Today was a highly productive day – firstly, I want to thank Brian and Justin for helping and doing most of the dirty work; it’s always nice to have competent pals 
. Roy and I are very appreciative of your help and glad that nothing broke or went wrong! Cheers!
The agenda was to install new front brake pads, coilovers, and wheels. Sounds like a big day of sweat, blood, and tears – doesn’t it? I guess the perk of having people who know what they’re doing (ya know, doin’ it right) is that things will get done quickly. I would say from start to finish it took less than three hours and this was done without air-tools! Again, the nice thing was that nothing broke! I was stuck with doing the easy stuff like jacking up the car, removing and replacing the wheels, removing nuts and bolts…I think that was it (hah!) – even though my tasks were simple in comparison, I learned and gained a little bit more experience with working on my own car…plus the satisfaction that it was all done at home.
Before Brian arrived I put Roy on jack stands using a brand new rapid pump low-profile jack from Harbor Freight. Just a quick review of the jack – at 45lbs this thing was heavy lifting out of the box, but maneuvering it around the garage was really easy. Our older Craftsman jack could really only go forward and back then to have it go sideways we kind of had to drag it left and right. With the HF jack, it glided really easily back and forth as well as side to side…it really didn’t feel like 45lbs once it was settled on the ground. Overall, it has a very sturdy and reliable feel to it. The pumping wasn’t exactly effortless, but each pump got the car higher quicker.
Here’s a snap of Roy teetering on the stands. This made me really nervous. What if one of the stands failed?!
Moving on – Justin and I decided to install new brake pads for the front. The pads that I used were the Performance Ceramic by Hawk. I didn’t lend a hand for this, but it must be an easy process if it was done quickly even before I could ask about the status of it.
These are the original brake pads – they look like they’ve got a lot of meat left! However, the Hawk pads are so much more responsive and braking feels a lot more solid now. I’m a lot happier now with how the braking feels much more secure and reliable (this is coming from a person who has nightmares of not being able to stop >_<).
Once Brian arrived, the real dirty work began…
I was assigned to remove the nuts from the trunk and rear shocks. Here you can see the Bilstein shock.
I was told that the bushings were in pretty bad condition, along with the dust boot and the spider webs -__-;. A few months back I bought a set of bump stops and dust boot for these guys, I may just replace the old with the new since they’re off the car and incase I want to put them back on Roy.
Tein Flex coilovers on! Now time to put the goodies on…
RS Watanabe 15×6.5 front 15×7 rear +35 (I think…).
I think I want the ride height a little bit lower and he would look perfect. What do you think? Like? Hate? Ricer? Awesome?
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