This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Welp, I guess I have a project car now.
The friend of mine who recently passed away left me his car. It's nicer than my car on paper (nine years newer and with 90K miles whereas mine is pushing 250K), but I didn't love it when I owned it, and while mechanically sound enough it is beat to hell with loads of stupid body damage, and the interior is trashed (In my friend's defense, one of the things I hated about the car is that it has a white leather interior that looked great when new but is extremely difficult to keep clean, and the grade of "leather" Mazda used isn't winning any points in my book for durability.).
I'm in the middle of a bare-minimum cleanup (The driver's seat is hopeless and the back seat is rough, but the rest came out fairly well and leather conditioner smells much nicer than stale dog.), and working on a to-do list. I'm not sure what I want to do with it but, keep it or sell it, this pig is need of some lipstick.
In terms of relatively low-budget fixes, I need to do the following:
Fix the rear bumper/replace the broken tail light. I'm fairly confident that the huge dent can be popped out if the bumper cover is removed, and you have to remove the tail lights to remove the bumper cover, so I've ordered the tail light.
Replace the cabin air filter. I did this when I first bought the car from a chain smoker, but holy crap that was 7 years ago. Part ordered, and my fun observation is that cigarette smoke is easier to clean up than dog hair (It was a shorthaired dog.).
Comprehensively finish removing the mud from when the car was driven into a sinkhole. Time consuming, but free.
Repair the touch screen. Mazda touch screens are notorious for the digitizer cracking/delaminating and causing issues (namely, ghost touches that cause the radio to go crazy), but a knockoff replacement is cheap and the job doesn't look that hard. I've ordered the part.
Rotate the two good tires to one axle, get two new tires, and an alignment. Hopefully nothing in the front end is broken, but the absence of clunking is an encouraging sign.
The front brake rotors are warped enough to be irritating and are likely too worn to be turned, but hey the rotors are cheap on Rock Auto. The brake fluid also needs to be flushed because the brakes are even mushier than I remember them being. Low priority.
The Y-pipe/rear muffler either needs to bent back into shape or replaced such that it sits in the hangers correctly and doesn't squeak over bumps.
The driver's side door seal needs to be replaced because it is torn and makes for some annoying road noise.
The LED headlights need to be removed and replaced with the stock halogens. Those were bright enough and the fans for the LEDs make an annoying humming noise.
Things I am unlikely to fix:
The big scrape on the bottom/side of the car. You almost have to look for it and this would require real repair work.
The driver side door skin is damaged from where the fender was smashed into it. I replaced the fender to fix that because it was surprisingly cheap to buy a whole new painted fender, but a whole new door skin is not cheap, and again it's another one of those things where you kind of have to look for the damage.
Almost all of the undercarriage plastic is missing. Added together, that's a few hundred bucks worth of plastic, I never noticed a difference in fuel economy or road noise to justify it, and why would I pay to make changing the oil harder?
The front bumper has its share of scrapes, but fuck it it's an eight year old car. It doesn't have to be perfect, just not look like and feel shit.
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