13 Dec The New
Today, we’ll be looking at three different happenings at Fluid MotorUnion HQ in Plainfield, all centering around the idea of newness.
First up, we had it on the blog a little while ago, and now it’s back. This Porsche 914 (their mid-engined, four-cylinder car) is undergoing a pretty serious restoration, which should have it looking as good as new once everything is done. But we’re not nearly finished yet, as there’s still one major part of the interior that needs addressing. First, our body shop finished up with the engine bay, blasting out the rust, replacing metal where necessary and covering everything in a coat of primer to keep further oxidization at bay.
Now that the engine bay is finished, it was time for us to remove the remainder of the interior (seats, carpet et. al) and assess how much work needed to be done in that area. After removing all the necessary parts, we were greeted with, well, this:
That’s not a small amount of corrosion. There’s going to have to be a good deal of work involved with this. Our first step was to tackle the firewall between the back seats and the engine bay. There was one small patch of it that needed to be cut out, cleaned up and given fresh metal, but otherwise, the majority of the firewall labor was spent on a good deal of grinding. Thankfully a majority of the rust was surface only, instead of eating all the way through and requiring extra metal to be welded in.
From there, our body shop continued to move toward the dashboard, cleaning up rust, replacing devoured metal and layering the clean surfaces with primer to prevent more rust from walking its way into the car while we finished the remaining jobs. It’s a very intensive job, but we want to make sure that we eradicate this rust as completely as possible. We’re almost there, and we’re hoping to have the body finished and fresh paint laid down by the end of the month.
Moving on to another topic, our humble narrator has once again fallen prey to the whims of the tire gods. Last Friday, he removed his remaining Pilot Super Sport summer tires and swapped over to his winter tires, some Bridgestone Blizzak WS70s. Going on their third season, they weren’t so much new as they were a little long in the tooth. Well, now he’s got good reason to move to a new set of winter tires, which he did when one of his rear tires grew a bubble and decided to commit seppuku on the interstate, tearing itself asunder much like the Super Sports did. At least he’s got new snow tires now, for all this insanely snowy Chicago weather we’re having (there’s been zero measurable days of snowfall thus far, and it’s currently 48 degrees Fahrenheit just before sundown).
Finally, moving over to the dedicated dyno room within our performance fabrication garage, we have a white X6M on the dyno. After receiving a bit of service, we’re doing some tests on the Dyno Dynamics dynamometer to see if there’s any need to tweak its custom ECU tune. People always give these cars a good deal of gruff for being not quite a car, and not quite an SUV. However, none of that matters once you’re behind the wheel, smashing the go-pedal. These things are fast. Deceptively fast, given its size. It’s got quite a stout motor underneath that hood, but you can’t really tell upon first glance, as it’s covered in OEM plastic of varying colors and contours. Eventually, engineers will abandon engine aesthetics altogether, instead choosing to create some grandiose design out of plastic that will undoubtedly cost a great deal of money to replace. For now, though, we’re too addicted to the sound to care. If you saw the fireball video on our Facebook page last night, this is the flamethrower.
It’s almost the end of the week; have a great day and stay with us for another more daily blog post tomorrow!
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