The build begins.

So the past couple days I finally made a start on this project. You'll remember that when it was dropped off it was lowered into the driveway with a crane and it was missing a wheel, making rolling it impossible.

Well I finally found a jack that I liked and some axle stands and so I could now wheel it into the garage, getting stuck every 50cm or so on the ground or some random pebble.

Fortunately, the previous owner had already done a good job stripping most of this car down, so I didn't really have that much to do.

The main reason I picked the MR-S is because the rear panels just unbolt and that was the first step. It's unbelievably easy to remove, only around 13 bolts or so, some of them are hidden behind the gutter for the soft top but you can just pull it out of the way, don't even have to remove it. So for now I've got the original soft top still in place as it might come in handy in the future.

With the rear quarters removed I could then lift the car up on stands and finish removing the rest of the panels.

I can't even tell you all how much less intimidating this huge workshop is now that it's got random car bits all over it. Crazy how a little bit of decorating changes a space.

Doing stuff like this always reminds me of my favorite part of watching Pimp My Ride as a kid when they would get the car in and just gut the whole thing.

This is the most I've ever torn a car down for a build and it's sooo nice just taking stuff off knowing it's never going back on and that I don't need to take meticulous notes of every bolt and bracket so I know where it has to go.

With that done the next thing for me to focus on will be getting my 3D printers set up and running. Like the Stagea project, I'm going to be utilizing 3D printing to build the moulds for this car. I've looked for CNC machining places thinking that I might get it carved out of foam, but it's taking me so long to find a place to do that that while I look I might as well get started with the prints.

I also want to announce that Elegoo have jumped on board as sponsors and sent me 2 of their Neptune 4 Max printers. I'd been using the Neptune 3 Max back in NZ and I was really happy with it so I reached out to see if they wanted to help and they immediately sent me 2 full printers. So massive thanks to them, never in a million years when 3D printers started coming out would I think that I'd have companies sending them to me for free.


That's all for now, over the next few days I'm going to be working on turning our 3D model into a mould that I can print out piece by piece over the coming days.

I'll be aiming to get the video for this up by this weekend.