altezzaclub

Well, another trip to Adelaide over Christmas, this time I was under pressure to do the 1200km in 12hrs before the reception desk closed at 5pm. That went well, although not the 7.0L/100 I was hoping for... Then i got keen over quietening it down even more and bought some foam/foil insulation off Ebay. First was making a few short videos as I drove to the workshop and back each day, now I just need a video editor for dummies so I can measure some noise volume. I started on the parcel shelf, straight over the fibre-board Toyota fitted in the factory, and I'll put a coloured cloth over it when I can convince the wife to sew it. Next was some melamine on 3mm MDF for the firewall area, but fitted much more carefully to make sure there aren't any holes or gaps. I didn't think of photos until 10min ago, and I'm not taking that seat back out again.. The base foam goes straight on the floor, which is where I'm up to. It covers the guard curves under the seat wings too. So, I'll fit the seat base, run a few videos on the way to work on Monday and see if I can measure a difference in noise.

Its toast! Just not as warm... Power arrives at the panel, and I assume you tested an earth leading away, and you can't get a reading through the panel itself. If the earth wire goes to the chassis with less than 5ohms, the problem is in the panel, and most likely there is a break or corrosion in the wire somewhere along the way. I don't know what resistance it should show, but 10ohms would be enough to defrost a window.

"The car already is a bare shell with literally nothing on it, and it's about to be 100% rust free once the repairs are done. I'm having a 4AGE and a T50 being built+remachined/reconditioned in California. As for the rest of the work, such as the T series diff conversion, AE86 front suspension, etc, is all gonna be done by a shop that has a fabricator on hand for anything I need. Basically all I've been trying to find through these forums are the parts and conversion that I need to buy/get started on so that the shop can install them once my motor is finished and the rebuilding process begins. I'm hoping it's gonna be pretty quick since the car is just a shell with no paint, no interior, no suspension, etc. " Excellent! By far the best way to tackle a project like this! Strip to a shell, rebuild shell, undercoat, fit engine/diff/suspension, strip them out, paint it all then re-fit mechanicals and wire it up. It will be great to see some photos as it progresses. Spreadsheet- The clutch master cyl can come out of a whole range of Toyotas, but the pedal box would be nice if it was stock. If you get stuck you will fine the clutch part is usually just grafted onto the auto pedal box, so probably not hard to stick a clutch pedal off another Toyota onto a KE20 frame. KE70 crossmember will be wider I expect. We had 4K motors fitted here and while the AE86/KE70 crossmembers are the same, the mounts won't take both motors. I have a Haltech Sprint 500 sitting on my desk to run my 4AGE when I have time to fit it. It came out of a race car so it does everything the 4AGE needs, but there will be extras you may or may not need with the flasher Haltechs.. I don't know if you'll find anything interesting in here- https://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/12068-ke70ae71te72ae86-similarities-differences/page/2/#comments

Nice! I remember some of those photos of the previous build, should be great when you've got it on the road.

Excellent! Well, there ya go, now you're educated and experienced and it didn't cost too much!

The AE86 center should fit, but get the axle first and see how it fits under the car. It should be noticeably wider. Changing the front struts would be ideal, Celica or Corona 50mm ones, giving bigger brakes as standard. That introduces all the problems of ride height, LCA length & camber, steering arm fitting and the big one I forgot yesterday, are you going to use a rack or a steering box?? That decision changes how the 4AGE fits in, and then you realise why people convert to a rack on the AE71 cross-member that is made for the 4AGE. Otherwise the gearbox bellhousing won't fit very well. Hopefully things like sway bars are a minor issue. The bars to hold that axle in place will be a lot more complex, but just start off with a leaf spring setup and see how it suits you. This guy was running 180KW through leafs on a Skyline diff- https://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/22610-my-2tgte-ke20/#comments Where's the KE20 fuel tank?? In the boot under the parcel shelf? Have you worked out where you're putting the surge tank and fuel pump? I'm a great believer in a small surge tank, mine is maybe 300ml so takes up no room under the 4AGE intake system and I've never had a problem with it. A big alloy radiator and an electric fan on the list? These days I'd cheat and strip the KE20, put it on a rotisserie and start from there... Is a 12month fully restored and modified 4AGE/KE20 project a problem? Cruising through the web, this is an interesting problem- "I've got a late model AE86 T series Kouki, disc brake rear end that I'm trying to fit into my Ke25, and my engineer is tell me that it can't be done. He said the only way to bring it back to ke20 1320mm width would be shorten one side about 60mm (i.e. left side as diff centre is already 20mm off centre to the right.) which will bring diff centre 40mm to left. My issue with this is that I think I'll have drive shaft clearance issues?" https://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/72644-ke20-diff-to-ae86-conversion/ ..read it carefully, it explains the offset driveshaft in the Skyline Borgy in the 2TGTE link at the top & how difficult it is to shorten axles. Do you have a good engineer looking over it for certification? That's the biggest part of a project these days. Well, I can see you have weeks or reading, there is so much on the net about doing this project. https://www.toycrazy.net/tech/ke2strutupgrade.htm

" sounds easy when you say it fast. lots of work. " Absolutely! So the easiest is to find a T-series diff from a leaf rear end & fit it. That's Corona and vans and Celica. They'll be wider so expect to move the mounts in, and drums only. If it hops around you can add a panhard and lower anti-tramp arms to help it. That's half a 5-link you've fitted. Next is an AE86 or T-series liftback or any imported Corolla that had a banjo-style Japanese diff, not the Borg-Warner. They will have coils & 5-link arms, so as Dave said, start chopping the floor and welding on mounts. I've never done it, there will some tricky questions to solve. Keep the diff as light as possible, no ute diffs, as the car is already so light it won't like another 80 to 100kg bouncing around under the tail. The 4AGE doesn't have enough torque to blow anything up unless you're particularly mechanically insensitive. We put OS Giken limited slips into the T-series diffs for the rally cars, they are high quality and seem to last. There's a list of all the Toyota diff part-numbers, their size and what car they fitted floating around the web. That's pretty handy. I kept some of it here- https://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/42407-the-girls-ke70/page/5/#comments This is big project, I hope you've got some prior experience doing this sort of conversion, or a lot of patience! Make sure you have a point fixed where you bail out of it- https://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/64432-how-to-tackle-that-engine-conversion/ That's as important as the finely detailed list you must have before you buy anything at all, every job broken down into exactly what happens and where it fits in with all the other jobs. Project management makes or breaks these adventures.

The Girls KE70 4AGE apparently came out of a race car 'with the biggest cams before you have to change valve springs'. What this means is although it runs on a stock ECU, intake and exhaust, the idle and the slight throttle response are erratic. It idles nicely at 1000rpm when semi-warm, climbs to an unsteady 1600 when warmed up and may quickly drop in steps to zero & stall. Both coming off the last touch of throttle on a slight downhill or just opening it to maintain speed gives a very jerky over-run or pickup. It wants a solid message from the TPS and it wants to be accelerating. While this is great out of town, it rapidly becomes a pain in daily work/shopping & requires constant heel & toe. I put it down to the lack of vacuum signal below 2000rpm from the cams. I now have a Haltech Sprint 500 to fit, and recently realised every bit of wiring I installed 6years ago needs to be removed and a new loom done. That also came out of a race car & needs a different dizzy setup, a different style of injectors and I'm hoping I don't have to transfer the ITBs with their 2-wire TPS as well. So, start with the stock ECU to see, but be prepared to ditch it and rewire it again for a simple Haltech. The motor uses the T50 gearbox, but if you're flush and want more work, a J160 Altezza box can be adapted to fit. A new driveshaft for sure, and a Japanese banjo diff from a Celica or similar. In the build thread I have how that went into a KE70, but you could use a Corona one as you don't need 5-link mounts. Of course a 5-link or anything to tie those leaf springs down would be better than what you have! A J160 will make you a friend of SamQ, you'll need a gear lever adapter, new mounts, a bell-housing adapter, and a hydraulic clutch for either T50 or J160. A J160 needs the KE70 transmission tunnel to be beaten out slightly, they are much bigger around the bell-housing than a T50. On a K20 it will be similar I hope, you should fit a T50 in as it is, they're not much bigger than a K50. Ah- You will likely need a new hole for the gear lever, just expect that. Start at the end of these and work backwards- https://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/42407-the-girls-ke70/ https://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/69126-how-to-build-a-rally-car/?gopid=680040#entry680040 PM me with any other questions or stick them up here- Cheers

That looks pretty terrible! OK, the front water holes are not used, we figure Toyota made a cock-up in their circulation design and tried to make the water circulate around the rear cylinders more by closing off the front holes with the head gasket. However the rear holes on your head/block also look crap! So, someone used no coolant for a decade or two, and never changed the oil in the same period! If you're going to use that head, get it professionally cleaned, it needs to come back spotless. If the valves aren't too thin around the edge and the seal on the seat looks OK & not burnt at all, just get the head cleaned and grind the valves in yourself. I use a wide snap-off craft blade (no knife, just the blade) to carefully scrape the old gasket off the head, it doesn't want to be too new of you can dig into the head surface & ruin it. Take it easy & slow. Finish it with a sheet of 320grit wet & dry sandpaper with some WD40 on a flat steel surface. If you don't have a flat steel, get on, you'll need it sooner or later. Even a piece of 150mm wide steel by 10mm thick by about 200 long will do, just make sure there are no edges sticking up. Any steel supplier can sell you something. It does the manifold surfaces and everything. If not, have the workshop that cleans the head skim it lightly. With both heads off put a pair of pistons on TDC in each block and rock then left & right across the block with your thumbs. Pick the block with the least movement, the piston slap. Look for the smaller lip at the top of the bore too, although really the pistons and bore should be measured accurately. Tip both blocks over and take off a main and a big-end bearing, and compare those between motors. Decide which motor has the least wear & damage and use that, probably the one you were using but you never know. If the bearings in the original block don't show signs of wear, just put the two you took out back and hope... If not, pull them all off and lift out the crank. Keep all the bearing shells in order, take lots of photos. Either they are all good enough to use, or some are more worn or damaged by dirt. At that time you need to decide on new bearings, mains and big-ends... which may mean paying for the crank to be ground if they are down to the copper backing, or just get the crank polished and fit new bearings of the same size. Make sure you scrape the water jackets out on the block you are using. If the pistons feel OK, leave them in the block, just sort out the bearings. You could check the cam chain & tensioner for wear and slack, another job worth doing while its apart. Why did the valve hit the piston in the original motor, and how well did it run for the month or three before it died? Just too many revs?? Tappet clearance problem? Where abouts are you in Aussie, someone might be close enough to give you a hand.

Once you have the head off drain the bock as much as you can, all the oil & water. Tip the block over on its side and scrape the dry rust out of the water jackets, mainly around cyls 3 & 4. This is where it builds up & stops water flow, causing overheating on the back cylinders. With the manifolds off put a straightedge along the manifold faces. They must be straight and aligned with each other, and mis-alignment is the cause of many an exhaust gasket failure. There's stuff to look at in here- https://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/42407-the-girls-ke70/ Cheers

Strip it completely and check the valves and bearings/pistons/bore. If it look OK, send it off to be cleaned and measured, then make a decision from there. It might just need a hone, rings & bearings and a gasket kit to give you another 200,000km, and a hot solvent wash would return it like new. If you don't want to spend that much and it looks half worn, I've put bearings back in a motor before and its ran fine, and the ultimate was building an Evo3 motor a few years back from 3 old motors and using pistons where the rings were seized solid with filth, going onto another set of conrods and being put in a third block... That motor did a year of rallies under a giant turbo without a problem. So strip it and clean it yourself, check it out and make a decision. The next motor you buy will probably be in similar shape, they're all getting old. The pulley is marked like this- I've forgotten what the other two marks mean, haven't had a 4K for a while now.

Cheers!

Auto or manual?? If manual, push start to see that everything except the starter is working. It would be easy for them to knock a wire in the engine bay and break a bad connection that was just about to break anyway. Either way, chase the wire to the solenoid with a multmeter as Banjo said, see if power gets to there. If it does, solenoid is crook. If the solenoid goes "Click" when you hit 'start' but no starter motor, starter is crook. If the power doesn't get to the solenoid, chase it back to the key wires as the key 'start terminal' inside the ignition block might be crook. If there is power coming out of the key start wire but not getting to the solenoid, check the relay in the middle. Banjo put a KE30 wiring diagram up on here a decade back, but he's so old now he forgot! It would pay to PM him and get a good copy as they're hard to read. Let us know how you go, its always interesting to see what goes wrong.

After that couple of thousand Km with an exhaust that needed earplugs I bought a Redback three-chamber muffler from our local guy for $100. They're a great design, I'd bought one for the car a decade back but ended up putting it all on the gold car when I fitted the 4AGE & sold the gold car with it. Josh & I put the car on the hoist and cut out the wiggly bit I'd had to stick in for the Maxima catalytic converter and made a cone to 2" pipe instead of Nissan's blank wall. The cat was 3" inside and had a flat wall with a 2" hole in it! It didn't help that the only suitable bend I found in the Woolshed was 1&3/4"... With all the pipe now 2" we replaced the angled straight-through muffler with the 3-chamber and put the same tip on it had. What a difference! Growly under power but lift off and cruise at 100kph and its quiet! I reckon it breathes better too, the new muffler is a 2&1/4", but maybe that's just the noise.... I should have done it years ago!

Probably Ne, a pulse generator from the crank position sensor in the dizzy. Why not use the coil negative, the same as on a carb engine? I'm using that on the 4AGE.

Yep, I used the hoseclamp "circlip security system" for years too. ..and the spacers to take up the cable stretch & keep the pedal where you want it.

Still trucking along.. The 80km daily run to the workshop and back had a change when I went up to Walcha for a week last month. A quick 1100km and back home for a week where we found time to cut off the inch&1/4 curve of water pipe I'd welded on the muffler as a tail pipe all those years ago, and replaced it with the correctly sized two inch... It made the car so noisy I can't believe it!! Especially as I headed for Adelaide at the end of that week, about 1200km of resonance inside a tin can! A week there and off to Melbourne, a few days and off again to Eden on the South Coast, and drove home today. That's over 3000km with earplugs in, so apart from an oil change and a new exhaust system before Christmas, the car is running fine! I'm sure there are quite a few surprised people around who though 'this old car will get in the way in these hills..' Melbourne was funny, no Epass so I was dumped off right in the central city at rush-hour and crawled my way South through the inner city suburbs. Ferraris and Maseratis waiting in the traffic, but everyone was looking at the noisy old KE70 with the big cams.

If you give it a hard enough time I'm sure you will. You're relying on making one rear wheel skid on the tarmac every time you turn the steering wheel, so the stress depends on how much grip the tyres have. Don't weld the teeth together in the diff, fill a pair of teeth on either side of a spider gear so the gear has a little movement but can't move past that one tooth. That makes the car turn in much better than having it plough straight ahead with no play between the rear wheels at all. Eventually you will break a spider gear I expect, although we twisted axles in the Celica rally car.

Ag sies man! You'll have to find a nice 4AGE & a T50 gearbox to make it nice to drive! There are a couple of KE55s at my local wrecker, same body basically, and they're pretty rough as expected for old cars. What parts do you need?

Yslike, a Gautang nommerplate eksie! No rust?? Kept away from the coast? You know as well as I do that all the old Corollas end up in the townships, I've been thinking of coming back over and filling a container from the shanties in the Western Cape. T-series engine?? 2T? So much better than the K-series motors they put in Australia's. I don't know any one place, but on here is as good as anywhere, although apparently most Rollaclub stuff is now on Facebook so make sure you find that. Anything on Gumtree that you need? https://www.gumtree.com.au/s-parts-accessories/ke30/k0c18323r10 Otherwise, as you say.. no hope!

You KNOW what that manual is going to have as instructions! "To re-assemble the gearbox: Assembly is the reverse of dismantling the gearbox" Which it never is!

They are the bearings marked in red on that picture. They are a set of rollers held in a loose cage, and run directly on the shaft, not in their own housing.

Have you got this? That's the only data I have on them. They die because the layshaft bearings are un-obtainable, the rollers were a custom Toyota part apparently. The worn rollers eat into the layshaft and chew off the hardening. You can have another dismantled one for $50 +postage, its sitting in my workshop. Worked fine until I asked a gearbox shop to put in a new front seal and they stripped it, cleaned it and told me it needed new bearings.. I was not happy!

So, how far have you got? Does it start nicely yet?

4AGE is the only option, but expensive with the cult tax. 1600cc, light on fuel, light in weight, gets you a decade ahead in engine design age, but it all depends on how worn that particular motor you get is. Needs a T50 gearbox, the KE70 should have come out with one right from the start. You could hunt for a 5K, but they're a lot harder to find and a decade of design earlier. Even more-so for T motors, never so many on the road. In the back of my mind I have Mazda MX5 for when the 4AGE gives up, there just isn't any other RWD 4cyl with a good gearbox anywhere. They can be 1.6L 1.8 or 2L, all in RWD. If you want to go to 2L, the Altezza 3SGE is popular, but its a very tall motor.