altezzaclub

Do it! Great package so just beat him down to what you can afford then make him help you with it! :P

Easy enough. Just have a think about what you want to do with the motor over the next couple of years. If the bottom end is strong then just whip the head off and either have an engineering shop cut the valves and seats or grind them yourself. You can also open the ports up and have the head skimmed for more compression... which leads onto extractors, sports exhaust, round cam, Weber carb... The stuff I did on the girls KE70. How fast do you want to go and how much to spend? For the price of a couple of gaskets and a new valve you could do it yourself dead cheap without adding any improvements..

Yep- that's the problem we ran into with Celcia struts on the KE70. We ended up getting AE86 tapered coils off Kings Springs for them.

Surely its just simple engineering... Cut the spring base off the KE70 strut and re-weld it on, just like we did on the rally car. If you want to lower it 50mm, weld it on 50mm lower. Cut 50mm out of the strut tube and reweld it. Then shorten the shock shaft by the same amount. Just cut it near the top, grind to points and re-weld. If you're not a welder then pay an engineer to do it. That lowers the whole system by 50mm and retains all the factory relationships. If you want it stiffer learn about the wet struts and close up or stiffen the valves that the oil passes through. You could cut the springs and move the spring base upwards to keep the same low ride height, but the spring will be stiffer. Cars raced in Formulae One with shocks like those for decades!

Is that the manifold gasket on the head or just a pattern to work from?? What's it made of?

Fair enough- You'll feel the difference!

I don't know which brand Richo bought for the 345K, but I'm sure we got 6cc. Measure it up when you've got it all, it will be interesting to see how it works out. Someone used 80mm flat-top VW pistons apparently, but I've never managed to find them. Anyway, if you're skimming from 35 to 30 it will make a tremendous difference. He went from 4K to 5K bore, dropped some compression from the dish, then skimmed 20thou off the head. It was chalk and cheese from before...

The diff drain/fill plugs often don't have gaskets or washers at all. I re-use sump washers regularly without any problem. If you pull the whole cover off you can just silicon it back on. I clean the surfaces up with brake-clean and try to use as little silicon as possible.

You might be 2cc light on that piston dish, I thought they were 6cc. ..and the head gasket is also around 7cc depending on how thin you reckon it gets. I measured the last one I took off as 1.5mm thick. That would make the TDC volume 45 going into 428, a lot lower at 9.5 .... I thought 30-31cc was about normal for a combustion chamber, and I know when you put the 5K pistons in a 4K you don't get any increase in compression even tho' they're bigger. The increase in compression from that is taken out by the dish.

...and understeer around this corner, and ooops, understeer around this corner, and gosh, understeer around THIS corner, and running really wide here... until the tail steps out and you're a passenger! Excel is probably faster tho'....

Forgot to mention- At idle with a warm motor the vacuum in the inlet manifold pulls oil down the inlnet valve stems past the seals. As soon as you drive away the oil burns out as blue smoke and stops as there is no vacuum in the manifold under throttle. So you just get one cloud then nothing. In contrast, worn rings let oil up to be burned under acceleration, and that smoke doesn't stop coming out as you drive. So you get a continuous cloud behind you. How are the compression readings? Maybe all the rings are worn...

Which carbs?? Doesn't matter, just get in it and drive over to Rollake10's place so you can both spend this weekend in the Finnish forests with the WRC!! Only 1000km each way..... but what an experience!

The noise is a pain, the pump has to be really seperated from the chassis. It has to sit in a tube of foam where no part of the pump touches any part of the body. That setup should work OK, just get the hoses in the right order so it always stays full of fuel.

The revs often mask the problem, such as a head gasket blown. Do a compression test to make sure the valves are OK in #2 cyl. Look for traces of oil in the radiator, water under the oil filler cap, and difficulty starting in the morning but OK after that to get an idea on the head gasket. Another way is to fill the radiator to overflowing one morning before starting it, then fire it up and leave it idling until the water in the rad gets warm. If it overflows with bubbles coming out before the thermostat opens then the head gasket is leaking. Swap plugs and see if the missfire follows the #2 plug. Then swap two leads for the same test in case its a lead. Check the dizzy cap inside and out for black dirt lines around the #2 socket, it may have a crack. Take off the manifolds, clean up the manifold faces and the head, and make sure all the nuts and studs have clean threads and go right to the end of the threads. Then fit a one-piece gasket, not from Toyota.. This one- http://www.rollaclub...-makes-them-4k/

Look over The girls KE70 in my sig below, what we did cost very little and was very educational. Any questions, post 'em up... it all depends on what you want to do with the car. If it hasn't got a K50 5-speed gearbox I'd do that first. Then do a compression test on both motors and pick the best for a better carb & exhaust system. Compare the front and rear shocks on both cars you have and pick the stiffest too.

You could assume that by the time you pull a 50x75 plate through the parcel shelf the G-forces would have killed you... Seeing you're pulling paralell to the parcel shelf plane the leverage the parcel shelf has is immense. But if you want extra safety you could just bolt a 100x150x3mm plate on the harness bolt under the parcel shelf with an extra nut. That way if the 50x75 pulls through the shelf the 100x150 will then jam against the underside of the shelf. At least it keeps the corpse in the car! I'm a great believer in spreading the load, so letting something fail and give a little before the next thing kicks in. The other point that always amuses me is the strength of seat mounts. If the seat mount fails the harness holds you and the seat in place. If the harness fails you exit via the window and the seat doesn't help at all. I haven't looked at how CAMS logs track/hillclimb stuff. We have had the rally rego passed this last year so the whole car gets a rego inspection by a "super-scrutineer" once, then checks at each event. That was the first attempt to get all scrutineering the same, as some guys would allow something and others wouldn't. Phone the scrutineer for the event you want to enter from last year's supplementary regs and ask him just to make sure.

Parrot you're a star! Steve ph'd last night to say the 4AGE had died 50km out of Tamworth with no spark, so he had to truck it back home on the Mothership. ...and this morning the whole 4AGE manual appears on Rollaclub! Sorry Luke, back to the Blue Thing....

Good ldea! Looks great now!

We have a Supercrap gun and it is terrible! It doesn't have an air supply pressure control on the gun at all, and the fan spread control doesn't work. The front cone doesn't seal against the gun body either. I put wire into each of the fan nozzles to cut down the size of the fan and lessen the overspray, but we're using plain white enamel designed for spraying steel & thinned with turps! (its cheapest...) Find yourself a new gun after reading a stack of "how to spray cars" on the net and talking to a couple of spray painters. Just keep adding thinners until it looks like milk, and if you drop the pressure you won't get so much overspray. The only way is to try it out, like you say. Why not ... Ah, I know why, you have a wagon and your boot floor is a different shape to a sedan, so I suppose you don't have a little corner on the driver's side behind the diff where you can hide the surge tank! Just by the panhard rod mount.

You don't think the shroud cuts off too much of the normal air flow?? The fans will never come on unless you're stopped at the lights after a good hard run up the mountain.. Even then that's unlikely in Tassie! We're just running one fan and it never comes on. What psi are you painting at? Its really all to do with how good the spraygun is, but I usually spray at about 30psi or less, just enough to atomise the paint well. How is the surge tank going?? Is it in the engine bay or under the car at the back? I figure the front is fine, the lift pump can push a lot of fuel at low pressure up here and the injection pump can boost it to 60psi right next to the motor. Damm nice work, I'll have to get you up to the Woolshed sometime, we really need someone who is fanatical about getting it clean and just right!

Well, put the car on stands and take out the shocks and springs. That's only half an hour. Put in the coilovers without their springs on and jack the diff right up. See if the diff hits the bumpstops before the coilovers bottom out. If that happens then you won't bottom the coilovers out when driving and it should be fine to use them. If the coilovers bottom out first then its not going to work, you'll bend a shock shaft or punch them up through the boot floor, or rip the shock mount off the diff... It may be fine for the times you're in it by yourself, but the day you have three mates in, or someone asks you to deliver a heavy load in the boot... then it will all fall apart! The AE86 guys use them all the time. They should just bolt sraight on, but I'd check that they won't crash out if I were you.

When you next turn it off from warm watch the fuel filter for five minutes. One of my KE70s boils the fuel from the residual heat in the motor and pushes the petrol back out of the pump, out of the filter and back down the line. Then the dry pump can't suck fuel until it has all cooled down and vacuumed the fuel back along the line. An alternative is to pull the fuel line to the carb off the pump and crank the motor over to see if fuel is being delivered at the next time it won't start. ...or take the aircleaner lid off and look down the throat while you open the throttle on the carb. The pump jet shold squirt a jet of fuel down the carb throat while you watch. These will tell you if there is fuel in the carb, in which case the problem is elsewhere. Sometimes coils or condensors can break down from heat, but that is pretty rare.

Well, its all just tuning. What are the tappet gaps on the valves? They are not crucial for power, although if you lose 5thou in the gap it is 5thou less the valve opens. More of an effect would be the change in cam timing from the wrong tappet gap, making the valve open too late or close too early.. Cam timing IS crucial, so that needs to be checked carefully. The Datsuns used holes in the cam gear and a pin on the cam to locate the timing, & we used to drill extra holes to get a wider range of options. Ignition is vital, so make sure the spark timing is advancing as the revs go up and maxs out where it should. About 35deg I expect. Then its all up to fuel and carbs. Does it pull up to 6000rpm? Does it pull all the way up there smoothly, or has flat spots? Does it splutter if you boot it quickly? ..and the idle... all to do with carbs. Do all throats sound the same if you listen with a plastic tube in one ear? That balance between all four throats is important. Ah.. so much to go wrong!

You could re-machine it so it screws in further to touch the seat, if it is long enough. There must be hundreds lying around, I gave my stock carb to a mate when I fitted the SUs, and I think its lying in his shed. I'll ask him if I remember. My auto was also a pain going from either too high an idle speed in neutral, or stalling when put in drive, especially when cold, which is most of the time. My solution is to fit a 4AGE, or option B is to hot the motor up with cam and quad carbs.... Set the idle speed to idle in gear when warm, which is what I did. I think it was about 800rpm, but then it goes up to over 1000 in neutral.

30" of mercury is a full vacuum, and that would be correct as at idle as the throttle plate is shut and the inlet manifold under max vacuun. My AFR moves up and down from 14.7 to 18, that being a mix of the SU carb characteristics and the cam makig idle grumpy. 16-18 is lean, but I cruise at 100kph at that and go up slight hills until I push the throttle down. With adjustable jets on the SUs I have set them to be that lean at idle. Your leaness might be from the groove in the idle needle, it lets in too much air no matter what you do with it, or maybe a tiny leak somewhere. Being lean like that makes the electroics work hard as its harder to fire a plug. So spark plugs, leads, dizzy components ... any weakness will show then, apart from a leak, as you say. Thne again, its a 35year old motor, a miss at idle is not much to worry about!