furlough week, means car projects

"MonkeePuzzle" (monkeypuzzle)
05/18/2020 at 13:30 • Filed to: RuqSaq, BexTheTSX

the downturn in every industry, but especially for big oil (whom doth employ this monkee) means I am on furlough, so I’ve been playing in the garage more (and interacting online less)

first up, I copleted mounting my seat in the Civic. It’d been test mounted before, but not wanting to attract any attention to modifications before I had a place to safely park it in the garage I took it out

to get it as low as possible I’m running without rails. so it took a few test drives with wrenching in between to get it exactly how I wanted. but it is now perfection. and so solidly mounted.

kid tested. father approved.

but monkee, the custom matching fabric, wheres that?

well, as the world transitioned to working from home (or not working) my mother in law, a retired nurse and excellent seamstress, transitioned to making masks. and she turns out a QUALITY mask! but, that does mean she isn’t sewing my seat covers :D so that will come later

next up was some love for the TSX. It has a decent factory sound system, but the basic speakers were letting it down at the extent of its range. It has 6.5s in all four doors, 6x9s on the back deck, and tweeters in the dash, and behind the dash is a factory amp. So actually a decent setup, so I simply replaced all the facotry speakers with something that could cope with what the amp was delivering them

after a few days of driving, I think it’s still missing some punch in the bass, so I’ll do an underseat sub at some point in the future (when funds allow)

then, with some free time finally, I set back to my custom headliner project for the civic. When I left off I’d cut the headliner and fitted the console (from a Jeep) then fibreglased it in and sanded the fibreglass. This week I lavished bondo all over

then sanded that smooth and set to laying the new fabric over

and, despite having done many headliners in my time, including the same custom console in my last civic, I royally messed this up as it got to the final curves

so I stripped it off. I’ll have a little foam to clean up, then I can retry

in most cases, not a big deal. I’d just hustle down to Joanne Fabrics and get another $15 wiorth of fabric and retry. But Joanne only just this week reopened, and the line was ~2 hours long. So I’ll face that hassle another day equipped with a snack and a podcast.

I also set to finishing up a repair on my centre console (from a Prelude) that will be going in the Civic. It’s weakest point had cracked which I mended with plastic weld. I had intended to simply tidy that up and paint it all... when I dropped it off the shelf. The repair was nice and strong! so it cracked in a new place to the left. so I fixed that, and set it aside to wait for paint another day

I did take this opportunity to clean up the remainder of the interior plastics, which is of course far easier to too when you can hit em with a hose in the yard. So many years of scum

again to projects that had been sitting in my basement waiting for the car to have a secure parking space, I mocked up two options for how I wanted to vinyl one spoke red. do the whole spoke or just a stripe across the top?

my social media replied whole spoke, so that what I did and mounted them up

the need for lowering has never been more evident :D

I’ll also likely run a spacer to bring the wheels out slightly, but I wont mess with that until the ride height is sorted

then, I set the kid to work mowing teh lawns

and I busied myself with tuning up my !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!

it’s setup with some fat road tires and a more comfortable stance so it has a different purpose and feel to my orange bike.

And there endeth the furlough week update.

DISCUSSION (7)

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > MonkeePuzzle
05/18/2020 at 13:39

Thanks for the picture of your boy. It gave me a smile. I’ll be heading out to the wood shop here in a few.

TheRealBicycleBuck > MonkeePuzzle
05/18/2020 at 13:49

MTB with Slicks! I love that setup for commuting.

Also, REEL MOWER! My mom bought a self-propelled reel mower that didn’t see much use at her place. I think she overestimated its capabilities. Her place needed a lawn tractor with the occasional brush hog applied to the back three acres.

MoCamino > MonkeePuzzle
05/18/2020 at 13:52

Is the JoAnn in your area doing curbside pickup? My wife is a frequent JoAnn customer (often two-three times a week back in the “old normal”). She still gets quite a lot from them and has had very good luck with their curbside pickup process. Pretty painless.

Nice progress on the fleet!

jeepoftheseus > MonkeePuzzle
05/18/2020 at 13:56

I love seeing your progress on this. There is a clean EG/EK? red hatch with a ducktail and a big exhaust that runs around where I live and it makes my day everything I see it. Unfortunately it was my high school peers that contributed to the decrease in supply back in the day .

MonkeePuzzle > MoCamino
05/18/2020 at 14:01

they are doing curbside pickup, but said that since opening up for real last week they can’t keep up with orders. which I interpreted to mean, they are NOT actually doing curbside pickup really.

MonkeePuzzle > TheRealBicycleBuck
05/18/2020 at 14:02

the yard pictured is about half that big in the front, the manual reel mower takes almost zero maintenance and far less space to store. It’s ideal for my slice of cookie cutter suburbia

Jb boin > MonkeePuzzle
05/18/2020 at 15:02

Also got Focal ISS/ISC on my A3 that are way better sound that the original cardboard speakers, especially in the treble and middle frequencies but also not the most impressive in term of deep bass (the cars have 13cm in the front and 16.5cm at the rear without a subwoofer and the door panels are not bass-reflex unfortunately so its can’t do magic ) and also have been thinking about adding a Focal Ibus subwoofer or similar under the seat .

I have a Milltek catback and a 200 CPI cat so the subwooferless sound system bass sounds tame in comparison but it still more enjoyable than the stock non-Bose sound on my B7 A4 that has a subwoofer but everything else is terrible in comparison (you dont even really ear a difference when putting your hand in front of the tweeters) so i plan to put some Focal in the A4 as well .

I do believe that they have a break-in period and did better in term of bass after some time but it might be in my mind .