I wanted to get a thread started even though I don't have pictures of the finished car yet. My friend wanted a del sol but around here they seem to be getting hard to find and most of them are tore up. We decided to pick up one that was really beat up and just fix the whole damned thing to be really nice. It started with body work and ended in a complete rebuild of the engine. I'll make more posts about it later and a list of all we did.



the interior was in severe need of a shampoo

both door handles were broke

he spray painted the freaking rims, and that wafer of metal used to be a rotor

rust

more rust

cut that off to find...more rust :/



All the rust was cut off and/or blasted. We made patch panels out of sheet metal and welded them in. All Metal was used to fill in the low spots. I decided to spare you the ugliness of my attempt at welding. I didn't take a lot of in process pictures because we were busy working. The car was sprayed with high build primer and sanded. Then sprayed with a mercedes color I can't pronounce much less type. Almindenscwarz Metallic? Something like that. Once the body was finished we got to the engine. It wasn't running on all four so we checked compression. Cylinders 1 and 2 had none, I mean none, zero, 0. Here's why...


I got some of my old valves, lapped them in, and tossed the head back on. It sounded good, ran good, and smoked like grandma on bingo night. The rings were toast. I got annoyed and ordered a rebuild kit. We pulled the motor on friday July 5th. We rebuilt it and dropped it back in on Sunday July 7th. That's where we are today. It runs great and sound pretty damn good.