altezzaclub

I bought the Altezza and my Datsun 1600 over in 2007, but I can't remember who I used. Shoot me a PM in a week when I'm back at home and I'll look it up. Kings handled it over here. We took a complete 40ft container for the whole household, both cars and all the furniture. Cost $10-12K, and when it was delivered it came with an extra fridge, washing machine and dishwasher.... obviously we had a little space left over that the NZ shipping company filled up! Earlier when I looked at shipping a car over for a rally it was a couple of grand.

We stripped the steering rack completely and cleaned it all after a few years of having a broken boot I think. Then re-greased it, put it back together, painted it and fitted it.. Steve's back at uni until friday, so I'll truck along with the last bits of seat mounting, then the rear firewall and then we need to start on a cage!

Even more than that, I'm going to put a section of exhaust tube across the tunnel underneath, between the seat rail mounts, as the tunnel is as weak as piss. I finished off the driver's side frame after Steve welded it up by fitting a crush tube in the rail where the frame feet go. That meant cutting handy bit of steel pipe to the right length and drilling a large hole in the rail... those more astute will recognise a KE70 rear suspension bush crush tube! Nice hard steel and a handy size when cut in half... The hole is 19mm due to some odd imperial drill bit lying around the wooldshed from the 1980s, and the suspension tube is 19.6. The answer is to hold it loosely against the bench grinder and let it spin as it grinds.. sorry it blurry, one-handed! ..and yes, that's the wife's new cheese press handle, before she's even seen it! Its done at 19.2mm, so then its over to my friend Mr Vice to make sure it fits... ..and it gets touched up by Mr Hammer to seat it finally before Steve welds around it. Then it will happily take a 10mm bolt at 40ft.lbs. While I was working there I noticed these strange tracks on the floor... Any ideas?? Thousands of little lines of dirt carefully lines up at 90deg to the track.. The nav's seat setup is done, you can see how high the front outer tower has to be while the inner rail sits straight onto the stock chassis rail and uses the stock bolthole. Agricultural welding, but it won't come apart.... The next thing is to see if Sparco can replace the old upholstery for that seat, its in Armidale with Steve right now as we might have to find an upholsterer to make something up for it. Leather would look nice...

I don't know Ken,its a new trial- it is quite flexible but will stop the seat rails from smacking the occupant in the back in a crash. Even if it cracks it will have done its work. Steve was sceptical too, but it stands his 100kg OK. (yep, it is additional to the netting) He spent a day doing moo-cow dentistry (counting teeth to see who will be sent to 'the works') so I cleaned and painted the front section. That made a real difference to the look of it all! Then it was back onto the seat mounts... With the white paint dry I could finish painting the struts- and put the suspension back on, whereupon the next problem became apparent. The RA40 camber tops don't fit the strange triangle of strut tower boltholes the KE70 has! Not only do we need to buy new camber tops, but our cross -strut bar won't fit either!! Today we finished mounting the fuel tank frame and built a cheese press for Mrs Altezzaclub! We got into the driver's seat frame as a copy of the nav's, which means cutting the ends off, folding the tab over to weld the box section closed- then welding a foot on it. I'll grab some more photos tomorrow, but we get so busy working I forget most times!

We have a J160 Altezza 6-speed for the 4A motor in the AE71, but the adapter plate takes up 14mm. This has to be machined off the bell housing, and getting that off was a problem as a selector bung was siezed. It is a terrible idea of a large diameter bung with a tiny 8mm hex in the middle, so it has a large grip area around the thread and a small leverage on the Allen key, which promptly strips. The answer was a welder of course... We spent a whole day at one of Steve's uncles farms using his mill to carve 13mm off. It just needs a final skim over with a fly cutter now. I left a couple of towers on it to mark the original height... We started on the seat mounts, making them simpler and more efficient than in the Celcia. ..and I grabbed some 1" water pipe lying in the steel pile and we made a mock-up of the main hoop for the cage The seat mount needed a tower built, which slowed us down for a bit- That nav's seat is all done now and I'll get a photo tomorrow if I remember. It uses one original bolt and a rail across the back, with the other front bolt needing a tower built up. The two rails will bolt onto the transmission tunnel, weak as piss, so we will reinforce that between them underneath the floor.

Well, back up to the farm for Easter/Anzac. Unload the car at the lower farm, and as I go to drive up to the top farm I find the Kitty Cleaning Company still working on the radiator... lots of grasshoppers on the way here! The first day was spent getting the various KE70s under shelter. That meant moving the spare-parts Celica shell out of one of the sheds, awkward as we'd stripped the suspension out of it! Nothing like a turbo Slowdeo.. dragged it across the grass a few hundred metres to beside the rally car shell. With odd cars shuffled around we hauled the 'good' Celica (too good to rally, so we will sell it) out of the spares shed and replaced it with two Ke70s. Then we pulled the head off Steve's daily, an auto KE70 owned by the proverbial little ol' lady. He'd owned it for 6months when a radiator repair let go and cooked it, and it suffered from being driven with a blown head gasket then just sitting! Rusty sludge was everywhere.. We finally got onto the rally car, stripping and cleaning then painting the front suspension. I had bought 3-ply up with me for the seats, so the flexible net here- was reinforced with a plywood panel and zip-ties!

none..... There is no such thing as a simple engine swap, just take a look around the builds on here to see how much work goes into the unexpected problems. Do you want to register it, with all the engineering problems, or is it just a paddock-basher?? What sort of car do you want? Old school with an 18RG? We have three of them here, you can buy the one from the rally car... More modern? the 3SGE from their series 1 in Celicas to the last of them in Altezzas. More work than the 18RG for sure, but comes with a wonderful close-ratio 6-speed gearbox. Later than 2005 I don't even know what Toyota make.

Take the 5K pistons and bore the 4K to take them. Unless they are the deep dish ones of course!

Before you buy anything just pull the carb off, strip the jets out and hose petrol through all the drillings leading to them. I get a 5ml syringe to do it, but a can of carb cleaner with a long nozzle on it would do fine. Do the jets too of course. When fuel evaporates it leaves a sludge through the carbs.

How's the port spacing of the 2T compared to an 18RG?? Unlikely to match I suppose.... http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/TOYOTA-18R-18RC-CELICA-HILUX-CORONA-RARE-TWIN-SU-S-U-CARB-CARBY-INTAKE-MANIFOLD-/271170462658 Still, you could build a manifold for around that price I reckon.

A great idea! Take a look though The Girls KE70 in my sig to see what I've done, I reckon SUs are great. Manifold- well, the 'DIY' Dave found is a good idea, they can sell you the flanges and you can make a manifold to fit. Otherwise just make up the pattern from the head and get it cut in steel by an engineering company. One of the guys on here has a bro who was going to cut manifold flanges for bike quads, he could do it. I found that borrowing a spare head made life easy as it kept the car on the road while I worked on getting all the throttle links and extractors fitted, & made up the airbox.

Same question Reggie, how much money have you got? You can easily sink $4000 into a 4K if you want it fast and reliable. You can make a nice, easy-to-drive, under-the-cop's-radar 4K that keeps up with the traffic easily enough. What's the car going to be used for? What experience do you ahve in modifying motors? How much work can you do and how much will you have to pay for? Read this topic & start a new thread with all the questions- http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/64432-how-to-tackle-that-engine-conversion/ ..and take a look at what I did on my daughter's- http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/42407-the-girls-ke70/

3K combustion chamber is about 29ml, 4K about 31ml. You'd have to measure them yourself to be accurate.

If it were a rally car you'd aim for- -the shock to sit about 2/3 out of the strut when parked. This means it has twice as much room to go down as go up. You alter that with spring length or moving the spring base up the strut. So find a stiffer/longer spring or re-weld the spring seat higher up. -the spring to be stiff enough to just have the coils hitting each other in the biggest bump you hit. So after a rally I take a look at our nice yellow springs and see if we are coil-binding more than the middle three coils. Usually the dirt is marked from the coils touching and that is just fine. -The front shocks to be stiffer going down than up. This is the hard one to get, as road shocks work the other way around- they pull the car down and hold it down to stop roll/keep a low center of gravity. You want them to resist the car going down and move it back up quickly. Google 'shock foot valve' and learn about them. The movement you feel when you bounce on the car is done by tiny castellations in the outside of the valve ring, they are used to bleed oil in/out when the car rolls in corners. The main valve doesn't open then, that happens when the weight of the car lands on the shock from a bump. If the car bounces up/down too much you need the shock stiffer in that direction, so make a hole smaller or block it off with epoxy, or stiffen the flexible steel valves with a washer. Change to a thicker oil to stiffen both up and down damping. This is the black art of custom suspension tuning you are getting into, no-one knows all the answers... Rear shocks & springs need to be soft going down so the car squats and transfers weight to the rear tyres for traction. Same problem, if the springs coil-bind more than a couple of coils or the diff hits the exhaust/body you'll have to raise the car or stiffen the shocks. The Celica was just right by the time we finished, it barely hit the exhaust but squatted right down onto the soft bump stops we had. You want it as soft as you can drive it without it bouncing around. Rear shocks are all cartridges, so you can't adjust them. Take the front sway off and try it, it will eliminate some of the understeer but remember it will have more of a tendency to tuck the front outside wheel under and roll. Have you welded the diff? Don't weld the teeth/gears together, just fill opposing teeth with weld so two gears rotate until a pair of teeth hit a weld, and then the gears can rotate back again. This stops the terrible weldy understeer most welded diffs have.

Only if they're original wet struts and not inserts. Pull them apart and examine the footvalve on the bottom of the piston. Take a shim washer out from the side that allows extention, ie when the car's nose goes upwards. Alternatively you could make the holes that allow oil down through the valve bigger, so the shaft rises easier. There is special shock absorber oil available, it has a low viscosity but most importantly a high viscosity index, which shows it holds that viscosity over a wide temperature range. You can get 4 or 5 viscosities. If you use a low Vi oil they shocks start off good then go soft as they heat up.

You could change the coil, the resistor coil is designed to run at a lower voltage than the non-resistor GT40, and you're probably tripling the voltage being fed into it. On the rally Celica Steve fitted a GT40 with the Spitfire electronic setup. Then again, I fitted the 5K electronic dizzy to my KE70 and never touched the coil. If it dies I'll replace it then. Just run the GT40R without the resistor fitted and open the plug gaps to about 35thou..

Sigma lower control arms for camber. You could PM Insanity and see if you can buy the pair off the rally celica in my signature. I'd expect Celica struts to fit too, but you'll have to learn how to calculate spring rates to really find something to lift the nose. Either modify wet struts (or use the most knackered old inserts you can find) to let the nose come back up quickly (the opposite of road shocks) or you'll have it diving into the ground over bumps.

I figure the theory is that you have to hit a dyno or fit an oxy sensor & fuel mixture display to get it right. They will tell you the fuel:air mix under driving conditions, but it all depends on porting and cams and cam timing and compression and ignition timing and... So most stuff is pretty broad in scope. I've seen graphs of Weber jet usage, but the 'lines' are areas on a curve.

I removed the broken windscreen carefully, just as practice for getting a good one out of another car. I'll do a complete How-To sometime, but you use a hammer and screwdriver to dig the sealant out from beside the glass. Then its out with the welding wire and two bits of wood to follow a spray of detergent. This cuts the remaining sealant away from the body. The wire doesn't last long when sawing it against steel or glass, so expect to change it often. Don't lose the two little blocks of rubber at the bottom, they hold the new screen at the right height when you're gluing it in. This all worked for the Celica when I fitted a screen from the spares car, so I'm hoping it works again. Josh said the seat smacked him in the back during the roll, so I stripped one. There is a bar across the back of it at the small of your back height, and it is welded between the frame rails. It would be a much better design if they had welded that bar behind the rails to give some clearance, but then the seat cover woudn't look so cool. I'll get some 3-ply panels and slide them over the front of that bar and also above the two little ones under the seat base. That will make the seat firmer but you won't have steel bars exposed. So, I'm back in Orange frantically catching up, Steve is at Uni and I'll go back up at the end of next week when he has Uni holidays until after Easter. Lots to be done!

I hauled the motor into the workshop, but with the rain the grass was so muddy I had to jack it up onto the concrete. We paid a gazillion dollars for the adapter plate to put a J160 onto a 4A motor, but now we need to machine the thickness of the plate off the bell-housing. We stripped the T-series diff from the Celcia and found we had a bearing problem- ...and an axle problem! Both caused when the car rolled we assume. The boot and the bonnet have been outside with weights on while the silicon sets to glue the frame back onto the panel. (a typical Corolla problem!)

I pulled the firewall out of the Celica and found the parcel shelf was miles too big. A hit with the grinder sorted that out, but although the width was good the Celica had much higher guards. So I cut an insert from the offcut and bent it into shape- Now it needs a line of silicon and some rivets to join it to the main sheet, and they can both be fixed in. This doesn't seal the boot from the cabin, as the "C" pillars are hollow and wide open. This shot was taken through the tail-light hole and shows where the C-pillar joins the boot to the roof, which I'll seal that with urethane foam. It may burn but it stops the fuel flooding into the roof while you're upside down and getting out. I stripped a door in my spare time and found a massive anti-intrusion bar across it, the same as in the Celica. This weighed 8kg in The Big Girl, and makes plastic windows look a waste of money. The rear doors will get it stripped out for sure, and probably the front also as I'd rather have a pipe welded inside top of the door at a height where it does more work to protect the crew.

There are two problems with your Roman cart-axles. They 'wind-up' under acceleration then snap straight to give you axle-tramp which bounces the rear wheels up and down on the ground. The anti-tramp bars stop the leaves making an "S" shape of themselves. The other problem is that the whole diff moves around in the car because of the leaf spring's flexibility, back and forward as well as sideways. The panhard takes care of the sideways walking and the anti-tramp setup helps with the fore & aft. So the simplest solution is the anti-tramp & panhard. The next most sophisticated is your 5link from the fastback being fitted, which means mounts for the 5 arms being welded onto the chassis. I find the KE70 suspension is fine, and that is after years of driving Datsuns with IRS (independent rear suspension). Ultimately IRS is better, especially something like my Altezza, but a 5-link does the job for day to day driving. Stick your head under the TA62 and measure up what you would need to do, it shouldn't be too bad.

Backfiring into the carb? Did you re-grind the valves when you fitted the cam? Could be a valve letting flame back in, or just the overlap of the cam doing it. See if a jet change fixes it first.

Why not use the leafs then fit a pair of anti-tramp bars to stop them winding up, and a panhard rod to keep the diff in place. The anti-tramp bars require welding front mounts on by the spring mounts, although this guy bolted them on in a clever way. The panhard needs a chassis mount and a diff mount. I'd expect the TA62 panhard rod to be fine.

Head gaskets blow when the head gets warped between 2 and 3, so its probably dumping compression into the water from #2. I've got the same on my new car, but its not bad enough to panic over yet, just starts on 3cyl for 20seconds and bubbles come out the rad. The big decision is, do you do any other mods while the head is off?? Skim for higher comp, fit extractors, fit twin carbs... which is what I'm thinking about now..... Don't forget to solve the problem that caused it to overheat in the first place! You wouldn't want to blow a second gasket... The previous owner replaced the leaking radiator, but was ripped by a garage for new plugs, leads, dizzy and a stack of stuff chasing the very obvious head gasket misfire!