Authors’ cars: Banana love

Kicking off 2012 with an update on everyone’s favourite savanna banana!

Progress on the two-seater conversion has been excruciatingly slow. So slow in fact that I’ve been considering just giving up completely and rolling around with four seats and a “dodgy” WOF.

But lo and behold – towards the end of last year I found a listing on ebay for the elusive rear storage compartments, and immediately hit “buy now” as I was fairly sure I wouldn’t get another chance for an eternity. After some to-ing and fro-ing between myself and the seller, and a couple of long distance phone calls, I convinced him to sell me the rest of the rear interior parts, and he seemed to understand exactly which items I was after, so fingers crossed he a) actually goes thru with the deal and b) sends all the parts!

of course the next hurdle is getting all the items to NZ without spending a metric crapton on shipping!

Like rocking horse shit, with the lids intact, and even the keys!

Got back from holiday this week and none of my friends seemed interested in hanging out, so I went down to the lockup and started readying the RX-7 for the eventual 2-seater conversion.

First, out came the rear seats (and boot floor carpet, which I didn’t take a photo of):

Trust me, you wouldn't want to sit in the back anyway.

Carpet and seats out. The luggage straps come in handy.

Also, look at that little space saver tyre.

then I removed the seat retaining clips.

Stateside readers - you guys never had these in your RX-7s, for obvious reasons.

then the rear boot panels/wheel arch covers.

Again, different from USDM spec in that they contain cutouts with a rubber gasket for the retaining clip mounts.

It was at this point that I discovered the previous owner had screwed the speakers directly to the boot panels instead of to the mounting points on the body of the vehicle ergo, some careful cutting and re-soldering of the wiring will take place once I purchase some bullet connectors.

in this photo you can also see where the rear seat retaining clips bolt to the body.

in the end I just decided to leave the boot panels for the nonce.

Voila, one (mostly) stripped RX-7 rear interior.

observant folks will notice the front seats aren’t factory. the original driver’s side requires some upholstery repair, so I found some FC3S Infini II seats for a reasonable price and installed them instead.

Contrary to initial apprehension, the FC seats don’t look as out of place as I feared – the colour blends in well enough with the grey vinyl, and the fabric trim pattern is generic enough to be unobtrusive!

I’d like to think my next banana progress update will be with the 2-seater interior all fitted and the car completely road-legal, but we shall see. As in the previous blog entry, I made some good progress with my vintage audio AUX-in project over the break, so I have a good feeling it will be ready for installation before the interior parts arrive.