wheel_of_steel

Hey everybody!



Well, a man can never have enough X3s, so I picked up a(nother) 99 model on tuesday. I was given the keys after I remortgaged my kidney to make the $100 purchase price. Anyway, there is a backstory to this car, which is nice. I'll run the VIN past Hyundai and see what recalls and service work has been performed to this car too. It is pretty cool to know its history.



-Original owner bought it, drove it around in the desert and shiz

-The car got munched in a hail storm and was deemed a repairable write off.

-Original owner took the payment, bought the car back off the insurance company and sold it to her sister

-Sister drives it around, gets another car and gives car to her daughter

-Car gets rear ended while parked by an indian attempting to do a skid

-Car is deemed a repairable writeoff - daughter is leaving town, so she gets the payout + is allowed to keep the car

-Daughter gets new car when she comes back to town and no longer requires Twinkie

-wheel_of_steel purchases car...



So at this point, Twinkie had been sitting in a yard in eastwestern timbucktu with the windows cracked, and it was full of junk. I trekked out there with the seller (she lives in my building) and we cleaned some of the sh*t outta the car and got it going. Here is the car as it was when I first saw it:















It was pretty filthy. Here's a better shot of the actual damage:







And yes, that is packaging tape in the right of the frame Anyhoo, I drove the car home without issue, it certainly pulls much harder than the piglet! Almost to the point where the chassis feels (mildly) overpowered. I guess it depends on what you are used to driving.



The first thing I did when I got it home was to source a replacement bumper, taillight and rear fog. I picked up a bumper from a 95 sohc 5 door, but the fitment is exactly the same. The paint on the new bumper is atrocious though, there are old stickers and paint runs errywhere. I'd rather have a ghetto white one than a random maroon or green bumper though, so that's all I could get. Once that was sorted, I stripped the back end to see just how bad the damage is.







Pretty mild, the frame rails are unaffected, but the body skin under the tail light has been pushed in a little bit. I tried to fix some of it with a hammer + block of wood, but I didn't make much of a difference to the problem. Ultimately, nothing has to bolt up there so it doesn't matter if it is creased internally. It was more of a hassle just trying to get the tail light fitting without rubbing on anything. The moral of the story is that I got it all together with only a modicum of swearing and the use of only a single zip tie.



The next item on the agenda, and I was dying to do this, was to give Twinkie a thorough wash, vacuum, delouse and fumigation. There was so much wildlife in this car, it may as well have been a nature reserve. A two inch wolf spider ran at me when I was brushing out the wheel wells... holy f*ck. Needless to say the car was pretty filthy.







Just a taste.







That brown crap was evil. Some of it just washed off, but the rest was very baked on. I had to bust out hardcore industrial degreaser + a toothbrush across the whole front bumper, the bottom of both doors, the sideskirts and some of the bonnet. Not only that, but there were several spots where the paint was permanently stained from bug/bird sh*t that had not been cleaned off.



Once that was done, I went over the whole car with no.2 cut & polish, which worked wonders.







I'm considering going over it again with a clay bar and some wax to actually get some gloss going. I might just leave it though, I kind of CBF manually buffing the entire car two more times. It has got fairly heavy hail damage so there's no point getting too picky with the paint.



Here's the final result after a full day's work:























And here's my repair in a little more detail.







Not bad for $100, eh? Anyhoo, I'm planning to take Twinkie for inspection early next week, I just need to get the last of the insurance paperwork from the previous owner, just stating that the car is a repairable write off et cetera.



I think Hyundai was on to something when they wrote this ad...







Cheers for reading!

300D50

Epic.

Hyundai, showing the world that cheap cars don't have to be cheaply made.

wheel_of_steel

Well, it turns out that this car is going to end up as a parts car after all, purely due to economical reasons. I enquired about the process of getting this car on the road, and in WA it goes something like this:



-Present car with proof of ownership to a government approved body shop. If any parts were used to repair the car, you need the donor VIN, seller's name and an invoice for the parts.

-Pay $220-$365 for a structural inspection.

-Provided it passes, now you are allowed to paint/bog the car if you so desire

-Pay $90+ for the pits inspection

-Pay $220 for registration



Add the $100 purchase price and $80 repair bill so far onto that, and it really isn't worth it for a damaged X3. So, this car is going to become an epic donor for the Piglet - can anyone say TWIN CAM CONVERSION???



I'll also change over the seats, hubs, driveshafts, lights, window regulators, springs/shocks, centre console, and whatever else I break during the course of the conversion. So, as a final salute to the X3 that could never catch a break, here's a standard wheel_of_steel-illegally-sneaked-onto-the-park photoshoot. Cheers for reading everyone.





























Life goes on I guess. What a shame.

tib _500

dont forget to swap that console. the 99 looks way better and more functional to catch all the junk u want to throw in it lol.

wheel_of_steel

Yup, good spotto. It's interesting, the base models never got these consoles in our market. Somebody must have swapped it in at some point, but considering the rest of the car is completely stock, it doesn't seem likely that someone would notice/care.



It is a July 99 build, so maybe they had an overstock of the deluxe consoles or something. But yeah, it is a much better item. It even includes an ashtray for the rear passengers

Stocker

w_0_s just figured out why they can't have guns anymore in Australialand.

wheel_of_steel

http://www.urbandictionary.com/defin...erm=gearboxing



I do have a couple of spare alpha transmissions. Now I just need to figure out where the government's doorstep would be.

300D50

Haha, awesome.

wheel_of_steel

/twinkie. Poor thing.

HyundaiKitCoupe

Awww what shame to see it go! Nice photos by the way, it's funny that you can sneak into a park and take photos. Nobody saw you? If you did that in the States, someone would tip the cops and the park would be surrounded.



I suppose they put all these fees to push the demand for new cars...