altezzaclub

Make sure you have the suspension travel sorted out carefully or bottoming out will knock the shock mount off the diff won't it? The weight of the car at 2G currently goes into the top of the diff with the shock taking a portion of that to slow the motion down, whereas you will put all that force through the mount pin. Whichever motor you pick, I'd look at dry-sumping it as you will be buuilding up some great sideways force and oil surge will be a problem. The cage will be another interesting design as you want stiffness around the suspension but not a lot of weight added. For some reason most cages have a lot of steel in the back seat where it does nothing but slow you down. Are you going to use twin master cylinders on the brake setup?? I can't see you ever needing that hydraulic handbrake in time attack or hillclimbs, they're really just a bling factor. You might pull some ideas out of our builds of rally cars on here, and from Steerfast's current one. Are you going to seam weld the shell?? I'm currently hunting down weld bolts or steel rivets as an option as seam welding concentrates the force along the weld and encourages it to crack, while fasteners in the center of the seam allow some flex around them while holding both panels together. Don't forget an adjustable cross-strut bar!

When I took the gold KE70 up to the farm three weeks ago I unloaded it, chatted to everyone for an hour, & then we thought we'd take it down the pub for dinner. It started, ran about 10M and died, and wouldn't restart... We used a different car and the next day I poured some fuel down the carb and it fired up. I took it up to Coolangatta that day and parked it at the hospital where my bro' was. After a couple of hours I went to drive it home.. it started, ran for 10M and died! We left it in the car park and the next day I poured fuel down the carb and it started. If I just left it overnight without re-starting it then it was fine. Back down on the farm I watched it and found the fuel was pushed back down the line from the pump and it even emptied the filter, so it wouldn't run once it used the carb bowl of fuel as the pump was full of air. Overnight the vapour condensed and pulled the fuel back to the pump, but for that hour or two it had no chance of starting. A blow down the return line with a compressor seems to have fixed it, it's been fine since. I suppose I should've disconnected the return line at the tank and blown the shit into a jar, now the tank is full of silver and black shit too! I wondered if the return line actually did anything!

OK, I'll pop down the wrecker on Monday and get some prices and photos.

Got a smartphone? Richo d'loaded some dyno app for a couple of bucks and it is most impressive. Then all you need is a flat bit of road you can do 0-110 times on. Start a new topic to see which apps guys are using, or I can ask him which one he got if you want. We're going to compare his 345K with stock and modded KE70s next time I go up. I assume the cam will run on the stock pin, so it can't be adjusted, and you can play with jets in the carb and ignition timing.

I can ask the wrecker how much he wants for them if you like. So long as you don't want the long ones on the gutters then I should be able to package them OK. LoL! One of my KE70s has chrome and the other has black rubber.. I never noticed!

Can anything be done about the manifold and the sharp corners the air goes around?? Were those aftermarket larger venturis Coln? Cna the stock ones be filed larger? I suppose twin carbs would feed 2.4L at the same performance level as a stock 1.2L single-carb, so they should wind 1.5L right off the tacho....

fair enough- you can always fit anti-tramp rods to the rear if it walks about on its leaf springs, and some longer LCAs in the front will give it an unnoticable touch of negative camber that helps the handling a lot. Richo has his sacked to the ground, in fact I had to take the rear bump stops out to give it some travel, and while it looks cool in a JDM sort of way the ride is horrible!

Shame- I thought the Gisbourne was NZ's, some great driving arond there. Yeah, build a racy little car if you're not stuck in Melbourne traffic, something that goes up hills without changing down and cruises at 100kph all day. What are you planning for the suspension?

A build thread would be miles better than Facebook, that is a lousy way to display photos. Maybe its because I've never bothered wth it that it doesn't seem as clean and logical as a Rollaclub topic. The car looks nice, you must have tipped some fair money into it by now. What carbs do you for it?

LOVE this photo! Porting is stunning too! http://www.rollaclub...ttach_id=115349

LoL! Yes, pics! If it is as good as you say, then $2000 to $2500 I'd say. There are quite a lot around $1500-$2000 that are in very good condition with 100-150,000km on, but not immaculate. I paid $1800 for the blue one, and $900 for the gold one, both with just over 100,000km on. The gold one was cheap as it needed a head gasket from a failed radiator. Steve recently bought the best one I've ever seen from a little old lady for just over a grand I think it was.

Depends what driving you do with it- All trips or night drags and you can use over 285deg, but driving around town and getting out of the gutter would be a pain. The 169 is good, it still uses stock springs. The theory is that lifts over 0.4" need the Holden 202 springs, which is what Richard just bought for his Tighe cam. I think its a 150A, and he does mainly long trips to Uni and back and lives in the country. Mr T himself said "Yeah, OK, I'll fix you up with something.." and it has one set of lobes at 311deg and the other at 290 odd...Not something listed in their catalogue! Anyway, it always pays to chat to the guy who will cut it and explain what you want the car to do and what else you are doing to it. If you're up and down the Te Karaka Road, (one of my all-time favourites!) then get something 280-285deg. Compare the Aussie cams with what you can get locally in NZ, we can always mail you one from here... http://www.tighecams.com.au/COROLLA3K.htm

With the cams in we could start setting tappet gaps, a long job in these motors. With the exhausts all fine we found the inlets had two valves with no tappet gap, one with 12thou as it should, and one with 24thou... The first thing to do was undo the cam bearings 5thou and re-measure, and repeat until we had a gap on those two tight ones. Turned out one was about zero gap to slightly negative, and one was about -10thou! this was quite troubling.. In theory they should be around 12thou, even with Steve lapping them in. The exhausts were fine. There is only the valve length, the shim thickness and the cup involved, so we pulled the cams out and measured all the shims and all the cups. they were all fine, so it was as puzzling as ever. We thought maybe the big valve gap was due to a bent valve, so we had to build a tool for a leak-down test. First job was to drill out a spark plug.. yeah, we broke two as the drill bit was juuust too big! So a smaller bit and the third one was copper core.. that allowed us to screw it into the cylinder with a brake hose on it that had a schrader valve in from a ruined rally tyre. The compressor tyre pump gun put 100psi into the cylinder- We used a bit of tube to listen for leaks in the ports, and thought a couple of valves were dodgy, but not really leaking, so finally decided to pull the head off again. We had already ordered new shims of the various sizes needed but they would take days and days to get to us. We tipped the head upside down and filled all the combustion chambers right up with turps. After a couple of hours they hadn't leaked at all! We checked everything and all seemed fine, and I can't see how the motor ran with those (lack of) clearances, and I can't see anyting that could cause them! Seeing we had it off we measured the combustion chamber, the head gasket and the piston crown height and figured out it has 11:1 compression! ..and we were out of time! So I'm back in Orange while Steve has 6weeks of Uni, we still have an 18RG to finish, and the rally car got nothing done on it really! Richo is happy tho', blasting about in his 345K Ke30!

It got colder and the heater was replaced by our old fire again, with the chimney out the door. Not the best idea, but still great to stand around! Along the way we re-found the linisher Steve had discovered a while back, hoping to use it to shape the roll cage pipes, but apparently you can't get belts for them. With the head on we started on the cams... and along the way we noticed a problem that had been there since Steve bought the engine.. No oil plugs in the back of the cams!!! The cam grinder must have forgotten to put them back in some years ago, and it was obvious when we checked the cam bearings... the further down the head you looked, the more graunched the cam bearing were as the oil ran out! We searched around the steel junk-pile and found a solution- A stock KE70 spring! Once cut & lightly filed they could be hammered neatly in with a bit of silicon... Actually I think we did one with silicon and one with araldite, due to a difference of opinion on which was best!

The head had suffered from all the pistons hitting it many moons ago, so we popped it on the block without a head gasket and used a grinder to slowly relieve the combustion chamber and clean up the piston crowns... Why is this?? Well, you are never meant to skim an 18RG head or the piston crown touches the hemispherical head, but that head had been welded up for corrosion in the past and skimmed time and time again as the guy welded. In fact the valve seats were touched by the fly-cutter so much was removed! That explained why grumpy was faster than the rally car! While Steve was doing this I was distracted by an old kero heater we found in a shed, and I fired it up on the turps used for painting.. Naturally it was blocked up and I ended up stripping it completely and re-buiding it. After the head was sorted we started putting on the timing chains and cover. This was always a major source of oil leaks, as the motor had been in a crash and the timing cover was smashed then welded. Steve didn't have a flat steel plate so we bought one from the local engineer, about 200x150 and 15mm thick. Then he settledf down with some wet 'n dry sandpaper & the timing chain cover and sanded it straight. The welding had left quite a distortion in it where the head sits, and it eventually lost over 1.5mm. We made another thick gasket to bring it up to the correct height and then painted the cover. We did the sump as well and fitted them on-

The crank went in, followed by pistons with their new rings. We fitted an uprated oil pump, not the raped one we found in a "race" engine he bought. This is how someone changed a mid-sump to a front-sump to fit it in a Celica... The head was next, we hauled out the 18RG valve extraction tool I'd been working on last time, something we had to make as the standard sort of valve spring compressor won't fit around the wide twin-cam head. The drill press stand was lying in the Woolshed anyway... Surprisingly it worked, although its really a two-man job. One guy holds the press handle down and the other uses a magnet and a screwdriver to get the collets out.

Ok, the first job was to move the rally car, so it needed the Bilstein front struts from the RA 40. First problem was that the nicely cleaned and painted KE70 steering arms just didn't quite fit the RA40 struts, so after a lot of pissing about we raided the wreck and cleaned up the RA40 arms. With them in place we found the 3 turret holes on a KE70 have a unique pattern that nothing else will fit, so new cross-strut bar ends and new camber-tops would be needed on the RA40 struts. Then we found that even with the stock KE70 strut top the RA40 spring top wouldn't fit in the turret, so we moved further down and used a stock KE70 spring top, which meant a KE70 spring.. This meant we could push the car out even if those springs will not be any good for rallying. The photo has the KK70 spring gear on the RA40 strut that we moved the spring perch up on last year. Steve wanted to build the 18RG motor for Grumpy as we had all the bits for that but didn't have the roll cage tube yet. We got started and of course the tube arrived, but he was dead set on bulding the motor rather than the cage.. "It will only take a couple of days..." First was to free up an engine stand that had a spare 18RG on, so we strapped that down into a wheel barrow. Next was to paint Grumpy's block... he reckoned floro pink marker paint, so I said a clear coat of urethane would be needed. The bonus was a lovely crackle effect over the white undercoat!

Sounds good! If you get a chance in the future swap the cam for something around 275-280deg, it will work better with the compression and twin carbs.

That cam is fine, similar to mine at 265deg. It pushes the pushrod up an extra 1mm or so, and if you skim the head half a mm that is still only 1.5mm more pushrod movement. Some cams alone increase it over 2mm. The bit of paper in the photo here is actually graph paper. http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/42407-the-girls-ke70/ Are you porting the head too? Its a simple and free way to get extra flow if the ports are smaller than the gasket & manifold diameter.

Well, another fortnight of holidays has slipped past and not enough got done! I picked up the 18RG bits from the engineer on the way up to Walcha so we had all the bottom end balanced, and we ended up concentrating on assembling that. Its the first of 4 or 5 motors Steve had bought for the Celica and we need to get them running in an RA40 one by one and sell them off. That's the motor for his road Corona Grumpy, the one from Speedhunters, and he'll have to update that build thread. Little bro Richo and I put his 345K together and that is now running, quite a little monster with a 4K block, 5K pistons, a 3K head and a wild cam. He spent a day or two getting the best setup for the Weber DCOE he has and once it is run in I expect to see some neat graphs off a dyno app he d'loaded. It just walked away from my stock KE70 and sounded like a 13B when crawling along in 1st gear. The build thread he has for it will be updated. I'll download my camera tomorrow and update this thread too.

Put a piece of graph paper on the combustion chamber and run your finger around it. You should get a dirty outline of the chamber, or use a felt-tip pen. Then count the number of mm squares on the graph paper to get the area of it. Once you have the area it is easy to work out the amount to cut off to get your 5cc gone. My 4K chamber is 30sqcm, your 5K is smaller I think. I'd say you could take 40thou off and not worry about the rocker on the valve, as that is more a factor of the cam. What cam lift are you aiming for? We just measured Steve's 18RG, which was skimmed to death before he used it, and found it was 11:1. It's skimmed so much the valve seats have been touched by the cutter! No wonder it flew!

I've never done it but I can't see why anything would change. You have- Starter main 12V cable- use eitherstarter Solenoid activator lead-same for solenoid Oil pressure switch- use the same one if you like Water temp gauge lead- same as oil pressure switch Alty wiring- and you can use the same alty. Dizzy wire from coil- both the same. and that's about it. The 4K carby might have a fuel cutoff solenoid on it that you will have to run a 12V ignition wire to.

No, you shouldn't need new cam bearings, they don't touch the bearing surface on the cam. You should get the followers ground by them as the new cam lobes will want to wear the follower surfaces to match. I had Crow grind mine, but there are half a dozen biggish companies do them for K motors, including Tighe, Camtech, Waggott, Wade...

Bad luck man! Good thing you weren't quietly sitting in it at the time. You could get a free shell from Steve that needs the passenger's sill replacing, but its up in Walcha...

two of those things seem to work in opposite directions- Pinking at full throttle or high load is from too much advance, but poor fuel economy and poor revving is from not enough advance. When I was watching my ignition with a timing light it reached its maximum of 36deg before 3000rpm. You can mark the pulley with white paint spots at every 5deg and measure your own advance curve if you have a tacho. Buy some octane booster and put that in the fuel to see if it stops the pinking. If it does you will have to retard the timing or use octane booster all the time. You might buy a bottle of octane booster at a spares shop or just buy toluene at a paint or chemical company. I used 10% toluene with petrol in the rally car. If it doesn't stop it then the pinking must be from some other problem. Possibly the Petronix is advancing too fast in the rev range, or the maximum advance is too much. Do you have any data on the ignition curve from it?