Sum_Fing_Wong's Project Levin

[Eircamae86]

Nice, im going to be watching this one carefully, love your work

[oldskull]

I hope that redline taillight is not for your car

[Sum_fing_wong]

thanks Eircamae86 i hope i don't disappoint you !

nope oldskull its not for my car, although i do want redlines for my coupe ...

Once i got most of the braces burned in, i decided to start taking care of the rusty areas. See told you it was bad under there, actually i didn't even know it was that bad until i cut into it.













here she is all patched up, its nice having friends with parts cars that i can grab/cut pieces off of, it sure saves me from having to make the patches, the one patch was from a red car ....



Unfortunately there are some patch panels that are still needed to be made by hand.

[Eircamae86]

Snap....

[Sum_fing_wong]

whoa that was trippy lol i just clicked on my build thread to post some more pics and was like ... i don't remember posting a picture like that ^^^ and then i noticed Eircamae86 it was your pic. is that your WIP ? hum yup that's quite the hole you got there.

next area i decided to tackle was the area between the left door and rear wheel. when i got it from Japan i noticed that they had used some kind of epoxy putty or something similar in the wheel well. since at the time i didn't have the means to take care of ... what might be a big job i just left it as is.

cutting into it, well it was worse then i thought i'll let the pics do the explaining.



cutting in further ... what is that inside ???





i thought it was bits of rust and that my rockers on the inside were done ... but thank goodness it was only soot.



that's just the bits that stayed intact there was literally almost two handfuls of the stuff and i still don't know how so much of it accumulated inside of the rocker area. after a couple hours of blowing it out with compressed air and vacuuming ... it looked better



this is what i cut out

[Sum_fing_wong]

i tried using the pieces i cut out as a template but they were just to complicated so i just started cutting metal to the approximate size and shaping and shaving as needed.





first the inner panel tacked and shaped and welded !



then came the outter panel ... after some fitting trimming and reshaping with good old tin snips and hammer this is what i came up with.





and then i welded it in ! well mostly i left some areas for later, coz the part i made was made a bit bigger then i needed, so once i test fit everything i'll still have material that i can remove.



unfortunately once again i got to caught up in the work that i forgot to take pics ... before i cleaned up the welds



and then i coated it ... with some primer



and a quick skim coat of filler before paint and i think it will be a gooder !

[Sum_fing_wong]

lower rad support replaced !





old one out ... new one in

[Sum_fing_wong]

After the rad support my next area of focus was the rear of the car. Every Corolla I've owned has had the rear lip just behind and under the rear bumper as a problem area. i fixed this area once already when i first had the car but since the spare wheel well was also rusty i decided to just rebuild the whole rear end.



now i realize that with cutting out the rear like this i lose the ability to run the factory fuel tank ... so i decided to run a fuel cell once the fuel cell arrived, work really began. But first i have to patch things up, while the rear was open up i found it opportunistic to build the bracing for the rear towers and get them welded in, as well as cleaning and coating the rear area.





i think i'll hide the fuel filler behind my license plate !





next up ... is closing up the underside





stay tuned for the next update

[Ivan141]

Great work, I'm following this with interest.
Small remark: If you're going to ditch the back end underside, why not
chop the side pockets off while you are at it? They're also a trouble spot on most 86's.

[Tig]

Very cool build.
What I like the most is how you laid out each weld, its spot and size.
Awesome, I will also be following this, I love Coupes