scrap487

theres a pretty good chance I am wrong, but a geo tracker is differant from what you are thinking. I believe what you are thinking of is called a suzuki sidekick here and thats not what got tboned.. I dont know much about suzuki, but geo is owned by chevy or something along those lines.

hahahahahaha:clap:

that... is totally awesome

eh, I've never been near a pathfinder before, but I wish I had the center caps for these. I dont think they look all that good, but the offset and width of the rim is PERFECT.

hah... aftermarket and consumables(stuff that every car needs/goes through) dont count, now how much did ya REAALLY spend on making it go? I bought my car for $375, sat for 9 years before me, it ran and drove with 2 bad axles, a seriously fubar hitachi, no rear brakes and a leak. everything I did to it was optional cant beat 375

please do and then take pictures :-)

figuring out how to do the linkages is pretty tough, especially for my lifted rig, I dont think anyone has done it.

oh yes please do, in the offroad forum. I cant really slam cherokees cause i had one once and it was pretty awesome, and yeah I banged up my tierod quite a few times but it was fun. it was a pos but it was fun, your bro just wanted an excuse to come along :-p

yeah... i did that on purpose

ok, as you notice, the linkage goes into the transmission in 2 differant places, goes into a box at the rear, and then comes out and goes to the front of the transmission. engaging 4wd and hi/lo are completely differant actions, 4wd is engaged at the rear of the transmission, while the hi/lo reduction happens at the front of the tranny. all you have to do is disconnect the rod that goes to the front from where it comes out in back and fab up a seperate lever for hi/lo

those bushwacker flares on that jeep in the backround are ugly.... :-p

nice dude what all is going into it?

oh my god those cars are small...

my sentiments exactly. I took all that stuff off so I could get those vacuum manifolds out and just clear some of the clutter and I had the paint so I was like eh.. I got time to burn. I'm not sure I'm even going to paint my wagon any more but I had been thinking about just painting it flat black, OD or OD white/grey and black camo. Its hard not to attract a lot of attention with this thing no matter what color it is... flat/semi-gloss or a darker OD is our best bet.

not that far, I live pretty close to i84/205 and I'm over in orchards all the time visiting my granma. My advice is wait a little while before you start tearing you car apart for a lift, enjoy it for a while before it gets some more down time. Are you going to build a lift yourself? I built mine and I could probably help you with most of yours.

i'd try soaking it with something, like gas or kerosene or pb plater/penetrating fluid.

oh well I dunno. Anyways, MilesFox having more experiance and knowledge with all this kind of stuff, of course he can do things cheaper. But it DOES seem like you had a fair amount of bad luck, dont feel bad about your car. as for tinting, its really hard to do it and make it look good when you do it yourself, especially with the cheap tint and probably not having some of the tools to do it right. Its also time consuming. I dont know how much waterpumps and timing belts and all that stuff costs for subarus, but considering waterpumps typically cost around 40$, I have a hard time imagining the parts costing less than 100$ depending on all that misc. stuff, such as plugs, wires, rotor/cap, filters etc... if you're buying new/reman

I went through the same thing with my jeep, except in that case jeeps are peices of crap. And I didnt try to make it look nice either well hopefully things work out, you invested a bit in aftermarket stuff, where as if you had sold that and bought another car, you'd be going through the same thing tinting the windows, dealing with the exhaust at some point or another and tires and all that other crap if you had bought another car, it might have been slightly cheaper but who knows what kind of engine troubles you would have had to deal with. In your case it was just a matter of bad luck, not a bad investment. You should go back to the machine shop and cry about it cause it was their fault you shouldnt have to pay for that.

I didnt do any masking, aka "half assed" I took the intake manifold, alternator, alternator bracket, and thermostat housing off and painted individually. The only "masking" I did was covering up the holes in the alternator when I painted it so I wouldnt cause any problems. I did that yesterday when it was dry, I was putting stuff back together today and well, today it is raining and I dont have any cover. I figure once I get everything back together and hooked up on the car it will be hard to notice the paint on the block not being too good, besides it will get muddy soon enough.

yes

Its not going to be here till monday or tuesday, but I got bored and decided to clean things up a little bit, and paint the intake... I decided since I was doing that I might as well at least do a half rump roast job painting the block from inside the car to cover up the stains I couldnt get out of it. Also using almost brand new hardware for everything, and when I took things apart I managed to not break any bolt which is amazing because they were so corroded and gunked up(especially the intake manifold bolts). I still need to get some more hardware before I can bolt the alternator back on. So far all the emissions stuff is gone except for the pcv system. I still have yet to plug the EGR port on the head because i cant get the fitting off. If I still cant get it off when my weber gets here I will probably just clamp it shut and then weld it. Other things I have done to this since I broke down a week or so ago include: new distributor, new coil, new cap and rotor, new fuel pump and filters, most anything rubber/tubing whatever has been replaced or will be shortly. Pretty much all I have left to do other than install the weber kit is get new plugs and wires and tune everything up and I should be fairly happy. Oh yeah I need to research a little bit about ripping the computer and all its electronics out. anyways here are the pics: before(excuse the mess...): after: why my neighbors hate me:

you'll probably spend less money doing everything with steel, with aluminum blocks you'll need to find bolts that are long enough and those will get spendy, where as steel is quite a bit LESS expensive than aluminum and the cost of hardware will probably be less. I dont know about Oz, but you probably wont be needing welds n crap inspected. honestly its much easier with steel, although if you have any experiance casting you could probably make some pretty decent strut tops out of aluminum.

yeah.. dont shift untill 4-4.5k rpms, not only will it be a slug you also wont get as good a fuel economy as you could be. these cars get all their power in the 3.5-5k rpm range, meaning they also get all their efficiency at this range. sounds weird at first but shifting before 4k is worse for your engine because you will lug it down putting a load on it under 3 grand.

get any fender and then paint them. or repaint the whole car... I think except on beaters or cars that are built up to see abuse(like mine) mix and match, even if some stuff is carbon fiber, just looks real cheesy.

aluminum is way lighter than steel, it is considerably softer but I highly doubt that its structural strength is that much weaker than steel. But then again I only weld the crap together, I'm not a metalurgist.