Last week was a busy one.  I was either working, sleeping, or working on this hood.  A job that started simple, and got more complex than I should have made it.  It should have been a simple hood wrap…

I ended up with a semi decent product, good enough to show off at Northwest Nissans Golden Gardens meet as I intended to do.  Reaction to the vinyl wrap was pretty good.

The previous owner originally did the hood hump widening.  I found that it wasn’t welded, and that was most likely the cause for the bondo work to start cracking.

Destruction and resurrection…

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Over the last couple of days, I did the final sanding and painting of the console.  I’ll try and get some daylight pictures of it installed, see if the color is a closer match.

Overall, i’m pretty happy with the outcome.

So, I’m spent a couple more hours on the shifter console… its coming along great.

I grabbed a scrap piece of ABS plastic from Tap Plastics

Traced the area needing to be filled

And then cut it out slightly oversized

Sanded everything to prep for the epoxy

Taped everything together

Then epoxied (plastic weld) the hell out of it

Waited an hour or so for that to dry, then flipped it over and applied some epoxy to the top

Waited a couple of hours, and started sanding it smooth

I still had some gaps, so I put another coat of epoxy on…

The white epoxy had a longer working time (about 15 minutes) but with that came a long 4+ hour cure time.  I set it aside for the weekend, so it could fully cure.

Today, I started sanding the white epoxy down to the final shape.  On the sides and small end, everything was perfect.  On the large end where I had put the filler plate, I had built up the epoxy a bit so I could match the contour of the WRX trim ring.  After some sanding, I discovered a couple bubbles in this area.  So I applied another thin layer of epoxy to even everything out.

Tomorrow I should be able to do some more sanding on it.  If i’m lucky I’ll be able to step up to a finer grit, and then finally prime it.

Since I’ve owned Ultimate RX, there has never been a shift boot, shifter console, and until recently… not even the lower rubber boot.  As appealing as seeing the ground through your shifter hole is, I decided its time to remedy this problem.

This pic shows what i’m rolling with right now…  Just imagine a Kartboy short shifter and a Prodrive knob as well.  Now, this is all EJ linkage in the older EA body.  Biggest problem with this setup, is the shifter is a good 3″ further back.  In fact, it just barely fits the stock cutout in the body.  Normally the the EA shifter would be centered in that black rubber boot.  And that 3″ makes it impossible to fit the stock plastic and shift boot around it.  The stock plastic also is setup for 2 shifters, as the car originally came with the dual range transmission.

I picked up this WRX console and boot for a great deal from somebody at Surgeline Tuning almost 2 months ago.

On my lunch break today, I ran to the local Pull-a-part and grabbed this:

Stock plastic from a EA 3spd automatic equipped wagon.

The basic plan, is to merge the shifter opening and clips from the WRX console, with the EA plastic that will snap into car just like stock.

The following pictures show the progress I made today.

As you can see, I got all the rough cutting done.  Now I need to work on making a filler plate for the top whole, and filling in all the misc. areas and making it all look like one factory piece again.