I’ve been really bad at updating this thread, so here is a bit of a recap of the last 9 months!
I ended up binning off the idea with the wheels, and sold them on for what I paid for them. It worked a lot better in my head than in reality but I’m glad I tried at least.
The Sirion got mothballed over winter as there was too much salt on the roads for my liking. I took it out a few times but didn;t do much in the way of miles. After the road salt was washed away in March I began using it more, and I’m please to say its bearing up well.
The exhaust has stayed together much better with the C-Clamp compared to the strap clamp I used before. I did it up really tight, and in retrospect I probably should have used an M10 c-Clamp rather than an M8 one, as you can get more clamping force before the threads strip on the ‘legs’ of the clamp. For now its fine, but definitely a job for the future.
Now that the weather has improved, I have been out a bit more including to a local Japanese car meetup called ‘Daikoku Nights’. The cars there were really diverse but included a few cars in the Daihatsu corner
This chap had recently bought his Copen and it was in lovely condition. It has the JB-DET engine and manual gearbox, thought a lot of the engine bay parts were very familiar from my Sirion. He was meeting up with another guy whose Copen has lost the battle with rust and the two of them spent a solid 2 hours swapping the tonneau cover for the folding hardtop between the bad car and the good.
The other Daihatsu friend was a guy who brought this 1998 Hijet. It had only done 30k miles but was a bit cosmetically worn. He’d done a load of mechanical work to it inlcuding changing the hubs to accept 4x108mm Ford Fiesta mk2 ‘pepperpot’ alloys which I thought looked excellent. He gave my daughter a ride on the back round the field of the venue which she loved.
My Sirion got plenty of positive feedback even amongst some much more impressive machinery which was nice. Most of the cars there were daily drivers rather than show queens so my slightly ‘patinated’ car blended in just fine!
Fast forward to today and the Sirion was in for its MOT. I’m pleased to say it passed with flying colours, getting one single advisory for an oil leak (same as last year). I had a chat with the tester and he said that it wasn’t a leak as such, but just crusted on oiliness on the lower parts of the engine. I may try and clean it up a bit in due course, or just leave it along as a proactive rust prevention system!
I really need to drive it more - I only clocked up about 1000 miles between MOTs in the last year, and about 150 of those miles were a trip to see some other car friends near London in March.
Oh, and my daughter has had a go of driving the Sirion too. She’s only 15 but I have access to a private farm track so took her there to practice driving ahead of her 17th birthday when she can legally begin driving. The Sirion is good for that, as its small and has few mechanical aids so its a ‘simple’ car to begin driving. What’s less good is that the clutch isn’t very forgiving so that was a bit of a baptism of fire for her! She did really well and was able to get the hang of clutch and gearchanging (you can get up to 3rd gear fairly easily along the ~3 mile track) so thats another bonus of the car!