Stang

Looks like fun Stewy. A few more from a drift prac a couple of weeks ago...

While Cameron was repairing and prepping the Cefiro ready for painting, he said that it had been partly resprayed previously, and the front right hand side of the car was a bit different in colour to the left. To make sure I was ok with blending it, he gave me a call and I headed over to the workshop for a quick look. Some of the difference between the sides is exacerbated by different lighting, but you could see that the left hand side was a creamier white than the right. The bonnet is obviously different again, being from another car altogether. I'd actually wanted to get some progress shots while the Ceffy was being painted, so it worked out well in the end that I went up there in the meantime. So after checking out the paint and taking these photos, I gave Cameron the go-ahead to respray the front end of the car. Coming up in Post #20; freshly resprayed hills run photos.

The next day we visited a few friends. A week after going in to Cameron's shop for the quote, it was time to drop off the Ceffy, and at the same time grab some daylight shots of his FB wagon. In the paint booth at the time was this cool old Ford Falcon van. In the main workshop was the FB wagon, which Cameron had just finished working on. With the stunning paintwork and chrome, when he parked it outside on the driveway, it made the Ceffy look rather cheap and plasticky in comparison. There's a little bit of a surprise under the bonnet; a much newer fuel-injected RB30 six cylinder engine, pillaged from a Holden VL Commodore. Coming up in Post #19: In the workshop.

Saw Kahli's R32.4 driving on Henley Beach Road about 12:30, sporting an expensive windscreen sticker.

Back in mid 2009, I shot one of Cameron's cars for Extreme magazine; a purple EK Holden with a supercharged V8 engine. A beautiful machine and goes quite nicely too with the blower strapped on. He bought a CD of 30 images from the feature shoot, and had one of them blown up on the wall in his office, which looked pretty cool. In the meantime, he had also been building up a very tidy Holden FB wagon, with a funky teal and white colour scheme, complete with matching interior upholstery. He was actually headed to a car club meeting a short drive away from my house, so a little later that night Sally and I headed over to West Lakes Mall to check it out. Couldn't really take any decent exterior shots at night, so here's one of the interior, but we made plans to get some half-decent photos at his workshop when I dropped off the Ceffy to have the bodywork done.

Thanks Luciano, it was about to get a bit cleaner as you'll see in the next few posts. I was still feeling quite good the day after the awesome Hahndorf hills run with Sally, so we headed up to Mullers Road Crash Repairs to get a quote from owner Cameron for cleaning up and respraying some panels on the Cefiro. These first few photos are from a GoPro HD Hero camera, which I had mounted on the windscreen, set to take photos every two seconds. You can see more information about the camera on their website here: http://gopro.com/ You can make cool time lapse video clips with it taking photos so often, but the drive wasn't particularly interesting compared to hills runs, so these are just a couple with trucks in them on the way up. Once we arrived at the workshop, I grabbed the D300 for some non-warped photos like you get from the GoPro, which as you can see in the above pictures, has a very wide field of view. Cameron came out to have a look around the Cefiro, checking out the various marks and paintwork, and gave me a good price to have it all cleaned up the following Monday.

Looks like you only just made it on there! Hate random electrical problems...

The Ceffy was kind of dirty again after the hills and freeway driving, so close to home I pulled into another BP for a quick happy wash. After not going for a hills run since April 2010, the feeling of satisfaction I had in finally being able to go for one was great. Coming up in Post #18; respray quote and random driving.

Cheers mate. After wandering around taking these photos, it was nearly 5 o'clock. We had been planning to pick up a few things from the Beerenberg strawberry farm on the way, and managed to just get there in time before they closed. With a few random presents for people, we headed back to the Hahndorf main street and the German Arms for dinner. Well for Sally anyway, I was just syringing water through my jejunostomy tube instead. Headed back down the freeway, I made the tough decision to take the old Eagle on the Hill road instead of the tunnels again. There are some really nice twisty roads which are much more entertaining to drive on, but you do miss out on the epic engine sounds in a tunnel.

They were still closed from ADGP weekend, probably go in tomorrow I think.

I went into Sleeka Spares a few weeks ago to pick up a HICAS lock bar kit, which includes the bits and pieces for blocking off the hydraulic lines. I'm not sure if it was meant for S13/Cefiro specifically, it was $140, I'm yet to install it though. I'm actually going there in a few minutes to pick up some A31 Jap novelty plates, will ask them about it for you and let you know later today.

Following the bonnet swap and after cleaning up greasy hands and changing clothes, Sally and I headed out in the Cefiro, planning on going up to the German Arms at Hahndorf. I felt more relaxed driving around with the car not standing out so much due to panda-spec panels. Getting up to Glen Osmond Road near the freeway, I pulled into a BP service station to fill the tank up with premium, which certainly hadn't gotten any cheaper since I was last driving regularly. After topping up the fuel tank, we headed up the freeway towards Hahndorf. The Heysen Tunnels are always a good spot to lower the windows, slow down and then give the car a bit of a boot, with the exhaust and turbo sounds loudly echoing off the tunnel walls. A little bit further on we passed a paddy wagon/ute full of cops which I thought was a bit unusual. That said, I don't live anywhere in the country where putting cops in a ute is necessary, so it probably isn't odd at all. Rolling through Hahndorf, the sun was getting pretty low in the sky, so I took a bit of a detour on a random winding road to get some shots of the car in decent light. Coming up to a t-junction, the street sign pointed to 'Pain Road', which was mildly amusing I guess. A little further up, Pain Road turned into gravel, so I stopped to take some photos of the Ceffy in the shade under some trees, with the golden sunlight in the background. It was so good to have such a nice backdrop for photos, as opposed to my garage or a Foodland car park.

We stood it up to dry in the sun for a little while, and then I supervised the transportation of the bonnet from the backyard to the garage. At some point a courier had dropped off my Ensure liquid feed supplies at the front door. With a ratchet at the ready, I watched as Sally and Todd carefully lowered the bonnet down onto the car. For some reason it looked like it wasn't fitting properly, which didn't make sense considering the bonnet was from another Cefiro, and I didn't see how they could be any different. But it was quite a way off actually being in the right spot. I spent a minute or two being confused, until looking more closely at the corners of the bonnet. I then realised that since the white bonnet came with hinges, it would probably work better if I removed the black bonnet's hinges from the car first. With that low-IQ moment out of the way, a couple of minutes with the ratchet had the white bonnet secured to the car. Despite being a cooler shade of white compared to the slightly creamy car, it was immediately a big improvement to the look of the Cefiro. After seeing it for so long with a black bonnet, it was great to have the car pretty much all the same colour. Not a perfect match, which was more apparent from some angles than others, but as far as blatantly sticking out in traffic went, the obviousness was dialed way down. I did manage to put a lot of greasy fingerprints on the previously clean bonnet though. From the right-hand side, the paint appeared to be more similar, although that was partially due to the different light I think. Feeling like I'd removed the target from my car with the white bonnet, and not having too bad a day health-wise, I decided it was a nice afternoon to go for our first hills run in a very, very long time. Coming up in Post #17; a hills run to Hahndorf.

While the bonnet was straight and free of dents and scratches, there was some gaffer's tape on each side, which I think was to stop it being scraped by ropes or tie-downs. It had gone hard being out in the open weather, so after a few marginally successful attempts at peeling the dry tape off by hand, we decided it needed some attacking with various cleaning and grime removal products. My arms are obviously not the strongest for tough cleaning, so my awesome girlfriend Sally started scrubbing away with some sponges, a toothbrush and a mix of Windex, Jif and lots of water. Judging by her comments, she was not particularly excited to be spending a sunny afternoon scrubbing a car bonnet in the backyard. Under my careful and expert supervision, she managed to get all the tape and gum completely off the bonnet, leaving it much tidier looking than before.

After seeing a couple of his drifting videos the next week... ...it reminded me how much I would love to get over there myself one day for some sliding. He's got the reverse entries down pretty well by the looks of it. So after hooking up a trailer to my parent's Commodore, I headed over to buy the bonnet and bring it home. I took photos of the load and trailer on the day, but unfortunately I seem to have neglected to actually copy those photos onto the computer at the time, so I only have pictures of the swapping process. I used what was likely an excessive number of ropes to make sure the bonnet was tied down and secure in the trailer, before carefully making my way back home again, keeping an eye on the trailer in the rear view mirror to make sure it was ok. Unhitching the trailer from the car, I pushed it to the back of the garage and spent a few minutes unraveling the maze of ropes. With some help from my girlfriend and younger brother, the white bonnet was moved into the backyard for some cleaning, followed by unbolting the black bonnet and putting it in the trailer.

I had been pondering for a while what to do about the black bonnet, and was thinking a respray would probably be best. I had looked around for a white bonnet, but Cefiro spare parts and panels can be hard to come by, so I wasn't having much luck. Clicking around facebook one afternoon, I saw that local drifter Christian Pickering actually had a white Cefiro bonnet up for grabs in a 'garage sale' photo album. He hasn't had the easiest time with his health either, fighting and beating cancer a few years back. He was still competing in drift competitions between bouts of chemotherapy and surgery, and even managed to place second in the 2007 Toyo Drift Australia Series. After a couple of quick messages, I organised to buy and pick the bonnet up from Nisswreck the next day, where it was sitting on a Cefiro front-cut. He was about to head off to Japan for some drifting at Ebisu, so reduced the price a little for a quick cash sale before the weekend.

Thanks Danny. As you may be able to tell by the wildly varying photo quality, some are taken with a point and shoot, and others with my good digital SLR gear. I had some piping that came with the HKS front mount when I bought the car; they used what they could, and fabricated the rest. Not sure what the kit was intended for originally. Yeah I'm trying to decide about more boost + Nisstune etc myself. Boostworx isn't the cheapest, but they do quality work and Shaun is good.