Restoration Part 3!, All fixed. For now... Options

[enderswift]

Halloween 2009 some douche got beyond drunk and bashed into my parked celi before speeding off . I found the damage a few hours later and aside from an internal cuss-fest I kept my cool and was really relieved to see that there was no mechanical damage. Pictures say a thousand words so observe:


this picture is from when it first happened and doesn't really convey the magnitude of the damage, I seriously thought the rear suspension was boned. I'll post fresh pictures soon, they'll show my sad looking (but effective) attempt at rust proofing.


After saving every penny from my summer job while scouring the world for parts, paint, good advice, and someone to trust my celi to, I finally have everything in order


(thats $300 in paint supplies right there, the majority of which was the insanely expensive toyota 3l2. That taillight was damn near impossible to find for a reasonable price)

I just cant be happier right now. Ill finally be able to wax my celi without wondering if I'm an idiot for waxing a ruined exterior (I figured a dent isn't an excuse to neglect the whole paint job!) also, I'll finally be able to pull up somewhere or go on a date w/o cringing every time my drivers side is displayed

So now the next order of business is to take a few things apart before delivery to my body guy. The rear bumper has to be removed together with the taillight, mirror, power antenna, front head light, sideskirt, and window trim. I'm paranoid about having someone else work on my car so I insisted on being as involved as possible. In fact, If I had the time I would learn body work and fix this on my own. Too bad university has to be so time intensive while body work is a skill that comes with lots and lots of experience..Either way until I graduate I'd rather have someone fix this thing rather than count on my rustproofing to hold up.

I'll post pics of the tear down soon

This post has been edited by enderswift: Jun 2, 2011 - 8:34 PM

[enderswift]

another day another update. I never realized how tedious it is to put together a halfway decent progress thread, with the picture taking, editing, uploading, organizing, and writing. It really puts into perspective just how dedicated some of the members on here really are. but i digress...

After calling a bunch of junk yards and searching craigslist I finally gave up on finding a local celica to use as a parts car. There are a billion 5th gens roaming the streets but 6g's are few and far in between. So I turned to ebay for my passenger high beam for $86 shipped and got my radiator tie bar trim from autopartswarehouse.com for ~$31 shipped. Both parts should be in by the end of this week, just in time for me to pick up my celi.

My last paycheck was this past Friday and I was originally planning to use it to buy a couple final parts before I considered the celi complete. Among them were a set of rear rotors, parking brake shoes, a drum hardware kit, denso spark plug wires, fuel filter, and, after 3 years of owning the car, a key fob ^.^ Then the accident happened and i figured the check would go towards fixing everything.Lucky for me everything worked out in my favor so the original plans are on track! wooo!

Anyway, after running around and buying all of those parts I decided to make to most of my day off and prepare the celi for my body guy:



Obviously the first thing I had to do was get the car in the air and take the wheels off before I could take the front end apart. I figured this was good opportunity to show off my overspray removal efforts, since my body guy got quite a bit of paint onto the suspension and wheel well splash guards. I still have some work to do but its really really tedious. This time im going to make a point of stressing that I want as little overspray as possible, especially since the engine bay is involved. I'll even offer to mask things off.



With the car in the air I unbolted the bumper and took off the surprising amount of clips and hardware attached to it. Now I could see the true extent of the damage and it really isn't that bad. Only the upper part of the support was bent and it looks easy enough to pull out. Like I mentioned before the condenser almost took the radiator with it but I couldn't get a decent picture



Here's a shot showing how the condenser got damaged. I'm not sure if that vertical bar is absolutely necessary for the structural integrity of the radiator support, but i guess the toyota engineers wouldn't put it there for no reason.



as before I took the time to bag and label bolts and parts to ease reassembly. I tried to put myself in the body guys' shoes to figure out what would get in the way and what was needed to help in aligning the support properly. This guy is doing me a favor since his labor costs are way below what he usually charges so I want to make it easy on him... not to mention he had a triple bi-pass a few months ago!



These are the rotors I mentioned earlier. Nothing special but I figured I'd post a picture anyway. I know I love lots of pictures in progress threads




Finally this is my car as its site right now. The bumper is basically just hanging off of the fenders with a few zip ties holding it in place at the upper support. The point is to be able to drive the car over to the shop while still being super easy to take apart. Celi should go in for work tomorrow and I'll post paint progress pictures this time! (i think)

oh yea, no one knows anything about the AC question i asked earlier???