One Month (Un-tension Cable)

Today marks 31 days since I checked the car in for painting restoration. I forgot how an S2000 drives and I go to work by bus/taxi. That experience sucks for the most part.

Anyways, here's what happened since last post. I decided that the job done on the soft top is nowhere near what I expected from "the best customization shop" around, so I followed a friend's advice and returned it for a redo. It's good that I did, because I found out that one of my tension cables were broken.

Broken soft top tension cable

There are two such cables on an S2000 and each passes through the side of the soft top cloth, just above your window, and is supposed to hold the material tight to the frame. My options are now to either get a new cable, which, including shipping to my part of the world will cost me around $50 and two weeks, or to attempt repairing the one I have. The answer is obvious.

Step one: find a similar cable. Time: 4 hours. Money: $2.

Step two: find a guy who deals with steel and nag about your problem. He will then pry open the two metal pieces on each side of the cable, put the new cable, measured to be the same size as the old one and close the metal pieces back. Time: depends on your connections. Money: $5.

Open spring side cable holder thingy

The result:

Other good news is the airbag and seat belt have arrived.

...

One week later I picked up the reworked roof.

Brought it to the base and proceeded with a nice wash, using water and dish cleaner.

It turns out dish cleaner works pretty well on vynil soft tops.

Aside from a few imperfections with the pathches, I'd say this was a pretty good day for this roof.

Week 3 (The Lego Game)

The trunk lid is adjusted to form proper spacing on either sides.

Before/after of the trunk lid

Next the bumper to fender alignments.

After/before of gap adjustment on the bumper: right

After/before of gap adjustment on the bumper: left

It is now week 3 and it's time to deal with the horrors of left-rear fender. First order of business - reassemble the doors to provide for some level of guidance while bending back the damage.

Doors and fenders reassembled temporarily to provide additional references
while straightening

This is the level of "undo" required

Pre-straightened fender

After several good hours the fender is straightened to smooth body lines.

Fender after straightening

Then all the rust is sandblasted away

The Roof Job (Or How Not to Spend $1000 on a new Soft Top)

Since the roof was off the car and has always had a few tears and holes in it, it was very much the time for some repairs. A new soft top cloth costs nothing short of $880 plus shipping, so finding a good place to spend a few bucs on repair would definitely pay off.

Here are two pictures of the roof, prior to checking it in.

After 8 days I received the roof back from the shop that dealt with it. First impressions are mixed feelings, especially around the work on a right side tear, but I'm still waiting to see how it will look while installed.

Patched, sewn and glued rips

Two and a half weeks in (or when you realize in how deep a shit you are)

The week starts with some cleaning. You wouldn't believe how quickly a garage gets dirty while working with a sander.

About now would be a good time to do some inventory:
see what's missing and wrap stuff in plastic.

I've been avoiding this, but one's gotta do what one's got to do.

Removed rug and the stupid "carbon-style" airbag replacement

Renault seat belt on the driver's side. No wonder it never properly sat fastened.

The above picture deserves some comment. So, the guys who repaired messed up the car previously didn't bother much to get a Honda seat belt, at least, if not the original one.

The small, dark gray spots on this fender are the first signs of corrosion. 

The Stripping Off (Or When Stuff Got Real)

After two years of owning the car with a redone motor and a crappy body, I gathered enough bravery for a more or less complete body repair. After finding the right guy for the job (more about this in another post, perhaps), I took one last photo of Alessa (that's how my S2000 is named, by the way) and handed it over to the master.

The right guy is on the left

The next step involved saying good bye to the old paint, plaster and superfluous body parts.

This door must have been changed some time. Black paint is factory paint!

The biggest surprise showed itself up soon enough on the right-rear wing area

Superfluous stuff

More superfluous stuff

Cabrio indeed

Car minus rear bumper and rear crash bar, plus cat

The paint is sanded out until the bare metal is left

The process is not always easy though

These two have behaved like a couple of bitches. Very hard to get off.

But in the end...

Since I had nothing to do all these days, I took the crash bars out for a ride. The tow thread never worked on me and that needed to be fixed.

The longer one is on from rear

First, check the thread on the bars themselves. Check.

Then take care of the towing hook. Mine had bad thread so had to be re-threaded.
Yes - that is red hot chili metal.

Lathe machine in work

Aand, done!

Chassis

The first significant procedure I did was to measure the geometry of the frame and arms using primitive means. Luckily the frame did not show any detectable skewness (by means of measuring diagonals and sides) and all I had to replace at that point were the front arms. Old arms seem to have taken a beating on every occasion.

Measuring the span of the lower front wishbones

As expected: quite a difference of about 10 mm

The new arms came at around 250$ each and the left one took me quite a long time to grab. None of the stores seemed to have it.

This solved the issue with geometry on front and for the first time in years this picture was possible:

Correct camber, caster and toe on front. The caster difference used to be 2.5 degrees