altezzaclub

Valves could have jammed open and allowed the pushrods to drop down and out. Saw that in the 1970s with an old Holden that no-one ever changed the oil on, the sludge jammed a couple of valves open. Maybe the lead supplement has jammed them in the guides. Could it have been the last great thrash by someone when they sold the car, and valve bounce let the rods jump out? I'd expect bent rods or valves if things were that bad, maybe that is why its still not good.. 10 & 12thou for tappet clearance, set them up and do a compression test to see if the valves are sealing well. Let us lnow what you get.

What cam are you using snuff? Are you going to run it in the stock position or advance it? Do you think there is an advantage in running the adjustable setup?

Then again- just in my newsfeed.. Maybe you just call a driverless car on your smartphone, it turns up, takes you to work/shopping, you pay foir it with the phone and it goes off to take someone else somewhere. You could go on a 500km holiday with the family & luggage in a driverless 7-seater then use a little driverless sedan around your destination.

Check out Great Wall agents. They used a 3Y or something in a ute and they are the same tubes. Mate bought a new set for peanuts.

If it were me, I'd put it in a vice, hook up 12V and a coil with one spark plug and spin the drive by hand. ..or with an electric drill! Check the wiring and the air gap, maybe its still fine like gav's. I've just spent two weekends getting a VK running with young Rob. At the end of the first one we found the new electronic dizzy rotor wasn't touching the old but similar-looking cap, but the spark would jump the gap occasionally and fire a cylinder. We had the timing light on all sorts of places, carb checked, poured fuel in, tried all sorts of shit. After it just ran, the following weekend we couldn't get it going, and it took all that weekend to find out that the brand new spark plugs he had put in his rebuilt motor were shorting down the ceramic insulator instead of jumping the gap! They'd got pretty fouled from the previous weekend.. New plugs and it runs like new! So, we checked and checked everything, but its amazing how hard it is to see a simple problem right in front of you!

Well, lets see know.. I'm right in the Baby Boomers, at the front end more, and buying cars for similar-aged friends has shown me.. We can't move as easily as we used to, we can't bend like we used to, we can't turn our heads as easily as we used to and we aren't as strong in getting up and down as we used to be. So, we don't want cars that are small inside. We don't want low cars or ones where you lie back in a seat. We don't want sloping rear 1/4windows or rear windows with no visibility. That knocks out nearly all the cars with ugly modern styling, which is why I suggested a Skoda Yeti to a friend recently. We don't want long sloping rear windows that make the boot opening too small, and we don't want hatch floors where you have to bend over, lean in and pick something heavy up from a recessed floor. We don't like electronic gizmos and toys, we don't own smartphones and we can't see or use modern computers/touch-screens in cars. We hate black plastic and small buttons with incomprehensible lables! "User-friendly" and "Intuitive interface" do not apply to people over 60, and they are not into reading 70page manuals that read like a computer user-guide. The kids have got married and moved out, there is only the two of us, so we don't want big cars. We want roomy, tall, upright cars with good visibility and small motors... That is the most numerous and most wealthy segment of society that manufacturers will have to sell to in the next decade or two. ...and why I drive a KE70! The Mrs drives an N14 SSS Pulsar, but she's a decade younger! ..oh, just before you rush off with plans to Toyota, imagine how all those Fiat 500 fans felt when their Little Goddess was re-released and they found it was transformed into a fat FWD.

I put a loop of wire around the spring end and pull on the wire. Use a flatblade screwdriver to push the spring end into the shoe with the other hand. Always a shit of a job tho'....

Good price- no bargain but you have bought the basis of a 4AGE conversion straight off. It drops in more simply than trying to convert a KE70. The high-top wagons were around, but for what they offered I don't know why Toyota bothered. Clean up the rust, finish the painting and it will be a great runabout while you find a 4AGE for it.

Pull the speedo & cable out and see if it is all lubricated. Hang the cable from the roof and put a few drops of gearbox oil in the top every time you walk past until it comes out the bottom. Check the speedo gears and put a drop of oil on the the 'bearings'; and grease on the gears. The cable drives a magnet, which turns another magnet on the needle against a spring. If you screw it up & break it you're no worse off... I can't imagine why it should read higher than the speed you're going unless one magnet is rubbing on the other.

Read this one too- These are simple mods that transformed the car my daughter drives, while I have a dead-stock auto KE70 to compare it too. An absolute dog as it came out of the factory! http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/42407-the-girls-ke70/ Don't worry about twin carbs unless you can either get a good pair of SUs (most are worn) or you have someone who can put bike quad carbs on it. (They need a simple manifold welded up for them) Simplest will be the 32/36 Weber off an old Ford Cortina or even better a smaller version off a Fiat I think it was. Still old carbs though, so a single DCOE Weber would be best. There is plenty on here about carbs. The $220 extractors are easily available, the rest of the exhaust in inch & 3/4 pipe will cost $350 odd with a sports muffler. Cam cut is a couple of hundred bucks. How good is the motor right now? Do a compression test and let us know what each cylinder reads. If its up at 150psi or over I wouldn't touch the bottom end, but strip the head and grind the valves & port the inlets out yourself, then get 20thou skimmed off.

Good setup. The door you want is an upside down "T" cut in the wall, and on the inside you tape a plastic sheet about 2M high by 1M wide and it should overlap the "T" easily. That alows air to go inwards, (lifts the flap) and then out your fan window, but the flap stops air going back out through the door. Basic asbestos cocoon...

School holidays! See, I tol ya... Start here- http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/64432-how-to-tackle-that-engine-conversion/ Chat to someone in the car club who has done it and can give you a hand. There is nothing better than a mentor, and nothing harder than doing it yourself. I assume its a manual, end of story. Personally, I'd say hot up the K motor to start with. You will get great experience in how motors work and you can have fun with it for a year or two while you gather up the 4AGE parts & gearboxes etc you will need. Strip it, new rings or a rebore, cam grind, head skim, lighten flywheel, extractors and sports exhaust... Oh, that budget you have is about 10% of what you will need for a big engine conversion!

Ah- so it is not as bad as it seemed. Chase up the conversions of dizzys to electronics, I can't think of any on Rollaclub that have done what I saw, but you just use the dizzy base to keep the rotating cam and fit a wheel to that. You can use a magnetic sensor or an optic one I expect, anything that sends a signal to the computer to fire the coils.

In $US, how much did the respray cost?? With a clean, enclosed spray booth inside a concrete-floored workshop and done by a guy in full safety gear and workboots it would probably cost you $4500US in Australia! You can see the differences between rich countries and poor countries right there.. It costs so much for everything in a rich country that you are no better off in the end.

Throw lots of solvent at the engine bay, the oil & dirt that has got into all the seams and joints will be your enemy. Undercoat is meant to grip the paint beneath better than topcoat, it certainly grips the paint going over it well. So u'coat over seams and joins too. ...and as the man said, turn the pressure down so it just does what you need and no more. Take you time and leave it to dry rather than hit awkward corners with too many coats trying to get into that last spot. Even acrylic will run easier than you expect.

T18s are the two-door fastback KE70s. 'T" designation from their T-series motors instead of the "K". If I were you I would weld up a water fitting out of steel sheet without too much trouble, but the dizzy will need converting to electronic. That means buying some aftermarket computer, fitting the cam sensor part to the dizzy base only, so it shortens the dizzy. The dizzy cap and rotor get replaced by the wasted spark system that fires two cylindes at once. More advanced (and expensive) would be to mount a crank sensor on the pulley or flywheel and replace the dizzy completely. So price up the cost of customising mounts, radiator & brake system changes if needed, ECU & coils, machining, driveshaft and add a couple of thousand dollars for problems you can't see yet and decide if it is worth trying to resurrect that motor or just throw it away.

The 120cc of extra displacement is what you will get, which means the motor works a little less hard. They are basically the same size, I think the 3K block is slightly higher, but it should be a bolt-in swap.

Its quite good overall, the rust is to be expected. Are there any problems with going to a 4K motor? It will go just that much better...

Next year.... !

Keep us up to date with this- its quite a problem and a major obstacle to FWD conversions.

Nah, we looked through the online piston catalogue over shitloads of cars, but the gudeon pin diameter and height don't seem to match any flat tops. You could take 1.5mm off the block and the 5K pistons to help, or just let the pistons rise up that much if the head gasket will let them. The 3K has a different face shape around the gasket edge to the 4K, that could be skimmed flat too..

Get it back to as good as it was 30years ago and it will last another 30years! Certainly if anything does go wrong it is easy to fix! They have no 'model faults' that I can think of, so there is nothing that breaks regularly on all of them. Take them a drive and see if the diff whines, the gearbox whines or the motor has rattles, they would be the main things that slowly wear out. Check behind the wheels for leaking brake fluid and make sure the pedal is firm, not soft. All the usual things you would do buying any car. I paid $1800 for the first KE70, it was overrated but had the wrong oil filter on and rattled in the bearings when started. You can read about it in The Girls KE70 in my sig. We've done a lot of mods to it, but I could have left it as it was. The maintenence over the last 6years would be brakes and steering balljoints. Then I paid $900 for the gold car, body not as good but better than average, and a blown head gasket. I've only had it a year or so, and haven't had to do anything except the head job. More mods are planned... $1500 should buy you a granny-spec original KE, but it will take a while to find. You'll have to do some things, usually rust I'd expect, but once done it should run for years. I'd take one over ANY non-Japanese car, including newer Fords, Holdens or any Euro & Korean car!

I've got evidence of 5 or so in 'The Girls KE70' build from different forums which all seem very successful, so I was keen to do Richard's with his. We built a 345K last year, a 3K head on a 4K block bored out to 5K, and he runs the single DCOE and a cam. Its great! He's meant to update his build thread on here but hasn't done it yet. The shallow-dish pistons have about 6ml in the dish (Richard has the measurements we made) and that cancels out the extra size of the cylinder with the compression. I'd mill a bit off the top of all the pistons and the block to raise the compression on the next one. The 3K head does that, or just skim the 4K head. It remains to be seen how long they last, but no-one has owned up to having one fail from thin cylinder walls.

Stock KE70 tank is 50L in the sedan, 47L in the wagon.

...and if you can't find a 5K just modify your 4K! Single DCOE Weber, cam grind, extractors and sports exhaust, skim the head, some porting & lighten the flyheel. It doesn't have to be noisy or hard to start/drive, but it will make a big difference. Then you can bore the 4K out to 5K pistons if you're keen. A 3K head will do the compression increase if you can find one, or skim the block/4K head. That's all not hard to assemble and a great learning curve if you are starting out modifying cars. As Banjo said, you don't want the car off the road for months while you sort all the motor conversion parts, and then it becomes a "never finished project" that you have sunk a couple of thousand bucks into.. Run that for a couple of years while you do the body and amass the parts for a 2T or 4AGE conversion!