Unwrapping all the bubble wrap to unveil this carbon fiber beauty:

I also got this nice low profile spoiler that sits on top of the tail light section. I wasn’t a fan of any of the other spoilers that actually bolt into the hatch, this one is much cleaner and makes the car look more Viper-esque.

Test mounting it. Unfortunately, the finish quality of the spoiler wasn’t too great, there were scratches and other imperfections scattered around. I ended up having it painted a gloss black.

The quality of the hood was much, much better thankfully. One small corner did somehow end up broken off when I received it. This meant spending a few hours sculpting, sanding, and painting to get it back.

Here’s the car with the OEM hood removed.

Fitment is great, I did run into a problem trying to close it shut initially. Turns out, the latch locking mechanism couldn’t fit over the U handle (for lack of a better name) on the hood; it was too thick in diameter. Comparing it to the one on the stock hood, there’s a groove in the part where the latch hooks over. So I busted out some dremel bits and made a similar recessed groove, and it did the trick.

Excuse all the finger print marks on the front of the car, that’s from compulsively getting everything to align correctly.

Comes with a cool adjustable tip.

Colorful, uniform welds:

I also put on a Carbon Kevlar version of the diffuser I previously had. I loved the style of the diffuser, but the old one was in FRP. This was something I had been eagerly waiting on for a while, and really ties together the other carbon kevlar parts I have.

Both the new exhaust and diffuser installed:

I said why not, and took the opportunity to go ahead and strip my parts off the Bianchi and buy the Broakland. I ended up making a late night trip out to SF, and the dude lived in a warehouse in some industrial district… so at first it seemed pretty sketchy.

Turns out the previous owner had it made a year ago (The bottom bracket has a stamp with a production date of 9/08) and said he rode it only on special occasions. Sounds good, so I brought it home.

Came with a Chris King 1″ threadless headset and carbon Wound Up fork.

The tig welds on the frame looked amazing with everything still raw.

To take care of the surface rust, I read up on a chemical rust removal procedure on a Vintage BMX forum. I went to Sherwin-Williams and picked up this pound of Wood Bleach aka oxalic acid. The acid is mild and eats away the rust / converts it to this yellowish powder stuff that can be easily cleaned off. I didn’t really need to do all this, especially because it was hard to find a container big enough to sink the frame in, since I was getting it sandblasted and powdercoated anyway.

After all that, I took the frameset with me back to San Luis Obispo and dropped it off at Central Coast Powder Coating, what I later discovered to be the most incompetent, pathetic powder coating shop in existence. The idiotic owner told me they had a ton of colors, but when I go there to choose they have almost nothing I wanted, causing me to make multiple trips back to clear up the color choice. This was especially hard since I had no car in SLO, and of course no bike either. After a while I get a call finally from the owner saying it was done, so I immediately make my way over there only to find the shop completely closed down when I arrive. I spend the weekend looking at all the parts laying on my floor and no frame. I go back on the following Monday, only to have my worst fears come true. The paint job was so hideous and unevenly sprayed. There was massive amounts of orange peel every where, it was definitely a rush job. Unfortunately the owner of the shop held my bike for ransom, and forced me to pay for that horrible powder coat. What a shoddy business to say the least.

After stomaching the crappy situation I was in, I immediately made my way over to the other powdercoating shop in SLO, Full Spectrum. The owner here was much more reasonable and actually knew what he was talking about. He gave me a much better price for a 2-stage powdercoat. The frame was re-sandblasted and cleaned off, and a much much better paint job was laid down. Everything was glossy and even. The color is called Anthracite Metallic. Getting this frame properly painted was truly a headache, but at least it was accomplished in the end.

Since this was a Steel frame, I took an extra measure to preserve it and bought a can of Frame Saver. After spraying down the inner tube walls, this stuff dries to a high viscosity oil that is resilient to rust.

The long awaited reassembly:

Getting the headtube refaced:

I’ll have completed bike pictures at another time…

These are the pictures taken by photographer Tom Nguyen.

Here are the boots:

A look at the shifter trim panel being removed to install these things:

The shift knob:

Everything on… I’m not completely satisfied with how the shift boot is because everytime I go to shift, I grab a handful of the boot as well. Tightening down a ziptie around the neck of the boot didn’t help much either, all the nonuniform folds that were produced looked a bit off. So, I decided to utilize a counter intuitive approach, and ditch the new suede shift boot all together.

Around the same time, I had taken my bumper back off and dropped it off to the paint shop again. I decided it needed to be repainted again… while it was redundant work and a week of downtime, the end product was much better. Before, there were small dimples and holes that weren’t fully filled and sanded across the bumper, and other things. Thankfully all of the prior imperfections were remedied.

Once I put the bumper back on, I went back to get it cut and buffed. Here the bumper is getting wetsanded with 1200 grit:

Then came the buffing with some compound:

For the first time in a while, the car is back on the ground instead of on jackstands.

With that, I said whatever and didn’t bother cleaning the car. There’s still many months worth of dust and grime on the car from all the work that went down. I also was lazy and didn’t find anyone with a fancy camera to do the pictures for me, so I went at it with a random point and shoot I had. Here they are:

After making my way to SevenStock XII, I met up with Ken from ShineAuto in person and paid for their “revised” FEED front bumper. The revision includes lowering the angle the nose points at and making it more parallel to the ground, which suits the car much better in my opinion. I also did a lot of wheel shopping and researching, and scored some AME FS-01 Tracers. Additionally, since I wanted to lower the car, the old Apex’i GT-Spec cat-back’s canister was too huge so I had a straight pipe section made.

All of this happened over a span of some months… it took a bit of patience and quite a bit of work but I’m finally very happy with the car and pleased with the outcome.

I originally bought a set of ‘99 sideskirts, but ditched them because they wouldn’t have matched well with the FEED front… so instead I picked up some FEED sideskirts and some bumper protectors in carbon kevlar:

Here are the AME FS-01s, sizes are 18×10 and 18×9. Tires are Federal 215/40 and 245/35. The amazing story behind these wheels is, since AME USA only had a few sets left and they were only in bronze, I decided to buy them anyway and have them powder coated black. I took the wheels to a nearby place and they were able to strip and repaint it all in one day… one of those times where things just click into place and work out. The paint came out great too.

The lowest these wheels would go offsets wise was +25, so I grabbed some H&R 5mm spacers to give it that little bit of poke.

Sticking on the fronts… This is what it looked like with the original bronze, not the look I was going for:

Now with the gloss black. The passenger side headlight cover is off because I gave it to the body shop to color match for the bumper, more on that in a bit.

Next I installed the sideskirts, it came out very clean with the use of some self-tapping screws.

Somewhere along the line, I bought a 4″ diameter 18″ length Magnaflow tip, and had an exhaust shop make me a cat-back to my taste. Since my car at the time was still on stands and with the bumper being painted, a local RX-7 driver was kind enough to lend me a hand. He drove over and we had the shop make the exhaust with his car as the template, basically. Here I laid down some high-temp paint with ceramic.

Installed… also did some fiddling with the diffuser at this point too.

Figured you can’t have a car that looks mean without sounding mean, right? This thing is a good deal louder than the GT-Spec but has a pissed-off snarl to it now…

Fast-forward to the FEED front bumper, once I got it back from the body shop I stuck on the turn lights and the protectors, etc. Then came the install, which actually wasn’t bad at all. I did have to do some cutting around the front vent since the intercooler wasn’t clearing. I also tinkered with some various adjustments of the headlight covers and hood latch to get things fitting more squarely. The paint job wasn’t exceptional, but atleast it matched and the bumper is going to get rock chips anyway.

The bumper wasn’t sanded and buffed yet in these pics, which is why it looks rough.

Here are a couple more pictures of the wheels and their fitment.

Fronts:

Rears:

Alas, this is what all the work and time and $$$ produced:

As it goes, you always gotta start by taking out the old. So began the process of uninstalling and moving parts that were in the way. First was the bumper:

Since the bumper was off, I took this opportunity to remove the front fenders as well. I wanted to tuck the wiring harness that sat right above the front wheels, below the fender… if the car is lowered, there’s a good chance the tires could rub through the wiring harness. There was a metal ledge that I ziptied the wires onto to reduce the chance of contact with the tire.

Unfortunately, when it came time to reinstall the fenders, I encountered one of the most horrible bad luck streak ever… Needless to say, I was baffled with the amount of things that went wrong. When I put back the passenger side fender back on, it was slightly misaligned with the door which resulted in a lot of tedious tuning. In this process, 5 bolts out of 8 holding the fender on were stripped. Not all at once either, they happened over time, so you can imagine the amount of stress hovering when I was trying to get the body line even while dealing with stripped threads. I ended up retapping all the threads and buying new bolts. Eventually the passenger fender was on. Next came the driver’s fender, which aligned much easier than the passenger side did. Only a couple bolts ended up being stripped here, but there was one on the very bottom of the fender that had the bolt head actually break off. These are supposed to be “Grade 9″ bolts, yet they seemed like they were made out of twigs. I probably could have left that bolt out, but being the perfectionist in me comes out in these situations. After lying on the floor and drilling for hours, and breaking countless drill bits, it was fixed in the end…

I don’t know why, but reinstalling the front fenders was unnecessarily difficult, probably one of the most painstaking things I had to go through. Atleast they’re back on, so we can move on now.

I then turned my attention to the engine bay, where a few things had to be removed: stock (puny) intercooler, the airbox, battery and battery tray, and then the splash guard from underneath.

With all that stuff out of the way, the stock radiator was drained and then plucked.

Here’s a comparison of the Fluidyne versus the OEM…

The electric fans were transferred onto the Fluidyne, and everything was put back in and reattached. I bought a gallon of distilled water and some anti-freeze to refill the coolant system.

With the radiator taken care of, it was time to focus on the intercooler which had arrived:

The seller included some universal piping and a few random couplers. While I got the intercooler kit for super cheap, it just goes to show that nothing is totally free… because the piping and couplers were basically useless. Atleast the actual intercooler, which is an Apex’i GT-R delta-finned core, and the t-bolt clamps were still great.

Underneath the front bumper’s rebar is a crossmember that is spot welded on. Some convincing with a chisel and hammer took it off. The RX7Fashion intercooler then mounts across where the crossmember was.

A comparison shot of the new and old, I was surprised at how wide and thick the Apex’i core was… as you can tell, the stock intercooler is dwarfed. I never knew why Mazda used such a tiny intercooler in the first place:

Intercooler mounted on the car:

I had to make a couple notches in the hood support for the inlet pipes to go through:

Since the supplied piping was pretty much useless, I had to figure it out on my own. Around this time, I had to pause the install since summer was over and school started again. I took the next month and a half or so to gather up some new materials, which included a pair of specific transition couplers and new piping. I decided the best route was to buy a “universal” piping kit that included straights and various bends, then cut it up and make it fit. The actual pipes I bought proved to be good quality, with really thick walls too. I also ditched the stock plastic throttle body elbow for a greddy one.

After putting some more work in, everything was finally installed.

Following the same mindset, my Nikon D90 camera was also sold at this time so the quality of pictures from this point won’t be as good. I’ve went back to an old Canon Powershot point and shoot, does the job though…