altezzaclub

So its turned out that it is a very straight rust-free solid shell that has suffered a single coat of topcoat over topcoat purple! If you want any of the inside gear let us know, there is stacks we wont be using including suspension, diff, T50 box, trim, seats, fuel tank etc. It was time to start planning. The pedal box and steering went back in, and the driving seat. The fancy sports steering wheel is for clowns with their cap on backwards and their seat waaay back so they can only just see over the wipers... sadly it puts the driver 60mm further back in the car, not what you want in rallying. The seat needs to be lifted miles up at the back to get the back vertical and the drivers head up by the roof so you can see the front corners clearly- With the four-door I'm really keen to get the spare wheel and battery inside, so there is less weight in the boot and less polar moment. It will take a bit of fabricating but it all can be done. After that I took out the fuel tank (still had 20L in!!), the bumper, tail lights, towbar (anyone want one?) and everything else that bolts on. The little fuel tank fits in easily, and the wheel well will be cut out tomorrow... Plenty to do....

Steve found time to get the engine out with me, and that afternoon had the mighty single-cam non-crossflow completely useless and stupidly designed 4AC on a wheelbarrow.... The motor got its revenge for our remarks when Steve got caught out by a camber change as he tried to park it in the spares shed and the motor jumped out of the wheelbarrow. I raced over and grabbed it, so it tipped the box of drawers off the purloined shopping trolley and that clouted me in the head! Steve spent the next hour picking tiny parts out of the grass and the sheep shit! We gave it away after that, then this morning Steve went to Uni and I hit the woolshed. By morning tea the front looked like this- and the back looked like this- With the engine bay looking like this-

Well, here we go again! ..as a follow-on from the last project, extremely successful but typically short-lived... http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/64027-how-not-to-build-a-rally-car/ We started yesterday on this poor unsuspecting AE71 that thought it was going to live its days out quietly under a tree... after the tree had dropped a branch on it and smacked in the roof and screen, allowing Steve to buy it for $300! I started on the interior while Steve raced around trying to find where to store everything. By morning tea the car looked like this- The back looked like this- and the front looked like this- I really wonder how much of these cars were made in Aussie and how much in Japan. Who could be so fking cheap to paint the pedals HALFWAY UP then leave the pedal box to rust!! WHAT Toyota quality!

OK, should look like this. These are Corona LCAs, so longer enough to give slightly negative camber. The inner pivot point for the LCA is beside the end of the rack, so the 'rack end' and the LCA are paralell. The outer end has the steering arm on the LCA, so its fixed, and the outer balljoint of the tie-rod end goes into the steering arm tie-rod joint. If you fit longer LCAs you'll need to wind the rack ends out further. If you fit different steering arms you can adjust for toe-in but might lose the Ackerman steering when you turn a corner. All you should need to do is adjust for toe-in, which can be done by using a tape measure, two straight edges and a mate, or pay for a wheel alignment. Just measure across the front and rear of the tyre under the sump, same height front and rear, and give it 1 or 2mm toe-in. Check it a few times, rolling it back and forth a metre or two between each time. Its done on the ground with the normal weight on the car. Then watch the tyre wear over the next month or two. If you've got a hoist, check all the balljoints for play and you might tighten up the big hex 'nut' on the steering rack by hand. Loosen off that giant locknut, turn the hollow hex in until you feel it go firm against the rack, then tighten up the locknut. Check that the steering goes from lock to lock without any tight spots afterwards, you can overtighten it. cheers

WTF! Is that a tyre on that rim or have you just painted the edge black?? :o No potholes for this car!

As far as I know the theory is that the LCAs are the same length and on the same pivot points as the steering arms, so they go up and down together. If they are pivoted differently then you will get bump steer. Fitting longer LCAs means you have to lengthen the steering rods to keep the wheel alignment. I'll take a look tomorrow if I remember.

Get some colour in those rims! Love the badge!

Do it all yourself- 4Ks are cheap enough if you fk it up and you need to learn for the future Banjo is dead right, get it all measured first, then you now what needs to be done. If you're lucky it needs a hone then new rings and bearings on the bottom end. If you're not lucky it might need a bore and a crank grind. Bore it to take 5K pistons in that case, and get the flywheel lightened & the whole rotating mass balanced. The head will need the valves & seats machined, some porting to match the Lynx manifold and a skim for extra compression. The cam gets ground at any of the 5 or 6 major cam grinders in Aussie. Don't go silly, 280deg will do a daily. The cam chain can be tested for droop to see if it needs replacing. Then you put it all together. See this- http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/42407-the-girls-ke70/

We used one in the Celcia. No problems at all until it received a large fan & tree imprint recently.... One will be going in the AE71/KE70 rally car.

Would the stock air-con compressor do it?? Just another air pump... The Mothership is an Isuzu truck with the brake vac pump on the back of the alty. Must be some at truck wreckers. Figuring out how much vac and how many revs will be the trick. I assume you'll spin the vapour out and catch the oil. This is where the bhp increase in dry sumping comes from- nice idea Andy!

As an aside, we have a handful of Celcia parts for sale, a whole RA40 in really good condition (much too nice to ruin) and several 18RG engines that we will be testing in Grumpy so you can drive them before you buy! I'm very happy that everything we built in that car worked, the suspension, the welding Steve learnt how to do at TAFE, the wiring, the bodywork and things like the petrol tank and fuel system. They never failed and it had two solid crashes. Here's a vid we made ages ago for shits 'n giggles... I loved having a 1920's light switch for ignition and a cigarette lighter for starting. We hadn't started it for months it fired up on the second push. http://s170.photobucket.com/user/altezzaclub/media/Startsequence.mp4.html

Early the next morning we towed the shell around the back to her final resting place beside Steves Dad's first rally car... I expect they will be sitting there in 30years! ..and we hauled the purple KE70 into the Woolshed! A tree fell on that, so it will need the roof off the green one.... As they say for the King- "The rally car is dead, long live the rally car!"

We hauled it home and argued over the three hour journey about what to do- repair it, swap the gear into the spare (really nice!) RA40, use the rusty RA23 in the shed or start the conversion to a KE70 early. The chassis was bad- ...very bad... In the end the KE70 idea won out so we stripped The Big Girl that afternoon. Josh shotgunned the cage for a khancross car he's building, but we only had a dished masonry backing disc on the grinder.. that wouldn't fit the flat cutoff wheels very well, so we made a spacer out of the only masonry disc. Then he was into it as we had already taken absolutely everything out of it- and by nightime it was done (and so were we!)

I'd taken the time to floss the bonnet up a bit- and make a new dashmat too! and so we headed to Bago. Things ran fine until stage 5, when a throttle return spring broke and they stopped in the stage to fix it. They'd turned in a 12th, a 14th, a 4th and a 5th before that, and after refuel the same stages were run again. At the spectator point he looked like this- You can see them all at www.nashyspix.com/‎ Then there came a Y-junction where the flat-out 3rd gear left hander crested and went downhill, so the car lifted off and it clouted the bank before rolling headfirst into a tree! We got it out of there with the great help of the road closure crew as the steering was broken, the wheel jammed against the body and an axle so bent it jammed. They used their 4WD to haul it up the trailer ramps behind the Slowdeo. ..and the final insult was a flat on the Slowdeo itself!

OK, update time, back in Orange with a cable to d'load photos! Well, it came off the Nabiac Rallysprint with a dent in the rear side and one week to the Bago rally. I was into the Woolshed with it left on the trailer as a nice workbench, and Steve was back at Uni. Things didn't look good when I stripped it- A little surgery with my favourite tool- Made life much easier... When Steve popped back we grabbed the usual fence picket to attack the C pillar We welded the cutout back in and I hit it with a touch of bog then an aerosol can or two- good enough!

Well, seeing it is resurrected and still pertinent, if your sanding a bonnet don't press any more than you absolutely have to... The metal will bend under the force of your hand (same as a roof) and give you a hollow around your bog hump. Use a foot-long piece of 2"X1" wood it a piece of sandpaper wrapped around it and sand with one hand underneath to support it if you can. Most Rolla bonnets and boots have let go of the frame underneath by now, so that should be attached with 'No-more-nails' or whatever glue you prefer.

Panhard to diff is 78NM, all the other link bolts are 102NM. D'shaft are only 8mm diam bolts so about 20ft-lb. Don't forget to only do the suspension arm bolts up tight with the weight of the car on them. Brakes... http://www.rollaclub...um-brake-shoes/

I'm not sure which bit you mean, but you only bend the tab that touches the neele base. Same with DCOEs. There's a second tab that limits the drop of the float, but that's not important really.

Well, no photos as I forgot my camera cable so I can't d'load them, but I have a couple off Rich's phone... This was at the Nabiac rallysprint, shamelessly stolen from Dusty Photography on Facebook. He's got over 200 photos of the day on there- here's how it came back after a tree jumped out... ...and a week working on it has us waiting for Steve to get home so we can leave for Bago Rally tonight! More next week when I get back to Orange

WoW! if you do as good a job as the 240Z the KE70 will be amazing! 2-doors... we just never got them here! Such a shame, like Toyota not releasing them with a 4AGE and calling it a KE70 GT or something...

I just use petrol. I have a few 10ml or 5ml syringes around and I push petrol through the drillings behind the jets once I've stripped a carb, make sure the jets are clean and re-assemble it all.

Haha- that wire idea is sheer genius! Go for the data logging, I haven't had time to get started on my setup! I'm now busy panelbeating after last Sunday's rallysprint at Nabiac before this coming weekend's rally at Bago.

Well, scrutineering is like being stopped by the cops because they want to check out your modded Rolla... There's nothing actually illegal, but it does look like there maybe something not right. They don't really like the dashboard with its fence picket, the floor is pretty beaten about, the nav's foot panel didn't look good enough.. in fact, that's the problem, nothing has been made commercially, so it doesn't look like it should. I folded up some angle iron for a navigator's footrest and Steve welded it up, then the new nav asked for a panel instead. I grabbed some 2mm panel from the pile, chopped it up and Steve welded that on top. Its works fine, just enough flex so I can tell what the nav thought of Steve's driving on the last stage, but it doesn't look like a $100 piece of punched alloy. Somehow it didn't get painted either.. The underneath has been beaten to death- Steve has just welded plates under the LCAs, the g'box crossmember and the lower arm mounts of the rear suspension. All those get bent out of shape. What I'd like to do is cut out the complete rear footwell on each side and weld in panels at the height of the front floor. The floor pan is the same as a KE70, and if you look under you'll see the rear floor is down at the bottom of the sill, while the front floor is halfway up the sill. That would make it look less damaged and welded up, but really if anyone is ever building a rally car gut the inside completely and paint it white. Black looks terrible, and makes repairs look worse! When we build the KE70 it will look different!!

Will the ol' man pay the fuel bill?? Why not supercharge it if you're going to spend most the time off boost? The s'charged Altezza I drove suffered no ill effects when off boost, and it only cut the supercharger in when you booted it. So most of the time it was quite normal to drive, until you went to overtake someone. Then EVERYONE could hear it had a supercharger under the bonnet! The other nice thing was that it could boost instantly from idle, so at 1200rpm in 2nd gear it was getting a massive torque increase. Great for driving around town when you needed it.

Can you see the accelerator pump working down the carb throat?? Take off the air cleaner & without starting the car just flick the throttle wide open, and you should see a jet of fuel squirt down there. If that is blocked it gives an instant flatspot whenever you boot it.