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Ae92, Supercharged Khanacross Car.


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Thought I's post some belated build photo's of my AE92 Khanacross car, There's not a lot of information out there for them, so could be a helpful resource to people contemplating this path in the future.

 

I was fortunate to get this ex-roadcar from a guy at work, who had spent a bunch of money on it with the wrong people, and become disenchanted with it. Originally he wanted quite a bit of money for it, but I managed to eventually prise it from him for not a lot at all. It still had it's issues, faded paint, dents poorly repaired, rust, horrible wiring with a typical boyracer stereo and lowered suspension.W

 

When it first arrived.

 

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Start stripping everything out, I'm not going to use any of it.

 

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Body deadening gone ! Dry ice is a real saver here. Stripped several cars of their bog, and this was by far the easiest. Heap the ice on for a while till you see it get all frosty and then bash it with a big rubber mallet, the floor flexes a bit and the bog breaks off.

 

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Dodgy brake lines... didn't count on that.

 

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Suspension wasn't lowered, it was just rooted !!

 

Coil bound

 

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Don't know what this was about, but was in both rear shocks

 

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Car had already had the superstrut brake upgrade, but there was a few issues with all of that. Most of the shims that take up the space between the pad and the frame were missing, and somewhere along the line one of the pad ears had gotten behind the frame and was jamming the whole deal up on my side only. Despite this the guy told me 'it brake's great, just lean on the pedal and it'll haul up quick smart'.... yeah.... right.

Also had the wrong discs on it, right diameter, but wrong thickness and someone had spun the spigot out on one side, so the disc wasn't centred. Thanks to the info here on Rollaclub, got all of that sorted now and got some new pads in there, was even able to get the shims ex-japan for not much. Crazy thing being, tried to get the shims for the rear calipers (generic local supply AE92 SX rear brakes) one side complete was going to cost me more than a full set of the superstrut shims... wtf ?

 

Wheel clearance is an issue though with these calipers.

14" has got no hope.

 

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So changed a few things around, found some brake lines that would fit and bought some new stock suspension, with slightly uprated springs

 

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Still working on lightening everything up, one of the biggest saving's was in the hoodliner, damn that thing is heavy and way up in the car as well. Solvent to clean the glue off the roof, came up alright. Left the interior light in to help at night when doing up the belts.

 

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Ended up having to do some serious strengthening to the radiator support member when the engine/gearbox crossmember attaches, had failed at some point in the past and the repair was one of the dodgiest I've seen, with very little steel added and a lot of bog to hide it all, which of course resulted in it falling to bits and rusting. At the same time, cut a hole in the bonnet for the intercooler scoop.

 

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The car had been running around with the standard bonnet and the intercooler acting more as an interwarmer, being slowly beaten to death by the centre brace on the bonnet. Ended up replacing with a GT4 or MR2 unit that a mate had kicking around, fortunately my brother know's how to weld aluminium, but we had to do some dodgy bends to replicate the factory cast plastic bends.

At the same time, relocated the battery and created a bracket to hold a unifilter pod filter.

 

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The car also had some serious wiring issues going on, seems as though they'd layed one loom over the top of the other and done some dodgy splicing to make the ZE motor work. On top of that there was a central door locking setup where they basically coiled the wires in a big mess under the passenger footwell carpet and successive audio installs had simply run new wires, rather than removing/reusing the previous AMP power lines, I have a box with about 4kgs of spare wiring that I've removed which doesn't include any of the audio wiring and speakers which were returned to the guy I bought it off (part of the deal)

 

Because of the superstrut brakes not clearing 14" wheels and me being cheap, I picked up several sets of later model 15" steel wheels and painted them black, in all likelihood, I'll probably bend the damn things at some point, though this was not also without it's issues.

 

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Need low profile tyre's to clear the rear spring platforms.

Found these fairly cheap from a second hand tyre supplier, so that wasn't so bad. The wheels are only 5mm further in on the offset, so suspect this is more to do with tyre size than the larger rim. Low profiles actually helped with the gearing anyway, standard profile on the front would see this thing doing stupid speeds, if the engine could push it that fast. So ended up with low profile rally tyres on the front (purchased new as the second hand market for these is near non-existent). But they still won't fit the rear.

 

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I was later to find out that the increase in tyre diameter and 5mm offset also resulted in the tyre and rim, rubbing on the back of the gearbox and the chassis on the front when turning hard. Have since fitted a pair of 15mm Novustech hubcentric wheel spacers, Seems to have sorted the clearance issues and given it a bit more track at the same time.

 

Of course, no Khana car is complete without the addition of a bloody big sump guard.

 

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Tow points are sort of accessible by squeezing between the bumper and the guard, at least easy enough to get a hook or shackle thru there.

 

Of course, also need a rear harness bar.

 

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Stuffed upo when making this and had it a little too far rearwards, but was looking for the bar to be closest to the bolts, meant the straps were a bit short and ended up welding spuds in there for eyebolts, which then gave me enough room for the double wrap on the catches and for everything to work out about right for length.

 

Can see the relocated battery just obscured from view, Completely sealed Personal Water Craft battery, bit more rugged than odessey battery's, but a bit of a pain to get terminals connected to. Probably should be in a box as well, but haven't been picked yet.

 

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Can also see the tail end of the hydraulic handbrake, ex UK, just a cheapie 5/8" job, seems to work well.

Before getting to the Velo Gp90 seat, just an ADR spec version.

 

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And cheapie momo steering wheel from ebay.

 

Then added a foot tray, otherwise you wear the paint off the floor with your heels and it looks shitty real quick. Also keeps the mud from your boots in one place, probably made this a tad small, keep bending the edge of it as I get in and out of the car.

 

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The hydraulic handbrake caused a few issues. People familiar with the car will understand they have a cross circuit brake system. Works fine for road going use, but works out a nightmare for a hydraulic handbrake. There are solutions around requiring twin mastercylinder handbrakes and a whole plumbing nightmare, but they're also super expensive. I toyed with the idea of modifying the existing mastercylinder and did briefly venture down this path as I believe it's possible to get a plug machined to blank of the proportioning valve within the mastercylinder (basically remove it) and turn the system into a conventional mastercylinder. I was then still faced with brake balance issues, in that I'd have to run a reducing valve in the rear line to get the balance right, but if the balance was too far to the front, there would be nothing I could do. As rear brake bias is typically desirable in a gravel car, I bit the bullet and decided to fabricate my own pedal box. In doing this, I came across a guy running an AE92 (FX GT) in rally trim who'd solved the problem by simply re-plumbing the stock mastercylinder with the adjustable proportioning valve in the rear line and reckons it works fine, though he's running stock GT brakes. He's won his class in the local rally series, so maybe he'sright, but I was committed to the pedal box idea already.

 

Spent some time debating with myself over the ultra expensive Tilton and AP balance bar's for a while, before deciding that this 'cheapy khanacross car' was spinning out of control in terms of budget and it was time to slow things up. Even looked around at already completed pedal boxes, but didn't want to pull the dash out of the car (too much time) and couldn't find anything that would just bolt in, fine if I had an escort, but apparently AE92's aren't so popular.

So bought a cheapie balance bar with remote adjuster and started messing around with some bits of plate.

 

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There are certainly easier ways of doing a lot of things that I've done with the car, and if I'd cared more about it, I would have ultimately stripped out the dash and created something a bit nicer and welded it into the firewall and strengthened that area up at the same time.

However, I haven't done a lot of dirt driving as far as competition's go and I'm fairly positive that at some point in the not too distant future, my speed will outstrip my talent and I'll crunch the thing. I'm OK with this, it's part fo motorsport, but I didn't want to have to spend hours and hours on body mods for Mk II, so everything has been built so it bolts in with as little modification to the actual body as possible, then I can simply buy another shell (~$250) and swap everything over in a couple of weekends.

This philosophy does have it's downsides, in that with all the bracketry, the mastercylinders are now too far away from the balance bar for an off the shelf pushrod, hindsight's a wonderful thing. Ended up getting some slightly larger Grade 8.8 bolts and then linished the head to a rough ball to fit into the mastercylinders, doesn't need to be a precision fit. Seems to have worked quite well thus far, even given the extra length and potential bending problems with the pushrods.

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I then proceeded to take the car to a motorkhana for a shake down, where the hydraulic handbrake really didn't want to play the game.

And it was on 3 wheels thru most of the corners and I kept catching the power steering. The tyre rubbing problems also revealed themselves about the same time.

 

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But with the Khanacross only a fortnight away, there wasn't a lot of time to sort out all it's issues. Bought some new pads and discs for the rear and off I went. The car returned looking something like this;

 

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Rain and clay, stuck to that thing like gum to a blanket. 2 hours worth of hosing and even now, near 10 months later, there's still bits of that mud falling of the car.

 

The rear discs and pads sorted out the handbrake issues, but I had no interior blowers or radiator fan (turned out to be a wiring issue I'd created in fixing some of the past atrocities) I had an engine temp that was fine for idle, but dropped to near nothing when actually moving (thermostat siezed open), an exhaust leak and suspension that was just way, way too soft for the application.

 

Firstly, stay away from non-genuine Toyota exhaust gaskets, they all suck. None of them have the fire rings to stop the exhaust gases getting in between the gasket material and causing this within a fairly short period of time.

 

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Then began the great suspension anguish of 2011/12. I researched all over the place, including all the expensive guys, Proflex, DMS (who were quite helpful, just out of my budget), Bilstein options (who appeared a bit confused and wanted me to package the struts to Sydney so they could have a look, after telling me how many drift cars they'd sorted out). Looked at the Koni option for a while, but the necessary struts to make the Koni's fit are a bit like rocking horse poop, at least on this side of the country, and at about the same time, started showing as 'discontinued' items on the Koni.com website. Not wanting to outlay a bunch of money on stuff that would shortly become un-obtainable, I kept looking. Eventually I decided to spend my cash with a seller from ebay, flogging a generic coilover kit that was easily up-specced, had a GAZ insert and was at a price that looked pretty good. Recieved the suspension, after waiting 2 months only to realise it was complete and utter crap ! Great for a road/tarmac car, but hopeless for what I was using it for. Strut length was too short, shock travel was too short, camber plates on the rear were the wrong orientation, kit was assembled well, but packaging was rubbish and some of the items supplied with the kit weren't up to scratch, for me at least.

Ensuing argument with seller where he was fairly reasonable about it all and promised to make good, but tried to weasel his way out of the height issues with some flawed arguments, given the uncertainity over the GAZ shocks, some people love them, some people reckon you need to rebuild them every couple of races, I ended up demanding a return refund. Seller later admitted it seemed as though they didn't have the right specs for the car, another rally guy has since purchased a set and is perservering with them, so following that with interest.

Lost ~$300 in the deal, ad claimed $100 postage, which I was happy to wager on, but there was no way I could return them that cheap... another life lesson learnt.

 

So after that debacle, considered all my options again and for a moment was tempted to spend the $3K for a pair of 50mm DMS for the front of the car... but then looked at my bank balance and changed my mind. In the meantime had found that ST184 seemed to have the same spacing on the knuckle, same width of the ears and all of that, surely I could find a Koni insert for a ST184. Further investigation revaled that the ST184/5 was very similar, but had the much larger bolts than the corolla. ST165 seemed to be the answer as it used the same size bolts and by my initial measurements had the same offset from the strut tube. My initial measurements turned out to be wrong, the ST165 is abother ~10mm further out, no good for camber. Then did a little more research into ST185 shocks, found the travel is only 130mm, whereas the AE92 corolla is about 150mm and for rally purposes, the more wheel travel you can, get the better, so certainly didn't want to go losing any. At this point, gave up on the local suspension mob I'd been in contact with as they were being pretty damn unhelpful and called Koni Australia themselves. Turns out I could still get hold of an insert to fit the ST162/5 leg, ex stock, no probs and the ST162/5 has 160mm of travel, with the overall shock length working out only 10mm longer than the AE92. Once again though, Koni.com told me that the part was discontinued. Shame, but I had no other option, so layed down the cash for the Koni's and once they break, I'll have to worry about it then, hopefully they can be rebuilt.

So ended up modifying the strut ears, doing the old coilover conversion, bang in a couple of 275lb/in springs to cope with the supercharger weight and supercharged gearbox weight, and life for the moment appears to be good !

 

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Standard strut tops, just makes it easier for replacements and the rubber takes some of the shock out.

 

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And final ride height with the springs at a nominal 5mm of compression at full droop.

 

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Because of the stupid amount of travel on the corolla, (got back down to ~150mm with some height lost due to the custom spring seat) I had to go with 350mm springs to make sure the spring didn't bind before the shock had bottomed.

In truth, I could have probably made it with 300's, but it does take up a stupid amount of room on the leg, and without the aforementioned wheel spacers would probably cause clearance issues.

The rear is actually still standard monroe shocks with King springs, just sit's real high because there's no weight back there.

 

While I was at it, and contradicting my earlier, try not to modify the bodyshell policy, a rally mate said he'd seen the strut tops invert on these cars before, so I decided to plate it all in.

 

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The custom spring hats were to get around the rubber bell on the standard strut tops. At the time though, I was measuring a pair of AE111 strut tops, which appear to have a much deeper rubber bell than the AE92 tops, so in effect, I could have reduced the lost spring height, but another 10mm or so, as it turns out one of the AE111 tops had a shot bearing. Still, might be able to get AE101 tops on there still, don't know how different they are yet. Did breifly consider using the ST165 strut tops, but the ones I had were shot in the rubber and the bolts to hold them into the body, whilst on the same pitch spacing, are a larger bolt, probably would have helped, but finding ST165 strut tops would be problematic. ST185 strut tops appear to be the same with the larger bolt, but haven't measured them to know if there are any other differences.

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Some observant folks may have noticed the couple of pipes sticking thru the front bumper. These were a planned addition when I first started building the car as there are the occassional night events, so I needed a spotlight bar. After the suspension debacle, I was running out of time for the next khanacross and in fact there ended up being couple of weeks where I was working on the car to 11pm at night for every night of the week, just to put it back together for this event. Other problems surfaced, like the driveshaft boots being a bit average and one CV end being shot, as well as a dud ball joint and having to press the front wheel bearings apart to allow me to press in the longer studs for the spacers, then finding the driveflanges had about seen he end of it, fortunately found another set of better drive flanges, but they were from a later car, so meant enlarging the spigot diameter on the discs.... good times, so the light bar was fabricated a little hastily and I'm not 100% happy with, but it exists now. Lights were 140mm Hella's that I had kicking around from an old road car.

 

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Then took it to the last event and thrashed it around ! Seemed to go pretty well, have since got it back home, need to sort out the wheel alignment, but have done an inspection and nut and bolt check and all seems to be good, so apart from some minor changes to ventilation to help keep me cool, I'm hoping to be able to just take it to the next event and thrash it again.

 

Couple of additional pics of the sump guard mounting bar that I forgot earlier.

 

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And then a vid of one of the tests from the last event, the others are there as well, but I feel this is my best showing. Got 2nd overall for the day, so can't have been so bad.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckP_JR-c1_k&list=UUWPi5J7CYt9TpvG6D2MV30w&index=4&feature=plcp

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Cheers fella's, if there's so much information around for AExx's, where is it then ? :wave:

 

No roll cage planned for this toy, maybe one day I might step up to rally, but don't think it will be with this beast.

 

Future upgrades will also hopefully be limited, spent so much time building (~18months before the first event), now all I want to do is get out there and use it !

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hey boosted, brings back memories reading your thread, great pics and really good read. I've won a lotta khanacross events and on that track in your vids the suspension is way to high, lower it and the times will come down. No need to have it jacked up like a 4 wheel drive on smooth track. Even on the Wagga khanacross track which is rough as guts we still ran lowered pedders and had no trouble. My ae92 4agze build thread is on the link below. I havent updated it for a while but the car performs great and does a 1.45 at Winton.

 

http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/48352-4agze-powered-ae92-track-car-build/

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Yeah, get stuck in! These things are supposed to do pretty well with rally, but you'd have to ditch the supercharger.

 

And where's the fun in that? :)

 

Was discussing that with a mate and not sure that I would have to actually. As they were a proper version in Japan, as long as there are homologation papers for them, should be able to make it work, you'd just be in the larger capacity class. But still, not sure it's worth the hassle when you could get an excel for not a lot of $$ ready to race.

 

You're one game bloke doing that with no cage!

 

All real low speed stuff actually, rule for Khanacross is no more than 100m before at least a 90º turn, and courses must be designed to limit maximum speed to no more than 100km/h.

You're perfectly OK to take your road car along to these events with a regular seat and lap sash seatbelt. Most courses are very open too, so chances of hitting anything is pretty remote. Autocrosses are even faster and they canbe done without a cage too. Seen a car go over on a fast Autocross corner, it makes a bit of a mess of things, but the occupants just jump out, swear at the thing and wait for the tow vehicle, car's usually no good after that though.

 

hey boosted, brings back memories reading your thread, great pics and really good read. I've won a lotta khanacross events and on that track in your vids the suspension is way to high, lower it and the times will come down. No need to have it jacked up like a 4 wheel drive on smooth track. Even on the Wagga khanacross track which is rough as guts we still ran lowered pedders and had no trouble. My ae92 4agze build thread is on the link below. I havent updated it for a while but the car performs great and does a 1.45 at Winton.

 

 

Hey Rob, had seen your thread before, but didn't realise you were also competing on dirt.

The first event I did with the stock front suspension where it sat a fair bit lower at the front, it bottomed out all over the place, perhaps more of a function of the spring rate than total suspension travel.

The usual track for Khanacross over here as some big dips in it and is quite rough, the video is from the last Khanacross I did, which is really quite smooth and flat. I'm keen to get back to the other Khanacross track and see how it goes. The rear is actually standard height King's springs on Monroe shocks, I think it's just sitting so high because now there's no weight in the rear. I'll agree it would be pretty average for tarmac events at it's current height. Unfortunately I can't unwind the springs anymore without losing entrapment and having to fit limiting straps.

The shocks shown in your build thread look very similar to the Taiwanese ones that I ended up sending back as I didn't like the look of them or trust the guy I'd bought them from to have the valving set right.

 

Only thing I'm doing before the next event is looking at improving the ventilation and I've now grooved the rear (road pattern) tyres as it lacked a bit of rear end grip in the faster corners, nice and oversteery. Also need to make up a set of alignment bars, will post pics once I've sorted out how I'm doing that.

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