altezzaclub

With the head back I checked the manifolds and found the exhaust headers failed to line up with the ports. Things were soon ground to fit each other.. The head ports needing taking out to match the Lynx manifold, and the gasket was 'ported' to make sure everything lined up properly. The exhaust was wrapped and everything finally fitted together before putting the head back on. The crank was in and spinning, the flywheel I'd had lightened when we did the manual box conversion a year before, and the cam was fitted. All that was left was dropping it back in. That was done as a reverse of getting it out, the girl and I got on opposite ends of a long 4x2 timber with a trailer tiedown and we heaved it up and in. Amazingly, it sat exactly where I'd planned it!

The girl finished school last year so finally I took the motor out last Xmas. I wanted to fit new crank bearings after that oil filter had hammered them, and I knew it would be much easier fitting a cam with the motor out. The head I wanted off for a compression boost and the sump I wanted off for the oil pump washer trick.. First up was headwork- valves cleaned by a bit of wet 'n dry sandpaper with WD40 while the valve spun in a drill. Does a great job, just keep off the seats, and you can re-shape the back of the valve for flow. I measured the volume of the combustion chamber... ...and the area using a bit of graph paper, then sent it off for valve seat cleanup and a head skim of 20thou. While that was being done I picked a Crow 606 cam for low-down torque and sent it off with the followers. and I took the crank out and had it cleaned up while I got all the rust out of the block. I was carefully trying to avoid removing pistons and having to do rebores or new rings... The block generally was covered in tar and the crank was only cleaned after I tried fitting the new bearings and they jammed at the outer 1mm on the tarry edge of the journal.

All this was being done under the house without a vice, so you don't need a flash workshop full of expensive toys to do this sort of work. A nice gent in a welding shop tacked the throttle quadrant onto a bolt I bought and cut up and charged me nothing. I finally ended up with a system that would work nicely in the car. (or so I thought) While I was preparing, I matched all the little things like the heights of the two manifolds where they share a fixing, and made sure the manufacturer's welds didn't foul the nuts. (they did of course) Unfortunately there is very little room around a pair of manifolds on the same side of the motor. The arrow also notes where the original brake booster pipe used to enter the manifold, but it blocked the mounting nut so I drilled and tapped a new one and blocked the old one off. I still have that very particular tap for that very particular thread should someone need it for their Lynx manifold in the future!

SU Midel supplied a pair of ram tubes, which is why the airbox is so large. There is sufficient distance in all directions around the throats to allow maximum airflow. The filter fitted perfectly with clearance to the ram tubes. and the cover bolted on with clearence to the strut and a fitting for the cold air inlet from beside the radiator. Yeah yeah, I know, a bit of 65mm downpipe off the house, but this is a budget build! The heat shield was a bit of alloy sheet I had lying around. I needed throttle shaft supports, so a bit of alloy shelf bracket was pressed into service. Some steel plate reinforcing was glued on at the bendto give the latest in light-weight composites!

The SU conversion was next. I'd bought a pair of inch & 1/4 SUs off here, along with a set of extractors, and I wanted an airbox instead of the usual pancake filters. (which I reckon don't work very well) I bought a modern 'rolla air filter to build it around, and measured Rob's SU setup. I drew up a plan and gave it to our local steel tank maker. For $100 he folded it up in galv sheet. I borrowed a spare head off Rob so I didn't have to take the car off the road while I fabricated everything, and I set it up in the garage.

In this guise we did one of the car club's gymkhanas on an airfield down Cowra way. This was an introduction to driving with your foot hard down while going sideways for the young lady. lost by imageshack..

I wanted the manual car's diff for its 4.1 ratio, but that particular diff whined at open road speed and the one in the car had only done 120,000km and we had fitted new rear shoes to it. I find overall the best cars are autos as they are owned by old people and th manuals get thrashed by every young guy. Anyway, a very fine gentleman on here supplied a 5speed for a slab of beers, and that dropped straight in. Now it sits at 3000rpm no problem on the open road, using the 4.3 auto diff. We used it for a year while I planned a twin SU setup to help it keep up with the traffic... With the plans for a cold-air box in mind I moved the battery to the driver's side and dropped it down onto the chassis. http://www.rollaclub.com/board/index.php?showtopic=37086

We went down to Benalla from Orange to help at the gliding Nationals, so we did 1300km at 6.4L/100km (or 44mpg if you're that way inclined) We sat on 90kph all day up and down, and gave no problems at all. A little suspension work got caught up on, as there were a few Toyotas down the wreckers. Corona lower control arms were an easy bolt-on and gave it zero if not negative camber. I've never had it on a wheel alignment machine, I set it up myself and watch the tyre wear. I also picked up a Celica rear sway for $15 from an A60 at the wreckers. Before fitting it I tested it to see how much stiffer it was, 30%, which is just how much thicker it is. That bolted straight on too. Now it drifts around traffic islands in the rain! For that price its the best handling mod you can do, followed closely by the Corona LCAs.

The big project approached after we found it was a dog crawling up any hill in a 100kph zone. The auto box was useless! I found a manual car sitting outside a shed on a farm, where a young guy had stripped it to paint it for his girlfriend, then changed girlfriend! The car sat there for a couple of years.. For $400 we had the whole car delivered and I actually drove it up and down the road before we stripped it. The manual was a great improvement, and we fitted the lowered springs as well, then sold the car to a guy on AE86DC where it is currently being turned into a turbo 4AGE drift machine! Here's how we converted it over- http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/58879-how-to-convert-an-auto-to-a-manual-ke70/page__pid__590801#entry590801

The manifold gasket was chuffing slightly every time it started in the morning, so I figured I'd sort that out to start with. The usual failure between the twin gaskets, so we fitted a one-piece and sorted out little problems along the way. http://www.rollaclub...showtopic=27374 It rattled on startup for 30seconds each day too, and this was solved by a change of oil filter. The one on there didn't have a non-return valve so it drained out each night. It left it a touch rumbly, and that was solved just recently when I fitted new bearings while I had the motor out doing carbs etc. Anyway, back then it didn't take long to realise the headlights were pathetic to the point of being dangerous, so we fitted relays to take the load instead of the column switch. The improvement was amazing! http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/58878-how-to-fix-your-abysmal-headlights/

It didn't take long to find fine rust spiderwebs on the driver's side, obviously it had spent years in a carport where the weather hit that part. I figured it was worth scraping it back to steel and we ended up painting 2/3 of the car- everything except the passenger's doors/mudguards. Only cost $800 for two-pack, a mistake I realise now as one side looks a bit shoddy these days.

Well, Imageshack has closed all the free acounts and deleted the photos, so I will work through them slowly replacing them if I have copies. Sorry about that, but it seems the web dream is not permanent. Anyway- here's the best KE70 wiring diagram I have found- https://www.dropbox....adfile.jpg?dl=0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Back in 2008 the girl was on her L-plates, and we went down to Sydney to buy $1800 worth of 1983 KE70 auto. Very clean & very tidy. Her first driving lesson was driving it back to Orange over Bells Line of Road, where she found out that playing 'Need for Speed' does NOT qualify you for the real thing and 35kph corners do not mean 70! Once we got it home it had a wash and a cat chammy down, then she was off for driving experiences.

Yeah, give it a go bro! Its the only way to learn really. ..and I know you haven't got a lifting pin on one carb and who knows what else... ;) When you have them off we can go over them with the pair I've got sitting on the shelf and make sure they are 100% The richer needles sorted the over-run problem I was having and John Kane said the residual it is from the cam as it gets down under 1500rpm. It idles happily at 900-1000 and doesn't die when you turn the headlights on. I ran to Sydney at 6.4L/100 on the lean needles, but I haven't got a comparison yet. It won't be as good, I'm sure. What needles do you have in there? I've now got a couple of spare sets around... The air filters need to be replaced by an air box. Ugly but efficient! The oiled foam socks should be OK if you want to use them, that's what we used on motor cross bikes. How about machining up an adjustable cam timing wheel. You could move the power down 500rpm if it worked well. Nah, what the hell! get down to the motorcycle wrecks and I'll give you a hand.. quads! http://www.rollaclub.com/board/uploads/mon...40263_thumb.jpg

You are right- We had to cut the floor when we fitted the 4speed in place of the auto. The 5speed dropped straight in afterwards. http://www.ke70.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=1493

It depends on the actual muffler, both design and manufacturing. There are ways of getting high flow volumes through a muffler that will silence well, that's in the design. Overlaid on that is getting the noise out of the back pipe without letting it through the muffler walls, and that depends on how they build the walls and how thick the metal is. The backfirings not good for the engine, you'd want to eliminate that if you can. That's what the resonator under the passenger's seat is meant to do. I've run the extractors into a 2" pipe and a 2" resonator, but then back into the stock system until I get around to building or buying 1&3/4" for the rest. Here's that muffler comparison that shows the different types- you've probably seen it. http://autospeed.com.au/cms/article.html?&A=0383&P=1 Phithy, have you got any comments on particular brands/models that work well without being straight-throughs? I'd like another one like my L-Sportline or have it copied, its quietish but deep sounding and takes out nearly all the characteristic Altezza rasp.

Definately better than the stock carb. ..and they have the linkages I want!! Those are the the earlier linkages that let each carb idle individually, the later linkages bolt the two carbs together. By themselves its hard to say exactly what they do as far as changes, as I fitted extractors and had a cam grind at the same time. They will bolt straight on, but you will need to make up a fitting to connect the throttle cable to the center of the tappet cover. Easy to do.. If they're under $400 grab them!

I laid the bonnet upside down on the lawn and stuck the odd brick on the frame to pre-load it. I used liquid nails but it slowly vibrated off so its been replaced recently by silicon.

Well, its slowly smoothed out over the last couple of weeks. I opened the tappets out to 16thou, as Crow Cams said in their specs, rather than the Toyota 10/12thou I had them on. Now you can hear them, whereas at 10/12 they were dead quiet. I might take them back and see. ...& it was off to John Kane's dyno today where he set the mixtures on the new needles. He said the new needles work fine right up to max throttle, where they're about 2% lean which won't be noticeable. The remnant of the over-run is from the cam as it gets down to 1200rpm, but its hardly noticeable now. So... 'rolla sorted.... next project!

Ah.... I remember the flat blacker from the Sports Cars weekend at Bathurst over Easter... My brother was over from NZ and we went in the Altezza... There's no hiding Beau... :lol: The KE is the very tidy baby blue one with C3/C4 on the rear door windows in white paint. (left over from a gymkhana...) Daughter drives it, wife drives it and I drive it.

If it was running fine then everything you did to tune it was OK. Sounds like a bit of dirt has got stuck in a jet, hence the choke. If not, maybe fuel pump?? Join Twinky in a carb strip and clean! :lol:

Blocked jet?? Strip the carb and clean everything to start with. You should be able to set the timing to 8deg with the motor tuned off and it would run fine like that. I think its in the idle circuit of the carb from the sound of it.

What I have found is that thick-wall mufflers don't transmit noise up into the boot floor while thin-wall mufflers do. An expensive aftermarket muffler for the Altezza will weigh twice what a Repco one will, the stock muffler having a triple-layer wall (fibreglass sandwich) and the current L-Sportline one having a heavy stainless structure. The RPS I had was just thin and light, and needless to say boomed right through the car. You might try soundproofing the muffler itself... A bit of reading here- http://autospeed.com.au/cms/article.html?&A=0383&P=1

Landlord's car, Lexus IS200 (well, altezza)..... Off to fix house 1200km away.

Yep- find out if it leaks and what causes that- I'd say head gasket if you haven't seen a puddle of water under it in the morning. When the rad is filled in the morning, leave the cap off and start it up. Leave it idling while you watch for bubbles coming up out of the rad top until the thermostat opens and the water suddenly gets hot. If there are no bubbles then there's a chance the head gasket is fine and the water goes somewhere else, but if you can't see a leak then the compression leaking under the gasket into the water jackets is blowing the top few inches of water out until the thermostat opens. You only get water emulsion in the oil if the leak is water jacket to oil return.

hmm... Got my licence 45years ago.. Wandered around the world.. Armstrong Siddeley Typhoon- NZ Mini Cooper (Mk 1) -NZ Lotus Europa- NZ VW beetle- Aussie Alfa Gulia- South Africa Lots of Datsun 1600s- South Africa Ford Cortinas- South Africa Opel Rekord- South Africa Kombi Camper- UK Kombi Camper- took the 2nd one back to NZ More Datsun 1600s - back in NZ Nissan Sentra- NZ Honda Prelude- NZ Nissan Cifero- NZ Nissan Wingroad- NZ wait for it... Toyota Altezza-NZ, bought it to Aussie. Toyota KE70- Aussie Took a long time to find Toyota!