Alright, so here we go. Awhile back I came across this 96 Eclipse GST Spyder, the guy was asking 1000$, but it had a few small issues. The car overheated on long drives, had the typical oxidized paint and just like most DSMs was neglected on maintenance and needed love. He was only about 50 minutes from me so I decided to drive up and take a look. After a short test drive, finding a few other issues like a rear quarter window that seemed off track, some rust in the spare trunk area, top pulling away in the rear and a tie rod issue, I talked him down to 400$. I pulled the thermostat, jumped in the car and about three hours later barely made it into my driveway.

The good?
The car is completely stock...nothing on this car has been touched aside from the aftermarket radio and speakers.
Very minimal rust. Small finger tip size spot on driver side strut tower, surface rust on nuts and bolts from sitting with a leaking top and the trunk area looks...salvageable? Rockers are mint, towers are clean aside from that one spot, no rust in wells or under the car.
Body is pretty much dent and ding free, aside from oxidizing / fading paint this car is remarkably clean on the outside.
Wiring / mechanical hasn't been touched or chopped
Top works!

The bad?
Interior is soaked from leaking top...literally standing water in the rear floor boards
Brakes
Engine / bay needs to be pulled and gone through

Goals for the car?
Learn how to weld, potentially learning to make my own exhaust and body work for the trunk area
Good cheap car to try my hand at rebuilding the engine myself aside from machine work assuming things are in spec
OEM + build 350/450 hp keeping the exterior stock, mild bottom end, build head and solid brakes and suspension for enjoyable back road driving
Long term goal is to potentially autocross the car?

Alright, if you made it this far kudos to you good sir/ma'am. Ill shut up and post some pictures. I need to get it out and get better shots for the future. This thing is filthy and this is all I have for right now.

Got outside and gave it a quick bath and blew out all the little helicopter thingys that were EVERYWHERE. Its not perfect but I got most of the filth off, even though it still "looks" dirty because of the paint. I wanted to pull out a little bit of the interior so that it could start to dry out the standing water from the leaking top. I do have to say working on the interior of a Spyder is much much easier with having the ability to just remove the top. I need to take more pictures...again.





For some reason this picture is sideways but I just had to post it. Came out one night and found this little plant growing inside the car. Hard to tell from this picture but this is on the passenger side underneath where the seat would go. Going green I guess



Trunk area dirty and rusty





As you can see from the above images the trunk area had some rust. After pulling chunk after chunk off of the spare holder piece I decided I was going to just cut the whole thing out. I have always wanted to do work like this before but never really had a cheap car to do so. Here are a couple shots (don't mind my bald spot)

After trunk area was cleaned out



Doing some cutting



After







Started grinding down the edges to bare metal in preparation of welding in a panel. I still need to get in there and finish trimming things out, but just wanted the rust out for now.



Finally is a shot of the engine bay. Few things to note is that the windshield wiper assembly was broken so I pulled it and have started cleaning that out. I went to a local pick n pull and got a good one so Ill be doing the final clean up, plasti dip the cowl, clean up and grease the new assembly and install after I potentially repaint the bay. You will also notice I have started pulling things out of the bay as Ill be pulling the engine in preparation of engine disassembly. More updates coming very soon.

Wow these images are massive. Ill go back in and update them with proper sized images.

They have been updated

Anything new for this car? I've owned 2 spyders and miss having them. Now gotta watch everyone else's spyders.

EDIT:
Nevermind, just saw you sold it.

Haha yeah I ended up getting rid of it. The top had leaked so long that underneath the carpet was completely rotted out.

I saw your "forest"