Hiro Protagonist

NRMA has gone down the road of "no need to list modifications, they're covered as long as they are road legal" but you just know they'll try and find the hidden loop-holes or grey areas wherever they can. Plus there's generally not enough flexibility in the agreed value to be able to actually cover a significantly modified car.

Nothing?

That's the ground...

Suck it and see...It's a one-way valve, you want the air flow to be able to go from valve cover to intake manifold

The bumpers look right for a pre-facelift KE55, from what I remember KE30s had short all-chrome bumpers, 78-80 KE55s had short chrome with rubber end caps, and 80-81 KE55s had long chrome with rubber dagmars. Either mine had been changed or the 80-81 SEs kept the round-light bumpers

Gotcha. I think the fact that it's a KE55 isn't in doubt (since it's a '79) though

I had a square-light '81 KE55 with the rubber end caps, but it was only an SE

Early KE55s were round headlight with the square lights coming in the '80 facelift.

Could you just swap the block-side part of the engine mount from the 4AC over? Looking at the EPG the bolt-pattern on the block looks to be the same. Hopefully the extra block height of the 7A doesn't affect the mount location.

Latest acquisition - AE102 Sprinter 3-dial dash cluster. Unlike the JDM BZ Touring and FXGT 3-dial clusters, this one has the correct tacho for the 7AFE (8000rpm vs 9000rpm) AND retains the Aus-spec 200km/h speedo (vs 180 for JDM). Also doesn't have the superfluous dash lights for cat temperature, rear light failure module etc (although since the ADM Sprinters were all pre-facelift, there is no seatbelt warning light fitted). Still requires a bit of wiring magic but I'll most likely palm that off to someone who likes electrons more than I do in exchange for some beer or something.

1-3-4-2 with a flat-plane crank and 180 degrees rotation between firings, like most inline-4s. So even.

Always good to get the info straight from the horses mouth. Problem with a lot of online catalogues these days is that even if they appear to be regional-specific, they often grab their info from a worldwide database and can include models/versions not sold here, creating confusion.

I believe you should be after the 117Tx21mm belt, the 94Tx19 belt gets called up for the early-model 4AFEs that came out in the AE92. Easy way to check would be to take the cam cover off (easy job - spark plug leads, 2 vacuum hoses, 4 nuts, 2 bolts and disconnect the wiring for the alternator and air-con compressor) and measure the width of the belt that is currently fitted. Which catalogue were you looking at that showed the 94-tooth belt?

Gave it a good workout on Sunday to and from Wisemans Ferry for Classic Celica Day, don't believe I got it to cock a leg but the rear end definitely felt sharper and livelier on turn-in

Spent all of Saturday afternoon and half of Saturday night on my back under the rear end installing my Ultra Racing rear swaybar, and what a pain in the arse that turned out to be. Fortunately didn't have to drop the tank, but both straps, filler pipe, breather pipe and the exhaust from the cat back had to come out, and even then it needed some wiggling to get it out past the jack stands on the cross-member and holding up the tank. Stock 14mm vs UR 19mm (both solid) Fortunately managed to work out how to get my sensor light to stay on permanently, otherwise I would have had to call it quits as soon as it got dark and pick it up in the morning. Garage is too full of crap to get a car in these days, and chances are the light wouldn't have been much better in there since all underneath would have been in shadow. As it was I still didn't get everything back in and buttoned up until after 9pm.

Not exactly relevant since I know what you're trying to point out, but blacktop 20Vs are MAP so there is provision on the quads for a vacuum line

Just in case you didn't realise, he's talking about the Nissan KA24DE engine (ie from a 240SX, Navara or Bluebird), not a Honda K24. I did toss up the idea of a KA24DE back when I had the KE55, Aus didn't get the 240SX though so my only source of DE RWD parts would have been a D22 Navara.

The odd-timed injection in a batch-fire scenario isn't wasted and just pools behind the valve waiting for it to open, but when you think about it the valve is opening and closing ~8 times a second at 4000rpm there's not exactly a lot of time between injector pulses regardless. If you're chasing that last kilowatt or two it might be beneficial to go to a full sequential setup, but for more cases it just isn't worth the hassle and added complexity. Putting the injectors in the plenum is only one step removed from ye-old-skool throttle-body injection (which itself was essentially an electronic carby), a steaming pile of crap.

Sorry got confused - yes the 7A does run a hall-effect cam-sensor in the distributor, but no crank angle sensor (at least not in Australian AE102s). Not sure on the resolution (ie number of teeth) though. Ignore what I said earlier about needing both a cam- and crank-angle sensor to run sequential injection too (since the 7A doesn't run variable cam timing), my brain has been fried from work lately.

Batch-firing injectors is quite common as it simplifies the control and wiring. With sequential injection (ie every injector separately wired) you need both a cam angle and crank angle sensor to determine when the cylinder is at the start of the intake stroke (as the crank rotates twice for each rotation of the cam, just knowing TDC on the crank isn't sufficient to determine which stroke you are on). Sequential is more efficient and you have less fuel floating around in the inlet manifold waiting for a valve to open, but it is more complicated to control. It also has the benefit of lowering the duty cycle on the injectors by half (which is a good thing) Wasted-spark (where spark plugs are fired in pairs) is also common, for the same reason (even though it means the spark plug going off at the top of the exhaust stroke) and means you can have a single coil being shared between two cylinders. Because the 7A uses a distributor and a single coil it doesn't run wasted-spark though (the distributor is run directly from the cam so each HT lead gets power one at a time)

The 3TC has a bit of a cult following over in Puerto Rico where they boost them to high heaven, the downside of them being basically grenade motors is dulled by them being cheap as chips to replace. Whilst capable of big numbers (there's a guy in Qld with a TA23 running a compound turbo ~60psi ~500HP 3TC, but even he openly admits it is a stupidly ridiculous thing and is about to replace it with an F20C) there's no real reason why you'd use one here as any money and mods you spend on it could give you bigger gains on a better engine.

It's a great show, last year was one of the biggest since it was the 50th anniversary for the Corolla but there are regularly over 100 cars there.

Considering I help run it, almost certainly

After 18 months of pottering around with a stock exhaust, I finally got fed up of being bored to sleep and decided to pull the pin and install my old exhaust. In theory what should be a ~2 hour job by a mechanic with a hoist turned out to be a 2.5 day marathon in my driveway on chassis stands - first I had to drive around the world to find a shop that was open on a Saturday that actually had 2" 2-bolt exhaust flange gaskets (everyone had 2.5" and 1.75"), then the factory bolts were a pain to get undone (not surprising since they're ~18 years old, but at least they haven't been copping salt or snow), then the hangers didn't want to slide off the pins (copious amounts of WD40 required), then the engine pipe didn't want to slide out over the subframe (had to take the front hanger off the subframe), then I had to loosen the alternator to get the last manifold nut out which THEN highlighted the fact that my alternator belt had discovered meiosis. So that was the first day. The second day involved wrestling the extractors in to place (at which point I realised I had to fully remove the alternator to have a chance of getting the extractors around the oil filter and air-con lines), which added a few dings to the back of the radiator (I'll probably get a new alloy one at some stage anyway), then slowly piece-by-piece bolting the new exhaust up (with the new gaskets and bolts/nuts/antisieze), then wrestling with the muffler to get it on to the hangers. Job done, fire it up and take it for a spin around the block to savour the sound.....................of a bloody rattle. Bugger. So that was the second day done and dusted. Yesterday then consisted of jacking the car up on to stands AGAIN, then going about the task of finding the rattle - turns out it was the pipe between the hotdog and the muffler hitting the tunnel heat shield (initially thought it might have been the engine pipe over the subframe) as well as the left rear muffler hanger hitting the muffler heat shield. Figuring that the only thing that could be affecting it was the engine-pipe hanger (as the bolt holes are slotted) I loosened them and wriggled things around for next-to-no improvement.... Bugger. Next step was a niggling thought that I'd put the cat in the wrong way (as the flanges aren't parallel/aligned), so I went through the 3 other permutations of spinning and flipping the cat to see if things would line up better. On the fourth permutation (ie upside-down and back-to-front to how I had initially installed it) it seemed to make everything clear the heatshields, until I noticed that the rear cat flange was hard up against one of the studs holding the cat tunnel heat shield on..... Bugger. So out came the hacksaw to shorten that stud down (I don't have an angle-grinder). After an hour or so of sweating, grunting and swearing (not to mention sore arms) I had knocked off about 10mm from the stud, which then allowed the cat flange to sit high enough for the bloody rear pipe to start hitting the heat shield again.... Bugger. So THEN I decided that maybe I had been right all along when I put the cat in first time, and things just needed to be wriggled around a bit. So for the 5th time in as many hours I removed the cat and flipped it back around to the initial guess I had made as to its orientation. Except this time I also loosened off the bolts on both the front hanger AND the subframe mount nut, then as I installed the cat I slowly did up each bolt/nut evenly all the while making sure to keep the mid- and rear-pipes centred in the tunnel. And when that was all said and done, I finally had an exhaust that was fully tight and not rubbing on anything. It would still kiss the heat shield if I kicked the tip of the muffler to each side, but a quick drive down to the post office to pick up a package showed that in day-to-day driving it wouldn't come close (if it crops up in the future I'll probably just rip that heat shield out, or at least bash it a bit more open). Something missing? Ahh there it is Alternator belt discovering cell meiosis

In the AE102 the speed sensor connects to the dash, and then there is a signal from the dash to the ECU (where the circuit shows a transistor and a pull-down resistor). I believe if you're running the 7A ECU without that feed from the cluster then the ECU will throw a code 42 and you may get some performance issues. Have you looked at running an AE82 Twincam cluster? Might pay to check the wiring on them and see if they have the speed sensor output (since they were EFI as well but with a cable speedo). Get a speed sensor and speedo cable from a Twincam to suit the dash (might be cheaper than getting a whole 4AGE gearbox to suit, I'm assuming you've either got a C50 or an auto at the moment)