Banpei's new TA60 family cruiser

[banpei]

No news on the fuelpump as my mechanic is on holiday...
However, I couldn't sit still and do nothing. As I made the decision to keet the Carina, I made a short list of all the things I want to do with the Carina. One of the easier things I could do that wouldn't require me to be near the Carina were the Japanese facelift tail lights.

If you don't remember these, I bought them about 10 years ago and mounted them on the Carina:

And they look like this when mounted on the Carina:

I found out back in a day that there was an issue with the electrical connections not being 100% the same between the EUDM and JDM tail lights. To overcome this, I mounted the inner guts of the EUDM lights (containing the wiring and light sockets) right onto the JDM ones. This works, but there is an issue as the Japanese has a single lens with a dual fillament bulb handling the brake lights and the tail lights in the middle section, while the European has three separate lenses in the middle. I think this picture makes it a bit clearer:

Top ones are the EUDM and the bottom ones are the JDM spec tail lights. The issue is that there is only a single lens for the brake light, tail light and fog light whilst these are separate bulbs. This is not allowed, but hardly anyone would ever notice. However someone did: I did encounter a warning at the APK (MOT) renewal in 2017 that I should address the tail lights as the single lens wasn't allowed and also my reflectors were corroded (as you can see in the picture above). So in 2019 I de-JDM-ed the Carina:

The reason why I had corrosion on the reflectors was simple: both tail lights suffered from a broken bolts (it already arrived with one broken) and bad old worn seals. This caused water to creep into the tail lights and do it's oxidizing work.
Also, as you can see in the photo above, the indicator lens has become faded and yellowed and that also requires some attention. Since 2019, these JDM tail lights were in a box in my basement waiting for me to finally address these issues: correct the wiring of the JDM internals, fix the snapped off bolts, create new rubber gaskets and try to revive the shine by polishing them. So what I did this week was first figure out how to address all these issues one by one.

I started with figuring out the wiring. I found out the following connections were present on these connectors:

EUDM connector on the left, JDM connector on the right.
The pinout: (pin 1 on the top right, pin 6 on the bottom left)

Code:

pin EUDM    JDM
1   reverse reverse
2   turn    turn
3   tail    absent
4   fog     tail
5   ground  ground
6   brake   brake

Edit: I have reversed the pins to match the female connectors in the EWD, which are naturally mirrored
So it's clear I need to move pin 4 on the JDM tail lights to position 3 and everything should work as a charm!
Why didn't I do this 10 years ago?

I also made a first attempt in replacing the snapped off bolt. The issue is that the frame of the tail lights has been moulded around these bolts, so replacing them won't be easy. So my idea was to drill a tiny hole in them and then step up the drill a notch every time. Then tap some thread and insert an M5 threaded rod and glue it with some metal glue or JB Weld.

Step one: make the surface as flat as possible to allow me to center the hole:

My first thought was to use a punch tool to make a good center, but I quickly abandoned that thought as I would need a rigid surface underneath the frame (and lens) and that probably would damage it.
So instead I used a 0.5mm drill and it was good enough near center of the bolt. Then I increased size to 2mm and it now looks like this:

For M5 it should go up to 4mm and then I would be able to make a thread. Fingers crossed that this will work out as intended.

I will cut a rubber gasket using 2mm EDPM rubber that I found at the hardware store, so more will follow!

Also on my todo list are to revive the Black Racing rims:

They require new tires, but before doing so I'll paint them. I'm not sure if this will be a diy job or whether they will be powder coated (like I did on the Celica Supra rims). These rims are cheap knock offs, so do they deserve such treatment?