Spac’s adventures in Magna

Sometime over the weekend, I cleaned up the spare grille and painted it.

The Mitsubishi logo was quite faded, so I tried sanding it back, looking for shiny plastic under the sun damaged surface… but didn’t find it.

I ended up spraying the diamons with clear coat.

It all worked out ok - definitely not show worthy, but a big improvement over what it looked like.

I made a bit of a mess with the sikaflex that I used to hold the badge in, which is probably the biggest defect, but it was a useful learning experience.

The tint is peeling.

I ran a sharp blade just inside the peeling section, removed the peeling bit and it actually seems a lot better.

And yes… I bought another Magna today…
3.0 TF wagon with a couple of months rego, and a dead clutch.

Yes, it’s a manual wagon!
I actually looked at this car at the end of last year, but it was all too hard just before the Alpine Rally. He was asking the same price as the scrappers were offering, so I kind of assumed that it had been scrapped.

Turns out that I was wrong: it went to some people who loved it and did a bunch of work to it, and only sold it when they bought a Ralliart Magna.
The next owner was happy with it until the clutch died. He advertised it for scrap value plus rego value which I was happy to pay.

It’s a reasonably tidy car. The LHR door is damaged and there’s some scrapes on the LHR quarter panel, but the red paint looks like it will polish up quite nicely.

Interior is very tidy, but does have just a whiff of old ciggy smell that I will have to get on top of.

I will get it fixed and transferred into my name, and then sell Blagna.

Got up earlyish this morning and started pulling it apart to see what had happened with the clutch.
It was early enough that I didn’t want to annoy the neighbours with the rattle gun, so was a bit slower than normal, but it all went well except for two dramas:

1. breaking one of the 10mm bolts that hold the longitudinal gearbox support to the aluminium front subframe.

2. releasing the bloody pull clutch. There’s a knack to releasing them, but the shredded clutch fibre material was in the way. What’s supposed to be a five minute task took half an hour and needed The Boy’s help.

Finding the clutch plate had ejected the fibre material was not a surprise (looked exactly the same as the shredded 2.4 Lancer clutch in the blue Mirage).

What was a surprise was that the flywheel had a huge crack in it - ran from the centre to the outside edge, and was about 2mm wide!

Not sure how it happened, but it’s pretty wild.

Then I spent ages degreasing the box, the engine bay and the back of the engine.

Into my pile of old Magna/380 clutches and flywheels.

I eventually concluded that the flywheels are all the same (3.0 vs 3.5 vs 3.8) and the Magna pressure plates are the same despite the difference in plate diameter.
I also concluded that only one of my used clutches is still serviceable…
I started pricing a new clutch and quickly found that the nearest Repco in Canberra had one in stock and it was also a good price.
It was still only 11:20am at this point, so I went and bought it.

It all went back together fine, although drilling out the broken bolt was a turd of a job. The helicoil went in fine, so that was good.

Yeah, it was a solid day’s work but I took it for a drive before dinner. Initial thoughts are that it is more pleasant to be in than the blue sedan.
The gearing suits the 3.0 engine better than the 3.5 - the 3.0 has less torque and is happier to rev, so where the gearing is low for the 3.5 and it constantly feels like it is a dog pulling on the leash.
The front struts rattle, so they will be replaced soon.

Took it to the coast to visit mum/attend a high school reunion. Went great, used a bit less than 8.5l/100km.

It doesn’t rev any less than the blue sedan, but the 3.0 with the standard exhaust doesn’t feel like it would hugely benefit from another gear.

Put a little bit of time into cleaning up the replacement LHR door that came with it. It has been resprayed and isn’t quite the right colour, but it did polish up well.

I am now being indecisive about whether the damaged original door or the NQR replacement will annoy me more…

Because I got sick of sanding and polishing the paint on the Mirage, I decided to spend some time file-finishing and sanding one of the wheels I bought for the red wagon.
Of course, I began with the most rashed one, so it looks like I did bugger all…

These are 17x8 ET40 (or 41?) which should tuck them into the guards just that bit more nicely than the other sets of 17x8s that I own.

I bought some metallic grey paint that is almost exactly the colour I want, but I didn’t realise that it is hammer-tone until I got it home… so the search goes on.

Not really sure where today went… seemed like a lot of work for minimal output, but whatever.

Finished sanding the second of the 17” wheels.

Did have a moment of inspiration where I realised that the flapper wheel in the hand drill was a quick and effective way to sand out the recesses for the wheel nuts.

Untouched, half done, finished…

And then there were two finished:

If you look closely, you can see that I did a bit of messing around with centre caps. Specifically, I cut out some circles of black vinyl.

I have ordered some small triple diamond stickers that (hopefully) will look ok on the black. If they don’t, then it’s easy to undo.
It did occur to me that maybe some Advan or Ralliart stickers might have been a better choice, but no big deal.

To avoid rubbing back another bloody wheel, I cleaned up and painted the grille that originally came on Stinky.

It came up well.

The win on the grille motivated me to sand back the third of the 17” wheels.