IS300 - Paint, spring rates and wheels update

The car has seen a few events now and I always manage to damage something, the latest effort was the front and rear bumper at 2 seperate wet pan events despite this my mate Joseph managed to get some nice shots, you can find his work here.

As a daily driver the car had begun to look pretty sad so I decided with Halfway Hangs 9 coming up it was time to go for the full respray.

There was a lot of work to do spent a day fibreglassing the rear bumper back together and rebuilt the missing corners from various mishaps and ride heights. I also picked up a very cheap vertex rep bumper which required a lot of work to make fit somewhat okay. I reshaped the corners so they matched the fenders a tiny bit better, shaved under the headlight a little and filled the licence plate recess so it was a single smooth piece. I later used araldite to set some rare earth magnets into the bumper and the licence plate for a super clean look whenever I wanted. Almost forgetting I had a Minty Fresh v1 roof wing to fit as well.

I’m lucky enough to have good mates one of which is a painter and after a firm handshake and some cash he smashed out the prep work in a weekend. Thanks again Zac

The boot spring mount which had been broken since I owned the car finally got replaced along with a new boot that didn’t have holes for the oem lip to help tidy it up.

I put in a fresh Hardrace transmission mount as j160 and w58 use the same style and mine was looking pretty sad, a pair of spacer plates also went in to help with the amount of squish I was putting on it once all bolted up. One thing to note is there are two different types of mounts. This is the one I needed.

FInally I ordered a new set of 20kg springs for the fronts along with some helper springs as I was finding the 16kg setup was a touch soft for track with the BC BR valving.

I set my suspension the same way MCA suspension recommend in their videos as seen here and here

I dropped the car off on Sunday evening to another friend Dan Cardsy from Cursed Sundays who runs his own paint and detailing business TYM2RN. He put in a champion effort and the car was ready for pickup Monday night. I ended up going around on the tuesday and reassembled the car in the driveway at his shop before driving it home.

I went against the factory colour 1C0 and decided to get the newer Atomic SIlver from the 3IS colour code is 01J7.

It’s almost 2 shades darker than 1C0 but has a lot more metallic, it really catches in the sun now a lot closer to the platnium edition 1IS’. Couldn’t be happier with the result considering the short turnaround everything came together just in time for the trip to Valla Beach.

Lastly my good friend Andrew had found a set of AVS5 in original chrome and after thinking about it for 5 minutes I messaged him for a good price. They have always been a dream wheel to add to the AVS collection and this wasn’t an opportunity to miss.