Adam's Clubman

[Adam_NAclubman]

... So it appears I managed to take a bunch of photos where the wheels pretty much completely blended in with the tyres and wheel wells... go me!

[Jeo]

Pics of the Hot4's article?

[bensale]

So they went from this



To this



Thanks to a can of flat black that has been sitting on top of my tumble dryer for a few years

They actually look really good in that flat black! I loved them before the brake dust ate into them and they were properly fluro orange but the black really suits them too.

Glad you like the tyres too

[Adam_NAclubman]

Pics of the Hot4's article?

It was Fast Fours August 2011, I don't have a scanner, I'd assume someone has scanned it though

[Steampunk]

AJ on this forum? really? He has something intelligent to say?

I only flicked through it at the library, I'll go check it out again.
Also.... I could have sworn the licence plate was [SA CLUBMAN] but my short term memory is pretty bad.

What happened to your body and paint? it looks like you drove through an acid car-wash and bounced the car off the walls inside. Has it always been like that?!

[Adam_NAclubman]

I let my cousin drive it in the hills one night in winter at 2am and he was fine when he was driving fast but then we were just going slowly down a road that flows nicely but has like a 3+ metre drop straight off on one side into fields and almost always has gravel on the corners so we never go quickly on that road. We were talking as we came to the last corner which was a left-hander, hit gravel on the corner as he was braking and it locked up, he was used to having ABS in his car (and using it a lot, we've set his RedStuff pads on fire a few times) and kept his foot on the brake so it just slid straight off the damp road and kind of up the grass/dirt bank on the high side and through a 5 strand wire fence, taking out a fencepost. Broke the drivers side mirror and aerial, ripped a gash in the front bar, cracked the top tank of the plastic radiator and scratched almost every panel. The old bloke that lived across the road from that corner came out and helped us get it back on the road and gave us the contact details for the bloke whose fence he'd taken out, he'd heard us hit the fence and said that he hadn't heard any high revving etc like they get with people thrashing on that road, so he was nice to us. Then I limped it home, didn't seem to lose any coolant when I checked it the next day.

Next morning we called the bloke with the fence and offered to go and fix it or at least pay for it but he said he'd already gone out and restrung it and put a new post in. Then we went and found a secondhand radiator, new motorbike mirrors (because we'd been talking about how funny it would look with them...) and we were going to get one of my cousin's friends to spray it on the cheap, so a few weeks later (I think) we rubbed it all back to get it ready for painting, which left some big bare spots on the front bar where paint had peeled off, and we took the opportunity to slap some filler onto a few shopping trolley dents etc. The next week my CLBMN-5 plates arrived finally, but it no longer had a Clubman badge on it (and still doesn't, really should get around to that...) aaaaaaaaand it never ended up getting painted. I got bored one day in winter a couple of years ago and grabbed a can of white paint that was sitting around and did the worst job you've ever seen "covering up" the filler and bare plastic areas, I think I really just made them worse.....

Then last year I put the nose under the back of my friend's Skyline, we were in the middle of a big bunched up line of sunday traffic in the Barossa a few kms from the town my mum lives in, and you come around a left hand corner thats built into a cutting, and down a long hill that has an old rail crossing halfway down which is a big bump, so I know that people always slow down for it. I saw everyone's brake lights on and figured they were braking lightly to slow down a little for the rail crossing, and only realised at the last moment that they had all jammed on their brakes as hard as they could to let some ducks cross the road, I jumped on the brakes, wiped off most of the minimal speed I'd been doing (probably only 50 or 60 in this 80 zone) and locked up when I'd gotten down to 20 or less but realised I only had a couple of metres left, and slid the last few metres into his car, and because mine was so low the nose went under his rear bumper, scratching the nosecone and putting a crease in my bonnet..... and ruptured the floor of the boot in his R31 GTS1 that he'd just had all the rust cut out of and partially resprayed. FML... he was only in front of me because I'd let him pass me a couple of kays before so that when I turned off to go to mums he wouldn't accidentally follow me. I shouldn't have assumed that everyone was just slowing for the rail crossing

I'll get it redone properly at some point but it doesn't really bug me and I figure that as soon as I spend a few grand getting it painted someone will hit it or scratch it or something anyway

[Steampunk]

so you're saying, it's been crashed a couple of times.

[SuperMazdaKart]

One day it'll end up a bit like Goto-sans AE86 eh?? It'd still have a charm of sorts

http://noriyaro.com/?p=3447

Just need a really hopped up engine.

[Duj]

Lol, Give that poor thing a new paint job already!

[Jace]

Lol, Give that poor thing a new paint job already!

It just needs a new set of wheels hey.

[NitroDann]

that sprinter is BOSS.

Maybe my mx5 will be that good one day.

Dann

[Adam_NAclubman]

I think the difference is that the Sprinter actually gets dríven

I put the MX5 in storage in 2013 because I bought my brother's EP3 Civic Type R after someone smashed a window and threw firelighters into it (I'm pretty sure it would have been one of his neighbours, with a pod filter and a basically straight-through exhaust it was ridiculously loud, if I lived near him I would have burnt it too) with the intention to put the driveline into a locally delivered 5 door EU1 (which I still have yet to do, probably should get around to it really...) and I needed space for that at home.

A year later dad asked if he could use the 5 for the 6 hour regularity relay at Mallala because he'd been asked to help make up numbers in one of the MX5 club's teams so I ordered some new 195/50/15 Achilles ATR Sports and got them fitted, then we got new plates and better quality bolts and fitted the BD bar properly, fiddled with the bonnet latch and the back edge of the front bar until everything sat properly again and generally got it looking presentable.




It looked really good out on the track in the first session, the ATR Sports definitely didn't look quite as grippy as some of the other MX5s which appeared to be on proper semis but it was cornering at decent speeds through turn 1, skating sideways a bit in the transition to turn 2 then hooking in to that, so it looked like it was running quite nicely... Until he came in early, the temperature gauge had shot right up, then we discovered that the top radiator hose had split at one end. I drove to Gawler and bought a new hose, then we fitted that and put it out again for a couple of gentle laps to see if the temperature would stabilise but it started overheating again, then we noticed that the heater hoses were looking pretty sketchy which was kind of disappointing, all the heater and radiator hoses were from a group buy on here for what were supposed to be decent hoses, and I'd fitted them when the engine went in so they'd only done maybe a thousand kms. Luckily one of the MX5 club guys was gracious enough to offer to tow it back to Adelaide.


A few weeks later I organised for .............. damn I've forgotten his name and his businesses name, but he was a really nice dude.... to pick it up and pull the head off, get that skimmed and rebuilt and get it running again. I had to cut the front lip off to get it onto his trailer, I didn't think the car was that low haha



The same week I had someone show interest in my SSR Mk2's so I sold them, pretty much all of it went towards the head. Since getting it back from there I've had my brother look after it (partially because he has a shed, and partially because I figured if he drove it he might want to buy it, no luck on that front, well, not enough for him to put money down, he did have a big grin the first time he drove it) and I've replaced all the hoses with genuine ones, and then I went through and replaced all the fuel hoses in the engine bay with new hose, but at some point the collet that injector 2 sits in seems to have broken and it started making a weird whooshing noise but there was no smell of fuel so it took a while to spot the problem. I've got another collet from my old engine but I also need to replace the injector because it looks like it wasn't sitting right after the collet broke and part of the green plastic at the tip is gone, I do have a bag of injectors that I think originally came with this motor but they look pretty grimy and I'm not sure that fitting one that could possibly have unknown flow issues is a good idea so I think its time to get some bigger injectors. Aside from the noise it was running perfectly, in fact I think the idle was the best its ever been, I'm guessing it was blowing pressurised intake air out past the injector when the valve was closed

[Adam_NAclubman]

And out of interests sake (and also because I've seen a build thread for the MX5 with a K20A/K24 thats been fitted longitudinally with a S2000 F20C manifold, hmmm ideas....) this is the Civic



Doesn't look too bad from there




Interior is trashed but the engine runs fine and it didn't do anything to the brakes/suspension/wheels or front panels

So I'm thinking I can use it all to make one of these



A little less boring, since its basically the same car as the EP3 just with more doors and a different shape hatch (and a horrible bargain basement interior, but I have ideas to fix that)



I was also tempted to put the driveline in either an Accord Euro (they did an Accord Euro R with essentially the same engine, but it would be horrible around town in something heavier given how high in the rev range peak torque is made) or a later FD1/2 Civic (Japanese market got a FD2R which is vastly better than the spaceship looking British Civic Type R they sold here) but the 5 door version of what I've got would allow me to use pretty much everything, so it makes more sense to me.

I'll get it done this year, I've just been holding off because I don't want to spend any of my house deposit

[fastfreddygassit]

Great to read your updates.
You have been missed.....and you have missed a few candidates for The Sidchrome Awards

[Adam_NAclubman]

Ooooooooooh, do tell I wonder whatever happened to Mike....

I pretty much stopped regularly visiting model-specific forums a couple of years ago when uni and work took up all my time and energy, prior to parking the MX5 up I'd barely dríven it for a couple of years, just an occasional run to top up the battery, and the Skyline goes weeks at a time without coming out of the garage too (actually since I had to go swap it around with the MX5 when I brought that home its now at my brother's and won't get touched until I have the 5 running again.

It was really nice to drive it back home as I literally hadn't dríven it for at least a year and a half, I'd been planning on selling it either as a whole package or pulling the turbo kit and coilovers etc out of it and selling them and the car as a standard Clubman again, so I'd avoided driving it because I knew that would put me off selling it.... and it has. It was only about a 30 min trip, a chunk of which was on the expressway and I tried to keep the revs and load on the engine as low as possible but the combination of the driving position, super direct steering and the delicate throw of the gearshift really are streets ahead of anything else I've dríven since. It especially makes my Skyline feel like a truck, the steering is so much more vague and it feels like the distance between first and second gear is about the entire distance that your arm could possibly move in that plane. Then I took a 90 degree left turn (with good visibility, no other vehicles/pedestrians around) probably 50% faster than I usually take it in my work car, not a silly speed and well under the limit, and it felt like it stayed pretty much flat and the tyres felt like they weren't bothered in the slightest... I miss getting that feeling regularly.

I want to build the Civic so I'll have something reliable and a bit more... officer friendly? so I can leave my current job and work car and look for something that actually uses my qualifications, and I could go buy the base car and pay someone to do it tomorrow if I really wanted but I also want to buy a house with a decent shed so I have the room to not only park my cars but also so I can put two Civics side by side and swap everything over, so I don't really want to touch what I've squirrelled away, which is why I wanted to move on the MX5... I could sell the Skyline I guess but its such a nice stock example it'd be hard to find another good one down the road. Its all too hard haha