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I bought this MR2 from one of the AW11 groups on Facebook. It was only $1000, which was too good to pass up, even if it was currently in the midwest, an automatic, and not running. It was also missing a bunch of parts (Intake ductwork, AFM, EGR stuff, Muffler, Various bits and pieces.)

There was a reason this thing was so cheap. The previous owner told me that the car was running recently, but the fuel tank had gone bad. The car had been hastily resprayed purple on top of it's original Dark Blue. It was a T-top that was sitting in the rain for who knows how long so The floor pans were rusty to the point of being unsafe to drive. The trunk was filled with water when the car arrived. The inside smelled like an old 90's car (good) mixed with mildew and soggy carpet smell (bad.) Most of the time spent working on the car when it arrived was cleaning and derusting while I waited on parts.

Binford Metals in Kent had an MR2 they just brought in around this time so I went and pulled the intake ductwork. I spent some time scratching my head and parts hunting to reverse the EGR Delete that was done on the car by the previous owner. I wanted to bring the car back to OEM specs before doing anything to it. The fuel tank was dropped and inspected... The inside of the tank was disgusting.

There was rust everywhere. The liner of the tank was just peeling away and floating inside. I spent so long working on this gas tank and I was about to give up on it. I loaded it up with Ospho and nuts, suspended the tank from the ceiling, then I'd shake it up and let it sit, turn it 90 degress an hour later, shake it up and repeat.

I still wasn't happy with the results I was getting so I tried another method (when I probably should have just given up and gotten a replacement tank.) I took a plastic 55 gallon barrel I had previously used as a rain barrel, cut the top off, filled it up and tried using electrolytic rust removal. This was what really got the inside of the tank looking bright and shiny, but it took forever. The inside of the tank was then etched with Ospho and then coated with POR15. The tank went back under the car with a new pump, a replacement pump hanger, and fuel filter and was filled with fuel.

After the tank was put back in, I still wasn't getting fuel at the injectors so I took those off, tested them, and they were all clogged. Big surprise, right? While I was there cleaning them out, I put in a new fuel line with AN fittings to replace the notorious one that cracks and then starts a fire.

The last step to getting the car to start was setting timing correctly because apparently it was wrong. I had the hardest time lining up that god-damn-dot on the distributor. It took days of second guessing myself and thinking it was something else that was wrong. After many, many times of setting TDC and restabbing the distributor I got it running. Once the car got up to temperature though, it was gushing oil from just about everywhere.

It was about this time that I was selling my house and had to store the car for a year because my new apartment did not have a garage. I spent the time before the move clamping together a temporary exhaust system so I could drive it short distances without raising too much hell.

It wasn't until a little bit over a year that I was able to get my present location and garage. I dropped the engine in March of 2024 and got started on the reseal even though I didn't have the manual conversion parts needed for the conversion (save for the manual transmission itself since I found one cheap on the MR2 groups.)

I picked up some body parts from another local MR2 guy (thank you, Alex!) to replace the ones that were bad on mine. His car was totaled by insurance and he was parting out the body parts and doing something top secret with everything else. I used his burgundy trunk lid and hood on my car. It was starting to look like a harlequin car or Frankenstein car.

While I had the engine out, I decided on deep cleaing the engine bay, priming it, and painting it. I wasn't sure what color I was going to paint the car once I had it all together so I just painted the engine bay a kind of metallic gun metal.

I was reaching the point where I wasn't going to have anything to do until I got the manual conversion parts. It was looking pretty grim when I had a sudden stroke of luck. I was looking for someone parting out a manual car on Facebook and Reddit when I found a post that was a few months old of a guy offering to sell his complete totally car to someone. I messaged him, and after a few days he got back to me. He still had the car and was desperately looking to get it out of his garage. He was asking $500. I jumped on the offer and had it shipped up here for a little over $200. I now had everything that I needed to get the conversion done.

The conversion itself wasn't hard. Routing everything on the automatic car was straightforward save for the clutch master cylinder which needed 2 holes punched out. The hardest part of the whole conversion was finding the right mount that sits on top of the transmission and attaches just below the battery tray. I ended up having to fabricate a spacer that was 3/4" to line everything up. Everything was looking great in the engine bay.

I ended up using the engine lid from the new parts car because the purple one that came with the car was also rusting out. Now the car was 3 different colors: Purple, Burgundy, and Black. I needed to get this thing painted before the summer ended and the rainy season came in. I was eventually planning on getting a air compressor and paint gun set up for my garage but I was not going to have time to do it all before the summer ended. I wanted to get something on the car before summer ended, so I decided on running a little experiment using those awful, gigantic, rustoleum turbo cans. Was I going to regret this? Probably. Did I have fun doing it? Heck yeah. It actually didn't look that bad. I was still able to cut and polish it. Sure it didn't have the high gloss of a clear coat but it still looked good for the time being.

Exhaust Weld up Storage for Winter