So here's some more details - ideally this should be the first post in this thread.
I bought the car in February as a non runner, it was listed on Gumtree for £500 but I haggled my way down to £250.
It's fair to say the car looked nothing like the following pictures I was sent when I went to look at it. The below pictures were what I was given before going to see the car:
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At some point, the car had been resprayed white BUT the paint job was HORRIBLE. In fact horrible would be an understatement.
There was probably one coat of paint that had been applied and the surface hadn't been keyed down before the paint job.
Because the surface wasn't prepped properly, this happened (in more than one place):
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I've got several other scary pictures but I'll leave them out in order to compress this post down as much as possible.
MAKING THE CAR ROADWORTHY AGAIN:
The car had a completely worn out clutch disc, don't know how this is possible but the material on the plate was non existent. I got a 2nd had clutch disc and had it relined as well as a second hand flywheel and pressure plate for about £40
When I purchased this car I was selling a Civic for a friend and it just so happened that the buyer of this Civic was a mechanic, he agreed to let me use his garage to fit a new clutch in the car if I dropped the price by £50. So I did.
I followed this guide:
http://webspace.ringling.edu/~dplassma/cj/cj.html and by some miracle only took me 8 hours to do, there were points during the job where I thought that the car would never see the road again.
Once I knew that the car was mechanically okay (i.e. it drove) I started focusing on the cosmetic bits.
INTERIOR IMPROVEMENTS
The car needed a replacement interior as everything was ruined, the seats were torn, centre console was disgusting as was the rear storage box, fortunately for some reason things were selling for cheap on eBay.
((I purchased a centre console for £30 which came with the clock that had the S/R button, I followed by selling the clock for £40 on eBay.
))
Even the door-cards were ruined, the tweeters on the door had no cloth in them - so I purchased some 'speaker cloth' on eBay and fit that (was a pain to do).
Below Pictures are of the old interior parts.
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I also purchased a set of seats from a bloke in Rochdale, drove all the way from Leicester to Rochdale for seats. They were fabric seats from his zed but they were in absolutely immaculate condition.
Here is a photo of his zed (1.9):
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I'll post a picture of the updated interior once everything is correctly fitted and put back together.
COSMETIC IMPROVEMENTS
As the paint had started to come off and there were blotches of filler everywhere I wanted to get a respray.
Nobody wanted to respray that car, every body shop I took it to either quoted me a ridiculous amount for a partial respray -- £2000 at one place - or they simply didn't want to touch the car as it had been bodged up so many times.
I found this one place who agreed to plasti-dip the car, I wanted a matt grey finish, when applied the dip wouldn't stick in several places and it looked awful, like primer, I refused to pay for a job so poorly done, caused massive drama and in the end we reached an agreement where they dipped it in matt black.
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The New Matt Black Finish:
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Current Problems
So that's the car as it is right now. There is still several bits left to do before it goes in for its MOT, mainly getting a pair of new headlights, hopefully sourcing a pair of fabric door cards for cheap (original seats were leather but could not source cheap leather seats so got fabric ones instead).
- The current headlights have a burnt surface, so if it's possible I may replace the lens as opposed to the entire unit.
- The locks don't work, When I put the key in the drivers door lock it won't turn, it only turns at a very specific angle, same with the passenger locks, but the key turns fine in the ignition barrel. -- has this been an issue for anyone else? -- instead of replacing all the locks I was thinking of fitting a remote entry device as this may be more cost effective, I purchased one from eBay but I don't know how difficult it would be to install. Problem is the car has already had a remote entry system fitted at least twice, once from factory as it had the original BMW Alarm Module and then it has sensors on the A-Pillar for an alarm unit.
- The ABS light is on -- what sensors are related to the ABS light coming on? Is it just the brake pad sensor --
@littlefeller -- if it is a brake pad wear sensor then wouldn't it throw two lights on the dash, one for the pads and the other for the ABS?
- Roof lets in massive amounts of water, I'm going to try and adjust the pressure on the roof latches.
- Brake Hose will need changing, anyone provide me with a guide for this?
Thanks for reading, hope you're not too bored at this point.