altezzaclub

It hurts, but sooner a fox than a 'roo! Night time is dangerous in Oz.

I like the idea of a single DCOE Weber. Cheaper would be the Weber 32/36 d'draught of course, better for air cleaner setups and PCV hoses, but not as cool! Twin SUs would probably cost the same as the Weber, but they'd be older and although cheaper on fuel on a trip they would lack the punch around town. The efi would be the most technical for me, but you might be more up to date with it. Is it still going to be a daily?? What sort of cam?? Are you porting the head? Make sure you get the bottom end balanced, it will rev much smoother and last longer.

The gold-coloured XX KE70 I bought recently had a leaking head gasket, it always started on three cyls then picked up the 4th after 10-20seconds, then ran fine all day. After being away for a couple of weeks in The Girls KE70 I checked the water in the gold one and saw it was down, and the battery was flat, so I filled the rad up and charged it o'night. The next day the water was down again but the oil was overfull.. :o Off with the head and I could see the mark between 2 and 3 where the gasket wasn't sealing, so off to a head shop. They ph'd and said they'd found a crack in the head going outwards from a valve seat, although I haven't driven the 100km round trip to pick it up yet. Has anyone else had a head crack?? I thought they just warped on these motors.

..or are there any bubbles coming up the radiator outlet when it first starts?? First thing in hte morning take the rad cap off before you start it, fill the rad right up then start it and let it idle. Bubbles come up after a few minutes and push water out. Starts on 3cylinders then catches the 4th?? Same thing Dave is getting at, white smoke is often water vapour from a head gasket leaking.

Are the ratios the same? I know there were two different 2nd gears in the early boxes, but I don't know if they were related to the spline count.

Not vital- The KE70 idles at 1000rpm. Drop it back and see if its happy running slower. If its stock it should idle at 600 without a problem.

1- Does the piston & rod push further back into the slave cyl OK with the clutch pedal up? Just grab the clutch fork lever and push it towards the front of the car a few mm. 2- Does it do that just after you've pushed the clutch pedal down then up? 3- If you take the slave cyl off, does the clutch fork & release brg travel back and forth OK? One problem would be hydraulics that are working outside their designed range and don't return correctly. Another would be having the release bearing drop off the end of its tube.

A- Softer springs (if you're using the XT130 struts and springs) Keeps a smooth ride. B- Cut off the spring perches and mount them lower down on the struts. Keeps the same ride. C- Cut a coil or two off the springs. Gives a harder ride. Remember to measure shocks 'n springs to see what will get smashed first when it bottoms out. You might have to cut the shock shaft shorter, or fit longer bump stops.

I found a white bonnet in better condition than the purple one, with the usual Toyota problem of the frame un-gluing itself from the top panel. I laid it down in the grass with the sides supported, siliconed along the joints and put some weights on the frame to press them together. Even covered it with a tarp to stop the rain getting on the silicon. Next day it had been disturbed, and when we picked it up a damm cow had walked all over it, crushing the frame and adding an extra few inches of bend in the bonnet across the car! Oh- Those strange marks on the floor were lines of iron filings from the grinder & they had been lined up by the current in the Mig welder!

Well, Steve's back at Uni and I'm back in Orange with a long list of jobs to do... With the seats mounted the next big job is the roll cage, which will wait until the June holidays. We finished off with other odd stuff, like getting the fuel tank in- The firewall was mounted and sealed- Steve and Richard spent a night at the workbench, Steve grinding valves in a 4K head for his daily, Richo porting out the 4K head for his 345K. The next day was time for valves to be fitted, when to our horror we discovered we'd ground them into the warped head! So there is a very grubby but straight head still lying under the bench and MAO's original head is off being skimmed! I was down there by myself when storms arrived, so I jammed the rally car right at the back and reversed The Girl's KE70 in as far as I could and covered the bonnet. Just in time, this is as the hail started.. In the end the stones were no larger than 8mm, so they probably wouldn't have damaged it. It was very localised, as usual..

being "Do not let the smoke out of the wire!" Wires conduct electricity as smoke, and if the smoke escapes nothing will work... ATOYOTA the diagrams I found again were for models other than the G200, most being the G100 series and others older. You seem to have an unusual one there when it comes to the web.

had to look it up... Ausrotary had a topic on it- I supose this refers to the 5K electronic dizzy with the slow advance curve as stock. Time to change the springs inside! I'm still running the stock coil with the 5K electronic dizzy, so maybe I can make it even better with an MEC 723. Seems fine currently. We used a Hotspark type on the Celica with a GT40. That always worked perfectly.

Good grief! You must have cornered the whole market! You have to ask yourself why they didn't just use one cam chain.. Surely it wasn't too hard to run that chain you have fitted up and over the cams with an idler wheel to take up the slack. I suppose everyone was trained in side-cam thinking back then. So with 9.7 comp and 40mm carbs this is not too serious. We still have Grumpy's motor at the engineers, but I'll measure the comp when it gets back as the pistons were touching the head...

that's why the KEs run an 8V coil with the ballast resistor. They work at 100% efficiency when cranking, then the resistor drops the usual 12V to 8V when running. However if the Charade doesn't have a resistor then its designed to start at 8V. There only needs to be one wire on the coil +ve in that case, it should supply full voltage when cranking and when running, but obviously 'full' voltage is only 8V when starting. The other factor would be a poor battery that coulsn't crank and supply the coil with enough voltage. That's a worry, so we can assume the coil is fine. Is there anything else involved, or just a coil and a transistorised ignition pack inside the dizzy both of which you swapped at once for no result? How about you feed the coil +ve from another battery using jump leads and see what it does. That will guarantee 12V to the coil. If that fixes it then start hunting for some wire in the circuit that is robbing current from the coil +ve, or a bad earth on the coil -ve side. There are stacks of Charade wiring diagrams on the web, the one I looked up had a ballast resistor, so can you post a link to the diagram that refers to your model?

PM insanity (Steve) or I if you need some odd bits, we have half a donor fastback and the remnants of the rallycar coupe in the paddock.

X2 !

hmm... vents... I was thinking of a badly fitting bonnet that sits high at the rear.. Years ago when I had a fibreglass bonnet the rear corners were only a single skin and the reinforcing cut diagonally short across the corner. That left very flexible corners that looked fine when parked but lifted up to let air out when going fast... I should get Steve to come and work with you for a week or two to learn real welding! The tech course was fine if you weld clean steel on a bench while standing up.

I bought the Altezza and my Datsun 1600 over in 2007, but I can't remember who I used. Shoot me a PM in a week when I'm back at home and I'll look it up. Kings handled it over here. We took a complete 40ft container for the whole household, both cars and all the furniture. Cost $10-12K, and when it was delivered it came with an extra fridge, washing machine and dishwasher.... obviously we had a little space left over that the NZ shipping company filled up! Earlier when I looked at shipping a car over for a rally it was a couple of grand.

We stripped the steering rack completely and cleaned it all after a few years of having a broken boot I think. Then re-greased it, put it back together, painted it and fitted it.. Steve's back at uni until friday, so I'll truck along with the last bits of seat mounting, then the rear firewall and then we need to start on a cage!

Even more than that, I'm going to put a section of exhaust tube across the tunnel underneath, between the seat rail mounts, as the tunnel is as weak as piss. I finished off the driver's side frame after Steve welded it up by fitting a crush tube in the rail where the frame feet go. That meant cutting handy bit of steel pipe to the right length and drilling a large hole in the rail... those more astute will recognise a KE70 rear suspension bush crush tube! Nice hard steel and a handy size when cut in half... The hole is 19mm due to some odd imperial drill bit lying around the wooldshed from the 1980s, and the suspension tube is 19.6. The answer is to hold it loosely against the bench grinder and let it spin as it grinds.. sorry it blurry, one-handed! ..and yes, that's the wife's new cheese press handle, before she's even seen it! Its done at 19.2mm, so then its over to my friend Mr Vice to make sure it fits... ..and it gets touched up by Mr Hammer to seat it finally before Steve welds around it. Then it will happily take a 10mm bolt at 40ft.lbs. While I was working there I noticed these strange tracks on the floor... Any ideas?? Thousands of little lines of dirt carefully lines up at 90deg to the track.. The nav's seat setup is done, you can see how high the front outer tower has to be while the inner rail sits straight onto the stock chassis rail and uses the stock bolthole. Agricultural welding, but it won't come apart.... The next thing is to see if Sparco can replace the old upholstery for that seat, its in Armidale with Steve right now as we might have to find an upholsterer to make something up for it. Leather would look nice...

I don't know Ken,its a new trial- it is quite flexible but will stop the seat rails from smacking the occupant in the back in a crash. Even if it cracks it will have done its work. Steve was sceptical too, but it stands his 100kg OK. (yep, it is additional to the netting) He spent a day doing moo-cow dentistry (counting teeth to see who will be sent to 'the works') so I cleaned and painted the front section. That made a real difference to the look of it all! Then it was back onto the seat mounts... With the white paint dry I could finish painting the struts- and put the suspension back on, whereupon the next problem became apparent. The RA40 camber tops don't fit the strange triangle of strut tower boltholes the KE70 has! Not only do we need to buy new camber tops, but our cross -strut bar won't fit either!! Today we finished mounting the fuel tank frame and built a cheese press for Mrs Altezzaclub! We got into the driver's seat frame as a copy of the nav's, which means cutting the ends off, folding the tab over to weld the box section closed- then welding a foot on it. I'll grab some more photos tomorrow, but we get so busy working I forget most times!

We have a J160 Altezza 6-speed for the 4A motor in the AE71, but the adapter plate takes up 14mm. This has to be machined off the bell housing, and getting that off was a problem as a selector bung was siezed. It is a terrible idea of a large diameter bung with a tiny 8mm hex in the middle, so it has a large grip area around the thread and a small leverage on the Allen key, which promptly strips. The answer was a welder of course... We spent a whole day at one of Steve's uncles farms using his mill to carve 13mm off. It just needs a final skim over with a fly cutter now. I left a couple of towers on it to mark the original height... We started on the seat mounts, making them simpler and more efficient than in the Celcia. ..and I grabbed some 1" water pipe lying in the steel pile and we made a mock-up of the main hoop for the cage The seat mount needed a tower built, which slowed us down for a bit- That nav's seat is all done now and I'll get a photo tomorrow if I remember. It uses one original bolt and a rail across the back, with the other front bolt needing a tower built up. The two rails will bolt onto the transmission tunnel, weak as piss, so we will reinforce that between them underneath the floor.

Well, back up to the farm for Easter/Anzac. Unload the car at the lower farm, and as I go to drive up to the top farm I find the Kitty Cleaning Company still working on the radiator... lots of grasshoppers on the way here! The first day was spent getting the various KE70s under shelter. That meant moving the spare-parts Celica shell out of one of the sheds, awkward as we'd stripped the suspension out of it! Nothing like a turbo Slowdeo.. dragged it across the grass a few hundred metres to beside the rally car shell. With odd cars shuffled around we hauled the 'good' Celica (too good to rally, so we will sell it) out of the spares shed and replaced it with two Ke70s. Then we pulled the head off Steve's daily, an auto KE70 owned by the proverbial little ol' lady. He'd owned it for 6months when a radiator repair let go and cooked it, and it suffered from being driven with a blown head gasket then just sitting! Rusty sludge was everywhere.. We finally got onto the rally car, stripping and cleaning then painting the front suspension. I had bought 3-ply up with me for the seats, so the flexible net here- was reinforced with a plywood panel and zip-ties!

none..... There is no such thing as a simple engine swap, just take a look around the builds on here to see how much work goes into the unexpected problems. Do you want to register it, with all the engineering problems, or is it just a paddock-basher?? What sort of car do you want? Old school with an 18RG? We have three of them here, you can buy the one from the rally car... More modern? the 3SGE from their series 1 in Celicas to the last of them in Altezzas. More work than the 18RG for sure, but comes with a wonderful close-ratio 6-speed gearbox. Later than 2005 I don't even know what Toyota make.

Take the 5K pistons and bore the 4K to take them. Unless they are the deep dish ones of course!