I marked the last day of the first Summer of the rest of the Silvia’s life by doing some more upgrades and scraping a few more years away.

This time it was replacing the rest of the front end, more or less. With new coilovers already in it was time to address something that I was kind of embarrassed about. The ultra cheap bargain basement rubbish lower control arms and tension rods I fitted all those years ago. If you ever wondered what generic Chinese arms look like after 10 years of no use, here you go.

Like the rear arms, the tension rods are now ZSS. The LCAs are stock replacement jobs that I will get extended as need be.

This was all done because I was replacing brake rotors and found that Rob had, thankfully, loosened all the bolts on the arms. Once I saw that it seemed silly to lug all my tools half an hour down the road and then not do the arms with everything sitting there waiting to go. The new rotors are the black painted RDA ones, chosen because the hats and outer edges shouldn’t rust after being on the car for 5 minutes like all other rotors seem to do.

I obviously still need to repaint the calipers and change out the knuckle to strut bolts.

If it seems like progress has slowed a fair bit, you’re right. There are times (actually most of the time) when I feel like I’m playing this game with at least one hand tied behind my back. I get anxiety attacks thinking about buying parts, let alone talking to shops about doing work, I don’t have many of the skills I need to do the things I want to do and there are days when I’m the only one in my corner. The past few weeks have been like that, so things have stopped a bit.

There are things I’ve had on my list to buy for weeks now, and each day I tell myself I’ll get to it tomorrow because I’ll be felling more positive about it all. Some of those things are still on the buy list, but in the past week I’ve managed to tick some off. I am trying to push myself to get this done and to not waste even more time, because I’m more than aware that I’ve wasted more than my fair share already and time is running out on it. But some days, weeks or months it just doesn’t happen. So I’m more than a few weeks behind where I wanted to be on Labour Day.

I say all this because I’d like this site to be a realistic account of how this car is being built. Too often it’s all just the highlights.

Hopefully, though, I’ll have some more highlights to update you with over the coming fortnight. Let’s see if I can get the car (and owner) ready to go down to Melbourne before winter.