Saturday, July 23, 2011

Strut Your Stuff Pickled Petey!

After much wait I decided to finally order a strut tower bar. This bar allows the pt cruiser to better handle sharp curves and turns by keeping my strut towers fairly Parallel to one another.

The strut tower ordered was a polished metal texture, that wouldnt do for my red themed PT! So upon arrival I went crazy sanding it with some 2000 grit sand paper to make it not so shiny anymore.

I used some of my left over engine enamel (which is great since its hot under the hood) and I painted it completely red.

Installation was extremely easy, Not too much effort was needed to unscrew the nuts on the strut tower and place the bar on them. As far as torque is concerned Crewzin from PT Cruiser Links informed us forum goers that the nuts should be torqued to 25 foot pounds. Simple as pie!

In terms of changes while driving, It is extremely handy on the tight curves of the mountains. Its certainly worth the measily 20 buck investment.

Heres a picture of my engine compartment. The strut bar is at the top of the photo.


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Thursday, July 14, 2011

It Should Be A Sin To Look This Good!

Alas after a long while of relaxing without doing any car related things, im finally back in the groove.

Today I washed, clayed, and did all that other great stuff that you do to a car you really love. Petey has never been this clean before and you wont believe how amazing the clay bar is...



Im now a believer in the power of the Clay!

But also today I finished up a project ive been wanting to do for a while.

Back when I installed my shelf under the drivers seat I also purchased a rear view mirror from a 2001 pt cruiser. This rear view mirror had map lights on it. I decided that I would tint these red to create some mood lighting where I normally couldnt secretively get a red glow.

My PT has a overhead area with map lights already, so using this rear view mirror allows me to have red tinted map lights while still retaining all the original white light so I could actually see if I needed to.


In the picture above you can actually see both sets of map lights.

The red tint is actually vinyl, Ive never had the pleasure of working with vinyl before but needless to say it was very simple! To tint the lens all I had to do was stick on the vinyl and use an exacto knife to cut it to the perfect shape! The red vinyl I used was scraps sent to me from my buddy Danny (and his PT Eve) from way out in San Ant Tex!

To wire the new mood lighting I just tapped into the wiring in the overhead map lights... nothing too difficult at all!

Since Danny sent me enough vinyl I went ahead and made the cubby light red as well.



This was done by taking apart the light fixture (Super simple), then removing the bulb and sliding out the blue peice of plastic they have there. I then used the blue plastic as a template and cut out a rectangle of red vinyl and just slid it into the slot the blue plastic used to be in. Then I reassembled the light and viola!



Heres the finished product. Sadly cameras like to do odd things to pictures, but trust me, the cabin area glows a nice red color. I have red LEDs in the center console near my shifter installed by Morkeste but I didnt turn these on so you could see exactly how the lighting I did today looks.

Im very happy with the way things are going and believe it or not, my exterior LEDs finally arrived! So be prepared to see Petey glow in the dark!

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Special Thanks To Danny (AKA WolfmanG from PTCruiserLinks.com) and his PT Eve for sending me some red tint scraps!