I removed the broken windscreen carefully, just as practice for getting a good one out of another car. I'll do a complete How-To sometime, but you use a hammer and screwdriver to dig the sealant out from beside the glass.

 

Then its out with the welding wire and two bits of wood to follow a spray of detergent. This cuts the remaining sealant away from the body. The wire doesn't last long when sawing it against steel or glass, so expect to change it often.

 

Don't lose the two little blocks of rubber at the bottom, they hold the new screen at the right height when you're gluing it in. This all worked for the Celica when I fitted a screen from the spares car, so I'm hoping it works again.

 

Josh said the seat smacked him in the back during the roll, so I stripped one. There is a bar across the back of it at the small of your back height, and it is welded between the frame rails. It would be a much better design if they had welded that bar behind the rails to give some clearance, but then the seat cover woudn't look so cool. I'll get some 3-ply panels and slide them over the front of that bar and also above the two little ones under the seat base. That will make the seat firmer but you won't have steel bars exposed.

 

So, I'm back in Orange frantically catching up, Steve is at Uni and I'll go back up at the end of next week when he has Uni holidays until after Easter. Lots to be done!

w00t!

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!

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.

Edited April 21, 201412 yr by altezzaclub

Is the ply something you've done before or a new trial? I wonder if it wont crack under load?

 

Never mind, I was thinking you were replacing the netting with the ply. I re-read, you are using both correct?

Edited April 21, 201412 yr by 67Rolla-Ken

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!

Edited April 21, 201412 yr by altezzaclub

Man that fresh white makes a big difference.

You're making me want to find a paddock and try and build rally cars!

looking good, you are going to use 100mm square plates each side of the tunnel to bolt the seat mounts through, so spread the load through the sandwich plates yeah?

 

Loving the progress :)

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...

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!

Awesome !! can't wait to see this in action and already enjoying the build :D keep up the awesome work !

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..

Edited May 1, 201412 yr by altezzaclub

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 now I've herd everything! :lol:

Well now I've herd everything! :lol:

 

Hahahahahahaha! :)