My buddy Keith has a shop wherein a lot of truly brilliant things have happened to a number of vehicles. Home base for at least one Galant VR4 rally car, this is the shop where “Crazy” Ray Peters built the twincharged 1G DSM, for example. Pictured below is “Sumo” Mike (real, live ninja and all around good guy) probably looking for the wandering 10mm socket during an all-nighter he, Ray and I pulled, getting the twincharged car running right just days before Ray moved to Alabama some months ago.
Back in early November, when I purchased [464] from Roger Hull up in Prescott, he was getting out of the Mitsubishi game. He had been campaigning a first gen Mitsubishi Eclipse in the California Rally Series (CRS) for years and had amassed quite a stash of spare parts. I got the Galant and Keith, who is a fellow Mitsubishi rallyista, picked up all those spares. Dan Ernest Ernest drove me up to Prescott to take delivery of the car and we ended up helping Keith to load up his trailer with three of everything.
In the months since that day, we’ve had the holiday season and everyone is playing catch up at work and home. Keith has been slammed and I’ve been wrapped up, but this weekend, we finally took our first steps towards being able to unload the trailer that took Dan, Roger, Keith and I about two hours to load up back in November. As Keith and I joked on Saturday, we’ve literally got cubic yards of parts to unload, sort, and put away. Seriously. It’s a 10×10 trailer filled three feet deep with everything from power window switches to transmissions to axles to you name it, we’ve got three of them in that trailer. We just don’t have anywhere to put it yet!
This is where Project MR FATS comes into play. MR FATS would be: Make Room For All This “Stuff.” So, with a three day weekend at hand and, to our surprise, a little free time, we decided our first order of business would be to make room for all these parts. This requires cleaning up and organizing the shop. This is a major undertaking. No doubt, if Ray reads this post, he will be laughing out loud because he knows just how large an undertaking this is.
Notice the Mitsubishi banner up there. Recognize it? You should. I have the same one back at the fort. The difference is, at the shop, that top shelf is about fifteen feet above the shop floor. The picture above shows just half the top shelf. To the right are a pair of Galant VR4 front seats, some totes, a large crate and another Galant hood. Keith and I began the day by hauling steel shelving kits up there and building them to make room for the truckload of spares soon to arrive.
By the end of the day (about nine hours later), we had shelving up in the nosebleed section, cleaned out the larger, “Rally Ready” area in the middle on the left (totes between more shelving), and emptied out the two center shelves. There’s a drivetrain area now with a couple TRE transmissions, at least four transfer cases, differential and transmission rebuild kits, and half a dozen CV axles loosely parked for the time being. Above that, empty tote storage. The scale of this project doesn’t really translate well through the picture above, but I’ll tell you that the Galant at right is actually on a lift and I barely have to duck my head to simply walk beneath it. If you’re familiar with the size of a 4G63 intake manifold, there’s two of ‘em up there on those shelves.
It was exhausting, dusty work, but as is always the case when one starts to see a project coming along, it feels good to look back and see actual progress. I only wish I took a better “before” picture in the morning. In a few hours, I’m headed back over and we’re getting right back to it. Next up, we need to decide if we want to haul the Galant off-site or install an engine and drive it away. Then it’s time to bring in the trailer, face our fears, and begin the daunting task of sorting through a metric ton of old Mitsubishi parts.