Spac’s adventures in Magna

Spac · 2022-10-21T11:59:51+00:00

Today was spent on the maroon one, dodging the rain, and sometimes in the rain. Apart from the terrible paint, it is actually quite a nice car. Clutch master...

Spac

Chris
This was good advice, thanks!

I bought the Autoglym stuff purely because it was on special: $27 from Ripco rather than the usual $36.
Seemed to do what it promised on the box.

First go:

After the third go…

Obviously still needs more, but the bottle was running a bit low, and I want to see what it can do with the grinder sparks in the Lancer’s side window.

This is a lousy photo, but is intended to be compared to the photo from yesterday. One application of the iron remover, that I didn’t let work for long enough before I washed it off :

The stuff only goes purple when it is reacting, apparently. This shows how much contamination there was on the paint…

Chris

Looks like you're onto something there 😀

Ex850R

The Aussie brand one may be cheaper , its high power vinegar i believe but when its reacting on iron it is toxic , im highly sensitive to chemicals that are toxic these days so cant spray any shizz on anything without a P3 .
*must be a industrial version available for $60 a bloody gallon or summat!

Spac

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.

Spac

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.

Ex850R

Ozone machine cheap from AliEX?

Spac

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:

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

Wino

Good old Towgna

Spac

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. Image description

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. Image description
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.

Spac

Wheel progress.
Turns out that stock BMW centre caps fit, so that’s nice.
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Colour onto the wheels. Image description

Clear coat. I doubt that the single pack clear will hold up well, but it is worth a try. Image description

Looking pretty good… just need to do it all three more times.

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Major Ledfoot

What's the PCD and bore size of these Magna wheels?

Spac

Major Ledfoot

5x114.3. Standard centre bore is 67.1mm, not sure about these ones.

Spac

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.

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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…

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And then there were two finished:
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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.

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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.
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It came up well.

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The win on the grille motivated me to sand back the third of the 17” wheels.
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Ex850R

Could i leave two of my cars with you for a while!!???? It would be very satisfying to make them nice!!

Spac

And then there were three… Image description

But getting to four was a painful slog…
I had assumed that the 4th wheel was going to be the easiest because someone had already had a go at painting it with some crappy paint.

Turns out that it was decent paint very poorly applied, so it was awful to sand off.
So I bought aome paint stripper and reminded myself why I hate paint stripper so much. Image description

Apart from the mess, it took four goes to remove enough paint to be ready to sand back.
And then I still had to sand it back!

Got there in the end. Image description

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Side quest was to work out the replacement rear door. I was worried about the colour match, so I polished the front door and rear quarter so I was comparing apples with apples.

And I was right to worry - it’s terrible. Image description

If you look closely, the top section of the replacement door is the correct red (more orange visible) but the majority of it is a more purple shade of red. Image description

So that idea has been put on hold. The way forward is to respray the new door in the correct red and then fit it. The colour is close enough that any chips won’t be super obvious, the jambs are the right shade of red, so it still makes sense to use this door rather than one of my blue or green spares.

GreenGL

How's the roof paint on the blue Magna holding up?

The bonnet of my V70, and various parts of my red Toyota need doing due to failed clear, I'll probably take a similar approach to yours

Spac

GreenGL

So far, so good.

The car is overdue for some cosmetic maintenance (ie: wash and wax! 😁) but so far it is looking fine.

Spac

Finally got the wheels on the car.… tyres are RE003s that came as pair on the other two sets of 17” Magna wheels.

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Needs to be lower, but that can wait.

Dragged the crappy aftermarket E36 fire extinguisher bracket out of the cupboard, bent it slightly and made it into a Magna extinguisher bracket.
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Spac

Confused myself with clutches today.

First, non-confusing part is that I confirmed that a second generation RX7 (FC, aka Series4 & 5) turbo clutch plate fits a Magna box/clutch.

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So the gamble of buying a nearly new RX7 button plate paid off - it was less than 2/3rds of the cost of a new plate for a Magna.

Then… despite the 3.0 Magnas having 225mm clutches, the 3.0 pressure plate is actually designed for a 240mm driven plate. Image description

And despite the 3.5 clutch being described as 240mm, the spare 3.5 plate I had is 230mm?!
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Then onto my pile of old clutches…

Long story short, is that if I can find a source of the pucks and rivets, I’m feeling confident that I can make my own button plates.

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The star bit in the lower middle is the splined section from the worn out 230mm plate in the earlier photo. This can be riveted/bolted to a disc like the plate in the bottom left.

I’ve found a Chinese seller of the parts, but I assume they will want to sell me 10,000 at a time.

And after all that, Google spat up a good spec Lancer Evolution button clutch for about the same I paid for the standard clutch that went into the red wagon…
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All of the brain melting wasn’t worthless, because I can still use the knowledge to make something for the blue 2.4 Mirage.

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