323 GTX- The Refresh-ening!

No pics but today i cleaned the windows and i have a detailing question: How do you get glass super clean? I used that rainx spray stuff and it got the windows pretty good, but still not great.

Tomorrow i'm taking it out to see if the rattle is gone (or reduced) and to see what else doesn't work to add to my list. So far the 'needs fixing' list is as follows:

Speakers- check power supply
Hood release cable- figure out how to route it under the dash and into engine bay)
Figure out why air blows in through the vents at speed when fan/vents are all off
Gas gauge is weird- PO mentioned there are 2 sensors in the tank, one of which is screwy.

Plenty needs to be detailed still, but mechanical stuff is priority at the moment. Actually, fixing my van is top priority as it is currently blocking the GTX in, and no brakes makes moving it really tricky...

Rufledt wrote: Figure out why air blows in through the vents at speed when fan/vents are all off

Is the HVAC set to re-circulate? Do the outside air switches next to the vents move freely, and can you hear the flappy door clunk back and forth?

yes to all as far as i can remember, but i will double check tomorrow. I think i tried last time on recirc vs. outside air, different fan settings. I can hear the flappy door moving, i think everything is mechanically operated on this car, but i don't know for sure. Anything else i should check? The car has spent a lot of time in storage, any possibility something could've gotten in there and chewed something up? I did find a stash of acorns in the engine bay...

After I clean the windows with glass cleaner I take a dry paper towel and rub all the streaks away.

Rufledt wrote: yes to all as far as i can remember, but i will double check tomorrow. I think i tried last time on recirc vs. outside air, different fan settings. I can hear the flappy door moving, i think everything is mechanically operated on this car, but i don't know for sure. Anything else i should check? The car has spent a lot of time in storage, any possibility something could've gotten in there and chewed something up? I did find a stash of acorns in the engine bay...

The outside vent levers move the flappy doors directly (the outside air vents are one of the best features of mazdas from this era) and the main hvac controls use cables. There may be a clump of something preventing a door from closing.

I find that microfiber towels work well on the windows. Wipe down with the glass cleaner and paper towels to get dirt off and then go over with a dry microfiber to get it completely clear.

Rufledt wrote: How do you get glass super clean?

Is griots pretty good stuff? Im trying to find any recommendations that arent linked to someone selling me something... I used a microfiber cloth and that seems to work pretty well but the water spots are pretty stubborn, ill check out that griots stuff.

The vents thing seems to happen worse with fresh air setting, almost nil with recirc on. Its not bad I guess, but ill look into it.

Engine side cover rattle is greatly reduced, now I can hear some rattling from the exhaust. Its also audible when the car is idling. The exhaust might need some work sooner than I thought...

No work getting done this weekend, we have relatives visiting.

You can polish the outside of the glass with Barkeepers Friend. It's a light abrasive so you need to be sure to really rinse well, but it will get you back to bare glass clean. I do it every couple of years to my cars. Polish them and then fresh rain-x and it's like a new window.

ok i said no work this weekend but i did sneak in a tiny bit. Remember when I fixed the brake line o' death? Well a little bit of air got in the line. A tiny bit. Not enough to make the pedal as squishy as, say, any other car I have, but not as awesome as it was, so this happened:

A little bit of bleeding and the pedal is feeling great again. I double checked the brake line, too, and it hasn't budged since i adjusted it.

In case you don't remember this is a near 30 year old car, take a look at the suspension bushings! They look near destroyed in the picture but the surface is all that's cracked. The rubber bushings holding the airbox looked the same way. I could've put money on them disintegrating when i tried removing them, but the structural part of the bushings were fine with only surface cracking showing up when they were compressed. I hope these are the same way. Poking at them they don't feel hard or crumbly, but firm and a little rubbery, they just look like hell...

The caliper doesn't look perfect, either, but as a northerner i've certainly seen MUCH worse. On 3 year old cars...

I ended up driving through an area with a lot of construction today and coated the thing in dust. Good thing I washed it recently Then again I didn't get this thing to only sit in a garage! Driving cars gets them dirty. I can live with that. Given the rally origins of the GTX, it should probably get dirty now and then anyway.

Thanks for the window tips, i have to order those products since they aren't at my local whatever the store is (can't remember if o'reily's or autozone or whatever) so i'll get back to you on how they work.

With winter fast approaching my progress is slowing on the GTX. As soon as snow hits the forecast, this thing gets parked, so i've been spending some time lately making excuses to go for a drive instead of detailing/fixing stuff. The brake/clutch problems seem to be fixed for good, and the remaining issues aren't all that dire, which means i'm starting to drift into planning mode for next year, the list keeps growing. Projects are expensive, and this one doesn't even need much. I can't imagine how you people do epic car builds for $2015, i've spent over $100 just for detailing products .

In the meantime, the car got dirty again from all the driving so i picked up some of this:

Or i think it's meguiars. It might be mothers, i don't remember, but it's that quick spray detailer. The car isn't 'dirty', more 'dusty' from driving, but i didn't go anywhere in rain or anythying. I'll try to find a way to get before/after pics for here when i give it a try. I'm also looking at this:

and i got this:

The 3 step wax system seems like a good idea. It's a cleaner, glaze, and wax all in one. Polish, then glaze, then a non-abrasive wax designed to work together. I've also never tried a clay bar, so that should be interesting. The paint on here still needs work (i really didn't polish as much as i should've) and i'd prefer non-abrasive wax. Since i just did waxing, i won't do it now, but i'll give that a shot next year. The wax I did use (mothers synthetic) supposedly works well but doesn't last long anyhow.

The exhaust rattle is starting to bother me more and more. It isn't getting worse, i'm just OCD about that kind of thing, and since the speakers don't work, it's kinda loud. There are really no other rattles, no interior squeaking or anything, so 1 rattling thing is kinda bugging me. You can see what I suspect is the problem in the bottom right of this pic:

The bottom right is the exhaust, or more specifically, a heat shield around the exhaust. The factory exhaust has a bunch of shields, and as you can see, they are all welded together. As you can also see, the welds are rusty. I suspect one of the welds broke free and is causing the metallic rattling, so now I have to find it, and potentially fix it. I can't get a factory exhaust from Mazda, and I can't find an aftermarket one, so what do I do? Do I find the broken weld, drill a hole through it and just bolt it together? I suspect since the weld broke, there isn't solid metal left to weld it back together, although the welds themselves are really the only rusty part (btw i can't weld).

I don't have the cash/time to put a new exhaust on at the moment, so i'm looking for more of a stop gap thing to stop the rattle noise. the exhaust isn't leaking and it's nice and quiet so it isn't all rotten or anything. I had the same problem on my E150 years ago, i just took the shield off but these are welded on so i can't do that. Also the cats in this aren't gutted, so they might actually get pretty hot and need shielding.

I did, however, reach the conclusion that I made a big mistake not buying one of these years ago. I've turned a 5 mile drive into a 25 mile drive every time so far. Just today I went to harbor freight to get some evapo-rust to try on some tools after David S. Wallens's post, and i spent an hour driving through the country. HF is 10 minutes away, all city roads. When i got home, i let the car idle for a couple minutes while the turbo cooled down. During those 2 minutes I thought long and hard for a reason to go get something else at any other store. Came up with nothing.

Self drilling self tapping sheet metal screws through the flanges on the shields.

The Meguiar's and Mother's quick detailers do a good job but they also remove some of the wax on the car. Griot's Garage Speed Shine does just as good a job of cleaning and seems to have a little wax in it. When I use it the finish feels smoother than with the others. Been showing vehicles for 35 years and have tried most of the detailing products.

In reply to Hal:

If you've tried lots of them, could you give me some of you top picks? Favorite companies/products for certain tasks? I'm currently focusing on mothers in general because a good number of their products are available locally and the few i tried seemed to work pretty well. I understand it's probably subjective and more down to skill, but i'd like to know whats good (and maybe what's crap).

Also I AM doing some GTX work at the moment, it's just not complete to have pictures yet. Fun fact, did you know the front grill comes off with 1 phillips screw and 4 easily accessible/removable plastic clips? Well, it is, and the grill is FILTHY where I couldn't see...

.032 safety wire if you're just going to replace the exhaust anyway. Doesn't need to be concourse quality and no one will see it down there.

Ok minor update. I felt like removing the grill and cleaning around it. Turns out there's only 1 screw top and center, and 4 plastic clips that are easily reachable and releasable by hand. I like whoever designed that.

Here's a look at the stuff that isn't easy to clean:

Pretty gross, and it's also pretty dull:

What's worse, the plastic clips attach to metal brackets that screw into the grill. The worst one looks like this:

They don't all look like that, in fact that was the only one with anything beyond surface rust. By looking at this one i can tell they originally had a black oxide protective coating:

Removal of the hardware was easy, and it seems even the worse one is still structurally sound. The screws looked fine, too, other than the screw heads. I was pretty happy the bracket thing didn't just break it half the instant i unscrewed it:

The previous Evapo-Rust discussion convinced me to buy a jug of the stuff and try it out:

I ended up throwing all of them in there. It pours out looking like Mt. Dew, but it turns black over time. It seems to work less well when it's black. The cool thing about Evaporust is that it isn't acidic, so you can leave the parts in there as long as you want without worry. According to their marketing, it contains a chemical that only bonds with iron. It bonds with iron more strongly than iron oxide (rust) bonds with iron, but not as strongly as iron bonds with other iron/steel, so it makes the rust fall off, but leaves all the unrusted stuff alone. It also doesn't leave a coating (doens't turn 'rust to primer') and ends up not eating away any of the non-rusted metal like acid might. It does, however, eat away protective oxide coatings which don't bond to iron as strongly. You can see it on this piece that i put in halfway:

I ended up putting all 4 parts in evaporust because all 4 had rust forming. Oxide coatings all failed on some level. Here's a shot of the 2 worst pieces after evapo-rust but before some clean up:

(the one on top got a cleanup and re-immersion after that photo to make sure i got everything)

The one on top was the hella bad looking one, now pitted but no longer crumbly. The one on the bottom was covered i surface rust, and is now lightly pitted and blackened. Following evaporust, i cleaned/sanded in preparation for painting. First a few coats of stops-rust primer:

Then a couple coats of flat black 'stops-rust' enamel:

Installed with the now cleaned screws:

You can see how the screw heads have some rust pitting as well, but now they look pretty good. I went with flat black because it's about as close to the original black oxide look as i could get using paint. Besides, these are parts you can't see, so it really doesn't matter. The deep pitting wasn't fully filled, however:

Again, waaaay better than it was, and these parts aren't visible. I don't plan on driving this thing in the winter (or even the rain, really) so it doesn't matter if it's perfect.

I also did some more cleanup and polishing, seen here:

I didn't take pictures, but it was basically the same process as before. I think that pic was taken before waxing, though. Just a simple cleanup and polish really revitalized this piece, but not as effectively as some of the other painted parts of the car. Still, it's WAY better.

Now i'm going to have to start checking other hardware all over this thing... I have a lot of evaporust to put to good use...

That evaporust stuff is amazing.

What does that stuff do to paint?

In reply to JamesMcD:

according to their info, it pretty much only removes oxides from the surface of iron, so if the paint or powdercoating or whatever doesn't contain oxides you should be good. I would assume if any rust has crept between the paint and the metal, however, it would end up fully separating the paint from the surface. Not that the rust hadn't already done that, but it would seem like a recipe for repainting. Also according to their info, it needs to soak limiting it to small parts unless you stuck a paper towel soaked in the stuff over the rust, then saran wrapped over that to keep it wet. It's not supposed to affect plastic, rubber, or any other metals, but it also won't clean them. In that sense it's a very limited/focused product. Within that window of effectiveness, however, it's basically magical.

Ok the GTX is buttoned up tight for the winter. I had been driving it the last few weeks now and then when the weather was nice, but with family coming for turkey day (and needing a place to park) i threw some stabil in the gas and put it away. looks like the wintery mix (and salt probably) will be arriving very soon, so it may stay away until spring. They already salted some of the hills and highway bridges last week. Sad day.

Until The infernal car destroying/life saving salt is washed away by spring rain, i'll get to planning i guess... Until then, where is this detailing thread i've heard so much about? i need some reading material!