altezzaclub

That's it in a nutshell, TV has killed Formulae One stone dead! He wants a spectacle, the Roman circus for the proles and to hell with the original idea which was to see who could build the fastest car to a set formulae. I always feel the racing is more honest in other places, like Le Mans 24hr or lower levels of the sport. Eccleston's ideas have been senile for years...

haha! Jace! Can't resist this- "Redwarf Group: Global Moderator" said- and buy a KE70 as the next project!

So, today was time to clean the holes out... The manifold bolt holes (I have only 2 studs and the rest are 10mm bolts) then the head bolt holes. I have a bolt with a hacksawed slot down it that acts as a tap without actually cutting any metal, so when I could screw that fully in and out by hand I knew the threads were clean. There can be a lot of tarry shit and dirt down a hole that you just never see, but it can stop the bolt tensioning up on the head or manifold. It takes a few tries to get the slotted bolt in and out without filling the slots up with rubbish. I measured a headbolt height in the block and the head depth just to make sure that the bolt would pull the head down without bottoming, you just never know... 3mm of extra space after skimming half a mm off the head. Then I tipped the block upside down on two bits of wood and banged it up and down a few times. Unfortunately I vacuumed up the rusty mess that came out, then I started in the coolant holes with a small torch and a screwdriver. Just scraping that around in all directions in each hole produced the extra pile of rust and stuff pictured. Most of it was on the bottom of the waterway at the rear cylinders, but quite a lot had bridged between cylinders or between a cylinder and the block. That all acts as an insulator that keeps the heat in and slows down the flow. I don't know how the car was treated for the last 25years, but at least I'm sure it will be better in the future!

Buy a $10 multimeter if you don't already own one, and check the voltage on the battery when idling & revving, both with and without the lights on. A healthy alty will keep the voltage around 13volts without lights and 12v with them on. I'd be surprised if it is a straight alty fault, (usually brushes worn or a diode burnt out) as the battery should supply enough to run the engine and the lights without the alternator connected at all for quite a few hours. I'm wondering if there is a short somewhere in the lighting circuit that is pulling a fat current out of the system and dropping the voltage, although you should smell something hot or burning if that is the case. See what you can find...

hmm.. I hadn't thought of that- I did notice the performance advertising was all aimed at Holden and Ford, while the most common Toyota extractors were for 4WDs, Landcruisers etc. Part of owning a 'rolla I suppose, buy somethig and then have to modify it to do the job it was designed for..

NOW I understand this modern term Azzy, the diff is the last thing you need to worry about! -Get onto an English course at Tech. If you can't communicate clearly you will not succeed in a technical field like engineering, which is what cars are all about. -Offer to work for a small garage like an Ultratune franchise for peanuts while you learn, say 6months, then if you really like it apply for an apprenticeship. -Get onside with the Boss & get him to help you do a head overhaul, fit twin carbs, a cam and an exhaust. -Go over the suspension and lower it, stiffen it with shocks and make sure the brakes are absolutely 100%. It still won't drift, but then you will know enough to fit a dff with an LSD if you want one!

Outweighed only by the internet itself, the most amazing place to spread information and store knowledge, something that was never thought of when Bob Kahn invented TCPIP! I'm sure people who have not lived without it cannot imagine what the world was like only a few years ago! There were no geeks, no forums, no gaming, no way of asking about your car unless you knew someone personally who could tell you over the phone in the hallway...

30mm. The head was about 27mm.

OK, the head has been off for a couple of weeks now. The first job was to open up the inlet ports to suit the Lynx manifold, which went well, then the engineer machined valves & seats, took 15thou off it and most important, got it sparkling clean! Now to match the extractors. The one-piece Durapro manifold gasket was offset to one side (it fits on the inlet manifold locating pins, so it can't move around) so I hit the offending holes with a small grinding wheel in a drill. They came out OK, but it shouldn't have needed to be done if the manufacturers took some care. Some careful marking of the extractors found the best-fit position for them (they do walk around on the bolts) but it was clear the end pipes were too low. This was obvious when I put a straight-edge across all four pipes. The straight-edge (a bit of thick-wall aluminium section) was perfect along the head ports, but over 2mm off on cyl 1 & 4 on the extractors The steel plate they are welded onto is straight, but the end holes are cut in the wrong place. The photo shows them after I'd already started work on them, I only got the camera out after I got pissed off enough to write a topic on it! Another half an hour with a grinder and a file slowly sorted them out. Take a straight-edge with you when you go buying extractors! Next was bolting it up to the head, and surprise surprise, the welds obscure the nut placement so the nuts can't be done up tight! So next job is to grind the welds back until a spring washer can sit there, which is after a cup of coffee now! That's labelled 'A'. You can also see the flange thickness difference between the inlet and extractors, so I'll have to pack the thinner one of the manifolds or it will not be clamped tight. That's labelled 'B' ..and talking of stupid engineering and poor execution, the brass circle in the inlet (labelled 'C') is where the brake booster pipe was mounted, completely obscuring the top nut on the inlet. You had to take the little pipe out every time you wanted to undo the manifold nut, AND you couldn't swing a spanner on the pipe because the manifold nut was in the way! That's been transferred into the thick manifold flange out of the way. This is all 2-hand gear, so what sort of quality are people building into their cars?

Use worn rally tyres on the back actually- I used to go track racing with them on my Datsun 1600 because the independent rear end had so much grip and the motor had no power! It would drift with smoking tyres all the way around the hairpin & the crowd would go wild!

..and the PCV valve works the opposite way to what one might expect. It flows a lot at wide-open throttle and closes off at idle. So it uses the high manifold vacuum at idle to shut the valves hard against a spring, and that's when you might see fumes coming out of the filter. On the open road under acceleration the PCV valve is open and sucking the fumes out of the engine, as that's the time you normally get maximum blowby.

That is where fresh air goes INTO the PCV system. It goes out through the brown hose behind it and into the manifold to be burnt. Stupid really, it isn't going to clear the motor of fumes by travelling 50mm, but I suspect the Govt said "you must have a PCV system" so they fitted the cheapest and easiest one. Check the valve sticking into the tappet cover at the end of the brown hose. It must flow air one way only. (towards the manifold) If it is gummed up then it won't suck the fumes out. Give it a good clean in brake cleaner and make sure the ball is loose when you shake it and seating well. If the valve is working and fumes come out the "in" filter then the motor is producing more blow-by than the PCV system can handle. That would suggest that the rings are pretty shot!

yeah, 'rollas have much better heaters than air conditioners!! Mind you, we could do a big trip at the same time he did, June/July in the interior is pretty good!

Yeah we used to heat the stripped strut tube in a vice with an oxy torch and put a length of pipe on the stub axle to bend it. You can measure the triangle that the strut makes in the car and work out how far to bend it to get the negative you want. Then we'd cut 75mm off a spare tube, slice it lengthwise and weld the half-tubes on over the bend to reinforce it. Then go rallying over jumps...

So, it runs smoothly on all 4 when it idles or its under no load, such as when you pull a plug lead off. It misfires when its under load such as changng down to 3rd or holding 80kph. That could be a plug breaking down under load or any of the electrical components. How well does it pull up through the gears doing a full throttle 20-100kph? Smoothly all the way? That would eliminate all the electrical stuff under load. Best way to find it is on a dyno, where you can check the electrics on an 'scope while its under load. The cheap option is to get it misfiring, immediately grab neutral and switch it off, then look at the plugs for colour, although this is harder to see. If its not a clear misfire on a cylinder then you might have fuel issues. Hard to guess, but maybe it leans out when working hard. That should show on a 20-100 acceleration test too.

Oh.. Now I understand this! :P

A 4A conversion in a KE70 might actually lower the price! The more that get modified, crashed and wrecked the higher the value goes for the granny-spec ones left. Watching the forums for 12months has shown a lot of quite nice stock vehicles get bought, lowered, fitted with a noisy exhaust, called "Drift Spec" then sold. All that's happened is the car has moved from being a nice daily to a 'P'-platers thrash machine and is off the road within a year. The value of all these cars is perfectly accurate providng its a free market- people sell for what they can get and people buy for what they can afford. If you need to sell it fast you'll sell it for less. While they are 30year old cars they are small RWDs, and that just does not exist anymore. An overweight over-priced BMW 318 is just not a comparison, and there is nothing else after 1984 or so. So you're up for a six cylinder if you want RWD, and somehow doing donuts in a FWD Ford laser just doesn't have that sex appeal! They're just one step behind the Datsun 1600s that are going for 10grand... In a few years when you guys are in your forties you'll all be saying "I remember when those KEs were only three grand! You kids are nuts paying $20grand for them!" I can remember when Austin Healey 3000s were only a few grand (which I didn't have in 1965!) and I saw one the other day for sale at $90,000!

That's what I'm using, a Z68. ...and that's a bit of a worry!

Haha! Well done Rob, that's a score! Valves are spun clean, starting on the head today & phoning around chasing cost of balancing & skim..

Ok, now you know its a non-interference motor. Next- The best gasket set is no doubt a factory Toyota one! For the best of the losers, I don't know. Next- Yes, the distributor has to be timed exactly to coincide with the crankshaft, the same as the cams. The fact that you asked that question rings alarm bells about your ability to make this motor work, so I suggest you do a lot of reading about how all the bits of an engine work together. There is stacks of really good stuff on the net. Make sure you thoroughly know how an engine works before you hit the 'start' button, or have a mate who is a mechanic go over everything you've touched.

That's an interesting question toymotar.. The vac advance unit is there to retard the ignition timing when you floor the accelerator so you get better initial acceleration, and then it advances it back up as you lift off the pedal and cruise. With less air going in on an almost-closed throttle you need more advance to burn it, so more advance drops fuel usage on part throttles. On wide-open throttle the cylinder air density is higher and it burns faster, so less advance. If we take the 'rolla down to Sydney from Orange it pinks at sea level as we can handle more advance at 2500ft. Without it you will not get the full spark advance unless you add more static advance at idle, and so add advance right through the rev range perhaps in places you don't want it. I don't know what it pulls, but this guy says it adds 15degrees, so max advance is taken from 36 out to 50deg. So instead of 8 to 10deg at idle you'd be looking for 25deg to let the mechanical advance get up to 50!! Unfortunately you won't be able to handle 50deg with wide-open throttle at 4000rpm because of detonation, so without a vac unit you will not get as much advance into the system. http://www.thesavoy.de/html/vacuum_advance.html As Rob said, you can get the dizzy re-graphed to suit the carb/cam setup and they will alter the springs and weights under the dizzy base to maximise the engine's potential. You will still not get the effect from spark retarding when you floor it or the fuel efficiency from the vac advance. Where it gets interesting is that the two points for getting vacuum, the carb or the inlet manifold, have completely different results. So hooking it into the brake booster line will be most interesting to see what that does to your advance at idle. It should suddenly add a handfull of degrees of advance on and you will have to retard the dizzy or lower the idle speed to compensate. I do wonder if all the guys who say their Corolla goes so much better with 12 or 15degrees of advance actually have a broken vac unit, or they disconnected it. What do you think Mr Philbey?

ask them- http://www.redlineauto.com.au/products/category/BFLXHVLE

I've just bought a flapper wheel to try against the 3" long length of 6mm steel rod with a slot cut down it I've used for years for polishing ports. There are some weird shapes in metal that do particular jobs around here, and I also have the 1800long 30mm axle that makes a superb pry bar... family heirloom from my dad!

Warm it up and spray with degreaser then let it soak for a few minutes. I'm using "5Star 3 in 1 " at the moment, but I've used a home-made mix of turps and detergent before, which is basically all those cans of degreaser are.

..not to mention the "mandatory sentencing for attacks on Police and public officers" that he pointed out. Are they somehow better or more important than the general public? THEY are the people who work to pay the 'public servants' wages... I thought Tassie was were all the weird people live... :jamie: He is dead right, he has been punished for a crime he was uninvolved in without a trial. Seeing its Aussie it has to be a kangaroo court! :lolcry: