12 year olds and cars - Kathryn's Fiero (Page 2/175)
Danyel APR 18, 08:41 PM
Yepp with an atttitude like that the girl will go far ... of coursde with the parents encouragement !!!! Welcome to the forum !!! A little two words of advice ....... TAKE PICS !!!
Danyel

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http://www.tylerstoy.com

datacop APR 19, 12:34 AM
We need a "Daddy's, Daughters & Their Cars" thread :-D

Welcome to the Forum
Carcenomy APR 19, 03:22 AM
Ahhh, I love threads like this. It's amazing how these wee cars can become a common hobby between parents and children - I built my first Fiero with my dad a decade ago, now we're both well and truly bitten with the bug and have never been closer.

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Genopsyde APR 19, 04:07 AM
awesome story, can't wait to follow the whole project on here.

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proff APR 19, 05:29 AM

quote
Originally posted by Genopsyde:

awesome story, can't wait to follow the whole project on here.




the perfect car
fast
fun
looks great
cheap to run
and 4X4
Axdrenalin APR 19, 07:04 AM
Great story there....You've got a great daughter there who is already using her head. I hope to be doing the same project in the near future with my 12 year old son...
michhiker28 APR 19, 09:23 AM
Wow, I don't know what to say. Thanks for the great response everyone! I'm going to start work on the thread and then once I get it up to date, I will share it with Kathryn and give her access to comment on there as well.

Once Kathryn decided to move forward with purchasing her car we had a couple of decisions to make. Once of the first was how much money she would like to spend. The easiest thing to do, would be to have her save her money and in about 4 years buy a really nice, well maintained car off of one of the forum members. :-) After all, we all know it is cheaper to buy something already built than to replace a bunch of parts yourself. Besides, thought I, this bug might wear off in a couple of weeks or months and then I won't have a derelict car. Nope! She wanted to learn how to rebuilt something, so my easy way wasn't going to work. Instead we had to start the search for a car.

Now, not being a fiero expert we started to read up. We realized pretty quickly that she wanted an '85 or later (88 prefered) car, would prefer a V6, it had to be stick (5 speed preferable) and she didn't care if it was a GT or SE....she liked both. After a bit of saving, and a lot of looking we came across an add on craiglist that was about 40 miles from our home. We drove out to see it and took along Uncle Bob. Looking at the car, I was horrified. I could see a lot of cosmetic work etc. that was going to need to be done. We had warned Kathryn before we left to see it that she didn't have to buy it if she didn't like it but that it would be her decision. Here is what we saw:

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Notice the great rattle can spray job!

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Interior's a bit manky.....ok, more than a bit!

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Engine bay is relatively clearn.......score 1.

So an 86 SE, with a 2.8 and 4 speed. I wasn't really impressed with the paint, body, interior etc but we realized pretty quickly was that the chassis was in great shape. Very little if any rust underneath or on the cradle, nothing behine the trunk carpet that was bad. The coolant lines under the car were intact, and the only bad corrosion was around the battery tray (or what was left of it).

Not that it mattered anyway since Kathryn decided early on that whatever we did was going to end up gloss black with yellow racing stripes on a black and yellow interior. So overall, this was not to bad. We were going to be painting and redoing an interior no matter what. We pulled Kathryn aside and told her if she wanted it, at least it appeared to be a solid foundation on which to work. She thought about it for a couple of minutes and said she was going to make them an offer. So Bob and I just stood back and let the kid go to work.

They were asking $600 for it. Kathryn offered them $400 to start, and the guy said he would really like to get $500 for it. In the end we walked out with it for $450. Not to bad considering we drove it the 40 miles home.....with one stop along the way to put a bit more gas in the tank.

Of course, once we got it home, she had to call her friends and take it around to show them. Then it went to the back yard to start the strip work, until there was a space for it in her Uncle Bob's barn.

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My thought was, that was where we would leave it for a few weeks until it was ready to go into the shop to start the dissassembly. NOPE! Kathryn had other ideas. I came home a few days later to find this:

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Apparently she couldn't wait. Luckily for Dad, she was pretty smart. If you look in the middle picture you will see the zip lock bags and the masking tape. As she disconnected wires and switches she labled the wire and the switch with the tape, and place the screws in an individual ziplock and labled that as well as to what they came from.....Man I love that girl!

So with pieces coming out of the car she was anxious to see some actual progress. We talked about it and figured that there was no point in doing something half. So if we were going to rebuild this thing we might as well try to do it better than GM did it originally. Her first thought was, "I don't want any rust on my car!" So we started with the support brackets behind the waterfall console. These things looked really bad after 24 years of humidity. Especially since they were never coated at the factory and are simple mild steel stampings.

[img THUMB]http://images.fieroforum.com/2011/A1Rustybracket_(Medium).JPG[/img

I asked Kathryn how she was planning on cleaning those up? She thought maybe some sand paper would do it, which of course it would....if she wanted to be there till she was 13 working on it. We introduced her to the wonders of the wire wheel (One of her new favorite tools!) This is what she ended up with.

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A little bit of primer and cheap paint later......

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Not bad for a days work.

--MH
datacop APR 19, 09:40 AM
I know that you're a corvette guy.. but I gotta be honest with you, that's a good looking car

One thing that you'll learn in working with the Fiero's.. we don't have to pay the Corvette tax
Benja APR 19, 09:43 AM
That is awesome. Wish I would have had started like that when I was 12.

The car looks to be in great shape. You should see the one I just started on, talk about horrified... The paint looks like it could be restored to a really nice shine. The seats and fabric can all be cleaned to look like new. I use a mixture of Oxy Clean and Tide detergent mixed in a bug sprayer to clean interiors. Hose them down and let them soak, scrub with a brush and hose down with water. Let everything sit out in the sun for a day or two and it will come out looking great, and smelling great too!
ALJR APR 19, 10:22 AM
You forgot #10 - No back seat! Very hard to make-out in and next to impossible (but not imposible) to, ya know, _________