Finally, some activity on this website! I have been keeping a very consistent pace of development over the past months (a lot of development on drawings and such) and I did have my reasons for not updating you on my progress. I am not able to go into all of those details here (for various reasons), suffice to say that now that the project is fully under my control again I can say and do whatever I want! And one of the things I want is to tell you what I am doing with the car! I hope you enjoy the information.

Getting the headlamp buckets done has taken quite some time. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to thermo-form abs plastic because I wanted to make the buckets out of black plastic. You know, just heat up a sheet of plastic, drop it on a form, suck the air out and ker-thunk - out pops a headlamp bucket. Well you can probably guess where that ended up. The headlamp buckets now are fiberglass and I have molds made the old-fashioned way. Now whenever I need a new set of headlamp buckets I place a phone call to my fiberglass man and he lays them up for me. Takes a bit longer, costs a lot more, but they do get made that way.

Here you see the underside of the bonnet/clamshell hood with a non-undercoated area around the headlamp cutout ready for epoxy and bonding. The bucket itself weighs maybe 1 pound and accepts Hella 90mm Halogen or HID lamps. These are available in Euro or DOT spec and cost approx $80 each for the Halogen units.

The buckets are a 2 sided part with a back panel that allows the headlamp and adjusters to be screwed to it.

 Here is an earlier photo of a trial fit in black.

Some of you may remember from previous posts that I was experiencing braking performance issues. Basically not enough brake to pedal effort causing a significant loss of confidence under braking. You  don't really want to dive deep into a corner when you think your brakes suck. So I did several things to solve this problem and it is well solved as the brakes are now awesome. The first change was the master cylinders are now 5/8" instead of 3/4", the second was the rotors are upgraded to 87-89 MR2 front and rear from 85-86 rotors. The caliper is identical on all the MR2's but Toyota went to the larger rotor on the later models. This required a change to the caliper bracket and the larger rotors.

 Here you see the difference in front rotor size. About 1" overall diameter increase.

Here you see the difference in the rear rotors. Even larger  than the fronts. This should make a big difference.

Changing the pads out to EBC GreenStuff too....

 The caliper brackets are larger  as well.

Cross Drilled rotors. Mmmmm Tasty. They look kewl! -- I really Like this particular photograph too.

I've been debating the gauge situation for several years now. First I thought I would make my own gauges based on the original MR2 gauges and reface them into something cool and not so 'japanese 80's',  but that approach does not work when you consider I built the car to accept all types of FWD drivetrain.

What could I do but purchase the coolest gauge on the planet?  The Mychron3 Gold Plus Auto. Ok, it's actually 2nd coolest as the Mychron Pista MXL with the larger lcd and blue backlighting is even cooler... But this is a really cool gauge!

  It's fairly small and really light. It accepts rpm, speed, and 4 additional inputs and does datalogging. Sequential shift lights and a gear display. It will display alarm leds based on predetermined settings for the 4 inputs. It also comes with an infrared lap timer and pickup. I plan on monitoring oil pressure, water temp, fuel level and boost. But what's nice is that the inputs are fully configurable so I can monitor pretty much anything I want.

 Recently I saw the following chart that measures SpD (Speed per Dollar). It applies really to the cost of a new car as used vehicles skew the figures completely so don't even try! hehe. But seriously, I added La Bala at $30,000 using a 245HP ecotec SS engine and a weight of 1,600Lbs.  La Bala comes out on top by a large margin!