ATSystems

More molestation! Pulled and gave the headlights a proper polish, scienced the crap out a rattling exhaust shield, did the rocker cover/spark plug seals on both sides after finding oil in #1 when I did the plugs and took to the crappy aftermarket front bumper with a hot air gun to make it fit the vehicle a little better. The bottom lip clips have always hung too low for the pins to engage, on tear down it turns out it's just a crappy aftermarket PoS that wouldn't sit right even if you vacuformed it on. But hey, the clips are now on and the towbar imprint now looks like a.. shallower towball imprint. At least I burnt my fingers trying! Being unaware of the setup of these rocker covers at the time and having only owned the vehicle for 36 hours, I threw up a little when I first spotted oil in that plughole. That should be in the welcome sticky. I have a clock/radio that intermittently forgets time and stations, clock unit dies in the arse for 20-40 seconds if you push a button/look at it funny. Relevant harnesses/fuses are all secured and inox'd and I reworked the solder on the clock board but every now and then they just frizz out. Likely related is an intermittent flicker of the clock unit and radio/speedo/tacho (specifically) backlights. 10-ish flashes (dimming more than flashing), the clock goes off for about 5 seconds, then all comes back. Gotta be a common circuit here, that's going to be fun to diagnose. Suggestions always welcome. As a more general question, does anyone have some good info on what makes a good rim from a technical/mechanical perspective? I want to ditch the stockies but I have no idea what constitutes a "good" wheel, which I need to factor in along with the aesthetics of the thing. I am familiar with fitment concerns like offsets, caliper considerations etc, but you could line 6 mad looking wheels up from the hokiest Chinese crap to top end JDM units and I would have no idea which one was going to implode on the nearest speed bump.

Hello people, new person here! Stoked because I have been umming and ahhing about doing my front grill black but found one in a wrecker today for $30. Dude that did it even did a decent job of it, you can barely see the sanding marks! The factory one was munted from.. something anyway, I can do it a nice deep metallic black at my leisure now I know the black looks mad. Managed to snatch up some outer window seals, a door card and a handbrake boot as well. Innards are getting less gnarly by the minute. Pic related but as I got her, have since removed the racks, polished the headlights and just generally scraped the munge off her. She has some pretty nasty paint defects on the roof and hood, looks like hard rain has eaten into the clear, paint seems ok. I have a decent idea how to attack it but I might go digging for a thread here, I'm certain there will be one (and if there isn't, there might be one shortly). When it's not too dark I'll get some updated photos and try to upload them.

May as well post it up here as well. Was having some drama uploading an image to my introductory post, a 4000x3000, 3.8MB jpg of my car. Ironically, I can upload a screenshot but not any of the pictures taken with my Samsung. I have tried rinsing the images through IrfanView and MS paint and stripped all metadata but no dice, this is all I get. I have cleared cache, deleted cookies, reversed my underwear b̶u̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶a̶m̶ ̶y̶e̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶r̶y̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶a̶n̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶r̶o̶w̶s̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶I̶'̶l̶l̶ ̶s̶e̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶i̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ ̶l̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶r̶y̶ ̶I̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶s̶e̶.̶ ̶R̶u̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶O̶p̶e̶r̶a̶ ̶7̶9̶ and tried another browser with no change. Anyone seen this before? [edit, I have now discovered I can upload any image up to 4000x3000, it is literally only images that have been created from both my old and new Samsung phones, despite stripping metadata]