Oddiish
10+ Year Contributor
- 42
- 0
- May 17, 2011
-
Oviedo,
Florida
First off, thanks for stopping by! I've been wanting to do one of these for some time, but never sat down to do one until now.
Keep in mind, this spans the course of about 2 years, and on the budget of a college student, so some updates may not be earthshatteringly huge
.
First off, the history of the car:
I purchased the car the summer after I graduated from HS, with the intent of making a nice quick daily driver, and getting my hands dirty on my first real "build".
Here's a pic of it, shortly after it was purchased, only thing done at this point were the wheels and a wash/wax.
A list of the mods on the car when it was purchased:
It was a bit of a mess to say the least,
Both the interior and exterior needed help, so the first real order of business was cleaning up the headlights that were clouded over using a 3M resto kit (awesome btw)
Next were the seats, the ripped gray leather just wasn't doing it for me, so my father and I recovered the seats ourselves using a seat covering kit I found on eBay actually!
Front seats:
Back seats: (terrible quality pic)
Some time went on, and for my birthday I unwrapped these two beauties to replace my now smoking T25 setup!
Brand new E3-16G!
and to replace the stock sidemount, CXracing FMIC kit!
I fabbed up a bracket and promptly mounted it all up:
Fit perfectly!
At this point, the car was running well and I had done what I could for the exterior for the time being, so I focused some attention on the interior. I pulled the carpet out, and dyed it black using the Rit dye method and it came out perfect! I also used a write up on this site to swap LED's into my gauge cluster, HVAC controls and dome lights which really updated the look of the entire interior
some pics:
I hit a dead spot in my progress about 1 year in, I was feeling lost on exactly how I was going to finish the car with my income, and lost some motivation. with only a couple of small updates to the build, I added a HD lip kit and painted my center section of my tails, and here are some pics:
^The paint on the center section of the tail looked better than the rest of the car's paint, a source of my lack of motivation, as I can be quite anal about the appearance of my car.
One day I discovered that my poorly fitting "sorta-fit" bumper cover was rubbing a hole in one of my IC pipes, so off to the scrap yard to pull a crash beam to cut up!
After some cutting and swearing at the slivers of fiberglass in my hands, my result:
(This was just before leaving the car to get body work done, it was requested to have a crash beam, or my guy refused to fit my new cover
)
Keep in mind, this spans the course of about 2 years, and on the budget of a college student, so some updates may not be earthshatteringly huge
.First off, the history of the car:
I purchased the car the summer after I graduated from HS, with the intent of making a nice quick daily driver, and getting my hands dirty on my first real "build".
Here's a pic of it, shortly after it was purchased, only thing done at this point were the wheels and a wash/wax.
A list of the mods on the car when it was purchased:
- TurboXS RFL BOV (vented)
- Painted FMIC core for looks (sidemount was still installed)
- 3g eclipse wheels with 4 different tires
- Totally blown Ebay coilovers
- aPexi N1 Turboback
It was a bit of a mess to say the least,
Both the interior and exterior needed help, so the first real order of business was cleaning up the headlights that were clouded over using a 3M resto kit (awesome btw)
Next were the seats, the ripped gray leather just wasn't doing it for me, so my father and I recovered the seats ourselves using a seat covering kit I found on eBay actually!
Front seats:
Back seats: (terrible quality pic)
Some time went on, and for my birthday I unwrapped these two beauties to replace my now smoking T25 setup!
Brand new E3-16G!
and to replace the stock sidemount, CXracing FMIC kit!
I fabbed up a bracket and promptly mounted it all up:
Fit perfectly!
At this point, the car was running well and I had done what I could for the exterior for the time being, so I focused some attention on the interior. I pulled the carpet out, and dyed it black using the Rit dye method and it came out perfect! I also used a write up on this site to swap LED's into my gauge cluster, HVAC controls and dome lights which really updated the look of the entire interior
some pics:
I hit a dead spot in my progress about 1 year in, I was feeling lost on exactly how I was going to finish the car with my income, and lost some motivation. with only a couple of small updates to the build, I added a HD lip kit and painted my center section of my tails, and here are some pics:
^The paint on the center section of the tail looked better than the rest of the car's paint, a source of my lack of motivation, as I can be quite anal about the appearance of my car.
One day I discovered that my poorly fitting "sorta-fit" bumper cover was rubbing a hole in one of my IC pipes, so off to the scrap yard to pull a crash beam to cut up!
After some cutting and swearing at the slivers of fiberglass in my hands, my result:
(This was just before leaving the car to get body work done, it was requested to have a crash beam, or my guy refused to fit my new cover
)
