Some Fixer-Uppers for Banshee

No mods this month... as I kinda used all my cash to get muhself a pair of brand spanking new Motorola Defy...costs RM999 per piece with Maxis' 2 year contract. Bought two, one for me n one for muh lovely wife.

Some might say not worth it to sign up for Maxis bla bla bla...but truth be told, I’ve been with Maxis for so long, I have no interest to change now or anytime in the future. Plus, my number is one of the first batches of Maxis hotlink prepaid (but has been converted to Postpaid a few years ago)…so you can imagine how old the number is…

Anyway, back to the topic. No mods this month for Banshee…but there are some fixer uppers done to her this past month…4 to be exact… 1 has been annoying me since I got the car…2 unintentional but had to be done, and the last one was simply coz it was time.

Before we begin, I do have to apologize for the quality of the pix. Most are taken in bad lighting conditions and the camera was a 5mp on the Motorola Defy. Definitely no match for my C905’s 8.1mp Cybershot, but during the times the pix were taken, the C905’s battery was dead… so live with it.

So lets start with the easy one…

1/ Bought new wipers for muh Banshee…this was simply coz it was time…
I’ve never really been much of a wiper brand person…so I just use whatever wiper brands that work… and I mean those that can wipe REALLY well… I’ve even used some fake BOSCH boneless wipers and that cheap fake wipers lasted over 2 years in Cutie Pie and gave excellent visibility when it wiped. I really liked those cheap wipers and were really impressed by them….

So this round, I decided to try something even cheaper hahaha… you know when you go to Giant or Tesco or Carrefour there are some stalls that sells many different kinda things? Well one of the stalls sells wipers for cheap @ RM10 per piece. So a pair is RM20 (in case some of u get confused). Cheap eh? Though I’m not sure of the material…but at RM20…gotta be Rubber right?



As you can see…the wipers are the boneless type wipers. My favourite kind. Coz these type of wipers look really neat when installed. Keeps the clean look of the car.

As for how the wiper performs…I truly have no idea…I bought it weeks ago but have not had the chance to drive it in the rain. When it rains, I’m usually in the office…Since I bought it, I have only used it for ONE wipe. That’s it. Yes, seriously…ONE. And that was coz I was driving under a flyover and a drop of water came to my screen. But judging by that ONE wipe…it was alright ;)

2/ Next up…unintentional but had to be done…

Heres a pic of Banshee…notice anything not right?



If u guessed it right… u get 10 points!

Yes, the passenger side windscreen moulding went missing! (Forgive the dirty fender, more on that at the end of the post)



Don’t know when it happened exactly, but I do know why. A few of the clips you see still attached to the frame were broken. That side of the moulding has never really sat properly so its somewhat of a blessing in disguise that it came off.

Consulted a few friends and they recommended either LHS in Jalan Ipoh or Exceptional Autoparts in Glenmarie to get the parts. And since Exceptional is MUCH closer to my apartment than LHS, Exceptional it is then!

To my surprise they had it in stock. Surprised coz the EG is a pretty old car and I was told that Exceptional caters more towards newer models. But hey, they had it and I was so happy that I emptied out my wallet and bought it @ RM180. Sadly, they only accept cash.

However, I forgot to buy the clips..and even if I remembered, I didn’t have the cash. I only remembered about the clips when I went to the guy who painted Cutie Pie to help me install. He said since the clips are broken, he wants to just put silicone glue to ensure the new moulding doesn’t fly off… it was fine by me. I had no intention of removing the moulding anyway. Unless necessary that is…which by then ill probably have to rip it apart and buy a new moulding. So lets pray that everything stays good :D

Heres a pic of the new moulding installed



Now whenever I look at the moulding, it makes me wanna buy a new moulding for the top too…hahahahhaa. The drivers side is still good thank god…

Next…

3/ The thing that has been seriously bugging me…my third brake light…

Heres a pic of the brake light that came with the car… see that fat ass on it??



I really hate that fat ass… and heres the reason why…



As you can see my view in the rear view mirror is seriously impaired coz of that fat ass…I really couldn’t stand it…so I went hunting for a nice thin rear brake lights… wanted those that uses bulbs but couldn’t really find a suitable one coz bulbs somewhat require a fat ass too…so I settled for the thinnest type available, LED brake light.

Even then I had difficulty finding one that suited my needs…until I decided to follow a friend’s suggestion and go to Brother’s to see if they had any. And lo and behold…I found exactly what I wanted…nice, long and more importantly thin LED brake light with adjustable legs that’s mounted via double sided tape.

I bought this for RM35 at Brother’s



Here you can see the “adjustableness” of the legs…



(don’t pray pray..its Super Intelligent! Hahahaha)

And here are (crappy) pix of the brake lights installed…notice that I didn’t connect the wires directly and used connectors instead. More on that in abit





Brake lights on…looks pretty decent eh?



In case anyone is confused… the bottom row of the 3rd brake lights are the real ones and the top row is a reflection…..duh!

I used connectors to make my life easier down the road. LED brake lights like this has a tendency of dying off 1 at a time. Either totally dead, or blinks til it dies….also, this is from Brother’s and everyone knows the quality of the stuffs in Brother’s are somewhat “questionable”. Which is why I didn’t even bother looking for the lights at Brother’s in the first place. So the connectors are in preparation for when that happens (hopefully not so soon). All I need to do is unplug the connectors. Crimp in new connectors (which I have a lot of and are also easy to find in hardware shops) onto the new unit and stick it on.

And heres a before and after pic of my rear view mirror. It may not look like much…but this change made a HUGE difference to me. I can see things MUCH clearly now.




I also recently changed my steering rack + crossmember. Hence u see the dirty fender in the earlier picture. My steering rack was leaking, causing me to top up on power steering fluid every now and then, so I got a pretty decent quote from Avantech for the entire crossmember set and steering rack and went ahead with the change. The new crossmember set came off a JDM Integra DC2 Type R. This also includes the front anti roll bar from the DC2-R. This change actually gave me more turning radius… with the previous rack I only managed to get 1 round of the steering (from centre) before lock. With this, I managed to get 1½ rounds. And since I have to make a tight U-turn everytime I wanna go home, the higher turning radius is much appreciated.

Since the new set also included the front anti roll bar, my previous anti roll bar, which is also from a DC2-R was taken out and I now have an extra set for sale.

My previous TYC headlamps are also up for sale. Links to the ARB and TYC sale ads are here:

[WTS] DC2 Integra Type R FRONT Anti-Roll Bar

[WTS] TYC Projector Headlamps - Civic EG

Thats all for this post, folks!