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Let's do this... slowly (Canadian 85P restore)

78K views 199 replies 46 participants last post by  SupraFiend 
#1 · (Edited)
It's taken damn near seven years and nine mkii's to get to this point. Everyone likes stories and pictures and you have to know where you came form to know where you're going, so let's have a quick run down to bring everyone up to speed.

  • Bought my first one in June 2003, an 82 L-type two-tone silver/grey out of Chilliwack for far too much money. It had to be push started and sounded very mean, but was in reality extremely tired. Took until 2007 to realize that amongst other things, one of the previous owners had decided removing the wiring harness when pulling the engine was too difficult and simply cut and it. His hackjob reassembly was the reason the car would never start with the key. While we're here, let's put up couple pictures! Car was sold in 2007 to another forum member after a marathon engine swap / repair session. Good times!



  • It's actually backwards, because #2 arrived before #1. #2 was a parts car, so it doesn't really count. And what a parts car! Total piece of crap bagged 176k kms 84 with a super cheap paint job. Previous owner ran it out of oil and tossed a rod through the side of the block. Contributed many parts to virtually every mkii after. $250, stripped and scrapped.



  • #3 is probably the most important one. Effectively forced to buy it out of a blackberry bush in some scary guys backyard with no title for $300. An SDR 85P automatic with an awesome sounding broken torque converter. Towed it home with the intention of stripping it for parts. Aside from some accident damage and rear-quarter rust it looked pretty good.



    At some point my situation changed and I suddenly needed a car to drive. using ICBC's last-resort process I was able to obtain a title for the car. Cue Seamus (Suprafiend) and parts from cars #2 and #4. Together we spent 2 or 3 nights in the pouring rain, outside, pulling the broken automatic out and installing an 82-spec auto in it's place. We loaded up all the manual-conversion parts into the back (amongst other things) and drove 70kms to Seamus' house, where we promptly removed the automatic and set about getting the car roadworthy. I'll skip the part where the drain plug on the transmission came out on the drive and we put about 10L of ATF through the system before realizing we were just pouring it on the ground. I proceeded to drive this beast in one form or another for the next couple years. During that time I did plenty of stupid stuff in the car, including rear-ending someone. Some of you might recognize a calendar-like shot from a few years ago. I think this still holds some sort of record as the worst Supra to get into the CS calendar.



    Probably my favourite car I've ever owned.

  • No pictures exist of #4. It was a white 82L (or maybe it was a P?) auto that Seamus and I bought for, oh, $80 and owned for little more than a week. Thanks for the automatic transmission #4! Moving on...

  • #5. Californian rust-free body and absolutely baked paint. Driven into the back of a womans taurus with no insurance coverage and bought via proxy for a very reasonable price. Anyways, not bad for a starting point.



    Several busy weekends in Seamus' garage yielded a pretty presentable car:




    A couple months later we struck gold at one of the local wreckers - a theft recovery 85P SDR with a black/grey cloth interior. So hot! By this point, we were becoming exceedingly good at taking these cars apart:






  • #6 and #7 we're bought for an exceptionally low price. #6 was a somewhat respectable light-blue 84 P-type and was sold the next day. I believe the car is still driving around the lower mainland. #7 was an 83 P-type, and would not be missed:



  • #8 was a very early (#3900 or so) 82 L-type hardtop silver/gray with a busted timing tensioner. Fixed it, cleaned it up a bit, and I believe it still lives with the same owner as my first silver/gray L-type. Was glad to save that one - it was on it's way to the crusher.



  • And so we get to the end of the list. #3 (Stepchild) was exchanged for #5 (The Californian), and #5 was in turn exchanged for #9. #9 is, well, pretty much the same damn thing. 85 P-type, SDR. The car has been in storage for the last couple years waiting for me to get settled in to working life (mortgage FTW), and now seems to be the time to get the ball rolling. Here's what we're working with:


    Not bad, not bad. An exceptional interior (and new leather to go along with it), a pretty decent, straight body, and the vast majority of suspension work is already done. I'm going to plead a bit of ignorance, as I have not driven the car in over two years, nor have I actually driven it while it's been 'mine'. I honestly don't remember what has been done to it already. Seamus will fill in those blanks, if he so chooses.
As for what's going to happen to it, well I think the general idea is to spend a lot of money recklessly and at the end of the day have something shiny, pretty, and worth approximately 1/4 of what's invested in it. That's how this works, right?

The title of this thread is very appropriate - I don't anticipate having this car in my possession for another couple years. I'm using that time as a luxury; I have not made a decision of what's going to power this thing. It will likely be a JZ-motor of some variety, because that seems to be the new hot shit. I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Back in the present, Seamus has begun bodywork on the car - repairing every flaw he can find and prepping the car for paint. I intend to the mechanical and electrical myself, but I don't have the confidence or knowledge to tackle the pretty stuff. I will probably cave and stick to the stock colour, but I'm a huge sucker for two-tone schemes a la Dan McBoost and may go that direction instead. I'd like to try a few things - I'll be losing the power antenna and trying to fit/create some form of moonroof.

Wheels are a huge thing for me, and the F+R BBK throws me up a couple sizes than I'm used to. I would buy some work equip-01's in about 0.25 seconds if they were made in 16" or 17", but it's just not going to happen. Beyond that I love mesh and a deep dish. I've got some time here.

That's enough for an introductory post.
 
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#7 · (Edited)
Just another Canadian that owns a supra. haha
Someone that wishes the local supra community was a bit bigger
It used to be, but Dean moved away, a couple others have been inactive lately and a few got out of mk2s all together. We'll get some more meets going soon :)

Great post (first one), so many memories. I won't do one of these, it would be too long as I'm at 16 right now :p But that includes #3 to #7 + #9 off your list. Yeah, we pass Supras around like... uh, lets not do that analogy. Dean and me were partners in crime in the Supra world for a long time. Well we still kinda are. I sold\traded Dean my old SDR 85 before he moved away and have been storing it for him ever since. For the last year I've been working on a company of my own (video game development) and doing a little restoration work on the side. This project will probably take a couple months.

This car was my main ride for many years. It has the first NAL leather skin kit as it was prototyped on this car, and was used to test the CFX hoods as well. This shot Dean posted...
was in the very first CS.com Calander. It won Best Wild MK2 twice and Best Interior once at the old BC SupraFests, and even took the Furtherest Driven trophy at TORCFest one year. It was a tough decsion to sell it, but I had to scale back the fleet so I could focus on my other cars. But now I've got the opertunity to finish restoring it. This car is what I call "Canadian Mint". As far as mk2s that have actually been used, this is about as good as they get rust wise in Canada. The only truely rust free Canadian cars I've seen have had less then 100k(60k miles) kms on them and been garage kept every day of their life. The rust on it currently is about the same as when I bought it back in 2003 as I've stored it in covered parking ever since.

My updates to this thread will cover the repairs to each area as they're completed. This is partially to keep Dean up to date to the progress on the car, but its also going to be a unique and innovative look of how best to repair and even prevent rust to all of the common areas that rust on these cars. Since this car only has the factory undercoating, its got at least a little starting in just about all of them.

It should be interesting, so check in often!

EDIT: The rust repair to this car is now complete. Those of you rereading this thread who are trying to find a specific update can do so through my final update post on page 5, as I added the final pics and links to each update there. See here...
http://www.celicasupra.com/forums/s...ly-(Canadian-85P-restore)&p=654057#post654057

I would recomend the rest of you read through the whole thread, its not that long and there aren't too many comments and you might miss something important if you just skip to the end. :)

2017 EDIT: Photobucket has decided to disable all 3rd party image linking unless you pay an outrageous annual fee. I don't have the time to move all of my images to another program (as many on this board don't). However there is a Chrome extension that will get all images working inline again for you. Please use it, works like a charm...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/photobucket-hotlink-fix/kegnjbncdcliihbemealioapbifiaedg
 
#10 · (Edited)
I'm going to plead a bit of ignorance, as I have not driven the car in over two years, nor have I actually driven it while it's been 'mine'. I honestly don't remember what has been done to it already. Seamus will fill in those blanks, if he so chooses.
Oh yeah, forgot to fill in those blanks.

The body is stock, obviously. Its been sitting on a set of rolling jackstands for the last couple years (read shitty mismatched stock wheels and tires). Interior is stock except for a sweet Momo that matches the stock grey/black color scheme beautifully, and is mint as I spent alot of time tracking down and replacing every part that had a flaw. The car has a kick ass alarm install by yours truely, and tint on 5 windows. This car also has the uber cool DigiDash, a Canadian only option on the later PTypes.

Dean put in a stock 86 5m as an interm motor (I pulled the original a few years back and it lives on in 2 other cars now). The brakes were completely done over with performance off the shelf parts but Dean has picked up the JKBB kit so we threw some regular stock stuff back on for now. I put in a nice 4.1 diff out of a stock auto car so its in pretty decent shape and the LSD is fairly tight. The 4.1 also corrects the speedo when running 225/50-15s. Also I had a parts car with only 88,000 kms on it (about 50k miles) and this car has the rear subframe, A arms and steering rack from it.

The suspension is pretty sorted as this car saw alot of autox action when I was driving it. The rear was kept fairly soft as I was always struggling with eliminating oversteer. There's ST springs with Monroe Sensatracs, and an addco sway. The subframe bushings were chopped down about half an inch to help with the negative camber. The sway bar mounts were replaced with super beefy ones I made up. The front is a bit more radical, this is the car that was used for my coil over thread (I think thats still stickied in Susp.). A few bits are out right now while the car is in storage, but currently we have an LJM bar, front addco sway, JK 25mm RCAs, Celica GTS steering arms (first Supra ever to have them), KYB Select A Ride adjustable dampers (precursor to the AGX), custom coil overs using Tom Motorsport sleaves (not that Toms, and for a Prelude application) on Celica GTS strut casings with 450lb 6 inch springs.
 
#11 · (Edited)
Alright, lets get started. I'm actually well into this project, I'm just a little behind on getting the pics sorted and uploaded.

Lets get a better idea of what we're dealing with. The first step of any restoration project is to strip the thing down and get a good look at the damage. Theres no rust from the doors forward so only the rear end and interior was stripped...



I use the supe in the corner of my shop as a bench all the time, don't think its going anywhere for awhile now...

Everything is meticulosly laid out so none of the soft touch parts have any pressure on them and the front seats are kept in the house.

The car was "clean" before I started, but nobody's mk2 can be truely clean till you strip it down to the body and wash it inside and out. So much trim on these cars for dirt to hide under! So I wheeled it out and gave it the most thorough bath of its life...

I washed inside every panel, inside the wheel wells and completely scrubbed down the inside of the floor pan and interior. A note to anyone who does this, be sure to pull all of the rubber plugs on the under side of the body, in particular any in frame rails as they will fill with water!
Its best to do this on a hot sunny day and then let it dry, but I can't wait till summer. Luckily I have a heated body shop room in my shop and I cranked the heat and let it dry out afterwards.

Now lets look at the real damage. What was shown above didn't look like much, but this is what it looks like fully exposed...




rear seat belt mounting point

just starting to poke through on the other side



just starting on top of the wheel well

inside of hatch




this corner isn't too bad yet but theres a hole starting in the wheel well

DS rear corner

theres lots of problem areas under the gas tank on these cars

this is the underside of the spare tire well

this is one of the mounting points for the last exhaust hanger bracket, on the side of the spare tire well

inside of the gas cap chamber

this is the underside of the rear valance panel, just behind the rear bumper\rebar (and you'll never see this unless you remove the rebar)


So does this scare you? If you've never pulled your car apart and you have similar looking rust as in the first set of pictures, you should be scared. The longer you put off dealing with it the worse it gets, often out of sight. And yes I still consider this car Canadian Mint, theres not many in better shape in this country :(

But its time to make it truely mint! First up, repairs to the hatch area. Stay tuned.
 
#12 ·
I truly love posts like this. I want to thank you for sharing with us, and keep up the great work! Looking forward to seeing more.........
 
#15 ·
Alright, finaly found some time to update this thread. Check my previous post with the problem areas, I added three new ones to the end of the list.

Also, there has been a slight change of plan. After talking to Dean we decided to keep this thread just about the build to this particular car so I'm just going to show pictures of the repairs as they're completed and I'm going to start a new thread to discuss the causes, repair process and prevention methods of all the common rust areas.

Dean! Edit your first post so your thumbnails aren't all on the same line, its making page 1 really hard to read.

First repair update is on its way!
 
#16 ·
Little off topic but as someone mentioned earlier.. Its time for another Vancouver meet...

Work looks good, I will be watching.
 
#18 ·
[OFF_TOPIC] I might be throwing a last minute DoriKaze meet for this sunday. You locals might want to get on the DK forum and attend meets with those guys. Pretty decent group of guys and I usually combine CS meets with the DK crew these days (like I used to in the old days when I first met Dean) as the local CS numbers aren't what they used to be. I usually cross post them here too, keep your eyes open, us DK guys move quickly when it comes to meets. www.dorikaze.net Mostly AE86 guys but the club caters to old school Canadian Toyota owners.[/OFF_TOPIC]
 
#17 · (Edited)
Ok, time to get caught up. I'll run through things here quickly in the order that I've been fixing them. Basically I'm starting from the rear end of the car and working my way forward. I'm only doing rust repair and metal work right now as I'm going to do all of the autobody and bondo work in one pass at the end (its easier, cleaner and quicker that way). So please keep in mind that the repairs you are looking at have not had any filler work done yet and anything that will be exposed will look like new before I'm done.

Alright, here's the repairs completed from the first 2 weeks work (I only work 3-4 hours a day, 5 days a week on this thing btw)...

First up, this common spot that we get on the corners of the rear valance panel...


It doesn't look like a big deal, just grind it down and reseal it and be done right? Wrong, I've done that many times on past cars and it always comes back here. This is why...

If you pull the panel apart you see that the rust has started inbetween the layers. The only way to fix it for good is to separate the panel, grind and treat the rust on the inside, then put it all back together and seal it up properly...




Next up, classic hatch rust...

theres a smaller spot on the other side too.



I feared the worst as rust bubbles on the back end of the hatch almost always start from inside the folded edge. I took no chances. This is going to be a controversial repair process for such a mint hatch, but I assure you its necesary. I'll go into why moreso in the other thread and provide some more photo proof, but check out the repair pics here...


Thats right, I cut out huge chunks of metal from an almost mint hatch. Has to be done if you want to preserve these things for good and to be able to fix what rust it already has.


The sealant on the corners had failed and I had to pull one of them apart to fix rust that had started in there.

Grinding off the rust that had started on the surface under the wing resulted in a hole, so I had to patch it...




All back together and sealed up...



Its also extremely important to seal up the inner ridge around the glass. The inner and outer hatch skins are spot welded together on this ridge, and are not sealed on either side. When these spot welds start to rust its usually the begining of the end for a hatch, rust around the glass is very hard to fix properly. I added 2 more holes to be able to seal the bottom ridge completely on the inside...


And then sealed the ridge on the glas side all the way around...



And thats it, this hatch is safe! Moving on...


Ahh, the spare tire well. Its the sewer system of the supra unfortuantly. It doesn't look complicated, just surface rust...


But this freakin exhaust bracket mount complicates things.

I ended up removing it to clean up the rust around and under it, then "simplifing" its design and reattaching it. I was very tempted to cut this spare tire well out completely as there were several places where the surface corrision had eaten small holes through and the metal was very thin after I ground all the rust off. It seemed less overkill to just replace the bad areas with new metal. I used seam sealer on all my patch pieces, and then POR15 on any spot that I just ground the rust off of.


The rear ward drain required an all new piece as the lip had eaten away too far for the stock drain plug to fit in. I didn't have a hole saw in the size of the original rear ward plug so now it fits a plug like on the front side of the spare tire well.

And last, I shaved the stock attenna hole as requested. Look Ma, no warping!

You've got to be carefull filling holes in the middle of big panels, very easy to warp the panel from the heat.

And that completes our first update. I'm currently tackling the dreaded quater rust behind the rear axels, fun fun! I should have that up by next week.
 
#20 ·
Quick update here I can wrap up now.

The spot welds on the underside of valance panel are prone to rusting as the seam on the underside was never sealed up...


To fix it, you grind off the rust, use rust converting metal prep as insurance, then POR15, primer and sealant to seal in the seam...
 
#21 · (Edited)
Ok, getting into the harder stuff now. Finished this section off last week.

I actually have donor metal for this car that I got off a super low miles rust free car from a wrecker, a total anomaly up here, so I took every usable part off the car (link), but the car was hit in the DS rear quater so I had to fabricate the replacement panels.








As you can see the flare still fits nice, its quite tricky making everything line up when you have to replace 3 separate pieces from scratch at once. Its very handy to have an intact car around to look at and measure when doing this. Obviously its not going to look phenominal till the bodywork stage is done, and any area that will be covered by flare doesn't need to be asthetically perfect.

The other side poses its own challanges, stay tuned.
 
#22 · (Edited)
Alright, long overdue for an update here. Just finishing off the passenger side rear quater and the gas tank area. This is probably the trickiest section to fix on these cars due to how the panels are formed and how the gas tank passes through.

Here's the exposed damage...


But the gas cap area on the inside has absolutly no undercoating...


To start, we cut out the perforated section, this requires peeling back the lower rear valance panel...




Next, there were signs that the rust on the back of the inner gas cap lid chamber had spread through to the other side. That complicates things as the only way to fix it is to remove the inner chamber panel, which can only be done if the outer chamber panel is removed first....




With the panels out I was able to sandblast them and clean them up nicely off the car and treat the rust on car that was previously unaccessable...



Now luckily I had donor metal for this area. I've figured out how I would do this without it, but it is certainly a little simpler with...



But wait, nothing is ever that simple. This sheet metal is off a car with only 88,000kms on it, that obviously was garage kept and appeared to be 100 percent rust free. But unfortunatly, any Celica Supra that has lived in even a moderatly wet climate and hasn't had a rigourous undercoating job is not truely rust free. Toyota really didn't put enough effort into sealing up these cars. You can see that the drain hole rusted around the rubber plug, but more alarming you can just barely see that rust has already started on the inner sections of this panel that we can't access. There's only one way to fix this...


Once the thing is seperated, the rust can be fixed and the panel reassembled (the rusted area for the plug was replaced too, the plug isn't necesary, theres another little one on the bottom that doesn't rust out)





Once its back together, you can use seam sealer to fill ALL of the panel seams so it won't rust out again.

Now with the donor metal all fitted and prepped, its time to weld it all in.



On the inside I had to remove and recreate the mounting tab for the wheel liner...


Then on the areas that were highly suseptible to the rust returning I POR15ed them...



Last reattach the outter gas cap chamber, a bit of self etching primer, some sealer and that about takes care of this corner (except a little bodywork later on of course)...








Thats the last of the rust behind the shock towers, next up is any rear tower and floor pan damage.
 
#24 ·
I love these type of threads. Great work so far! Can't wait to see your final work.
 
#25 ·
Unfortuantly it may be awhile before we can post pretty pictures of the car all painted and fully reassembled as Dean hasn't determined yet when he's going to have the paint portion of the restoration done. My end of things will wrap up in the next month or so and the bodywork will be all done, the repaired areas primered and ready for paint and some basic reassembly, but the car will be going into storage for at least a year before the paint work. I may be doing that as well, depends on availablity and all when Dean is ready.

Thanks for the compliments though, and there will be many more updates soon!
 
#26 · (Edited)
Time for another update.

Check my last post, I just added 4 new pics to the end of it. Sometimes I add pics of the repair with the final primer work and sealant applied later on as I like to give the primer a day to dry before I apply the sealant as it tends to disolve the primer if it hasn't cured abit. I also will not apply paint or primer overtop of the sealant untill its cured overnight as it shrinks a little when it fully dries.

Alright, next up rear seatbelt buckle mount area...



Doesn't look too bad right? This is the underside and the cause of the problem...


At first glance it looks like a single plate spot welded to the floorpan but infact its 2 plates, and the middle one is spot welded to the frame rails. And of course theres no sealant from the factory around any of the seams, so it creates a nice rust sandwhich as dirt and water can get in between the plates and rot out the spot welds. Lets see what it looks like inside...

hmmm, going to have to go deeper...






So as usual, what you see on the outside is rarely the worst of it. The actual exposed damage was very minimal, but infact most Supras look like this or worse once you open them up. Note how little the exposed damage was on the DS, yet on the inside it was almost as bad as the other side.

So the middle panel on the PS was rotted straight through in a couple spots so I replaced it with new metal completely, and then sand blasted and primered the other panels...

Note in this pic the gas tank mounting hardware in the top right, which I've removed (luckily they bolt off) and also sandblasted, soon to be POR15ed.

Next up the rust on the car was ground off or the metal removed if the rust was too deep...



Its pretty simple after that, weld it all back together with generous portions of weld thru primer (I use this awesome silver high build stuff that is very durable) and then seal it up with seam sealer...



And thats about it, it will never rust again here. If only Toyota had taken a couple minutes to seal these panels up properly at the factory. Once all the metal work is done the bottom of the car will get scrubbed spotless and get a full proper undercoating, and it will all look very factory and brand new.

Things are going quick now, look for another update soon!
 
#29 · (Edited)

http://www.proformproducts.com/en/products/detail/?id=81

Good stuff. The black sealer I was using before was a different brand (Domestic Sure Seal, great products normally from these guys) and I didn't like how hard it was drying to, this stuff stays about as flexable as the stock sealer. Its a little runnier going on which can be handy but does make it messier, however its pretty easy to work with and is the most similar to the stock stuff I've tried yet.

Alright, another little update.

Here's a super common rust spot, still in very early stages on this car...


This is the top of the rear wheel well. So why does it rust? Because of this little reinforcment panel they weld on underneath in the wheel well...


You can see the ends are not sealed in so it allows dirt and water to get at the spot welds underneath and rust out the well. I don't think I've ever owned a mk2 that didn't have this spot. Luckily, the DS was actually completly sealed up by the factory undercoating...

So nothing to do there, the rust always comes from underneath. Alright, lets get into it...


With the reinforcement panel removed we can see what we're working with.



I had to remove a bit of both well panels. Almost got away with just grinding off the rust on the outer one but the metal got too thin in one spot once I ground it all off.

So unfortunatly this spot is one of only a few on the car that is boxed in. What I mean is there are braces under the window that seal in the cavity that I've opened up. Here's a shot of the brace from inside the panel...


There is no good access to the back of the sheet metal I've cut out. This is a problem as welding burns up the paint on the other side of the sheet metal and you need to recoat it when your done if you want to avoid rust in the future. This is why so many DIYer or average bodyshop rust repairs end up rusting out again. You really need to think of how your going to repair a spot so that you'll have access to both sides of the metal before its done so you can seal it up properly. This is why I welded on the new bottom plate first...


I was able to get a little paint in there through the upper hole, but it wasn't enough. Your options at this point are try and spray the back side with some of that wax inner panel protectant stuff (which I really dislike) through a wd40 style straw, or add some access panels...


Since this patch bridges that brace I had to add two (ignore the little hole in the center). Hole saws are great. You can see the burnt sections inside that were previously unaccessable. It was tight working through those little holes, but it was doable...


I managed to paint and seam seal the entire patch seam and then some through the new access holes. Obviously these holes will be covered up by the interior and they are too small to weaken the structure of the car.

And heres a few shots of the rest of the sealer work, the way it should have been from the factory...

And the top too for insurance...


The next update is gonna be scary, for everyone. The area I'm attacking next is probably the area that rusts the most undetected, and is rusty on just about every mk2. Its also one of the areas that can kill one of these cars for good if the rust goes unchecked for too long. Stay tuned.
 
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