altezzaclub

Arrrgh! painful! So you're a wreck for a few months... Drain it, pop the axles and undo the diff face most the way, then clean the sealing area with Brakleen & smear sealant ito the gap. If you can move the diff head forward 8 or 10mm while leaving it on the bolts it should all work. Mind you, getting the axles out while a hoist will be a trick!

An arm... and a leg.. and probably your first-born... Anyway, we went up this morning after a big storm last night to find we had a slight problem... no power! Around the corner we found it hadn't done much for the Corona either... and that looked even worse once we had gone back for a chainsaw and started cleaning up! The power guys turned up and had it all organised in an hour or two, but no electricity until an electrician has connected it back to the Woolshed on Tuesday! So the car is on the trailer waiting to be taken to Tamworth at 7.30am tomorow to have the cage welded up. Then its farmwork for a few days...

The biggest savings would be to buy a pair of spring clamps and do the shocks yourself. The coolant flush can't be hard, and I don't understand what the serpentine bolt does... The biggest thing is the replacement car. The money they would give you as a trade-in is built into the price of the car you are buying, so yours is worthless really. If you put up less than $10,000 you will be buying another older, well-used car that will need just as much work on it soon anyway. Its all a big gamble, and fixing cars yourself is the only way to save money.

I thought a spring would work within its elastic limit pretty well indefinately and never sag. I supppose it depends on the steel they used. The spring only sets the ride height, so if you add a 50kg person to the 250kg you have on a strut, it will sink by that much more. The shock has very small bleed valves to control slow movements, (ie cornering and people sitting on the guard) so that will control how fast the strut snks when you sit on it. If you jump up and down on a guard you will use the larger valves that control bounce, and the strut will suddenly stiffen up. The oil in the shocks degrades with use, so if you feel the car bounces around too much get a pair of shocks, or if they are old wet struts strip them and put in fresh oil. If it rolls too much, get an upgraded sway bar, or stiffer springs, but they will affect the ride quality.

..and a button on the steering wheel, not a switch. Are we expecting things to happen very quickly here? That sort of 'instant detonation to destruction' scenario? You'd have to try the EFi fuel pump on the injector head to see what flow rate you get, but it sounds like it would work fine.

Well, we're slowly eating the elephant, one bite at a time! We have the turrets tacked into place, the boxes made up of 3mm steel that carry the cage feet. As you can see, we ran a strip of angle iron along the sill first to give it some guts, and welded 4mm strips into the ribs of the floor to level it.. The bolts are meant to be 8mm, but only the one through the sill is that small as we are a bit cramped in there. The other two are 10mm with captive nuts in the box. We have used our fine Woolshed equipment in making all the junctions where we weld 44mm tube to the main hoop and slide 38mm inside it to be bolted together.. to produce tolerances that would make a 6-axis miller jealous! Moving up from a steel picket for a dash, we have a dash bar. It fits right above the steering and leaves room for the instrument cluster. (more or less...) The rest has all been fitted in for the front of the car, and it bolts up fine. So this afternoon we took it out for some final tacking before it goes off to be professionally welded on the weekend. It looks so small out of the car! I'll probably add a couple of diagonals down the front lateral legs to strengthen them, but they won't be the full-size things the FIA want. Steve is a big boy and wouldn't be able to get in and out of a WRC car! Now we start the rear diagonal bars and the big 'X' between them... Of course, having made one cage, we could make a few more...

Don't touch it! If you haven't taken it apart you will never get it back together again, unless you have done several strips before. Just imagine sitting the garage surrounded by hundreds of bits of car that you don't have a clue where they go and more important, you don't know WHICH bits are not in the pile! Buy a going one, the best body you can find as Banjo said, and do a rebuild then modify it. Once you have done that you will be right for finishing other people's projects. $1000, LoL! Its just a pile of KE25 parts... $400 the lot!

Ok, so the compression will be about the same. If you use 5K pistons in a 4K the shallow dish removes the extra compression from the 1500cc. Another answer for idle knocks is, sadly, a broken compression ring. It doesn't hold the piston firmly so you hear the piston knocking at TDC. Other than that, just go over it all carefully and see what you can find.

If its struggling turn over the ignition might be too advanced. Mark 35deg or so on the pulley with some white paint and use the timing light to see where that is at 3000rpm with no vac advance. If you have to retard the timing you will have to wind up the idle speed. Then you know you have the right total advance, and you can look at idle and mid-advance separately. If you have less than 10deg at idle it might also get rid of the knock and if you're lucky, the missfire if its under 3000rpm. You should calculate the compression ratio, I'd do it but I don't have the head volume for that flat 5K one.

So, is this with nothing connected to the inlet manifold vacuum?? or rather, does this mean something that is still connected to the inlet manifold must be leaking. It seems so simple... like all the hardest problems! Definately a vacuum leak sound? or could it be a belt/bearing that coincidentally stopped then??

I think the full lateral bars have to be in one plane, the J4 drawing, which is why no-one puts them in conventional cars. Our main hoop in J2 is also in one plane. We have 4 turrets tacked together, one under each of the main hoop & front laterals, and things do join nicely at the top... but just before we tacked the main hoop onto its feet we realised we wouldn't be able to get it out of the car if we did! It tilts back in the car to get it out while it is just a tight-fitting pipe, but once it has feet on we won't be able to tilt it.. We have larger feet on it than CAMS require as the seat crossbars also mount on the same turrets. Larger feet means more lift of the hoop to tilt it backwards.. So we're learning why people weld cages in instead of making them removeable! That merely require cutting the whole roof off while you weld the top joints, or cutting the floor/sills out to drop the cage down to weld the top. Removeable cages are usually smaller than the cockpit edges, and we're trying to jam one in AND make it removeable. Tomorrow we will solve the tilting problem!

Try screwing the mixture screw in and out half a turn to get the smoothest fastest idle when its warm some day, and then set the idle speed once you have the mixture happy. I assume you did all the other tune-up things like ignition timimg/tappets/plugs/plug leads resistance in the initial major service.

Nice! I've always got an eye open for oil surge solutions that don't involve spending the thousands of dollars on a full dry-sump setup.

Anyone? Otherwise is $450 down the drain on some FWD souless Korean econobox that I'll have to book soon.

Nope, other way around. But the larger hose has a cover on it so its not as big as it looks. That's the one with the PCV valve in it, so under low inlet vacuum vapour flows through it into the intake, and are replaced by fresh air coming in the long hose. It shuts off at high inlet vacuum and the longer line takes the vapurs to the air cleaner box, where they make the MAF sensor all oily! I suppose you don't need the double line and the PCV valve, so long as your crankcase vents into the air cleaner box to keep the RTA happy . Blowby will get burnt up and so long as the rings are in good condition the crankcase shouldn't over-pressurise and blow oil out the seals.

Now, the springs in post #32 above.... The Celcia Kings springs are too wide to fit up inside the turret, but they will fit upside own as the 'bottom' coils get smaller in diameter. However the top won't fit on the spring base as it has a small diameter groove for the spring end, and we would have to remake the top spring mount. The KE70 springs fit in the turret, but won't fit on the Celica's small spring base... However! One KE70 spring is listed a having small spring base. Its actually for AE71s, and worse than that, they were never used in Aussie! So they only occur in AE86s (probably only imports too!) where the strut setup is the same as the Celica but the springs are KE70 diameter up their length. So if anyone has AE86 stock springs lying around we'd love to buy them, or even just get a photo and measurements! cheers

Last year I made a mock-up of the main hoop in waterpipe just to get it to fit exactly. This was left in the pile outside the woolshed and now it cannot be found! We blame the cows... this one was caught eating a K motor when we arrived one day, and we've seen them kicking pieces of steel around the place like footballs. If that motor vanishes I'll know who's responsible! So we started again, with my fitness fanatic friend pumping iron... We got the main hoop so it jammed in nicely, welded a brace on it and drew around it on the floor. Then we could measure sides and angles to get a reproducible engineering drawing. We did a lateral as well, as it is a 3D object and not in one plane. We raised one end on a block of wood while we put the second bend it it to make it kick out up the A-pillar. Then the tube we bought went off to a tube-bender in Tamworth and we picked it up later that day, all beautifully bent. A close enough fit, I couldn't have done better if I wanted too! Next was cutting short 44mm lengths and machining the ends into shark mouths so they fit the main hoop at 90deg. They will be the welded stubs that our 38mm laterals and braces slide into and bolt up. That way most of the cage will be removeable. I popped back to Orange this weekend and left Steve cutting 3mm panel for the feet and mounting boxes. Tomorrow I'll head up and we should be able to tackweld lots of it together before taking it down to the man in Tamworth to be welded up properly. Added to that will be the new seat mount bars we had to make as the rally car registration regs called for bigger box section than we'd used.... So we made them again, from the sill by the B-pillar to the tunnel where they bolt on and a piece that goes inside the tunnel between the two bars to strenthen the tunnel up. All that can be welded now too.

Looks like an oil level sensor... See if it earths out while its empty then hook up a dash light to it!

True, I'd need to go and look at a 4AGE to check how they do it, but it must be the same idea. The PCV valve controls the blowby getting sucked out of the motor and burnt, and when it is sucking there must be another way to air to get in to replace it. The Altezza's 3SGE has the PCV heading off from the tappet cover to the inlet manifold on one cam box and the clean air going in the other. You can see the two hoses running beside one another in this photo.

how many cans did it take?? It will certainly look better than brand-new!

Got the PCV valve in that line?? Working like it should? Its meant to shut off at high vacuums so the crankcase doesn't get sucked dry... The blowby then goes into the airbox via the 2nd tube, and only when the manifold vac drops does the spring inside the PCV push the piston off its seat and let gases get sucked into the inlet manifold..

Clever! Nicely done.

Maybe the voltage regulator is not happy. If you have a multimeter just check it is charging at about 13.8volts while running above idle. It would only charge that fast if the battery was run down, normally. It could be a sign of a dying battery.

...and suddenly its February 2015! A week spent getting the 4AGE finished in the KE70 got that out of the way, a total side-track from building a rally car. Then another week or two finishing the 18RG and putting it in Grumpy. First it was back to the head assembly, sorting out tappet gaps and then fitting cams These were timed using a dial gauge as they are 310deg cams with no clearance between the pistons and the head, and luckily having adjustable cam gears. We made up a lever to turn the amazingly tight engine and to carry the protractor. Then it was a case of bolting everything onto the outside of it- and we even polished the extractors! With nice old-fashiond designs you take the whole front off the engine bay nad it becomes much easier to get motors in and out. A day spent getting it running and sorting carbs and tuning, and it runs! Just as grumpy and hard to start as ever, between the cams and the carbs. So we drove it straight over to the tank shed and parked it. Now, onto the rally car!

Really, the only difference is the T50 gearbox instead of the K50, and the 4A motor instead of the 4K. The T50 needs a hydraulic clutch, so the pedal box becomes different. Diffs are the same old whiny Borgy, wheels and suspension the same. We've got 3 AE71s and at least 4 KE70s lying around on the farm with bits being swapped between them all the time. To lower it cut a coil off the front springs and 1.5coils off the rear... or go and buy lower springs. Don't forget that if you change the ride height you will need a wheel alignment afterwards.