UPDATE ON TOM AND THE BLYATSU
Tom turned out to be more of a troublemaker than I initially thought he would be. They day we did a service, was also the day I almost sent Tom into a ditch. The FR tire wasn’t very good at the ‘keeping air inside’ part, so when I drove to a shop nearby with two friends in the car, it didn’t really want to turn when I wanted to throw it into a corner. “Understeer” is almost an understatement. The way the car didn’t respond to steering input was ridiculous (and dangerous). So, I took off the wheels and replaced them with the steelies that were fitted to my YRV donor.
The old steelies had 165/60/R14 tires, which was slightly smaller than standard, and looked a bit weird in my opinion. Now it’s running on 165/65/R14 tires, and I ditched the Toyota hubcaps as well. Now it looks like a Sirion to me.
With temperatures starting to drop quite rapidly, I was in a bit of a hurry to fix the cooling issue. As I said before, the thermostat was broken. In retrospect, I’m not even sure if that was even true or not, because replacing it with a new one didn’t help. The car still didn’t get up to temperature, and it took some time to figure it out.
I thought that maybe it was struggling with the cold weather, and was simply cooled down too much by the wind, so I went full engineer.
Long story short: the car came up to temp slightly quicker, but it didn’t solve the issue.
In the end, it was running cold because the hoses connecting the radiator to the engine were fitted the wrong way.
It’s a shame it took so much time and effort to sort out, but at least it’s fixed now.
BLYATSU
To be honest, I didn’t get very far since I put it in the garage. I mostly took out a lot of parts, like everything under the hood except the drivetrain, nearly everything on the rear hatch, and the entire dashboard.
Looking rather sad
I can think of 4 excuses why I didn’t make a lot of progress, the main one being that I had to fix Tom first. The second one is me being a bit lazy, the third one is money (or rather the lack of money), and the fourth one being the weather. It it ridiculously cold inside the garage, which is a bit demotivating. I should be able to make a bit more progress in the next few weeks, so I’m hoping to start making some drawings for a few bits I want to fabricate (like a decently placed air filter box).
Wish me luck!