Chuck S

600ma or 800ma is more than enough for a battery maintainer. One that mounts to the battery as Jet suggests is very convenient as is a long extension cable. My car is covered and off the ground with the cable out the bottom of the car to the maintainer. A day every week or so keeps the battery charged. Can be left connected all the time if desired.

-- Chuck

hvAlfaWant_S2000

blueosprey90

Good Luck lad!

Might I suggest that you go on E-Bay and buy yourself a factory service manual. And I suppose you will need a good set of metric tools.

Krazykoreankid

Thanks!
I bought a cheap $100 craftsman 230piece tool set

rj.baker

That's how we learn. Now that I've bought a second car with TONs of stuff wrong with it, I don't think I'll fear any car purchase again. This second one I sent to PTuning to sort it out because I don't have the time, but at least I knew what to ask for and had a concept of the value of their service that I would have not had if I didn't dork around on my 3000GT fixing, oh, EVERYTHING, for the past three years. I was definitely over my head in 2012. But at this point, I can think of very few things that I don't know or can't fix with the car.

The amount you learn by doing much of this work yourself prepares you to handle just about any breakage in the future, whether fixing it yourself or not paying to much to have the experts fix it. Good luck and enjoy the journey.

Krazykoreankid

Thanks so much for the excellent vote of confidence! This is exactly what I'm hoping to get outta the experience. Confidence to move forward with any other repair in the future. Only reason I have no experience up until now is because learning a skill takes time and money, which now-a-days is pretty hard to come by.

yitznewton

Awesome post, r.j.

bgoetz

A radiator works by drawing cool moving air through metal veins that increase the surface area around coolant filled channels. Not only do I think that painting the radiator black will not create better cooling, I think that it is going to make things much worse, as you are adding another interface between the hot coolant and cold air.

If you are concerned with cooling of the engine via the cooling system the very first thing that I would do is install a Modifry ETC so you actually have some idea of coolant temps, because if your seeing anything more than 3 bars on an OEM AP1 gauge, you have issues. The next thing I would do is toss on a cooler fan switch and flush the system following Billmans DIY. If you do those things you really don't need to do much more.

I replaced my radiator with a Mishimoto because the OEM plastic tank was starting to fail, which is quite common. My car did actually run cooler, but the funny thing is that it actually gets hotter before the fan kicks on, especially in cooler weather. The reason being is the fan switch is on the radiator and temp sensor is on the back of the engine block. Going to a bigger radiator created a greater temperature differential between the two, especially in cold weather.

FI cooling is a different animal, but I think a lot of the issues guys have there is with intercoolers blocking airflow.

In summary I would strongly advise against painting your radiator

Krazykoreankid

Thank you! I have also come to the same conclusion. I was thinking a coolant flush would be needed, and I was reading up on that. That's a good piece of heating info to know about the fan temp sensor though. I'll definitely keep that in mind

zeroptzero

don't use baffled oil pans with gates/flappers, they tend to fail. There are some good baffled oil pans without active gates.