Blizzo

So last week i was quite busy on the car and as a result didnt get many photos but i got the coilovers finished, guesstimated the springs to be about 150-160kg so about right for the starlet. Becuase the struts are longer they gave the car some positive camber so some bug eye steering knuckles courtesy of Andy C sorted that out and they are now neutral, at some stage ill do longer bottom arms to get a wee bit more negative but probs not as it handles and turns in really well now. They other thing i did the night before my event on saturday was put in a quaife quick rack, this is one of the coolest mods i have done so far and makes such a huge difference, the steering is now 2 turns lock to lock rather than the standard 3.5 and it drives like an absolute go kart, check out the video below and see the minimal steering input compared to my previous videos, it is much much safer to drive hard. The rack is a AE86 quaife quick rack and pinion from palmside.co.nz and was very easy to modify to go into the starlet rack, its very obvious when you put them next to each other but all it needs was i think 32mm off the long side of the rack to make it the same length as the starlet rack, then drill a new hole and tap it in the end for the rack end to screw into and your sorted.org.nz. I got a new bearing for the pinion rather that try deal with swapping the old one over. So for the event on saturday just been i have new suspension, 15mm castor, slight neg camber and a quick rack and the car is now much easier and very fun to drive, particularly on the tight flowing sections of road. Saturdays sprint was a 4.9km gravel sprint on Tararua road, run by the Danniverke car club. It was good to have Rhys there in the KE20 to have something to aim for and bench mark myself against. The car was struggling with gearing again, 2nd gear was to slow in road speed and high in the revs for a lot of the flowing stuff but the car was bogging and not revving in 3rd, it needs either a 5.1 diff and ignore first gear or a close ratio box quite bad, watching rhys's video i can see how the box helps so much (apart from getting off the line). I was super stoked to be close to him in my first run, then actually got about 4 seconds on him in the second run but he put down a solid 3rd run and got me by 3 seconds. I'm really happy to be close to him like that tho and it shows the changes to the car have helped, also stoked that the both of us took down a couple of 4age powered cars in our little 4K's. well here's a few photos courtesy of Jeff Wells, ill buy some final res shots off him at some stage. And a video i banged together of run 2 (outcar) and run 3 (incar), bloody youtube decreased the quality heaps tho which sucks a bum.

so after the weekends event and deciding i def need some decent front suspension so got started on my coilovers. The bilsteins are too long for the starlet tubes which is ideal cos i want a taller strut to do the opposite of everyone else on this forum so I'm going to use the mitsi tube over the starlet tube. I got some standard starlet struts to cut up thanks to the guys and olds-cool autos. Cutty cutty and very conveniently the OD of the starlet tube fits perfectly inside the mitsi tube. so I have the mitsi tube slotted over 80mm of the starlet tube to give it enough strength. It will be welded around the bottom and plug welded in 4-6 spots by someone that can actually weld as these will need to be road legal. all mocks up alright, just need to get it welded. Pretty keen to do a brake upgrade while I'm at it as the starlet ones are not the best.

So i had my second event in this thing on saturday. Was really happy with how it went, was a cool little piece of road albeit quite short. Had Rhys there in the KE20 so had another a class car to try and chase but never even expected to be even close to him but my fastest time was only 1 second a km off so must be doing something right. I managed to nip a couple of 4age powered cars and KB1700, the pinto powered mk1 escort. Car is still running stock suspension all around and def needs fiddling, all the other starlets had modified sway bars to add more castor in the front and custom bottom arms to get more neg camber and increase front track width so I'm starting on my coilovers now. anyway a couple of videos, excuse the crappy camera quality. O and it was a rolling start also.

nyway i have inherited Mitch W's unknown suspension out of his yellow car because he is way to stance for coilovers that actually have travel. Still don't know what they are out of other than its something Mitsi I'm probably not going to use the strut tubes as theres not a sensible way to get them legal so I'm going to rob all the bits off them and adapt them to some starlet tubes. sorry for super fuzzy photo but my camera is having a mare as the threaded lower spring mount will have a larger ID than the starlet tube OD does anyone know if it would be OK for cert reasons to have a sleeve with a step on it welded and plug welded to the tube, that the threaded spring mount bit would slide over and sit on? at the moment they are not welded, but rather have a ring welded to the tube that they rest agaisnt. I will want to get it legal for rally purposes so will need to be crack tested etc. as soon as i got the things home i noticed the very very thick shafts and thought hmm they look like group 4 spec Bilsteins, whazaaa i was right they also have much bigger than starlet but still fit inside a 13" rim calipers and vented rotors, so will attempt to make them fit also, I'm guessing i will need bugeye steering arms but luckily i have a set of those hanging out in the spare parts department. so now i just need to find a set of starlet strut tubes for very cheap monies, as i want to keep the stock pair for spares in case i break something mid rally.

right have had some good progress latley, which was needed as its racing tomorrow. Got stuck in with the vinyl, and good old simon at quickstickers.co.nz made some lush custom decals. had the car on the dyno last night just quickly to make sure its safe. We have run 28mm chokes which is robbing a fair bit of top end but making it really driveable, i will run with these till i get the handling of the car then will go to 30s and hopefully a bigger cam is this one is mild as. it was wayyyy to super rich to start and now a bit rich but at a safe level. Token issues with trumpet clearances, cannot fit the socks at all, when they are on it runs super rich on the middle two cylinders so trying to solve that issue. Yeti at keith stewart dyno ( a couple of quick runs with the carbs still terribly unbalanced and it made 65hp at the wheels, which I'm happy with for now. He had a newly rebuilt ministock (so standard) 3k in the same day and that made 33hp at the wheels. With the 4.4:1 diff in it now it is peppy as ʞ©$ɟ and should go pretty good this weekend hopefully. Only the driver will let it down. Pics cos of coolness dyno- and some glamour shots by sparkle, excuse the primer overspray on the tyres haha

So I has been very busy putting this thing back together over the last couple of weeks. She's getting very close now After a trip down south over this Wellington anniversary weended to see the parentals in law I picked up the English that the father in law had converted to KP spec for me, can probably say that this is the only piece of Quaife goodies I am going to own in a long time All fitted in like a dream and the wheels clear perfectly, it's only 15mm wider than the starlet diff. Driveshaft needs to have 47mm trimmed off it though so that's getting done at garmac engineering in Wanganui this week. I also ordered some cheap China spec vinyl wrap to have a crack at making the decals esqe of an inverse on Paul Adams old Toyota NZ car back in the 80s. Man this stuff is a bitch to put on, watch this space

righto so good things happened tonight. this - unfortunately i didn't block out one of the old paint seams on the roof enough, and it is highly visible which even tho its a rally car it does piss me off. but i will have to get used to it. seen here- hopefully most of it goes back together this weekend

k so i managed to get the hatch to clear, by using the bigger hammer method. used the rubber end of my bacho rachet as a dolly and smacked the panel till it cleared. it put a few bows / bends in the roof line as seen here below, but i didnt give a ʞ©$ɟ at this stage / its only a rally car. so hatch is hung now, and its all ready to go to my mates booth for top coat. Now that the body is out of the way i got to a few other little jobs, made an alloy mount for the batter isolator switch now that my battery is going in the back. this will go just behind the handbrake. also made new seat mounts. the old ones were mish mash ʞ©$ɟing ugly / unsafe things that came with the car that have the worst birdshit welding i have ever seen, are made of so many different pieces and some of them are panel steel!! the rules are the must be made of 3mm steel at least, i made them at my cousins workshop and the smallest flatbar he had was 5mm, so they are overkill but meh they will be safe and are a bit more simple than the last ones. now for the exciting bit. Father in law just sent me this photo of the diff assembly he has built for the car, so stoked. Its an escort diff with a 4.4:1 CWP and Quaife ATB LSD, he made a jig for the starlet mounts and swapped everything over. He has re drilled the stud to 4x114.3 and lowered the bottom arm brackets by an inch to help with squat / traction / i don't know but he does. can't wait to get the locked 3.7 out of the car and get this bad boy in!!

righto updates have been a bit thin on the ground as i have been rather busy trying to get this thing ready for the event on the 16th, unsure if i will make it especially as i hit big hurdle today thats my own ʞ©$ɟup that i will ask for some advice on. i forgot to take to many photos of the panel beating but there was a shit tonne that went into it, as you can tell my all the shit that was cut out of it. turned my garage into a spray booth and jammed some primer on, had to trim my beard because my respirator wouldnt seal agaisnt my face and i didnt want to breath any baddy icocyanates or what every they are from the 2k paint. Cheers snoozin for the good deal on the safety stuff too so i started jamming some colour on it, I'm doing the inside myself and then a mates going to do the exterior in his booth right and this is where i hit my hurdle / ʞ©$ɟup. I went to hang the rear hatch and it seems the vertical panel that drips down from the roof is too far back / not recessed enough and the middle (apex of the curve) on the rear hatch hits in when opening and closing, the drivers side hinge also seems to have moved when i re made the middle panel (i didnt remove the hinges and the shouldnt have moved as still had plently of steel around them) who can come up with the easiest way for me to fix this? anyway while i figure out how I'm going to fix that I'm taking it to my cousins workshop to make some new seat mounts and radiator support etc. Loaded ready to go

sooooo i have not updated this in a while so ill jam up some progress. I'm pretty motivated at the moment as i have registered for DCC's 5 round gravel sprint series and the first one is on jan 16th, so have a fair bit of rust work and a paint job and several other things to do in that time. Anyway, on the parts acquiring front I had secured myself a very rare TRD U-code starlet 2 way plate LSD, my father in law went round do check it out but reckoned it was pretty shagged and they are impossible to get bits for so that broke my balls big time. But then he also told me he had just got me a quaife ATB LSD for an escort diff, a 4.4 escort nugget and is going to jam the starlet mounts on an escort housing he has lying around, so mega win, i married the right girl. Anywho panel progress, so like many 80's starlets it turns out this thing is a bit of a rust bucket, and like many 80s starlets some muppet has just filled all the rust with bog and gone shell be right. Thats not my style, I'm pretty rubbish at panel beating but i at least like to get the rust out and new steel in, bog can hide wonders. so here is some of the dodgy shit i found - The passenger side roof line was atrocious but there must have been like 2 kgs of bog on the ledge at the back of the roof / hatch. So i cut it out and buzzed a bit of new steel in there anyway 3 of the doors are also quite badly rusted at the bottom, some could be patched, 2 need the whole bottom 4 inches of the doors made, no drama tho bit of foldy foldy bashy bashy in between rust work i decided i wanted a strut brace to try stop those towers from trying to kiss. Being a jew rally car i decided a nice $5 brace from a mitsi outlander would do, still needs a bit of bending and welding - the rear hatch itself also had quite a bit of rust in it so i got way to carried away and cut it out, now i have to replace it all - gunna need some new stickers i think and this piece is my next task, hopefully I'm able to get it done tomorrow arvo I have decided before i try to do any panel beating that i want to look nice i need a good welder, my $150 little ching chong thing is a piece of crap, so hard to get good runs or penetration as its like it doesn't have enough grunt to run continuously, just gives a crack - - crack - - - - - - crack crack crack - - - - - - - crack response as opposed to good welders i have used that sound like frying bacon.

soo no update for a wee while, I have ditched the 3k-b bigport head, the corrosion is too deep and the head doesnt have much fat left on it to mill, the ports are wayyyyyy to big for this engine and it also stripped 3 rocker bolts due to excessively had double valve springs, doesnt need them as my cam only has 260 tho of cam lift, shes only mild. Anyway i have given my engine builder a overrated 3k-b small port head, so hes throading under all the valves, porting the exhaust ports a fair bit and just tidying up the inlet ports to try and match them to this - goodbuy single side sucker hello double doort doorts! i have two DHLA 40s to go on here but the mani needs a bit of work before that, its been ported to suit 45s so its getting built up and it has a corner broken off the head mounting flange so that needs repairing, all worth it as i got the manifold with linkage incredibly cheap. it does have a terrible port entry angle, like almost a right angle, but engine builder will port the head to try and reduce this. so yea just waiting for jimmy motorsport head work now and should be doing skids in a month or too, also have acquired a new cool piece of gear for this but i wont post it up until its in my sweaty little paws!

so I'm calling on some 4K experts at the moment to identify my head and the spare head i have, its weirdly different, is about 80 thou shorter (may have been planed) has wider water jackets, a much much shallower combustion chamber and little knubby tag bits on the sparkplug protrustion bits. this is my spare head that came with the car, note the lugs- scribing on spare head combustion chamber of spare head - current head combustion chamber - numbers on current head (note the weird place for it to have cracked and been welded where the RTV is, this was leaking from the sparkplug bucket- And another hori fix this car has had, think i may have found why cylinder one is lean, note the weld in the water jackets, this must have corroded and been welded up but not dremeled out, so will be running much hotter than the other cylinders

Had my first event on the weekend, just a wee gravel autocross, car went really well. Had a bit of temp creep at the end of the day so suspecting a mildly blown HG so will whip the head off this week. Things to do before next event are get rid of the bloody locked diff cos it's shit and sledges and makes your butt pucker coming off the gas downhill and to also get a better ratio diff as it has a bonneville salt flat spec 3.7 which is a million times too tall. I didn't realise starlets even came with a 3.7! Anyway vid for lols, yea I come off the gas a bit but it was my first event. Also take it easy on the sweeping uphill right hander before the oil drums as its really easy to get tied up on the in bend and the other side has a lake at the bottom of a short cliff. Soo at the event on the weekend the car was using a bit of water, and after about 3-4 rounds started to get a fair bit of temp creep when sitting at the startline etc, was all good when it had a foot full, so we suspected a mildy blown head gasket. Whipped the head off tonight to find this! Some pretty severe pitting in number 4 combustion chamber causing the HG to leak, as you can tell by the rust on the valves this is where our water is going! old fella reckons give it a good skim and bang another HG on and shell be right, so will drop it off to my local head magician. Other areas of concern here are also that numbers 1 and 4 seem to be quite lean and 2 and 3 quite rich, my guess is that this is due to the single sidedraught have much longer runners for inlet ports 1 and 4, don't know how ill solve this problem. Other thing that made me lol a bit is that someone has done some pretty serious port work here, as you can see in the photo below which shows the ported head vs a standard 4k head, but then they had not modified the inlet gasket so there was a massive restriction between the inlet manifold and the head! also concerns me a bit as the inlet ports have been taken out quite a bit but it still has standard sized valves, which reading suggests is actually detrimental to airspeed etc, so may look at getting bigger valves but don't really wanna drop too much coin into it at the moment.

So i cracked into the rather large amount of rust on the lower a panel last weekend. Shes not pretty but meh, rally car. Cutty cutty ( a lot more acutally got cut out, but forgot to photopotato that) Someone had done the good old sheet of tin and some jbweld trick, yea little johnny! Weldy weldy have since seam sealed and painted it. I'm just gunna fix pieces in between events so it doesn't become a garage ornament. Once all visible bad bits are fixed up ill give it a new coat of jam. Currently have front struts out, am banging new brake lines and cleaning the calipers etc, will buff pistons and jam them back in, fill standard shocks with 20 weight oil for stiffies. gunna look into possible strut upgrades soon to get bigger brakes, but i want to be able to still run 13 inch wheels, as i have a constant supply of cheap 13" rally tyres. Anyone have any ideas here, richie? Ned etc also on the look out for some old rims to bang road tyres on for tarmac events, don't want jap spec, just awesome ham 80s nz spec. Anyone got some tridents / turbos / hotwires around they wanna sell? Churrr

Blizzos KP61 rally car hey guys, blake aka blizzo here. New to the forum but usually lurk on oldschool.co.nz. This build has been going on for over a year now but thought i would throw the history up here So a dream of mine over the last few years of lurking in the corner of my father in laws rally career has finally come true. I recently took ownership of am 83 Kp rally car. I have been wanting to get on the gravel for a while, and have had a go co driving for my father in law in his escort. Now its time to get into the hot seat myself. He gave me a bit of cash towards this starlet under the priviso that he sits in the co pilot seat and teaches me with the occasional drive, pretty good deal IMO. So don't get excited, this thing isnt that flash, hasn't been used in about 6 years and needs a fair bit of TLC, but thats all good fun anyway. good bits - - "worked" 4k, still unsure how worked, has 45mm sidedraught but only a very mild, still waiting to hear from the bloke who built it for more info. (have since found out its pretty average) - rego on hold - MSNZ hologated cage, i just need to finish getting my R2 license and get authority card in my name. - different struts with good stiff rate springs bad bits - -a fair (LOT) bit of bog hidden rust - a bit gutless ATM, gunna investigate a few things (buggered mech fuel pump) and poss pull head off - a ghey colour scheme and average paint - VERY f@%kED DOORS (bottoms are very rusty) photos! bad bits - 2ED1E976-BBBE-4BE8-A146-710BFFA73264.jpg what it used to look like - I have since repaired the whole lower a panel for rust, pulled the vinyl off, painted te grill black again and pulled the front struts apart for new shocks etc. have a sprint to do on the last weekend of the month. Plan for it is to fix a little bit, compete, fix a little bit compete, so that it doesnt become a shed ornament. Will get a respray this summer ready for danniverke car clubs gravel sprint series at the start of next year. Cheers for looking