Rev3 MR2 with custom bodywork & V6 swap

[alan_uk]

that my firiend is genius i absoloutly love it how on this earth do you do that i need a custom tom tom in my life lol

[synXero]

Hahaha, sat nav icon is cool. Did you have to make partially turned icons too??

Sad to hear about the tacho. Removing the needles is a disaster. Such a pain in the ar$e to fix.



Any progress with our plans?

[JD]

Sweet. It never really occurred to me that you could customise a Tom Tom. I'm gonna do a full Outrun theme on mine if I can figure it all out.

[Magic Beans]

Have fun out there. Looking forward to the videos

[OwenK]

The tomtom icon is easy - it's even in the manual. Just make an 80x80 .bmp and dump it in the /art/cars folder on the tomtom. I didn't have to make turned ones fortunately - that's Garmin, and would have made things more complicated.

The only tricky thing was getting the size and angle of the car right. The examples they give you have the cars very big and from directly behind, which looks all wrong on the 3d display. I made mine smaller and angled so it looks like its sitting on the little road

Patrick dropped the car off at 7pm last night - down to the wire or what!

[OwenK]

So, three days and 600 miles around Wales breaking in the new engine.



Wow, what a great car! Looking at the performance it's actually not hugely faster than it was before, but the feel of the thing is just fantastic. And the noise, the noise... I couldn't stop grinning for hours. I can't accurately describe it, and none of the videos online properly capture it. It has this exotic sounding slightly high, echoey, soft bellowing tone in the lower half of the rev range, and the upper half it morphs into this more traditional aggressive note, but still sounds very expensive... I'll have to do some video soon. We did a bit of GoPro action but I don't know how well it captured the noise.

Regardless, it just makes it so much fun to drive now, and Joe Public absolutely LOVED the car - in every town there were kids gesturing for me to rev it, or yelling "Nice!", or appreciative nods and smiles from passing drivers. People stopped and turned to watch us pass, and a few people waiting at junctions nearly ploughed into the side of Dave behind me in his MX5 because they were still looking at the MR2 when they decided to pull out! Extremely satisfying.

The whole car just feels so special now: the engine is fabulous, it looks fantastic, there's a wonderful leather/fuel smell in the cabin that makes it feel like a classic car, and the appreciation from all the people I pass just can't help but make it feel like something really, really special. A great experience.

The car performed flawlessly as well - we only had one minor mishap where the car kept stalling. The flexi hose for the intake that Rogue had installed was poking out of the side scoop a little far for my liking, so I shoved it up back inside a few times; it turned out that this caused the intake pipe to pop off and so the engine could manage to draw air at higher RPM, but couldn't idle. Unfortunately this occurred while ascending a steep mountain road, stuck behind a lorry struggling to maintain 10mph - 1st gear and frequently having to dip the clutch caused the car to stall a few times, but when we pulled over to inspect the problem was immediately obvious and we managed to shoehorn it all back on OK - only a jubilee clip.

The photo above was taken with Dave's fancy-pants camera, of which there are many many more from the weekend that I'll post up once they've been filtered through and resized for the web. The below abominations are just some quick snaps with my trusty iPod camera.

[dan mkii]

Looks fantastic mate... really nice subtle but diffrent look , oh best colour too

What skirts are they?

[Magic Beans]

There's no better words to write than those which describe the first drive in the car you've longed to have for so long

Glad it's everything you hoped for and more. Enjoy these next few weeks as they'll be awesome

[rat-runner]

very nice combinaison of tom's rear bumper and border (neo's design) sideskirt
good work with v6 swap it's pretty cool!!

[synXero]

I am so jealous of the bodywork - fantastic job mate, my favourite 2 on the site.

[OwenK]

Thanks guys, looking forward to posting the rest of the pics soon.

Interesting point, I was worried about the height of the car before this weekend. It just looked a little far away from the ground, and I thought it would be something I'd just have to grin and ignore until I can save up for some coilovers. But this weekend it has looked just perfect - i can only assume the extra weight of the V6 has made it squat down a tiny bit further.

So now the coilovers can be forgotten!

[matt-mr2]

The car looks awesome

[OwenK]

Here's the pick of the best shots from the weekend:

[ashley]

That looks familiar, is that just South of Bala?

[OwenK]

As I recall yep, heading out into the Elan valley.

[ashley]

Cracking bit of tarmac- had a good few runs down there

[Magic Beans]

Some great shots

[OwenK]

[matt-mr2]

Those are some bright number plate lights

[ads]

Car looks superb, well done !

That tight uphill bend looks like the one above lake Vyrnwy? just down the road for me ..