it outside for a good power wash and cleaning. This carpet isn't perfect, but it'll work for now. I may replace it someday with an aftermarket pre-molded one. There is a leaked red pen leak under the drivers seat. And there's a cigarette burn on the passenger seat floor. But for now, here it is back in place in the car all cleaned up. Something about having the carpet back in there just makes it look so much more finished and further along. Lol.