MR2-itis

It's a beautiful day. Tomorrow my dad and I are going to make a 1.5 hour trip out to Exeter in the Mazda, but I would really rather do it in the MR2. It gets just as much attention as the MX-5, despite being 20 years older. I doubt I'll ever get tired of the thumbs up, craning necks, and random conversations in gas stations or parking lots.

In any case, the plan is that sometime next week I'll be able to get an inspection and have it on the road. But we'll see about that.

Today, I got the instrument panel disconnected and removed. I'll wait until the speedometer cable arrives to see what else needs to be uninstalled and replaced.

Until then, I polished some plastic pieces using Meguiar's PlastX. It buffed the cloudiness right off of my headlights and taillights! I was surprised it worked so well.

And I have this replacement part that I don't know what it goes to. I got it from the previous owner who said that it was a coolant temp sensor. But it's not. I'm surfing the web but can't match a name to the part. Ugh...even though it's not important, it's still bothersome to not know what it is for.

EVENING UPDATE: So I got bored and kept on working on the car. I decided to start cleaning the carpet and looking at the small rust hole on my floorboards from a different angle. Out went the seats and up went the carpet. The floorboards look really good for being 23 years old, but the isolated rust hole was a little larger than I originally expected. It takes up about the area of 1/2 a sheet of paper, but not all in the same place. I'll take a pic and post it later. I think that either riveting or welding a basic piece of sheet metal should do the trick (as that's all it is anyways).

Pictures!
- During the "extraction"
- After
- And the cockpit minus two seats*. I'm going to vaccuum and shampoo them before putting them back in (the same will happen to the carpet)
*Interesting MR2 fact: As there is no transmission tunnel in the MR2 (it's all behind the driver), that hump between the seats is actually the gas tank. Talk about using space wisely, as well as moving some of the car's mass forward.