Mate, I bought the black rims already black. And it is a pretty rough job with quite a few chips and scratches.

As for the painting stuff, well for now it will be my 2HP GMC air compressor, a Super Cheap spray gun, and Acrylic Paint. At $44 a litre plus thinners, this is a much cheaper way to paint anything than rattle cans.

I will not be looking for a show quality finish, just a respectable street finish, that I can be proud of having done it myself.

Cheers
BenJ

Invest in a gravity fed low pressure spray gun Ben. It will work much better with your air compressor with less start/stop time.

front end looks tough as

Much better without the black rims, didnt want to say anything when you put them on

Cars looking great Ben, good luck with the painting

Give your rims a light sanding with 600 wet & dry or you can just use steel wool/scouring pad to key the clearcoat. Clean down the rims thouraly after keying. I use any of the good quality auto acrylic touch up paints, your choice of colour. Light coats, more light coats to build up the finish is better than few heavy coats. When dry a couple of coats of clear and your away. Pauinted mine ages ago with PowerPlus touch up paint and they are styill good. Hope that helps. Back to you Benj.

Yeah use one as a spare and then you will have 3 rims for the trailer. look realy nice to have matching rims on the trailer.

Hi All

I had the good fortune to have another visit from snap0964 this weekend.

(Hey Snap, I see you got home safe. )

Snap spent a few hours on the Wagon installing White LEDs in to the interior. I have to say, it looks GREAT!!! No more yellowish light. Just pure white.

Another benefit from changing all the lights to LEDs, is the dramatic effect on power consumption. In the Wagon, with all the standard lights on, it would be drawing close to 50watts. Now that is a fair bit of power. With the LEDs in, it now draws a little over 1watt. So now I can safely leave the door open while modding the car. Sweet.

And of course some pics. Now these were taken at night and are a bit dark, but hopefully you can see ok.





A couple of weeks ago, when I picked up the EL Tail Lights, I also acquired the EL carpeted Cargo side panels. Typically this would be a straight forward swap, but my Wagon has the Spare Wheel carrier in the back. Talk about a PITA!! The EL panel is not a snug fit to the wheel well. In fact it sits almost 100mm proud of the rear of the wheel well. This required some judicious use of a variety of tools to make the necessary changes. A couple of hours later the cargo area went from this - wow the EB stuff is RANK!! But what do you expect for a $400 car?


to this - mmmmm clean and tidy sides



Now I just need to stumble accross an EL Wagon Cargo Carpet at the right price.


Other tasks completed over the weekend are:

EL Tickford LPG ECU installed - Goes better on LPG now - worse on petrol

Hybrid Cruise Cable - EL Module to Log Manifold - Still have to hook cruise up

Replacement Accelerator Cable - had a very firm pedal - all good now

Got some more work done on a certain headlight mod that has been gathering dust in the garage - watch this space!

In my search for a replacement Steering Wheel, I swapped some parts for this.

Tell me what you think about the colours etc.

Hope you guys all had great weekends too.

Cheers
BenJ

Last edited by BenJ on Tue Mar 10, 2009 2:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Those cargo area side panels are good huh? At least you started with a Mont EB or what have you - The FUTURA EF a*** doesn't even have fake carpet up the sidewalls - it's all loverly gray plastic. Awesome stuff...

About time you did the interior with LEDs. I'm starting to swap some of my blue ones for white ones - and three or four LEDs have actually died. The two under the dash for footwell light, the shifter light (no longer required) and the centre console light for rear passenger footwells. Died. Dead. Nudda.

Cheap a*** LEDs - must by them from somewhere reputable like tricky d**k in future. The blue light is cool, but does make finding small objects at 1am a complicated experience.

Ive been lurking this thread for a while, and this is my first time post- amazing car mate. incredible.

One question though, what are the specs of the LEDs you put in the interior? Whered you get them from? Jaycar? Ebay? the look great!

Well, yes at least mine had carpet, that was falling off and had an odd scent about it. The plastics in mine were all cracked and broken too.



I did consider some coloured LEDs but having seen Snaps wagon with the White LEDs, I chose to go with the white ones. Adds that touch of class I like.





Thanks Ash. This wheel is similar in the colour design to the wheel I am looking at to buy in the near future. Being able to use this one for a bit just confirms my wheel choice.



Awww thanks phillis.



I will leave that to Snap to reply to as he supplied the LEDs.


Cheers
BenJ

The White LED's do indeed look great. Did you use led globe replacements, or just manually wire them in?

They were individually soldered with the appropriate resistor, and custom hand fabricated wedges (bits of cardboard) to slot them into the holders.

BenJ

still got those side panels? i need the pocket door and maybe the fabric if you wanna rip them off (i have plenty of cleaning gear here to deoderise them)

Ebay specials, http://www.besthongkong.com/ 50 000 mcd - had them a while, IIRC about $20 for about 50 with resistors.
A few years ago, quality wasn't crash hot with the overseas items, but recently they've picked up.
Jaycar are pretty expensive, and some items like their LED dome lights, seem to fail fairly regularly.

Thanks Snap.

Small update.

This morning the I drove the Wagon on LPG to the Station, all of 30secs drive (yes, I am lazy) and as I was pulling in to reverse park, the car stalled. Tried to start it, it fired and after 10 secs stalled again. So I switched to petrol, parked the car and went to work.

After work I tried to start the Wagon again on LPG, it fired and stalled again after 10 secs. So after driving home on Petrol, I did the first obvious thing which is to undo the last thing I did.

I removed the EL Tickford LPG ECU and put back the EL Ghia ECU. TADA!!!! All fixed.

The Dual Fuel ECU was a dud. Oh well. Will keep an eye out for another one.

Oh, and I got some more done on the headlights too.

BenJ