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Ahh, the yearly inspection weekend. My family and most of my neighbors and friends who saw me this weekend thought I was crazy...
A bit of a back story, every year I need to get my car inspected and re-registered and to do so it needs to have a stock appearance which means my splitter, hood, fog lights and taillights needed to be swapped. I am afraid of failing the smog check so I reinstall the air intake and change the tune to back to stock while I am at it.
If it wasn't for rusted bolts on the splitter it wouldn't have taken much time at all. I ended up sawing off the bolts to get the splitter off and replaced them with rust proofed bolts, so that was a bit of an improvement.
While I had the back bumper off, I messed with the wires of the technostolgia tail lights because they haven't been working well with the China-spec taillight harness. I tried a few things and eventually got them playing nicely together for the first time since I installed them a few years ago. I also cleaned up the inside of the taillight housing where all of the leaves dirt and debris collected and got around to plastic-dipping my bezels black which is the first mod I've done in a quite a while. A few months ago I bought an extra set of bezels from a member here. Next year when I go to the inspection I'll pop the extra set on along with the old taillights. I'm pretty happy with the way the taillight bezels turned out. Its kind of like eyeliner subtly showing the lights.
Anyway, I think it is very good for me to have to look at my car so critically once a year. other than checking the engine, body and bolts, I also cleaned up the throttle body, MAF sensor and air filter and after reinstalling the tune I feel that my car is running perfectly. I have a friend who is a chassis expert (he works for KW, Porsche and a few racing teams) and after riding with me he gave me some advise on how to adjust my suspension settings (even though I have BC and not KW he's not mad)
So Saturday I took it apart, when to the inspection and put it mostly back together. I finished on Sunday and used most of the morning to clean and detail before going to lunch with my friends.
After I put my car back together it felt really solid and almost like a whole new car. Fall is beautiful in Beijing, I was so happy to spent the week outside the house playing with my car and making it better all while doing something that needed to be done I celebrated by taking some pictures on my school's campus for you all to enjoy.
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