Hello MLR and anyone reading this thread. My name is MR OZ and i own a Mitsubishi Evo Tommi Makenin edition. As we all know or have learnt over the years, these cars are special and becoming rarer/expensive due to rust and current world related things. Most have become collector cars/garage queens/concourse restored and so on...
I did not buy mine to be one of those things!
So the story of my evo starts or shall we say restarts here.
Bought in 2016 for just 10,000, the best car I've ever owned and immediately fell in love with the rawness and how good it looks for a 16 year old car. But soon started having issues. First wash underseal fell off of the underside and revealed rust - lots of it. So being a keen 24-year-old i stripped it back, red oxide/rust treatment/stone chipped nice and quickly - in the street on my back.
2017 rust had come back with a vengeance, no holes just surface rust everywhere.
From there i fully stripped it to bare metal again, used dinitrol rust treatment/rust bullet/stone chip/clear coat/dinitrol cavity wax on the underside. This held up for maybe 1 or 2 years with some wet days mostly dry (strictly no salt), i would rinse down the underside every couple of weeks mainly getting any mud out of the crevices, the joys of living in the country side
In 2018 it also had a forged engine, nothing crazy just a simple refresh with ''drop in rods and pistons'' some hks springs and tomei baffled plate, needed as had bad ring leakage across all 4 after 30 laps of castle coombe
Handful of other mods throughout this time including engine bay repaint.
2016-Til now just 4500miles covered give or take.
In that time its gone from a 10,000 car to over 30,000, i knew it would go up abit but prices have gone wild. Believe these where only around 32,500 new!
The car has been sat in my storage in bits since 2019/early 2020. Completely abandoned and unloved, with having a business/house/family taking my time and funds, couldnt justify spending serious amounts of money or time on it either. So its sat in storage Just covered in a plastic sheet with parts racked up, engine in bits and no effort to even do anything with it.
Over the years i have been thinking about my choices . First being sell it and put the fund into business, then only talk of once owning a legendary car. Or build it the way i want and use it the way it was designed to be used.
So i have picked the second option.
First problem straight away is how to build it, oem refresh with some subtle bolt ons? Concourse? Big turbo 600+ track weapon? Group a spec rally replica? Works spec?
Works spec is a complete no, i just cannot find parts and if i do they are very expensive (works suspension/gearbox/4 bolt hubs with wheels etc is over 50,000 used!) Group a spec is also hard to source for if you want to make it period correct. Big turbo is also a no, having worked on many high power cars they are a money pit, always broken or needing upgrades. Also i do not want a roll cage, need to be able to use daily.
What am i going to do then? Well being more grown up and now with a good dry space with milling machines welders etc at my disposal i can do what ever i want. The plan is a highly competitive road car with lots of modernisation, fast response good handling and most importantly a bullet proof underside so i never have to restore it again!
Technology/parts have changed alot since the late 90s and i would like to implement as much of this as possible without ruining the general heart of the car. Most of the things i plan to do haven't been done (as far as i know) so you may see things out of the ordinary compared to most build threads. This is going to be 1 of 1.
All that and not a picture of the offending car, here you go. In its glory 2016/2019
That's all for now.
Thanks for reading.
MR OZ
I did not buy mine to be one of those things!
So the story of my evo starts or shall we say restarts here.
Bought in 2016 for just 10,000, the best car I've ever owned and immediately fell in love with the rawness and how good it looks for a 16 year old car. But soon started having issues. First wash underseal fell off of the underside and revealed rust - lots of it. So being a keen 24-year-old i stripped it back, red oxide/rust treatment/stone chipped nice and quickly - in the street on my back.
2017 rust had come back with a vengeance, no holes just surface rust everywhere.
From there i fully stripped it to bare metal again, used dinitrol rust treatment/rust bullet/stone chip/clear coat/dinitrol cavity wax on the underside. This held up for maybe 1 or 2 years with some wet days mostly dry (strictly no salt), i would rinse down the underside every couple of weeks mainly getting any mud out of the crevices, the joys of living in the country side
In 2018 it also had a forged engine, nothing crazy just a simple refresh with ''drop in rods and pistons'' some hks springs and tomei baffled plate, needed as had bad ring leakage across all 4 after 30 laps of castle coombe
Handful of other mods throughout this time including engine bay repaint.
2016-Til now just 4500miles covered give or take.
In that time its gone from a 10,000 car to over 30,000, i knew it would go up abit but prices have gone wild. Believe these where only around 32,500 new!
The car has been sat in my storage in bits since 2019/early 2020. Completely abandoned and unloved, with having a business/house/family taking my time and funds, couldnt justify spending serious amounts of money or time on it either. So its sat in storage Just covered in a plastic sheet with parts racked up, engine in bits and no effort to even do anything with it.
Over the years i have been thinking about my choices . First being sell it and put the fund into business, then only talk of once owning a legendary car. Or build it the way i want and use it the way it was designed to be used.
So i have picked the second option.
First problem straight away is how to build it, oem refresh with some subtle bolt ons? Concourse? Big turbo 600+ track weapon? Group a spec rally replica? Works spec?
Works spec is a complete no, i just cannot find parts and if i do they are very expensive (works suspension/gearbox/4 bolt hubs with wheels etc is over 50,000 used!) Group a spec is also hard to source for if you want to make it period correct. Big turbo is also a no, having worked on many high power cars they are a money pit, always broken or needing upgrades. Also i do not want a roll cage, need to be able to use daily.
What am i going to do then? Well being more grown up and now with a good dry space with milling machines welders etc at my disposal i can do what ever i want. The plan is a highly competitive road car with lots of modernisation, fast response good handling and most importantly a bullet proof underside so i never have to restore it again!
Technology/parts have changed alot since the late 90s and i would like to implement as much of this as possible without ruining the general heart of the car. Most of the things i plan to do haven't been done (as far as i know) so you may see things out of the ordinary compared to most build threads. This is going to be 1 of 1.
All that and not a picture of the offending car, here you go. In its glory 2016/2019
That's all for now.
Thanks for reading.
MR OZ