Pre-Long-Distance Maintenance

Speedometer Cable Replacement

The speedometer needle had a slight flutter that was bugging me, so I replaced the cable.
I was bracing myself for a struggle disconnecting the meter from the cable, but it popped right off — partly because it wasn’t seated properly in the first place.
Come to think of it, just reconnecting it properly might have fixed the issue.
The other end connects to the transmission, so you have to get under the car to swap it out.
I was worried about breaking the tabs on the meter hood, but managed to remove and reinstall it without any damage, which was a relief.

Radiator Cap Replacement

It’s just a remove-and-replace job, but if this part fails you risk not being able to drive home, so it’s actually pretty important.
Comparing the old and new ones, you can clearly see the difference in rubber deterioration.

Oil, Filter Change and Flushing

First oil change since I bought the car.
If I take the seller’s word that they did an oil change before handover, this would be at about 2,000 km.
I tried flushing it as well, but barely any gunk came out, which suggests the oil was well-maintained by the previous owner.
The oil filter change was a real pain though — my extension bars weren’t long enough for the torque wrench to reach, so I ended up tightening it by feel.

Brake Pad Replacement

This was my first time ever doing a four-wheel jack-up on a car.
Since I also needed to get under the car, I played it safe — wedging tires underneath and following the textbook safety precautions.

I’ve always felt the NA Eunos Roadster gets low marks for braking performance, and I totally agree.
Especially when you’re coming downhill with speed built up, the brakes are terrifyingly inadequate under hard braking.
So I decided to see how much improvement a fluid change and pad swap would bring.
The result was a slight improvement, but nothing dramatic.

I didn’t know this until I saw it with my own eyes, but the front calipers are single-piston sliding type!?
I had assumed they were two-piston, so no wonder the braking is weak.

Accident While Lowering the Jack

When replacing the brake pads, you need to adjust the parking brake mechanism on the rear calipers, but I got this adjustment wrong.
As a result, the parking brake didn’t hold, and when I lowered the rear off the jack, the car rolled and slammed into the garage.
The rear bumper got scratched. (Thankful it wasn’t worse than that.)
The root cause was that I didn’t understand that the procedure in the service manual was referring to the parking brake mechanism.
This incident really drove home the importance of understanding how things work from the ground up.