Mitsubishi 360 screaming "Save me!"

Eric · **Posted:** Tue May 10, 2011 12:14 pm

Haha, thats exactly what i was thinking

Building this little gem, rebuilding a Bellet and still a girlfriend who is also willing to help you

Awesome little car and i enjoy every new post you make!

opelboy76 · **Posted:** Tue May 10, 2011 6:04 pm

simple:
she must be AWESOME!!!!

city hunter · **Posted:** Sat May 14, 2011 12:41 am

looking good man. Nice to see so many nice cars at the bbq.

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Mon May 16, 2011 5:12 am

Thanks for the comments everyone! I'm actually on my second girlfriend throughout the span of the restoration, haha. This one is pretty rock though! Here's a picture of her standing next to her favorite car!

Ya, she's pretty awesome!
Alright, back to the car, now that she is painted I really hammered down on her this weekend! Got a lot done!

Here's how it was sitting when I started on Saturday morning.

So, I decided to start at the back and work my way forwards.

Doors coming together.

Front fenders looking the part.

Back end all buttoned up. The bumpers look absolutely fantastic!

Side view, looking good!

Hood on and ready to rock.

Front back together!

It sure looks good!

Got most of the interior in.

And how I left it on Sunday night!

The only things to put back on are the door straps, the door handles and the mirrors! If I had had 30 more minutes I could have finished, haha. I still have to jack it up and find out why it's leaking transmission fluid and then clean and prep it for inspection. If it all goes smoothly it should be on the road in a few weeks!

Thanks again everyone for all the comments and support!
Cheers
David

ansarghani · **Posted:** Mon May 16, 2011 5:57 am

I am sure it is one of its kind on the planet. looking great! Fantastic job David!!!

opelboy76 · **Posted:** Mon May 16, 2011 9:03 pm

good to see it looking like new again. must feel good knowing you had a lot to do with that, too. I've honestly never actually restored a car, so I haven't had the sense of accomplishment, but now I want to get into a nice project even more than I did before. well done. you, sir, are a badass, and I'm looking forward to seeing the Bellet looking this nice.

DonTigra · **Posted:** Tue May 17, 2011 1:27 am

Read all 15 (16 now :lol:

) pages. Amazing work! :tu:

Small car bought a second life ))))

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Mon May 23, 2011 7:05 am

Thanks everyone so much for the comments and compliments!
I can hardly believe it myself but this project is nearing completion! They're actually going to take the car to go get inspected this week. Hopefully, everything will go smoothly and I'll be able to take it for a spin this next weekend!

She wasn't completely done when we left off last time, though. So let's catch up! Fender mirrors are installed.

Only one problem though. The driver side mirror got cracked floating around in the box. No idea when it happened, but I'll have to rethink my mirror options again.

Then I broke out a razor blade and got around to cleaning the years of algae and plant growth that had accumulated at the base of the back window glass. This stuff was almost impossible to get it, it was insane!

Then came the fun part, more paint. Here's some before pics.

Up on the lift.

And some serious masking!

And then on went the chassis black paint!

After that dried it was time for some polishing. One of those bottles takes of gunk and grime on the windows like it was nothing (kind of wish I had used it earlier on the rear window). The other polishes the paint to near perfect quality.

Then I hit it with a final coat of something, not sure what, but it might as well have been called frictionless coat. If you polished and coated a children's slide with this stuff, all the kids would have broken legs cause they'd hit mach 10 by the bottom! It's amazing stuff. Hard to tell in this picture, but the whole bottom 2/3 is the hood!
(10 points to whoever can guess what the two cars reflected in the hood are)

Another picture of the hood.

As always, she keeps good company.

And how I left her on Sunday. I only hit the hood with the frictionless stuff and will finish it all up next week. There are a few more places that need some touch ups here and there, but for the most part, she is done!

Thank you guys so much for everything, you all have been paramount for keeping my inspiration and motivation up!
Until next week!

Cheers
David

Eric · **Posted:** Mon May 23, 2011 12:12 pm

Such a sweet little car

I always think she looks a little sad, dont know why.
Again, great project! You just made a brand new 360!

Just to remind you how you first found her:

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Mon May 30, 2011 2:22 pm

Haha, she sure has changed a bit!
Good news, she passed Shaken and is fully registered and inspected! I even got me some tiny little motorcycle sized plates for it!

But, she was leaking transmission fluid and two-stroke oil...

It was slinging the fluid around so much it actually seeped through the seem on the transmission tunnel and into the interior.

Now, I'm pretty sure it was leaking transmission fluid because when i changed the fluid on the transmission I did it at a different shop (this was before I took the car to Classic Car Nagoya) and we put like 1.5 liters of fluid in. Turns out, the transmission is only supposed to hold 600 ccs! So, I'm pretty sure because of the massive overfill that it was creating massive pressure in the transmission and blowing past the shaft seal. The shaft seal actually looked pretty good, but it better because I have no idea how to remove it without destroying it and this part just doesn't exist anymore.

So I drained all the fluid out and refilled the transmission with the appropriate amount. Hopefully that will stop (or slow) the leak. Next up was the oil pump.

The seal between the pump and transmission looked terrible (and like it was made of felt or something).

I popped both ends off of it to see if I could put new gaskets there too, but one side had an o-ring and the other had a very elaborate and special looking rubber seal, so I put the sides right back on, haha.

I did make a new seal for the bit between the transmission and pump though.

And I installed two new copper seal washers for the bleeder plugs as the old ones were so bad that I actually saw them leaking before.

And finally, I put a small sticker on as a way of saying thanks to Classic Car Nagoya (unfortunately, they haven't made new stickers yet, so the phone number is wrong, haha)!

The car, for all intents and purposes, is done! Unfortunately, a typhoon rolled into town this last weekend and the rain was so harsh that I couldn't get the car out of their garage! So, I will have to wait until next weekend to post up some pictures of me driving it around, haha. Going to make sure all is running well, then take it back to the place I bought it from!

Anyways, thanks everyone for all the support, this project would not have turned out like it did if you guys hadn't been here helping me along!
Cheers
David

Aleks · **Posted:** Mon May 30, 2011 9:00 pm

Awesome! Love that cute look plate for it

Can't wait to see pics / video of it out and about now its done.

tj75gc · **Posted:** Mon May 30, 2011 11:48 pm

This has truly been an inspiring story to follow and I'm so happy to see it followed through to completion. So many build threads, much like their authors start off full of enthusiasm only to fall by the wayside when their interest in the project, or money for that matter, diminish.

I too have just completed a long term Mitsubishi project, nowhere near as thorough as yours mind you :mrgreen:

and I'm pretty sure I've got a good idea of the excitement and let's be honest, relief that its completed and you're behind the wheel at long last.
For me, that feeling is what building and restoring a car is all about. It makes all the (in my case anyway) skinned knuckles, long hours and the hole in your wallet where something used to be but you're not sure what - all worth it.

However, a project car is never complete :lol:

so keep us informed about the 360 new life.
I'm sure it'll be just as interesting.

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Sun Jun 19, 2011 6:25 am

Thank you everyone for the kind comments! You all have been extremely inspiring along this entire build! Although, I'm not quite done, both the diff and transmission have a slight leaking problem. The diff isn't so bad, but pretty the transmission lost more than half of it's fluid just sitting still in my garage in one week! Gotta get under there, find the leak (pretty sure it's the shaft seal) and plug her up. Haven't been able to get to it recently because I've managed to pick up a second job at the classic car place! Which leads me to my chance to finally give back to the community.

Upon first getting to Classic Car Nagoya I was astounded by the number of parts they had (mostly used parts, which is good, you can find the rare stuff that way). So I convinced them to let me translate their website into English and get pictures of the parts online so the rest of the world can have access to this massive collection. That's what I've been doing for the past 3 weekends and we finally got a few of the pages of parts up and going! So, if anyone ever needs any parts for anything send these guys a mail (they got me working there, so sending mail in English is A-OK!) and we'll find it for you!

Here's a small taste of some of the stuff they just have lying around:

Main page is here: http://www.n-classiccar-jp.com/english/index.html
Parts page is here: http://www.n-classiccar-jp.com/english/parts.html

It's still very much so a work in progress and the only parts pages we currently have up are the engine, transmission, emblems, steering wheels, meters, lights and original parts pages. Up until now I've had an extremely difficult time finding parts, but with these guys now working with me, we should be able to hunt down quite a lot of rare stuff. Definitely check it out!

This totally sounds like I'm advertising for the site, but rather I'm just trying to get some of these impossible find parts out of their storage shelves and into the hands of people who need them!

At any rate, I'll hopefully (depends on how much overtime I have to pull at my normal job) be jacking the 360 up this week and hunting down the leaks, should be some interesting pictures then! Till next update!

Thanks again everyone, it really made a world of difference having your support from start to finish!
Cheers
David

ill-minded · **Posted:** Sun Jun 19, 2011 6:43 am

The wheel at the back in the middle. Do you perchance know (or could find out) what it's off?

kidde16 · **Joined:** Tue Jun 28, 2011 5:04 am **Posts:** 3

i thinks thats mitsubishis answer to the mini cooper when it came out....

if you dont mind why not putting let say a 1.6L engine so itll fly.....

nice nice nice car,,,,,, very cute

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Mon Jul 04, 2011 4:08 am

Thanks everyone for the replies!
And kidde16, if I could find another chassis I would totally drop a busa engine in it!

Alright, my full time job (the Class Car Nagoya thing is totally just a part time gig on my weekends) has switched its schedule all up so I've been crazy busy lately! So that's the reason for a lack of an update, haha. That's not to say that noting has been happening, though. The car was looking pretty, but she just had this thing about transmission fluid, the transmission thought the fluid was better suited on the floor...

A closer look at the bottom side revealed that it was indeed coming form the transmission and not from some evil gnomes trying to mess with me, haha.

And the main culprit, the rear shaft seal.

So, first step was to pull the drive shaft, and good god, for such a small car, the drive shaft is mega long! It's like 1.5 times the length of the drive shaft in my Z31!

I'm used to standard splines, so this big blocky type spline got a chuckle out of me.

A drippity drip drip!

Old seal out. No wonder it was leaking!

Where the new seal will have to go.

Now this part blew my mind, Mitsubishi still carried a seal that would fit! Not the exact same, but the inner and outer diameter match!

Slapped it all back together and 95% of the leaking stopped. For the remaining 5%, well, as my father would say, "It's not a bloody watch you know!"
She drives pretty good, been getting some back fires lately and I'm going to need all new heater hoses as the pieces I'm using didn't hold up well to all the vibrations.

So, to give some scale of just how small this car really is, here is some comparison shots!
This wagon is a standard Caldina, not a huge wagon, but then again, when compared to the Mitsubishi, it just sort of is, haha.

And my favorite, a random Range Rover at the KFC. His mirror and my roof-line appear to be at the same height! Pretty sure I could have parked the Mitsubishi inside the Range Rover!

As soon as rainy season ends, expect to see some pictures of this little bugger out and about!
Thanks everyone so much for the support!

Cheers
David

Nath76LA · **Posted:** Tue Jul 05, 2011 2:16 am

I wonder if the seal is the same seal used on early Galants/Lancers. Might be the reason that Mitsubishi have one that fits, still in stock.

cat0 · **Posted:** Tue Jul 05, 2011 9:18 am

Great job with the little car, and great pictures. Awesome to see it nearly finished, although I'll miss the detailed posts on the build-up.

Camshaft · **Posted:** Tue Jul 05, 2011 10:25 am

cat0 wrote:

Great job with the little car, and great pictures. Awesome to see it nearly finished, although I'll miss the detailed posts on the build-up.

True, but now he's free to tear into the Bellet!

opelboy76 · **Posted:** Tue Jul 05, 2011 9:04 pm

Camshaft wrote:

cat0 wrote:

Great job with the little car, and great pictures. Awesome to see it nearly finished, although I'll miss the detailed posts on the build-up.

True, but now he's free to tear into the Bellet!

my thoughts exactly!
not that I haven't enjoyed this, but I'm really looking forward to seeing how the Bellet turns out (and all the adventures along the way)

Mitsubishi 360 screaming "Save me!"

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