altezzaclub

Well, I had a run-in with Jax over a wheel alignement, and although we parted on very bad terms after they never did the 4-whel alignment and I wrote a nasty email to the head office, the local manager did refund my money. I'd buy tyres from them, but won't get an alignment there again. You should hassle them again, and then hit the ACCC. The tyre was obviously not up to doing what it was sold for. Mind you, with the roads in NSW people sue the Councils for tyres after hitting potholes, the usual cause of smashed tyres and rims. ...and if you don't tell people who it was, your experience will just get repeated.

Now you can learn the joys of oversteer in a rear-engined car! I took a '73 camper back to NZ after living in South Africa/UK, and we lived in it for some months while looking for work. A twin-carb 1800cc as I remember. They handle extremely well and can be very nimble when you get used to sitting in front of the front axle. I think it terrified many a motorist coming around a corner in winding parts of NZ! In South Africa then usual conversion was to the Ford V4 or V6 motors. The Subaru makes more sense.

A Standing Km, so you launch when ready and go for a km. Everything from Pagani to Lambourghini, Supra to GTR Skyline, and right down to Golf GTi or anything you want to play with. Guys do it in about 20sec at 250-300kph. Several guys running 1000bhp, Supras that don't get traction until 4th gear.... Was on Speedweek today, so you can catch it on their 'catch-up' webcast. Quickest- Skyline GTR, Jeep Cherokee, RA Celcia!! (well, 4.7L twin-turbo V8..) Fastest speed- Supra, the GTR, and a Ford GT40 was 3rd. Fastest woman competitor.. in a KE70

Yep, the RA40 one does as well, and a mm thicker in diameter is a noticeable change in hamdling.

Yes! That's why they're so much fun, everything feels twice as fast and three times more out-of-control than a modern car! Tommy's motor must be pretty well at the top, if you can get 100bhp/L out of an old motor that's race-car territory of the 1970s-early 80s. The factory works BDA Escorts were getting 220bhp from 2.2L, so 130bhp 4K with transmission losses leaves you 90-100bhp on a dyno. I suppose Tommy's should start at 150bhp to give 110-120 at the wheels.

..and you're probably findng what we all are.. its too damm hot to work in the shed all day, so all this time off work won't be as usefull as we thought! Raid the local wreckers for an RA60 Celica rear sway bar to go with the steering wheel!

You will love this- Steve just sent it to me... The ultimate rally driver's secret revealed, something we all swore never to tell anyone about! http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2013/09/13/rally-driver-admits-he-has-no-idea-what-co-driver-is-talking-about/

PM Insanity and ask him. Steve knows all about it and has a few 18RGs floating around at the moment.

Don't forget that you are trying to get a power to weight equal to your WRX. As that is 184bhp/ton then you only need about 160bhp for your 880kg Toyota. Seeing the stock Altezza 3SGE puts out 210bhp you're home and hosed. I'm sure the 4AGZE could find 100bhp/litre to get to 160bhp too, but the 3S would do it much easier.

Probably, I've been driving the KE70 wagon with the stock 4AGE in that Steve bought then sold to his bro. Its basically underwhelming as I never took it over 5000 on the 150km trip to Armidale and back. Nice, just like it should have come out of the factory, but its still only 1600cc. Certainly I can see the attraction for running it up to 8000, but this was just a delivery trip to drop in his 4K for a rebore to 5K. It will be interesting to compare his 1500cc KE55 with a Weber to his 4AGE KE70 for general driving duties.

3SGE and the 6-speed it comes with. Pull the whole thing out of an Altezza. The turbo adds complexity and is a source for problems, the 3TC is too old and won't revs as well, and the 4AGE is OK but won't set your hair on fire under 4000rpm. The extra torque of the 3SGE's 2000cc will make driving much nicer.

We've never used the motor, we hauled it out of a Celcia at the wrecker in Orange when the Orange rally was on & put it on the truck. The J160 came from Brisbane when we were up there getting the spare RA40. They're both in the spares shed just as we got them. We reckoned we would build a copy of Neal Bates' rally car with a 3SGE & 6-speed. I've got parts from 3SGE RWD motors around, but we haven't sat down and sorted it all out yet. Since then we've got sidetracked by TRDKE70's machine and Steve has started amassing KE70s, so the development on the RA40 will stop with the 18RG motors and we will build a KE70 from scratch.

Phone Nick Chiew at North Shore Toyota in Auckland before you buy the clutch gear. It may work out a lot cheaper. I would be surrised if the flywheel crank bolts are different, but I've nver checked. We've got a Celcia 3SGE & J160 sitting doing nothing if you're happy to use that instead of the MR2. I've probably got most of the RWD bits to go on it lying around, a project we got sidetracked away from. Where abouts are you? This is in Walcha.

While this was going on we were also pushing little bro Richard's 4K along. We whipped the valves out and found one with a large chunk burned away, it looked just like an oxy torch had been used. Then we found the valve spring compressor wouldn't fit the 18RG head out of Grumpy, those old twincam 8valves are at about 36deg valve angle and the heads are very wide. That meant making a valve spring compressor, so much time was spent designing and welding odd bits of steel from the scrap pile to fit under a drill press on a stand. We rescued that from the back of the Woolshed, one of the early ones that was designed to clamp an ordinary electric drill into the press part. We were hunting out ways of raising cash for the gearbox and were in the shed where Steve has an abandoned RA23, and we could hear a kitten crying. Naturally we looked for it and found one ginger kitten in amongst its dead litter mates, on the point of death itself. So then it was off to Nell's house to swipe some milk and an eye-dropper, and the kitten spent the day either in Steve's overalls getting warm or in a biscuit tin on an 18RG. Naturally WRC (Woolshed Rally Kitten) ended up down at the main house, and after Pete was scandalised by not only finding a cat inside the house but actually on the kitchen table, Steve took it off to bed. The next day we found a young Momcat with kittens of her own and introduced WRC to her and it seemed he got fed. She was quite pissed that we expected her to feed that giant when her kittens were only a week or so old. All to no avail, he didn't survive that night, Momcat took her kittens somewhere else. Life for farm cats is hard indeed. The next interruption was Pete's farm bike, a well-used Honda with an open cage on the back where the dogs ride. The side-stand had broken off again, and seeing the design was not up to real farm work we cut the whole mount off the chassis and spent a day making a new improved one! We had to lie it down to weld behind the plate, which meant fuel dribbled out from the carb onto the grass under it, and I said "Don't worry, move the bike a bit as no more fuel will come out" as I headed off to put on earmuffs and grab the grinder. That meant I didn't really hear Steve yelling about the bike being on fire until he was getting pretty loud! Another photo I should have got, of him dancing up and down on the burning grass around the bike! Sadly I forgot to take photos of course, but I reckon the stand will outlast the farmbike. That will eventually get stacked along with the other 8 or 9 buried in sheds, from old Bultacos onwards. Grumpy needed cleaning before parking in a shed awaiting the engine, so we hauled out the water blaster. That damm thing has never worked properly, it only goes when you take it back to Supercheap to complain! A day was spent stripping it and bypassing the switch, and then to solve any problems of lack of water pressure we immersed it in a tank with the hose going. Still a fail, it would lose pressure after a few minutes and you'd have to stop for a while. So that got tossed in the bin permanently! Somewhere along the way we found we had two lightened flywheels, but lightened in different ways. The only way to check was to balance them, so we made a balance from Rich's engine crane and by measuring the distance from the middle out to each one we could get their relative weights. and that is pretty well where it has got up to- The block-pistons-rods-crank are being honed and measured ready for re-use. Then we need to relieve the head and pistons with some sandpaer to make sure they clear. Next we will make sure all pistons and rods weigh the same before sending it all off to be balanced. The head I will measure the compression on, (should be exciting!) and we will check the cams to see if we have any modified ones. If not, we will see if we can get a pair cut. Rich is looking for a sonic tester somewhere for his block, then 5K pistons into the 4K, a cam cut and the head skimmed. Then that can go back together with the DCOE and the extractors on, and Steve can have back his paddock-basher 4K that we swiped! We spent hours going through a piston catalogue looking for 80mm pistons for his 4K, a gudgeon pin diameter of 18mm and a compression height of 36mm. NOTHING seemed to fit, the gudgeon is small at 18mm, or the deck height would be wrong, so its 5K or a lot of work.

Well, update time... The car was fine after the rally so of course it got pushed off to another shed and ignored! I was due a trip up to Kingaroy to fit a new water tank, so I dropped in to see what was up on one cold and windy night in the pouring rain. Pete said Steve had taken the Slowdeo to Sydney to pick up engines and was due home later, but while we were having a cup of tea the phone goes... The Slowdeo had lost 3rd gear and was making a terrible noise in the Gloucester mountains. So we got The Mothership out of the shed and headed off into the night. Sure enough, the Slowdeo was found in a narrow winding bit of mountain and we all got soaked loading it on. The next morning we drained the oil, (basically none in there) and refilled it. Didn't help, it definately had no 3rd gear and you could hear it howling miles away! It was taken up to the Woolshed and we found out that .... all Rodeos leak straight from factory, everyone knows this, Steve was told to check the oil before he left, (which he didn't of course!) ...and now he's out $1500 for a reco unit. I left for Kingaroy that day and spent a week away. Back down, and nothing had been done of course. Too much farming! First job was to get the box out, it must weigh close to 100kg and is giant! Then he started seriously chasing replacements, which are difficult to find because everyone has them blow up! So we started on building a new motor for The Big Girl. We've been running a stock 18RG all this time, and we now have four of them. One was in Grumpy, his road Corona from the Speedhunters picture, and he had... you guessed it, blown it up doing doughnuts with other idiot mates in the car! Another is a so-called race motor we bought from down country and it doesn't turn over, so its been on a stand for over a year, and the last one he bought in bits recently from someone who seems to really know what he's doing. Grumpy's was the pick, we figure we'll rebuild that as a practice. Seeing it had been spewing litres and litres of oil out ever since he'd done a head job, it was not pleasant. By the end of the day we had found the rattle... Number 3 big-end bearing had spun on the crank, grooving the crank and allowing the piston to smack into the head! As a side deal both #3 and #4 pistons had the top compression rings fall off in pieces, explaining the oil spraying everywhere. ..and as a final clue, all four pistons showed old marks of having hit the head, and all 4 combustion chambers showed matching signs of being smacked by pistons. Three were carboned over, so it hadn't hit except for the first time, perhaps when someone was pulling over 7000rpm... From the web we learned that the rod bolts stretch under high revs, and you mustn't skim these heads. From the head we learnt that the waterways had been welded and the head had been skimmed to death by the engineer! Measuring a spare head we reckon it lost about 1.5mm!! So probably the pistons relieved the combustion chambers the first time he started it, or at least gave it some high revs, the rings gave up from being thrashed under very high compression and the rod bolts in #3 stretched enough to let one big end bearing shell slip under the other. That gave the rod enough slap for the piston to hit the head again. Mind you, doing doughnuts with a motor known to suffer oil starvation from a poorly-designed factory system is liable to starve crank bearings of oil and cause them to strip... Anyway, we hauled an old Corona in from the parking lot of paddock-bashers and pulled out the motor. The crank from that, Grumpy's block and pistons all headed off to an engineer to be measured, and seeing the #3 conrod was marked also we were back the garage with the Corona AGAIN the following day to get the pistons and rods out. Head was next-

The leads are in the right order, but the timing looks terrible. My #1 is by the head, between your #1 and #2. You'll need to re-time the ignition, which is a little time-consuming but well worth the extra tuning along the way. Take out the spark plugs and check the gaps and general condition. Leave them out. Take off the rocker cover and set all the tappet gaps, turning the motor with a spanner on the front pulley & when you're done leave the motor so the pulley timing mark is about the 10deg mark on the cam cover and its firing #1.. Check that the points have the right gap and are in good condition. Turn on the ignition and watch the dizzy cam & points rubbing block while you turn the motor past 10deg. The little cam should just crack open the points at 10deg and it should spark. The rotor should point towards #1 plug lead. If it all doesn't, then turn the pulley backwards to say 45deg before the mark and slowly approach it again. Always check it when turning forwards so the cam chain is tight. You might have to swap plug leads or pull the dizzy out and move it a tooth. The firing order is 1-3-4-2, and the dizzy goes clockwise. Put the tappet cover back on and the plugs in and it should fire up no problem. A timing light is nice but not essential.

Solexes I'm not sure of,. but twin DCOE Webers run on quite low fuel pressures. That pump would over-fuel them. Check on what pressure you need for Solexes or get a fuel pressure regulator when you get a pump. Flow for DCOEs is 750ml in 30seconds I think, a wine bottle full... Did that solve the missfire? If the 5K electronic dizzy doesn't fit you can always buy an electronic setup to fit in yours. We've got one on the 18RG. Get some pics up...

Damm that's nice! No sweat with clients in the car now... That link to the Hurricanes is just what I did with mine.

What else is wrong?? Had a compression test done?? It may be ready for rings and bearings, or a bit of porting and a better carb setup while you have the head off.

4-2-1 move the power lower, better for rallying. I haven't seen any for sale recently, they all seem to be 4-1.

lol- the list just keeps on growing! The joys of buying a old car... I can't remember if the stud goes ito the coolant, but it shouldn't leak anyway. Once you've caught up with the coolant things should be sweet for you.

Fit two and use sealant! Has the exhaust flange been bent slightly from being tightened up too much?? That would close the corners in and not clamp in the middle.

Well, its all very straightforward- bluntly, its not going to work! Look up lLoyd's build, he has done everything you want to do. You can PM hm and have a chat, but I can't see you using a car like that as a daily. Seeing I do 1000 or 2000km trips every month or two in mine, I can tell you than some things are to be avoided- mainly Low profile tyres, anything below 60series just crashes into potholes and whatever on Aussie's pathetic roads and destroys rims. Low hard springs, for exactly the same reason, after 6hours in a car you really feel it, it pounds you to pieces! Noisy exhausts, which always come with modding cars but deafen you after hours of a droning roar. If you want a drifter, you can do it with a 4AGE and still manage to get that on the road legally. It won't be a good drift car, and it won't be a good road car, but it will be the sort of compromise young guys put up with for 6months before they flog it off. The black window trims look good, I must get on and do mine!

Ah, but this way we all get to see how good the product is! Nothing is worse than buying something brand new and finding it doesn't do what it was sold to do! The blue ones also need some work, I did it here- http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/42407-the-girls-ke70/#entry445764

I paid $215 from the local exhaust shop in Orange. The usual blue ones, Pacemakers I think they are.