The opportunist

Well for the last half a year I've been working on Black Betty and last week I did what no one thought I would do, I sold her. Not my girlfriend not my best friends Rick or Curtis thought I would do it.

Why would I do such a thing? A one in a lifetime chance, at least for this MR2 lover. What you see before you is a picture of a Supercharged 88 MR2 that has been owned since new by a woman that is 72 years old today. I will post more pictures but the interior is amazing. Cloth seats, all power windows and locks. It even sports the original aluminum alloy wheels. She is everything that I wanted Black Betty to become but was a serious opportunity to really own a piece of motorcar history.

24 years ago less than 2000 of these cars were shipped to the United States. This 5 Speed original is amazing. It doesn't have the suspension under it that Black Betty has (not yet, hehe) but the gearing and power is a much better match to the car. I'll be working on "Decker" from now on, cleaning him up and restoring the few things that he needs to be 'perfect'. We'll replace his front bumper, put in new gears on the window regulators, and replace the 'eyebrows'. Then maybe I'll hunt down some more TRD Japan lowering springs and start that process again.

Staying The Course

I've been working on this MR2 for as long as I can remember now and in this state I made a simple but critical error.

When everything was finished I drove my MR2 to be inspected, they put it on the dyno and started the process. On the second cycle they turned it off and came in and told me the car was running hot. This has never happened before. However the tech explained it was probably due to the fact the car wasn't moving and was under strain. Fair enough, made sense and I told him to cancel the inspection.

Later that evening I decided to drive up to see my girlfriend. About halfway there the water temperature started to spike. Not wanting to blow a head gasket I exited and parked, waited for the MR2 to cool down and then drove home. What was wrong? This was crazy.

At first I thought I had caused an issue while I was troubleshooting the heater on the car. Could I have blown some sludge out of the heater core? Hoping this wasn't the case I started checking the cooling fans. I turned on the ignition and pulled the temperature sensor from the radiator. If all of the systems are working correctly the radiator cooling fans should come on. Mine didn't. What's next? I looked at the radiator cooling fan relay, fortunately my roller (an 89 hardtop I picked up for $100.00, keep your eyes on craigslist MR2 fans) had a spare and I swapped them out. However, when I put the relay back in the roller I noticed that the 30amp radiator cooling fan fuse was in a different location.

While I was in the process of rebuilding the suspension I decided to check all of my fuses in the frunk. Taking out each one by one and verifying that each still had continuity. Evidently I had put mine in the wrong spot when I put it back. After moving it to the right spot the cooling fan started up right away. So once again what is the moral of the story? ALWAYS and I mean ALWAYS check the simplest things first.