Stang

Nice, looks very clean. Looking forward to seeing it come together.

That does look pretty sweet.

While being somewhat stable in a way for a couple of months, at the end of September, my digestive system pretty much decided that it didn't want to have to go to the effort of moving food through my body. Obviously this led rather quickly to me being hospitalised again. And if I thought the previous hospital visit was pretty awful, it paled in comparison with the torturous 7 week hospital stay I was about to endure. Just as a warning, there are a few medical-ish photos below if you're sensitive to that sort of thing. With my upper digestive system basically closed for business, I had to have a naso-gastric feeding tube inserted into my stomach. while completely awake and alert. It was a pretty horrific experience, and it actually felt a lot worse than I imagined it would, so whatever you think it might be like, it's worse. It's hard to describe, but the sensation was like someone was coiling up a rope in my throat and all the way down to my stomach, and strangling me while I was gagging, choking, coughing and being unable to breathe. Both my girlfriend and my mum had to leave the room after the first 30 seconds of attempting the insertion. As you can see in these photos my girlfriend Sally took on her phone in early October, I'm not exactly the picture of health. So I went from having some nice wheels to drive in the way of owning the Cefiro, to being relegated to a hospital bed and wheelchair for a couple of months. I was around 63kg at the start of 2010, but by late October my weight had plummeted to 50kg. After spending weeks with the naso-gastric feeding tube rammed down my throat, the doctors decided the best long term option for me was to have a jejunostomy. Which essentially involves surgically implanting a feeding tube directly into the jejunum, which is below the stomach, as my stomach wasn't working at all really. About a week after the surgery and once I'd stabilised a bit, I was finally able to go home in late November. I really wasn't any better, but after the surgery there really wasn't much else they could do. The next few months I felt too sick and weak to do anything at all, besides lie in bed trying to make it through to the next day. It wasn't until February that I even took any more photos of the Ceffy, when one of my friends dropped round in his JZX100 Toyota Chaser. February 3rd, 2011. Checking out my hellaflush spiderwebs. March 7th, 2011. Gathering yet more dust, webs and associated plant debris. May 26th, 2011. By this point the whole car was coated in a layer of dirt and dust, peppered with some paw prints from nearby cats. I was also wondering if I would need some sort of winch to pull it free from all the cobwebs connecting the chassis to the ground. I managed to very slowly pick up some strength in the first few months of 2011. At the end of May, I was still extremely sick, but was able to contemplate being able to drive the Cefiro again, so I made a post on Performance Forums to ask about getting it running again. It hadn't even been started since that brief drive in September, so I wasn't sure how much I might need to do to get it back on the road. Coming up in Post #11; Bringing it back to life.

This post by far covers the least active and most unpleasant period of time I've owned the Cefiro. As I mentioned in the previous post, soon after the respray, my health problems got to the point where I was not really able to drive. In the middle of July, I got worse and was admitted to hospital for ten days, due to the nausea being so bad I couldn't eat or drink enough to get adequate nutrition or stay hydrated. Which is a lot less fun than it might sound, see this post for more details: http://carscameraschronicillness.blogspot.com/2011/06/my-story-hospital-2010-1.html I was still very unwell when I came home, so the Ceffy continued to sit in the garage, waiting for me to drive it again. The next couple of months consisted mostly of lying down and trying to eat a fairly marginal amount of food, and barely having the energy to sit up for more than a few minutes at a time. August 18th, 2010. I was missing being able to drive the Ceffy, so in early September I borrowed a battery charger from my Uncle Paul, and hooked it up for a couple of days to resuscitate the battery. As you can see in the photos, there were already a few spiders making the Cefiro their home. September 11th, 2010. So after giving the charger a couple of days to do its thing, I lowered myself into the driver's seat, with my Canon Powershot camera running video next to the exhaust. After not being driven properly for several months, I wasn't sure what to expect, or if it would even crank over and run properly after 6 weeks of sitting silently in the dust. Surprisingly, the engine came to life as soon as I turned the key, and settled into a smooth but high idle within 10 seconds or so. I let the engine warm up for a few minutes, and then slowly eased it out of the garage and onto the road. Just hearing it idling was nice, but it did feel good to actually drive it again. I was still rather weak at this point, and the clutch on the Ceffy is pretty heavy, so after gingerly driving it around the block a few times, I headed back home and nosed it back into the garage again. Just the exertion of that short drive took the rest of my spare energy, and I spent the rest of the day lying down trying to recover. While I was obviously very unwell, I thought getting the car running again was a step in the right direction towards recovery. Little did I know that I would not be well enough and able to drive it again until June 6th, 2011.

I'm not sure, I was really worn out after being at the workshop for a while taking photos, so didn't ask too many questions. I mainly just wanted to make sure it was running ok after only being started once between June 2010 and May 2011. Here's the readout from the dyno run, I'm not smart enough to know exactly what all the details mean...

Thanks, yeah pretty happy with it looking a lot cleaner compared to when I first bought it. Not perfect, but it's an old car. I do like 5 spokes, and had pondered Meisters as well...but I don't exactly have a lot of money to throw around. Not sure Drifteks would suit it. Not like it's a big rush to get everything at once anyways, tempting as it is. Wasn't using the cornering lights and thought it would look less busy if they were painted the same as the rest of the bar. Don't worry, I won't. I quite like the P1s really. Since I've only just recently recovered enough to start driving the Ceffy again and doing some mods, I've been getting a bit excited thinking about various options for appearance and power. I do like meshies on quite a few Jap cars I see. Stepped rims can look good, or a bit odd, depending on the car of course. At the moment it's about as low as I would want to go without beaching it on anything higher than a $2 coin, have already scraped on small speed bumps a couple of times. Kris' Cef does have an awesome stance, but cops here would probably shoot you in the face for that combo of rims and ride height. I'll keep looking around at pics of various wheels and stuff anyway. But may go for some more fasts rather than expensive rims. Making 139rwkw on standard boost and tune at the moment with FMIC and exhaust.

Love these rims! Work?

A couple of days after the hills run in previous post, I took the Ceffy to Seaton Crash Repairs to fix up the rear bumper and boot lid. Since it was pretty discoloured and burnt, I asked them to respray most of the rear bar, in addition to cutting out a neater square opening for the exhaust, and painting the boot white. After a few days, the car was a ready to go. As you'll see in the photos below, it looks a whole lot cleaner from behind compared to when I first bought it. Photos taken with a Canon Powershot A480. Stopped at a small carpark near home to snap a couple of shots in the sunlight. And back in the garage at home. Sadly, the Ceffy was to stay in the garage for a very long time soon after the respray, as I became too sick to drive for nearly a year.

Thanks, yeah I've been looking through their meshies for sale lately, I think my favourites are the VS-XX and Stitches so far, but open to suggestions. Still have the S2 grille to put on, which I reckon would look good with silver meshies. I should really take one of my P1s off to check the size and offset...

Looks like some slippery fun! Finally managed to take my freshly sprayed & polished Ceffy for a Gorge Road hills run on Friday, after being too sick to manage it for over a year.

Saw a blue Stag on Gorge Road this afternoon at about 3-4. Nice white R34 GTR at Park Tce/War Memorial Drive intersection at 6ish.

Unfortunately around 10 months of that time consists of the Ceffy sitting in the garage gathering cobwebs, with me too sick to drive.

Thanks Dan, I'm only up to May 2010 so far, much more still to come. I really like reading build threads and seeing cars gradually take shape. Or lose shape in the case of some drift cars.

After spending three weeks at home resting and recovering, I finally felt up to going for a drive in the hills. After dropping my girlfriend Sally off at the airport to visit her dad on Flinders Island mid-morning, I headed up to Gorge Road. This stretch of road is my favourite hills run route. Gorge Road has a great mix of twists and turns, in combination with some stunning scenery, and towering rock cliff walls along most of the way to Lobethal. I love going through there with the windows open in a nice sounding car, the exhaust and turbo sounds bouncing off the cliffs. Since I was mostly focused on enjoying the drive and getting some in-car video footage, I only brought my Canon Powershot A470 along and took these few photos just at the start of Gorge Road. I then set up the Powershot camera on a Manfrotto suction cup, attached to the inside of the back window. For such a basic setup, the footage and sound actually came out quite well which was nice. I was a bit concerned that having the windows down would just blast the audio with wind noise, but you can only hear it a few times. So here's a short clip I cobbled together of the drive up Gorge Road to Lobethal, and then back to town again on Adelaide-Lobethal Road. You can get a good idea of the impressive scenery I was talking about at the start of this post, and what the car sounds like with the new exhaust. Here's a Google map of the area around Lobethal. As you can see, there are plenty of awesome roads to choose from. http://maps.google.com.au/maps?q=Lobethal,+South+Australia&hl=en&sll=-34.940161,138.790498&sspn=0.014864,0.033023&t=h&z=13

After spending a few days resting at home, I felt a bit better, so I decided to get my Nikon Speedlight flash gear out to take some proper nicely lit photos of the Ceffy. It wasn't particularly clean, so I drove a few minutes down the road to Semaphore, and gave the car a quick wash in one of the bays. Photos taken with a Canon Powershot A470. After giving it a quick soap and rinse, I jumped back in the car and headed over to Port Adelaide. Given that I was about to shoot a white Falcon with a black bonnet for Street Fords magazine, I drove down to Hart's Mill, located just next to the Port River, for a bit of practice. It has a large area of gravel and bitumen nearby with no traffic, so it's a really good location, and has that nice industrial look, with a choice of old brick, stone or corrugated metal backgrounds. With the back end still looking pretty nasty, I just concentrated on a few little details, and getting the lighting, composition and angles right for a front quarter shot. These tend to be used for opening spreads in magazine features, as it gives a view of the angle most people generally look at a car from. Started off with a couple of detail shots. I like the random Japanese stickers you tend to find on most imports. All the photos were taken using a Nikon D300 digital SLR and Nikkor 85mm f/1.4D lens. To start with the front 3/4 photos, I took a few photos with just the natural light. It gives a different look compared to using flash, and is also good for getting a baseline exposure to work with for the three external Speedlight flash units. So after a few natural light photos, I got the three flashes out, set them up around the car, and started playing around with different angles and levels of light and exposure. When using the camera and flashes in manual mode, the general rule of thumb is that raising the shutter speed will make the general exposure darker, while dialing the aperture up and down will affect how bright the flashes are. That's not the best explanation of how it works, but it's all a matter of playing around with different settings until you like what you see. I think these photos were taken with the flashes set to half power. So below are a few photos with variations in shutter speeds and apertures. The flashes I used were all Nikon Speedlights; an SB900 and two SB600s. After varying levels of success with the Nikon CLS optical flash triggering, I bit the bullet a few months earlier and bought a set of Elinchrom Skyport wireless triggers. Not cheap, but they do reliably get the job done time after time, compared to the optical triggering, where it was very hit-and-miss unless you were close with a direct line of sight to a Speedlight flash. But combining charging the D300's battery, 12 AAs for the flashes, and the three Elinchrom Skyport receiver units, you need a lot of power points to charge everything up before a shoot. And that doesn't take into account charging spare/backup batteries, which is always a good idea. A few more detail shots to finish things off. At this point I hadn't yet heard how the new exhaust sounded from the outside, so I put my Canon Powershot A470 on the ground to take a short clip while I started the engine and gave it a few revs. At the time I was hoping to get out to some drift practices at Mallala, so I went to Nisswreck to pick up a couple of cheap stock R33 Skyline rims in my Civic. And then got some secondhand tyres fitted. The next week was pretty bad health-wise, so I spent quite a while trying to recover from the effort of getting out driving and taking photos. On the 12th I had a BMW to shoot for Hot 4s magazine. If you look closely, you can see the Cefiro in the reflection on the side of the BMW while I was shooting some rolling shots, with my friend/assistant Dean behind the wheel. The actual shot they used didn't have my car reflected in the paint obviously. Coming up in Post #7; photos and video from the first hills run.

This one is probably my current favourite...

Saw heaps of imports driving to Gepps Cross and back this afternoon in the rain. Noticeable standouts were a white JZX100 with plates 'NOM NOM' and red stripes on the boot, and a silver R33 with what looked like purple drifteks, and plates along the lines of RRB 033, both at Grand Junction/Port Road intersection.

Sorry that was a poor attempt at humour, I meant the tyres the shell is resting on...

Thanks. I was used to it being black after so long, but after making the white bonnet change on Monday, it looks so much better. Will look cleaner next week, taking it in for touch-up and respray next Monday. Taking photos of the crash repair shop owner's very cool RB30 powered FB Holden wagon as partial payment, so getting it all done for a very good price. Still trying to catch up in my build thread, but the front bar fins were trimmed to fit a FMIC a few weeks ago. Cooler and piping are sprayed matt black for subtlety. Have S2 chrome grille to fit as well. Liking the VS-XX & Stitches on the 31s, after looking around a bit they aren't cheap though! Not sure of the offset on my P1s...

90 degree camber. Hardcore.

Hmm ok, thanks. Jun emailed me a few photos after I asked on FB when he posted the rig shot on his page. Rear shot makes a nice desktop.

I'm not sure who owns this.

I'm actually considering this style of mesh rim...anyone know what they are? I like the BBS wheels but a decent set would probably cost more than the car.

I think I'm on the same page as you; I like the tough 5 spokes, but I'm also quite a fan of nice wire mesh wheels. Thanks, yeah I'd been wanting to change the bonnet pretty much since I bought the car, but with all the health problems wasn't able to do anything until recently. It's a cooler white colour so it doesn't quite match the slightly creamier paint, but I'm getting a few gouges and scratches on the front quarters and bumpers fixed up and resprayed soon anyway, including the black strips, so will just get the bonnet done at the same time, better than doing the black one. Have a contact through car magazine work to do it for a good price as he liked the photos I took of his car.