altezzaclub

Well, it drove back to Orange without problems, except for a plug lead jumping off the dizzy in the first 5minutes. I'll buy a new coil & put Ronnies back, and watch for carbon buildup in the cylinders. Maybe drive it harder too, I did glance down when overtaking one time & saw 7000rpm, and it sounded no different to 5000rpm, so its amazingly smooth and enthusiastic. Well over my usual 3300rpm cruise for hour after hour. Back up in a couple of weeks!

All organic, so we never even wholesale it. There are lots of restaurants and small organic shops that will buy it, more than we can produce at the moment. Give it a couple of years to get sorted out and we'll see how big it can grow. The next step is for Steve to work out a 12-month planting timetable and just see how it goes. Organic Certification is being done right now. Tomorrow is Monday, so that means a late afternoon picking greens & packing them in the freezing wind, followed by picking greens frozen in the frost on Tuesday morning before he heads off in the Hino for deliveries.. I'm hoping to head home then and sit by the heater in Orange!

OK, its been weeks working on it now and then, but it was finally assembled yesterday.. and didn't start! I checked one cyl and it had 150psi, which shows what hot cams do at cranking speed compared to stock cams in Mao at 200psi. Long story short, I swiped the coil & igniter off Ronnie's 4AGE, he hasn't done the conversion yet, and tried the coil. That didn't make it spark, so I tried the igniter as well, and THAT didn't work! So i went through all the testing in the manual, which showed the dizzy sensors for iGf and iGt were OK, the coil had a fine low-voltage side but the resistance on the high-voltage circuit was high (it was a stock 4k coil..) so I fitted Ronnie's one properly, and I measured the wiring from the ECU to the igniter. The final test is to put 3volts into the pink wire of the igniter and see if the coil sparks... which it did! So i hooked it all up and it ran! Fked if I know, maybe it needed to be reminded that it was an igniter, or maybe there is some really subtle intermittent fault in a wire that I'm about to discover on the trip home. Maybe the coil got hot on the trip up and couldn't keep going.. It was old and corroded inside the high-voltage contact. Anyway, now I know a lot more about 4AGE igniters, and tomorrow it needs the ignition timing checked. Seems to be running rich too, I can check that on the mixture display when its tuned. Maybe that's where the carbon comes from, the oxy sensor has been lying to me and the cleanup this time has sorted it out. I re-did all the manifold and exhaust joints and tidied up quite a few little things.

In the general chaos Lewis dropped his KE70 in saying it had a terrible vibration in the car and it had ruined the clutch. He'd just paid a mech to put new bearings in the driveshaft last year and it had never been quite right, then got much worse.. So up on the hoist and we found a driveshaft with sort-of OK front universals, a new center joint, and a completely dry & destroyed rear uni! The clutch?? Well, the circlip slipped along the cable and it went all soggy, as KE70s do! "A rally car" you ask? Ah, a desk for my desktop computer so I can read Parrots 4AGE manual while fixing the Girls KE70 in the workshop! Next trip!! I promise!

Steve's GF's Corona came back to have the heater fixed. We'd isolated it a few months back as it leaked, but -7deg mornings in Glen Innes were putting the strain on. I ripped the dash out, almost completely, and we put in another from a spare 'Rona... but it leaked too! So Steve had the original fixed and out the dash came again, then all reassembled... and it leaked again!! So that went back with the second one, and they said it was fine when tested, so we have two good cores and a leak from the heater control valve that dribbles inside the heater before dripping out! Then we spent a day converting it to an external tap under the bonnet from a KE70.. which leaked of course!! So we swapped it for a better one which was fine! ...until we moved the control slide and THEN it leaked! So its gone back to Glen Innes with a slightly dripping control valve under the bonnet! ..and I know a tremendous amount about how Toyota heaters work and how to get them in and out! I'd been working on the blue car on and off when I got time, the lack of compression meant a full head job, and it only got assembled completely two days back... and didn't run! Don't talk to me about 4AGE igniters, I'm quite allergic to them just now! I'll update The Girls KE70 after this. Anyway, another new toy was a seeding machine. The old ones have a horizontal disc full of various sized holes so you can select the hole for a vege seed and a rotating brush slides the seeds over the hole. this put out the seeds too close together, so Steve ponied up over $300 for a better system. I haven't got a photo of it before I extended the handles so it could be used by an adult. The handles only join the chassis through two miserable rivets, and it was flexing all over the place until I put a couple of diagonals in down to the back wheel. It has a vertical disc with cups that pick up a seed and drops it out through the wall to be planted, and you can tape over some holes to sort out the distance between plants. There are 6 discs for different sized seeds. Then we found as you push the force goes through the back wheel and lifts the front wheel off, so more mods were needed- Now it seems fine, and it planted a few thousand peas and beetroot yesterday.

Well, actually it was done with the help of the usual starving Uni students! Yeah, it was FREEZING cold! Then we hired a rotary hoe to see if it chopped the soil up finer. It did, but not before dropping the drive bolt out of a wheel, then having the engine cover chew the belt up.. Kennards were very good about it and gave us another weekend for free. After that Steve bought a tractor driven one!! Due this week sometime. There was still engineering going on, his little bro' was sowing oats and broke the harrows bar. We used a spare I-beam and reinforced the holes for shackles and always feeding out to do! A $30k truck of feed doesn't last long, you burn 20cows in the herd every time to feed them.

The seedlings in the glasshouse were big enough to plant out, bigger than when this was taken, but we had no machine to do it- The machine built for it let the seedlings fall over and ended up burying them rather than planting them- So we ran it along the garden to make the grooves and started planting brocolli.. 20,000 of them!!

Woo! End of June, I better catch up! So I came up way back in mid-May, with the faint problem that The Girls KE70 died on the way up! Steve picked me up that night with the trailer and we stuck the car in the workshop. His dad, Pete, was away for a few more days so his younger bro & I got stuck into the kitchen floor with a belt sander. In a frantic few days we sanded it all twice, filled it and sanded it again. We even painted the hearth! We finished it the day he arrived home, quite a surprise after a couple of decades with nothing once the carpet had been lifted. Auntie cat had two litters last summer, so The Dark Minx is quite big now, and all the new kittens are at the house. Minx's brother Sylvester is all grown up, and their three siblings are living with Steve's bro down at the shearers cottage. The new generation, another black & white, a grey & white, a ginger and two stripey tigers, have a lot to learn! So we hit the farming- first up was tweaking the Dyna design so the booms folded back properly and were supported when out. I think it sprays 6M of garden each side.

Just measure the distance from the top of the radiator, where the cap locks on, to the sealing shoulder down inside the neck. Make sure both radiators have the same distance for the cap spring to get compressed, as the photo looks like the Primera rad has a much taller neck. Diameter of the cap seal the same?? One way or another, if its not the head gasket I'm sure its the cap sealing that is at fault. A leak would be very noticeable and it wouldn't fill the overflow bottle if it was losing pressure through a big leak.

You bought a helicopter with the money yet?? maybe a farm?

Here's how I set it up last year when I had the head off. The camera 'fish-eye' effect makes it seem like both teeth are past their marks, but counting the teeth showed it to be correct. Of course with hot cams you could run different timing to be better, but a tooth out would be a big difference compared to adjustable cam gears.

Not a clue about the root cause. The motor came out of a guy's race car, so it has the biggest cams you can fit without new valve springs, and I thought maybe they give a low compression at cranking speeds. Cam timing looked OK, I'll dig a up a photo in a moment. The catalytic converter was suspected, but that is as clean as a whistle. Those Mazda leads I wondered about, but their resistance is within the range of Toyota leads. Running rich..? I've got the mixture display in there and it is impressive how much time it spends on 14.7, leaning out going downhill. Maybe the oxy sensor is suspect. I'm loath to pull the bottom off and pop the pistons, given the bore condition and the rare times I add oil between changes, but the carbon is coming from somewhere.

Well, another year of these 1000km trips every few weeks & it died again! Somewhere North of Premer it lost power so I stopped & turned it off to check it, and while everything looked OK it wouldn't restart. Cranked fine, fired occasionally, but never caught. So I ph'd Steve and he picked me up that night with a trailer. One odd thing happened.. With traffic of a car every 10minutes of so I was dozing in the pitch black when I heard a ghostly rattling & clanking approaching. There wasn't a thing to see, and as I wound the window down a completely lightless old Landcruiser crept past at 20kph towing a ruined old farm trailer! Not even dash lights! They turned off just past me & I could hear them clanking away through the scrub for 10 or 15minutes afterwards. So, we did a compression test & they were all 90-100psi. To check the gauge we tested Mao's 4AGE & that is all 190-210! I took the head off and there is a lot of soft carbon on the piston tops. The bores look fine, no lip on the top and no vertical scouring to suggest broken rings. The combustion chambers are the same- and once I pulled the valves out the loss of compression showed with carbon particles on the exhaust valve seats. The inlets I could've put straight back in they were so clean, but I gave them all a whizz with sandpaper and a quick grind. I'll assemble it this weekend and buy a borescope to keep an eye on it for the next year. I was most impressed with aaapowerparts on Ebay, $113 bought me a full gasket set with new bolts!

" bilstein shocks, adm ae86 brakes " " kings front and rear, full noltec bush kit including adjustable camber/castor tops " Same as us, I figure everyone short of cash does it. We're on Corona struts, same as AE86.

Got a $10 multimeter?? It starts at the coil -ve terminal, a black wire, and ends up at the tacho. Check and see that you have continuity from the coil to the tacho plug, and if that is fine then it must be in the tacho itself. The pins are 13 and 5, black in and white/black earth out, although this is an American diagram.

Crawling along in traffic, sure... On the open road at 100kph I doubt they do anything unless the manufacturer has designed a particularly bad intake setup. On the open road the air under the bonnet is not hot, compared to sitting around town at 20kph. Most cars pull air from outside the engine bay anyway, the KE70 gets it from under the guard. They real advantage will be a less restrictive setup as Toyota would want the intake quiet over being free-flow. I played around a lot with the intake on The Girls KE70 here, but that was because the twin SUs would have been sucking air from straight above the exhaust manifold.-

You mean like this? There's bound to be people who have tried it, but it depends on how you load the car and what the roads you drive on are like. I find the 205/60x14 I'm using bang around a lot and pull on the steering all the time. They're just too heavy. On the rally car we've just cut 70mm height out of the rear arch and riveted a Corona front flare over it. It fitted fine, we just used it because the Corona was sitting out in the paddock as a wreck.

I'm sure you've done this before, but scour it deeply on the back face, glue it together with Loctite, and once that is holding it in shape fill the back with Araldite and some matrix, like a strip of alloy or copper wires. Anything to build up the thickness of the panel as Superglue is only surface to surface.

Just lie on the ground and check the tyre tread wear every couple of months. If it is even enough then just swap front to rear once a year. Unless you are keen about how it turns in when you toss it into a corner with some enthusiasm, I wouldn't do anything. If you think it understeers too much then try to get zero camber, hence the slotting of the strut holes in the towers or the camber adjusters in Banjo's post there. It all depends on how you drive it.. The factory toe setting is for maximum tyre life, the factory camber is for safe gradual understeer and the factory castor is to give self-centering on the steering wheel without making it too heavy. They're all compromises.

keep forgetting to link to this... All these engine conversions coming up-

Ever had the V6 running in it? Should make a big difference...

https://www.ozzytyres.com.au/news/wheel-alignment-101-lets-talk-camber-caster-toe/ ...and... what's wrong with the "caster" diagram here, a giant multinational company full of highly skilled & highly paid engineers & techs? https://www.bridgestonetire.com/tread-and-trend/drivers-ed/tire-tread-wear-causes

C'mon Banjo, get those old Photoshop skills out.. Toe was 2.5mm in, mainly lefthand side, now 0.9mm in & even. That would have scrubbed the front left tyre. Camber is +50' both sides, unchanged. Meh, horrible but typical. Caster 2deg 10' left and 1deg 30' right, unchanged, so it climbs up the road camber.. Rear axle is crooked, not enough to notice... Does it drive nicely Graeme?

In reality, the best would be a Ford Ecotech, but I don't know what RWD gearbox you could bolt up to it. If we solved the FWD to RWD gearbox problem then there are some really light, economical, grunty motors that are recent. Ah... mounts too, finding holes in the block in the right place for RWD could be a problem. Ask LittleRedSpirit what his biggest problems were with the 2AZ.

How wide is the BRZ motor?? The low center of gravity would be interesting, but it might not fit at all. The 2J would put a lot of weight on the nose. How about an MX5 motor & a 6-speed. Its the only 4cyl RWD motor setups that is still new. Seeing they race so many of them the tech for modifying them is also new. Even the Altezza 3SGE is getting old now, but either would give you a light car that still handled well.