The story of the resurrection of a ‘90

[skeeters_keeper]

The story of the resurrection of a ‘90

I. History
II. Paint
III. Engine
IV. Exhaust
V. Misc

I. History
This is the story of a ’90 L Plus. The story starts almost 5 years ago in the summer of 2005, when my family and I were visiting Lynchburg, VA to look for houses in the area, since my dad had just got a job down here (at that time we were located in PA). In our wanderings around we visited the local airport and spotted this nice looking teal 90... of course, being the festy nut I was even then, I snapped a few pictures as we drove by.
(The time stamp on my camera was off, it really was the summer of 05 not 03 )





Now fast forward about another year or so. There was a house being built just a few miles from where we now live just south of Lynchburg, VA... and I began to see a very familiar looking teal L Plus! I would wave as I passed etc, but never really got a chance to talk to him. A while later a dark blue ’93 moved into the same house, and I noticed the teal car had moved to a spot in a field towards the bottom of his property. It didn’t look like it had been wreaked or anything, but it was obviously just sitting and he was now driving the dark blue festy.

A few months later in the fall of 06 I wrecked Skeeter for the first time, and due to the frame damage etc I thought it would be a good idea to get another body and transplant my B6/brakeswap/etc into the new body... so I stopped by this guys house and tried to buy the 90 from him. He had been using it as a parts car for his blue 90 and said he wasn’t interested in selling it, so I ended up getting Skeeter repaired and the 90 continued to sit in the field below the house. Sometime during the summer of the next year (07) the festivas moved out and I didn’t see them again until towards the end of 08, when I noticed a craigslist add for two festys – a running dark blue 93 and a teal 90 parts car! Right away I sent the guy (Jason) a message and went to look at the cars, bought them both brought them home. While talking to him I found out that he worked at the airport etc, so I was sure it was the same teal festy I had seen in 05. He bought it back in 93 (?) as his first car and drove it for years; it sounded like he really didn’t want to part with it because he had had it for so long. The reason it was parked is that he had some issues and ended up replacing the head, and forgot he filled it up with straight water; it froze and supposedly cracked the block... I didn’t care too much; B3’s aren’t really my style anyway. I didn’t tell him I had been stalking his car for the past several years

My driveway after bringing both those home (I already had Skeeter and a 91 teal parts car from Paul):





The dark blue 93 (which was a freaking amazing car and I almost wish I had kept it) is now Will’s (motoxpress). The teal festy just sat for a while waiting for me to do something with it. Then in the summer of 09 one of my friends was looking for his first car, and he loved my car (I taught him how to drive stick in it etc, and he thought it would be neat to have a festy too). So we started talking about it, and decided that we would fix up the 90 for him...

[skeeters_keeper]

II. Paint
At this point the 90 had a few different colored body parts (teal, dark blue, red, black) because Jason had been using it as a parts car. Jimmy is a huge Stealers fan (ew!) and decided he wanted it yellow with black racing stripes. So he and a few of our friends went to work swapping parts from my parts car to get the straightest fenders and stuff, then cleaning, sanding, and rattle caning:



Multi-colored parts:


First coat:


Engine bay cleaned:


sprayed black:


More rattle canning:





III. Engine
After the fourth-stiva mini meet last year Will and I went down to one of the local yards to look around. We came across a 323 (92 or 93) with a decent looking engine and, with only an hour till the JY closed, we started wrenching. 45 minutes later, engine, trans, wiring harness, and ECU were laying in front of the car. We disconnected the trans and I brought the rest home. It looked like it had a new water pump, timing belt, etc so I thought I had a pretty good score! It was nice and golden brown under the VC etc. I figured someone had just dumped some $$ into the motor and then wrecked the car. Turns out, it had a (very) warped head on it that someone had tried to ‘shellac’ in place instead of getting the machine work done. Morons.

Anyway, on with the swap pics. First you MUST clean up the new engine a little... best way to do this is with some high temp paint and using your mom’s oven while she’s not home.


(the blue VC is for my bike)
Inside the B6, looks nice and clean!

B6:


Old:





New:





Check out that sweet remote-mount battery with jumper cables running under the hood. Don’t worry, that was just temporary to get it running and run it did! But, on its first trip away from home it started to over-heat and blew a rad hose off... fixed that and then it still kept over-heating. While Jimmy was trying to get it back to my place it over heated again and he stopped, let it cool a little, and filled it back up with water. He said the temp gauge never reached the top of the line, but I found out later the temp gauge wasn’t working quite right. Anyway, it was bad enough that it wouldn’t start again and we ended up pulling it home with another car. Ran a compression test and it was 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 . Yep, that sucker was warped!!
At this point I was getting pretty fed up with the car (we had other minor hiccups along the way too, a simple little B6 swap that I should be able to do in about an afternoon was taking way longer than it was supposed to). Between school and work and everything else I didn’t get much time to work on it again for a while but when I finally got the head off I could see that someone had tried to shellac a new HG in place w/o machining it. That explained the new water pump/timing belt. So I got the head re-surfaced, cleaned up the block, lapped the valves (I should have had them all ground, cause they were a little out of spec. oh well.) Long story short, I had a bunch more problems (cam key broken, rad fan not working, minor wiring issues, etc etc) and I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever get that ugly pile out of my driveway.
But I got it running again just last week and the compression test was “ok”, i drove it for almost 200mi to make sure it wasn’t going to blow up and it did fine even in stop and go traffic on a 90* day, got about 34mpg, and pulled pretty hard (turned over the tires in 2nd, albeit they are still 12s).

[skeeters_keeper]

IV. Exhaust
The car had no exhaust at all on it, so I had to make another exhaust... this is my “nearly free” exhaust v2.0
It’s the same idea as the exhaust on my car, except I made it modular. Where mine is all welded/clamped together this one actually has flanges and bolts. The main reason I went this way was b/c I used the stock B6 downpipe, so I had something to start with. Then I got a cheap resonator on e-bay to make it look like it has some type of a cat (it doesn’t, but around here we just have a ‘visual’ inspection), and then just had to make a flange for the rest of the exhaust. Once again I made it out of 2” conduit from Lowes and a 2” 90* bend from lowes. Total cost was something like: resonator $15, glass pack $25, straight conduit (10 feet) $10, 90* bend $10. So about $60 total, and you can sell your stock festy cat for about $80 on e-bay. So for a net profit (!) of $20 you can have a sweet new exhaust.

Pics:








The flange I needed was made out of the center of an Aspire steely. Yes, that is one of the most... um... “creative” things I have ever done. But it had just the right bolt spacing and the center hole was exactly the same as the 2” conduit. So I just cut out the center of the wheel and welded it in place... presto, an awesome flange! I know I have some pics of it around here somewhere, but I cant find them right now... Anyway, it sounds great and is working good so far.

V. Misc

There were a few other things that it needed as well... the shifter was falling thru the floor, civic short shifter installed, battery mounted under the hood, ghetto overflow bottle, etc.
Short shifter:



falling thru the floor fix:



Battery mount from a piece of 2x6 (300cca lawntractor battery from Northern Tool, $30)


The screws holding it down:



Awesome coolant overflow:


Cleaned up a little. Needs a good wet sanding/wax, but at least it looks half decent when its wet :p




It needs a few more things... like a fuel sending unit, new passenger seat, and a drivers side CV axle... but it passed inspection and now Jimmy’s been rolling around in it for the last week or so... hopefully the worst is past with this seemingly cursed car! I was beginning to think that it didn’t want to be resurrected!

Until next time folks, Skeeter out.

[Festiva_Fred]

Sweet stuff! Good job on the car :thumbright:

[freshtiva]

I think it looked good to start with

[BEASTS'TIVA]

good

good work kid.

[rallytiva71]

Awesome Job, love the paint job, I really think all that work defenetly paid off!!!

[collegeboi]

You have too much F'n fun, seriously you should get banned. Im moving to your neighborhood haha

[Safety Guy]

Nate, you're awesome...again!

Karl

[sasquatch]

my finger hurts from scrolling and my eyes hurt from reading lol jk... looks like it was a fun build good job

[Britstiva]

Dang! Awesome ressurection!! LOL