Guess who's back.

Quick photo dump to get everyone's attention.

Some of you might have noticed that I've removed the turbofans and gone back to the original black and red aerocovers. I still think the turbo fans are cool, but at the moment my focus is on getting the front and rear of the car back looking like they belong on the same car, and having different wheels front and back was just making things worse.

They may go back on eventually but for now I'm actually much preferring this look of the simple aerocovers.

So to explain the radio silence for the past month, I'm temporarily back in NZ renewing my Visa and catching up with friends, family, and unfinished project cars.

While it was cool seeing the Stagea again, my main focus for this holiday is the Chimera. The plan while I'm back is to try and tidy up this car and get it looking like one car again. I left things pretty unfinished when I moved to Japan so my goal is to at least get the body panels finished, and some paint on it again before I leave again.

Straight off the bat I ran into an issue with a dead battery, and of course the battery is in the boot which normally is pretty easy to get to, but for me that meant taking off the spoiler and the roof to gain access:

This gave a pretty rare look at the car with no roof so I grabbed a couple extra angles.

I don't recall ever taking the roof off since I cut the rear fenders and deleted the rear bumper, honestly I think it looks pretty cool.

Even after jump starting the battery and taking it out to charge the car still wouldn't start. Turns out the fuel pump is dead and so I've bought a replacement and will be swapping that in just to keep it running.

In addition to that, I'm going to relocate the battery to somewhere with easier access. I know I can just jump start the car from the alternator if it dies again, but I don't want to have the battery somewhere where I have to remove the whole roof just to get to it.

Since it wouldn't start the car got winched into the garage where I pumped up that flat tire and started work on the first thing I want to tackle which is the front fenders.

Over the past couple days I've been taping up some new overfenders to go over the custom JGTC style fenders I made already. I was going to shape these with foam but because this was such a simple shape it was the perfect use case for just tape and fiberglass which I normally don't get to do.

The round style of these new overfenders should help blend the front and rear together especially once everything is painted to match which brings me to the next problem and the thing I want to ask you guys for input on.

When I painted this car, I used Rust-Oleum 'Black Stainless Steel' spray paint as my accent colour on the fenders and roof, but now that it's been a few years, none of the places near me even carry it anymore, I don't even know if I can get it at all.

So I need to decide what to do as far as painting this goes. I've found a replacement colour that might be close enough, and so I need to decide between two options:

Option 1:
I paint the front end exactly how the old one was, with the fluoro yellow bumper and lower door section, silver body, and dark gunmetal trim. Or,

Option 2:
I take this opportunity to respray the whole car and go darker and more dystopian with it. I've been thinking about going matte gunmetal or satin black with this car for a while, which with the weathering I think would look pretty great, but it would also lose the original feel of the car.


If I keep with Option one then I'll need to pull off all the wrap as it's burnt and starting to peel off, then respray the body of the car again in a silver as close as I can find to the satin silver that was on it, then probably also paint the rear fenders again to match the new gunmetal colour on the front fenders.

By a miracle, I still have 1 and a half cans of the fluoro yellow left, but honestly I'm not sure if that's even going to be enough to respray this front bumper and the doors. And they no longer sell this yellow anymore either.


So it's definitely a bit of a tricky call and I'm keen for your input on what you guys all think I should do.

If I get some good ideas I might put the top options up as a poll on YouTube or something.