A morning at the Pick-a-part

Dennis and I met up at 10am this morning at one of Sun Valley's beautiful pick-a-parts.  Niether of us had been for years and along with being stunned by the landfill mountain that had formed behind it, we were stunned by the prices!  $50 for a radiator? $20 for tires?  Who knew?

It wouldn't have been an issue if we hadn't found a 1978 RX7 that was in surprisingly good shape.  We got a muffler, water neck and a spare radiator.  I don't know if we'll use the radiator but this one seemed to be in great shape....so it's good to have as a back up.

Things I forgot about Sun Valley Pick-a-parts

1. Wear long pants

2. Wear a hat

3. It's smelly

4. Bring a rag

5. Bring a hammer

6. It's smelly
A tip - when removing an intake manifold make sure you remove all the bolts before trying to "pop it loose" with a crow bar.
The brakes were actually worse than the ones on our car and the only other RX7 in the lot had no brakes at all.

The roll cage is in!

Wow, what a Sunday.  Rhonda, Dennis, George and I took on the roll cage.  Gutting the car was easy.  Getting the roll cage together was more of a challenge than we thought.  After employing everything we had including child labor we realized that the generic looking brackets were actually for specific places.  So we took it out assembled it in the driveway marked everything and then took it apart and put it together in the car.  It turned out great!  we have something that looks like a race car!!!

More on the car

George, Dennis and I spent Sunday putting the engine back in the car.  Maybe not so much "putting", maybe more cramming, jiggling and stuffing.  Even with so much room and such a small engine, it still took forever. 

Well, now it's in and as you can hopefully see it turns.  So it's pretty much all uphill from here.