I just wanted to introduce myself, im nick and now a fully paid up member of the clan, some of you may know me from the facebook site, keep pestering for information, so im now here to do it aswell lol.
My passion for gtos didnt start straight away, i bought my 92 gto tt in 2013 after it had been stood since 2008 off my wifes uncle for a steal of £1500(or so i thought).
I bought it mainly because it was cheap and i missed my jap cars, having come from the early evo scene and losing my evo 3 in my divorce there was a void in my life which needed filling.
unfortunately due to getting married again my financial restrictions put the gto on the back burner for another year, i finally managed to start her restoration in 2014, i had originally set out just to clean her up and repaint the bonnet as the lacquer and paint was wrecked due to being parked under a tree and uncovered for many years, but then as i sanded back the bonnet to bare metal i had a thought “what if i change the colour of the car” so i pondered for weeks as to how i could change the look of the tired dull silver and give her a fresh lease of life.
How i made up my mind was a coin toss because i couldnt decide between kawasaki green and focus st orange, well you see how that went, i thought i would keep costs down by prepping it all myself so i took the bonnet to my mate who had his own paintshop,as i was on a tight budget he advised me to go to the local paintshop to get the paint mixed and put into a rattle can, so i did, as i watched him paint the bonnet effortlessly i thought to myself “that doesnt look to hard” so with the great result of the bonnet and feeling confident i decided to do it all myself with rattle cans.
So with every spare bit of cash i had and birthday money and christmas money i had built up a nice collection of paint and lacquer to start my facelift of an unloved car.
I would spend hours and hours and hours sanding,filling,masking,priming painting and lacquering, my new bride had become a gto widow, although by then i had started to fall in love with another.
To be fair it snuck up on me and i didnt even see it coming till one day i looked at her and it hit me, i love her, racked with guilt but also some pleasure and satisfaction i decided thats it shes mine forever.
Thats where my love for my gto started and has since grown, after finally getting her on the road a fateful day in a supermarket carpark 2 months later meant it was time to make one of the biggest decisions of my life…PART OUT or rescue her, all the late nights and early mornings we had spent together,all that work,blood sweat and beers, i know what i wanted to do straight away but convincing my wife was not going to be so easy, especially as her jealousy had grown of the time i spent on the car and with her.
Surprisingly she wasnt that hard to convince,so i set out on my mission to replace her beating heart, it wasnt long before i had some replies to my plea,i think fate drew this conclusion because after many road trips and alot of money later i had in my possession her new heart, unfortunately its wasnt a straight forward swap over, the new lump needed to be put together, so with very limited knowledge and the workshop manuals i set upon building the engine, now for someone like myself that had never built an engine before it was a daunting task which lay ahead (what could possibly go wrong) ?.
Well lets just say after much bad language,countless headaches,■■■■■■ knuckles,tears some grey hairs and a lot of support from the facebook group, i finally managed to get the heart ready for transplant, so with a bit of help with some friends the transplant was now complete, now was the tedious task of connecting everything back up, as she sits now she is nearly complete but not liking an easy life i decided it was a great idea to update the 90’s rear end and bring it into this millenium with a full custom led upgrade and strip out the whole of the interior to clean,paint and update and install new gauges to make sure her new heart didnt skip a beat and with a full standalone ecu installed this would make it easier to fine tune and get the maximum performance out of her new forged engine ,so right now i reckon a couple of weeks she should be ready for the 2017 show season and santa pod in april, it will be great to finally meet you guys who have helped me out over the old interweb.
Are you going to do a rebuild thread on here, would be nice as you have done a good thread but a couple of b4 and after photies wouldn’t go amiss.
