1999 Chevy Metro 1.0L 5spd ecomodding thread

[Daox]

Well, the weight reduction must be helping, because the mpg keeps going up. Or... maybe its the warmer weather.

I just filled up and got a very respectable 49.7 mpg. Just a few points shy of 50 mpg. I can't wait for full on summer.

[Daox]

So, I've been working on the Metro's hiccups lately. It has a few of them.

First one was I had no lowbeams. I had highbeams, and I had DRLs, but when I turned on my lowbeams, I got just running lights. A bunch of google searching lead me to a defective DRL unit. That is this thing. Its under the dash mounted to the steering column. I removed it to take a look. There was no visible issue with it, one of the chips in it must have failed.





So, I looked online again and found a way to simply bypass it, and did that. I just took a piece of solid household wiring, hammered the ends flat to fit into the connector, and shoved them in. Then, I wrapped it with tape to avoid any shorts. I shoved it back up under the dash and I have lowbeams again, yay. I also don't have DRLs anymore, but those turn off anytime I EOCed anyways... haha.

[Daox]

The next step in rehabbing was taking a look at that rear wheel well. I remove the interior panel started poking around and pulling out the rust. The rubber undercoating was mostly what was holding what was there in place. This is what was left. More pics to come...

[Daox]

So, apparently the DRL bypass did not work. I was at work yesterday and a coworker noticed my lights were still on... Very odd, but sure enough, I couldn't get them to turn off. So, I pulled the jumper and off they went. When I tested it the night I installed it, it seemed to work fine. Back to the drawing board I suppose.

[WD40]

re: DRL
My VX had a similar issue, If you take the unit apart you should see the circuit board.
On the civics it is an issue that some or all the solder points get fractured.
Simple cure heat up a soldering iron and touch the points, add solder if needed.
Mine had 3 bad points and works just fine now.

[Daox]

I could try that. I did remove the DRL unit and took it apart. None of the solder joints looked bad. It wouldn't take long to resolder the two dozen or so joints on it though.

[Daox]

I finished up the wheel well fix today. Looks decent. Also, yay for no more rocks and rain INSIDE the car.

Here are some before shots. Not pretty!







All the new pieces welded in place. All the shiny spots are hammer imprints from forming the flat pieces into curved ones.





I primed then undercoated it afterwards.

[MetroMPG]

Looks like you got the welder running right.

[Daox]

Yeah, I got a new spool of wire and it worked a lot better.

[deejaaa]

looks good.