JDM55

heres a quick vid ,even tho its thru a shity phone mic you can still here how much change the varex makes to the noise level, but I'm loving the note its got, nice and low with a slight pulse , not what i thought it was going to sound like thought it may have been a bit tinny with the cannon , but its not check it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpj84uWQd6U

+1

well small update, just been working on the exhaust system , basicly i wanted to do this myself and not pay some one to doing , i got some 2.5' stainless steel tube and a hole bunch of bends, 45 degrees, 90 degrees , flanges and gaskets, and some steel rod, and some exhaust rubbers, some advice : let the pros do this ! I'm managed to complete the hole system in 2 days , but that was working all day and all nite and into the early hours, and well the result was much less than i hoped for, if i had some bending tools and maybe a bit more knoledge then probably would have been a much better job, that being said i didnt do to bad in the way of being my first exhaust , just my welding skills still need improving i didnt have acess to the hoist so i done the hole exhaust laying on the ground! first i started at the dump pipe , got a flange to fit , then to work out the shape of the pipe , i drew up a cardboard shape of the floor and designed the shape keeping in mind clearance from the floor to the pipe, was a bit tricky and very very time consuming!! but worked out a ruff bend , then using the card board template of the pipe shape , i cut the pipe to match, then welded it up, since i couldnt use a bender i ended up with lots of little pieces welded together, this was the only way i could match the floor pan shape , or at least close enuff. the front pipe from the dump pipe looked pretty horrible, the welds were a bit chunky lol stainless wasnt welding together to well, so i wraped it in exhaust wrap, with made it look alot better, think I'm going to do the rest of it in exhasut wrap as well, but i ran out so need to buy more, more money again haa i flanged the front pipe and flanged the cat converter and bolted them together,then put the first set of rubber mounts on , for the mounts i used 2 nolathane rubber mounts and some round steel rod, cut the rod up and bent it in to some hook shapes, welded the hooks to the bottom of the floor, and welded some hooks to the cat , and fitted the rubbers to take the weight of the cat and front pipe, tho at this point it was very sturdy and wasnt moving round much. next was the pipe from the cat to the back, yes it looks horrible,just didnt work as well as i planed , mite have to do this one again, the shape of the floor and how i had it sitting was all up and down and weird ass angles ,was pretty hard to work out ,so it ended up a bit shit. then i flanged the end of that pipe and flanged a short hotdog muffler , and made some small brackets that bolt to the floor , and onto them i welded the steel hooks, this was alot more stuffing around ,but avoided welding on to the floor ,later on i found the 3 bolt flange hung down too low for my liking, so i choped the flange out and welded the hotdog straight to the pipe, then same again , made a cardboard shape of the floor going over the diff and designed a shape to go over the diff, again chopped up multipul pieces of pipe and welded them together and flanged them , that took me to the back end where i fitted a frigen way monsta of a cannon muffler, this muffler is a varex its got a butterfly in it that opens and closes , theroy being that its spose to quieten down the noise, and it actualy does work , tho the size of the thing is a bit rediculous , ut I'm getting use to it, for a tip i welded on a dumper, just casue i like that look. back on the gound :)

cool beans where you from ?

I'm from melbourne, yeah i was guessing trophies would be hard to win, spose you need big dollars to make ya car all fancy like , any way I'm just keen to go and enter and be in a show, think the last 3 years plus of hard core work is worth putting up to show , yeah i tryed to join on there once, ill try again soon, be cool to cruise up with some other rollas too , :)

cheers man ^_^

HAHAH!!!! thanks a bunch i will indeed :)

thanks there mate, i hope theres something useful in amongst all the babbling haha,ive tryed to supply info that ive personaly confirmed that works, any questions you can all ways email,i don't mind helping out fellow car builders :)

hey this is nice an tydy good to see a bit of custom work thrown in as well! ,pm sent re engine, looking great tho!

cheers guys, much appreciated :) feel like ive come along way in the last 3 months with it,think it was just be fore christmas that had the block fitted into the engine bay and now everything is attached and hooked up, and its looking great, a few of my mates think I'm mental doing all this ,but hey its the way i wanted to go with it ,and i think its realy paying off now all the extra work. still a way to go yet before she hits the road, but feel like ive reached the peak and now its all down hill from here, apart from the usual stuff being done ,i hope some one gets something out of these 37 pages of me rambling on haha, tryed to make things easy to understand for people that are maybe starting out and just learning the ins and outs of how cars work, i know ive learnt a huge deal taking on the task bymyself, but like you said nisrola,when you know exactly whats been done and going on its much easyier to work on the car if a problem does arise, i think just keeping things as clean as possible also helps to spot if theres any leaks or things not going right, mind you , i have the thing of if you rebuild or change or paint one thing nice ,then you have to do the rest nice as well or it wont look rite,lol my main goals from here are to build the entire exhaust system myself of corse,then move onto some serious wiring , ive got alarms and a gps tracker and head unit all to be wired in,then theres the final tyding of the igntion wires , and a huge amount of dash board wires and gauge wires all to be done yet so i can see several weeks worth of making looms and running hundreds of metres of cable lol then from there start finishing off the interior, seats ,carpet, dash board any trims that are left over, also have the rear suspention set up to do , so heeeaaapppsss to keep me busy as few a good few months yet, main goal is to get it done by september, I'm hoping to drive up to sydney and enter in the toyota fest show there, just for something differnt, never realy had a nice car to put in a show before so be new thing for me ,and just be great to see what other peoples have done to theres as well, some times I'm working in the week end and ill look out the window and its an awesum nice day, mannnn i wish i could just jump in the car and go cruise and enjoy it, and then i would also wonder i must be the only mental that works on there car all weekend and devotes mental number of hours into building so be nice to see other peoples hard efforts as well! pics can only show so much , seeing things in real life is much better :)

just done a coil over conversion to xt130 struts , on the last page of blogg may be of some use for info any way

so heres the engine bay fairly well completed!!! just a few things to wire up ,but the general set up and parts are there, what you guys think??? i think it looks tops , ive put ALOT of hard work into getting it to this stage,as you can tell if you have read thru my blogg,

haha yeah they are ,hopefully they do the job, but I'm happy now the camber problem has been solved and having adjustable stuff means i can set it up how i need to , but yeah man these calipers are big ass ʞ©$ɟ lol , can't wait to see how they pull the car up

cool beans, black and dark greys are always a good colour choice for intereiors, unless your doing a show car then white or tan ,and as from the green colour on the out side i think that mite be something differnt, show do it,what sorta skills you have??? alot involved in rebuilding cars

so back on the ground , and this is where its sitting at the moment,will go lower after engineering, also i have finished all the vacumm lines, there was alot of them ! going al over the show, but got them all sorted and thats pretty much the engine bay completed!!! :dance: still have a few thngs to wire up here and there, the set up is fairly completed now ,which is good ,frees up my time to move on to other things needed , i noticed after all the vacumm lines were fitted up ,i asume i done them right , was going off a diagram in a manual so they should be all right but i notice how much the idle has improved and starting up seems alot easyier too , all the emmissions parts are in place and next i need to build the exhaust system! yip going to try build the exhaust my self, don't feel like giving some one 1500 cash for welding some pipe , so going to give it a go, hell ive done everything else my self, can't see why i can't . got rid of that camber problem of the xt130 struts

and these are the hilux caliper, there a 4 pot set up, very heavy tho ,but should have good stopping power, i painted them a while ago,but i do need to rekit them with new seals ,they been sitting around for a few years and no doubt a few years before i got hold of them , but for the mean time i just want to get them set up and see if i can get them working with my brake system, got the caliper bolted on ,jesus its big, comparing it to the mx62 one is like lol can see how chunky !! i like it, how ever i couldnt fit the brake pads, since the pistons were to far out, i figured out a little custom tool to help press the pistons in, just a piece of threaded rod,2 nuts ,2 washers ,and 2 small pieces of pipe i put the magic tool inbetween the 2 pistons and winded the nuts towards the pistons ,this forced the small pipes hard against the pistons and pushed them in :) fitted the pads ,and the brake hoses, i was very lucky there, the brake hoses were set up for the mx62 caliper, the guy that made the line said if i wanted to use the hilux later on i would need to make up new steel lines ,between the caliper and the hose, but ... the hose fitted the caliper and was long enuf just to reach the strut bracket , so that was a bit of luck , by now you guys would know how found i am of making steel lines with flares 0.o on this side you can see the charcoal canister that i sneaky mounted under the wheel arch , but there you go , full custom!!! hopefully every thing will work as it should,i did find a small drip of fliud from one of the calipers, but i suspected that would be the case,would have been all dyed up and probably cracked when i winded the pistons in, not to worry i have a seal kit for them ,which ill do later, but for now there pretty much done, so again the parts on the conversion and set up :::: XT130 STRUT XT130 HUB HSD COIL OVER KIT CUSTOM SPRING TOP WITH BEARING KONI SHORT SHOCK GAS INSERT LN106 HILUX CALIPER PEUGEOT 604 FRONT BRAKE DISK T3 CAMBER PLATES BEARINGS BRAKE LINES

so alot of parts !!!! and thats not all theres more, calipers ,brake pads, bolts ,just for a pair of struts, any way on with the build, so struts striped sanded ,threads welded on and now painted ready to go inserts fitted to the struts, and the spring nuts fitted, they actualy fitted realy well over the cleared thread, coil springs fitted and t3 camber plates sitting on top, they look pretty cool :) both fitted to the car camber plates bolted in, happy with the colours i went with, these plates were well worth the money spent, great quaility ,and most inportantley have totaly removed my camber problem with the xt130 struts, now have the adjustability that i need :) now the first drama of fitting all this stuff, the dust plates wouldnt fitt, reason they wouldnt go on is using the ae86 arms ,they sitt slightly inward,as compared to the xt130 arms, this makes the dust cover hit the edge of the lower arm so i could bolt it on but it wasnt moving to well, to work this out it took me most of the day ,i started by bashing the shit out of cover where it was hitting , this just gave me a few mm clearance,which i thought was ok , but what happened later on is when i went to put the disk and hub on the disk was hard up against the bash out portion of the cover and wouldnt turn :bash: :bash: :bash: a very long story short , i ended up cutting a slot in the cover ,then bashed it all flat again, this let the edge of the lower arm come thru the plate slightly , got there in the end! dam thing , any way onto the next part assemblying the peugeot disk to xt130 hub ,after the small modds it bolts right on nice these wiegh a fair bit ,but are frigen chunky !! here can see the slot i made in both dust covers, i could have just not used it ,ive seen alot of these done with out them, how ever i needed the cover to keep it road worthy apparently , dam vic roads and there nazi laws another modd that needed to be done to the dust covers was to trim the opening for the caliper, these calipers are frigen huge so need to cut out the opening to suit, easy job just snip snip :)

so 2 coats of black unmasked the threaded tube and put one coat of clear over the whole lot, reason i done this was ive heard alot of storys about the threads rusting up rather quick, so hopefuly the clear will hold that off for a while,only thing i see wrong with doing that, is maybe the nuts wont go on because of to much product,??? so starting to lay out the parts!!! now can start seeing where the money side comes into this conversion, cusco i think it was a te37 model, that was about $$$$ 200.00 i think ,tho not part of the conversion the springs and threaded tube and spanners etc was $$$ 300.00 koni adjustable gas inserts were $$$$ 550.00 the xt130 hubs , with new bearings bearings were about $$$ 60.00 these are toyota ae86 power steering arms , these are getting hard to get ,took me a while to find a good deal on these, they cost $$$$ 85.00 these are the T3 camber plates , i painted them silver and blue to suit the car a bit better,they were gold and red ?? wierd ass colours but yeah , they cost $$$$ 180.00 these are the disks I'm running, there from a peugeot 604 , these ones are vent and slotted,there chunky as , these need to have 2 things done to them ,first the mounting holes need to be slightly reemed out by about 1.5 mm,tho the centre of the xt130 hubs fit the disk perfectly,the second thing is the outer diameter of the disk is too large and needs to be machined down a bit , can't quite remember how much it was ,12 mm??? it wasnt much tho, reason they need to be machined down is the hilux caliper wont clear properly,, the machining cost 25 dollars so not a big drama. so puegeot 604 disk ,machined down, and mount holes reemed out slightly, total cost $$$$$ 325.00 also for the spring tops, these are machined alloy with a needle bearing in the top to suit the t3 camber tops, price $$$$$$ 60.00

next step was to paint the strut black and clear over the hols thing got some etch primer on the struts ,ready to be painteded black after the black was done i removed the masking from around the thread... and cleared the entire struts

then after some further setting the strut up in the vice it got a heavy weld all the way around the bottom part, ( please excuse speeling mistakes of word that don't make sence its 3 in the morning and I'm exhausted from working since 8 this morning on the car @!!) both struts finished welds since i had sanded the hole strut before hand it was nearly ready to paint, just had to scuff off the welds and the threaded part

step 2!!!! next thing as to see if i can indeed use coil overs with these struts and with the wheels i have, there was a big concern the large nuts that the spring rest on would be far to close to the tyre,due to my offset so i was right in thinking that ,can clearly see if the thread tube was welded too low down the tube i would run into trouble with those nuts hitting the tyre. after alot of mesuring and working things out , i gladly found a good position for the threaded tube, where i ended up was a place that would give me a small amount of lowering to start with ,but with a few inches nearly of adjustment, ie dump it ,lol so now that i had the position worked out i could go ahead and weld the threaded tube inplace so the next things i done was to prep the strut as if i was going to paint it, the whole thing was sanded with 180# and red scotch brite , the struts ended up mostly bare metal but smooth, here ive got the struts all cleaned up and ready to be welded, marked the position of the threaded tube and i just used tape to hold them in place so i could get a few tack welds on them and heres the struts with a few tack welds on the threaded tubes, also i used a bunch of masking tape on the axle to protect it from damage while I'm throwing the thing about the place...

step one! again another set of (corona xt130 front struts) were bought, they cost me 120 from a wreakers , bit of a rip off in my opinion , tho i did get the complete strut with disk , spring ,caliper etc etc ,the hole strut assembly was what i got, so after striping the strut down to the bare thing , the first job is to remove the spring cup, I'm taking the cup off so i can fitt a coil over threaded sleeve. so get ya self some of these bad boys ,the xt130 corona strut::::: i set them up in a vice and used a grinder with a cut off disk to first hack the cups off.... then with a grinder ,i grinded down the left over cup metal and the weld that held it on there, till it was nearly all gone then further sanding the left over right down ,trying to keep the round shape of the tube,and keeping it level with the rest of the tube. so thats the first thing i done with these struts, cut off the cups and grinded and sanded the left over down level... Uploaded with ImageShack.us

well time for an update on things ive been doing , glad to have my daily driver back ,all the running around i have to do to get parts and get around wouldnt be possible with out it. so FRONT END ............................... ive already done the mx62 caliper and celica disk to xt130 strut conversion, and the brakes seem to be ok ,but the xt130 struts have a bad camber problem, even lowering the car dosent help to much, so i needed to get rid of that,i simply wouldnt be able to drive the car like that, so this little issue needed to be adressed. i decided to do a differnt conversion and try and get the best results out of that one, the conversion I'm talking about is the pug/hilux/xt130 brake conversion, as it goes with everything ,parts that arnt spose to be on the car can make for a few dramas,,,,,, but any way I'm going to go into some detail with this ,just so others can have some genuine imformation about it , as things on the net can be very vague at the best of times , ill try fill in the blanks, this mite get abit boring for some ,and i tend to burbble alot when talking about this stuff so bare with me. HILUX/LANDCRUISER/PUG/XT130,COIL OVER /CAMBER PLATES CONVERSION :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Well first thing i want to make very clear ,this is not a cheap conversion,this actualy cost me an arm and a leg to get all the parts together, which i did over the corse of 18 months or so, so any one looking at doing the same just note that this isnt a 50 dollar job, ill talk about the cost of things as i go along.

:) roll on

HAHAHA yeah dam junkie ,i still havnt cleaned out the car , I'm kinda putting it off ,don't want to find anything dodgy like needles or a pound of herion maybe lol, but thats guys yes glad to have it back and so quickly also, and still drivable! , funny story, now the police are patroling my area , ive seen them cruising past my work and having a look, then cruising down a side street,also my mates was pulled up right out side my work and asked about what they were doing there! so kinda good to know now there actualy doing there job and keeping an eye out ,