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Hi, from Uruguay this is my TE27


Trufauru

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Only one word for this project resto. . .  Incredible !    It does indeed look "handsome", even in it's current format.  Where did you procure the carbon fibre hood/bonnet ?

How much did it cost ?  Have you had a chance to measure the weight difference between the original steel hood & the carbon fibre one ?  These olde Rollas were over built in those days, where there was no computer aided design.  Their power to weight ratio, was abysmal, by todays standards.  There are two ways of improving the power to weight ratio.  Increase the power, & lower the weight.  A bit of both, is a very good compromise.  The balance would also be the relative cost of each method, of improving the power to weight ratio.

I'm in awe of your dedication.    Good luck !

Cheers Banjo 

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On 2/8/2022 at 7:28 PM, Banjo said:

Only one word for this project resto. . .  Incredible !    It does indeed look "handsome", even in it's current format.  Where did you procure the carbon fibre hood/bonnet ?

How much did it cost ?  Have you had a chance to measure the weight difference between the original steel hood & the carbon fibre one ?  These olde Rollas were over built in those days, where there was no computer aided design.  Their power to weight ratio, was abysmal, by todays standards.  There are two ways of improving the power to weight ratio.  Increase the power, & lower the weight.  A bit of both, is a very good compromise.  The balance would also be the relative cost of each method, of improving the power to weight ratio.

I'm in awe of your dedication.    Good luck !

Cheers Banjo 

I bought the hood from Restored, a company in japan which specializes in parts for old japanese cars https://restored.jp/parts/article/TE27レビン, it was like 800 dollars, and quite a lot more to bring it to my country. Sadly I didn't had a complete hood back then, it was very very rusted, and I just throw it away, I really didn't care bceause I knew of Restored that they could take care of the hood, I just had to save some months

And we are on the second page of this post

New years, and I’ve got a present for my birthday, an Ignition Models TE27, with the whole look of what I’m hoping for the car. 
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I’m getting ready for more work on the car, so I need some parts because I’m taking a few days off again to work on the car. A few months comes by and I get the new floors and front valance from https://www.autopartscomplex.com/ they are reproductions but close enough.
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Do you remember the piece of rocker panel that I took in the previous post? Well I took that to a place nearby that does sheet metal work and was able to bend a whole piece from that shape.
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I also was investigating, and there is an inner and outer rocker panel piece, so I had both made.
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And in April 2019, I took some days off work, and the car was again in the garage, and ready to work on it.
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First job on the agenda, remove the center cross brace, in order to remove the floor. So with the spot cutter and some patience I started to find and cut one by one.
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I realized that maybe I was going to compromise the structure of the car, so I decided to weld some metal rods to tie the whole body
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Some more work, and the center brace was removed, and the body had some reinforcements. There were some nasty surprises under that brace, but I will take care of them
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You can see that the floor is quite clean, that's because the night before I used some dry ice on the old sound deadening and took it all out. Some parts of the floor were in amazing shape.

With the center brace out, and the body with the reinforcements, I took a deep breath and did this…
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I cut the whole floor, and the rocker, I made sure that I got in the middle of the front under brace, and also with a lot of love cutting around the base of the A pillar of the car.
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And in no time I did a quick test fit of the new pieces.
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Next step is to make some cardboard templates for some small parts, I give that task to a friend 
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Cutting those small parts
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And test fitting those parts with the new floor 
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Another part that plays a role in this jigsaw is the front fender, so I bolted it to the car for a test fit
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It does look good 
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And how about in the inside of the car?
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This picture doesn’t show all the work I went through in order to make this look good. But the fender bolts in a undercut on the rocker panel, and that undercut makes that the fender sit flush with the rocker, so I had to cut, bend, shape, weld, try, try again, weld some captive nuts, it took a while, but it came out good enough
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Also the shape of the side isn’t constant, it gets a little bigger in the back, so I had to make some magic again
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But trying to learn magic and all the trials and test fits meant that I had no more free time to keep working in the car, so I had to wrap it and leave.
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A few months later I had some free days so I returned to the car and welded some more pieces
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Well actually I welded the whole passenger floor because it was almost done, and painted it.
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And cover all the welds with some seam sealer
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All sealed from the top and from below

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And with that we are Mid-2019
 

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Yeh Dave !   This is fantastic to follow.  Can't get over the dedication.  Most dedicated guy I've come across, when most of us on here, would not take on a project like that, with so much "cancer".

I take my hat off to him.  I'll certainly be following this thread.

I must have been living under a rock, as I've never heard of using dry ice to lift sound deadening material in olde cars.

In my defence, I've never had to lift any, & never researched it.  There a number of utube videos on the net, & it certainly works well, in floor wells, but a bit harder on vertical areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FqkxgcjRQQ 

Cheers Banjo

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On 2/11/2022 at 12:38 AM, ke70dave said:

wow i havent been in here for a while. fantastic work. well done. 

I had many photos and always wanted to build a thread, I had forgotten that I had one started over here and now trying to get up to date.

 

On 2/11/2022 at 1:34 AM, Banjo said:

Yeh Dave !   This is fantastic to follow.  Can't get over the dedication.  Most dedicated guy I've come across, when most of us on here, would not take on a project like that, with so much "cancer".

I take my hat off to him.  I'll certainly be following this thread.

I must have been living under a rock, as I've never heard of using dry ice to lift sound deadening material in olde cars.

In my defence, I've never had to lift any, & never researched it.  There a number of utube videos on the net, & it certainly works well, in floor wells, but a bit harder on vertical areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FqkxgcjRQQ 

Cheers Banjo

Thanks for all the kinds words, but it's half dedication, and half maddness, since it was the only TE27 on the country I knew that being a Toyota fan I had to save it, and I always I'm up for a challange, as my grandfather used to say "If someone somewhere could do it, I can do it too" so I took the project. The funny thing was that I was restoring an old Audi 100, that my friends said that was very rusted, when the corolla arrived the Audi was almost in mint condition hahaha

I've always seen online that they used dry ice to remove the old sound deadening, so when I had the opportunity, I had to try it. And it worked flawlessly.

 

On 2/11/2022 at 10:38 PM, parrot said:

Oh my. I have to come back to this and concentrate a bit later. Looks like some brilliant work

The posts are long, but mostly pictures, the good work haven't started yet


So lets keep up

After all of this I kept my search for new parts, and was able to buy reproduction metal fender flares, and new cabin vents, those vents are for the trueno and they look much better that the ones that were on the car (and they were destroyed)
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I also got myself a new mig welder, a “Telwin Maxima 160 Synergic” https://www.telwin.com/en/prodotti/?id=816085 , I was welding with a no name chinese “200A” mig welder that is more adequate for welding a thick metal fence than thin sheet metal, so I got a good welder with less power but enough power just for this job 

Until this time, I was working on the car on some holidays or vacations. The car was in another city at my parents place or nearby in a friend's barn, but it is an hour and a half drive away, so it isn’t very convenient, but I was on the lookout for a place nearby…

And I was able to find a place of my own to work on the car, near my house, just 20min away, and I could make all the noise that I wanted, and work comfortably. But first I had to get the car to this new place, first step, and after a lot of hard work we got the car on the trailer
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Then load all the parts and tools into the car and on the truck (of course you must tow a Toyota with a Toyota) and of we go, we had an hour and a half of journey to the new destination.
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We arrived at the new place, it used to be an old tire factory, and now a piece of it it's my “workshop” that was at the end of a kinda narrow hallway, so I maneuvered the trailer the best I could and we pushed all the way to the back
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Once we got the car into the shop, but we realized that we had to unload it first.
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We had to get creative, and some sketchy things happened
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But the car was unloaded “safely” as possible
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I had made a new cart for the new welder and was already coming handy
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It was great to have a place to work without disturbing anyone, and it was huge 7x7mts
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And the trusty wagon loaded with more parts, all the small bits that didnt fit, or where to fragile.
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The car on its new resting place with the documentation
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By this is 30th of November of 2019, we are down to the days and months
 

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The first job on the shop was to make a new workbench, so I went to homedepot, bought some wood, some 2x4’s and got this
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It has some great natural light by the day, but I was going to be working by night mostly
So I bought some lights, which were the second job in order to make the shop more usable.

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The car was lovely lit from one side, and could be turned around easily to work on the other side.
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Onto the real first job to the car while I was there, I wasn’t able to locate welding gas so I couldnt . The TE27 comes from factory with a steering box, it’s a big, heavy, and old tech, while I was reading on forums and groups, many people use the steering rack of a KP61 Starlet, and most ideas online use parts that are impossible to get over here, but luckily Starlets are everywhere and very cheap. So I got a starlet subframe, rack and column.

Why the subframe? You might ask
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Just to get the steering rack mounts
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Then I chopped the TE27 steering stops, and cleaned the subframe
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And done
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Well, not so easy, if you want to keep a good steering, there are a lot of measurements involved, I did my best to follow all of them. First of all I needed to find the centerline of the subframe, the steering rack, and the original steering bar
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You want that the pivot point on the suspension arm, is as close to the pivot on the steering rack/steering bar as possible. As you can see, the pivot on the original steering is inwards, and with the starlet rack it moves outwards (always measuring from the centerline). As you can see the Starlet is longer.
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But luckily without much modifications everything fits just fine, I just had to use the starlet inner tie rod, and the corolla outer tie rod, they screw right on and allows for the “correct geometry”, time will tell if everything works
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All the old parts, and missing from the photo is the steering box that must weigh like 20kg by itself.
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A little video of everything working together 

By now it is 10 of December 2019
 

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Hi Sebastian,

                       Lovely bench !   Love your work !

You've just pushed "my button" here, as that is a project, I've, for a long time, wanted to try on my KE30 2 door sedan. That is; convert the steering to rack & pinion, or maybe even power assisted ???  My question is whether the Starlet front cross member "chassis" mounting bolt centre to centre measurement, matches exactly, the chassis rail to rail measurement on your TE27 ?  Did Toyota standardise this measurement for all the early Corolla's, so front cross members are "interchangeable ?

I actually bought a KE70 front cross member, from someone on Rollaclub, years ago for $ 20. I just wanted it to mount on a a couple of timber sleepers, so I could build a simple engine test bed. 

image.png.c39eaac411f05f17ec5c9d957d91b4a4.png

 

It was from a KE70.  Now the KE70 cross member differed from other KE front cross members, as the KE70 had rack & pinion steering; so had the rack & pinion brackets already there.

I'll have to go out in the garage later, & measure it up, which might be a bit difficult as it has an engine mounted on it.

Altezzaclub, should be able to provide an answer, as He is the source of all info regarding KE70s, on this forum. 

With it all jigged up there, on the bench, were you able to measure any steering geometry angles etc. ?

Steering geometry, & the ramifications of changing it, is a whole subject all by itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackermann_steering_geometry

Cheers Banjo 

 

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Hi Sebastian,

                      So I went to the shed last night, & had a look at the cross member I have on one of the two (2) engine test beds I've made.

image.png.1067ca877e190dc43cc65806a78a0690.png

Luckily, it still has the rack & pinion clamps in place.  So from what I can measure, without removing the engine, the centre to centre distance between chassis mounting bolts for the front cross member is 75cm.

Could you measure this distance for me on your TE27, as it should be easy, with nothing in the engine bay at present.

I'd be very interested to find out if the Corolla various KE models & the Starlet, used the same mounting point dimensions.  The other useful dimension would be the distance between the bolt holes on each side, of your Starlet front cross member.  My KE30 dimension is 12.5cm, where I have the question mark below.

image.png.0b0ad7100b20614e9d9985f58a4101ff.png

These are the two (2) dimensions, from your Starlet front cross member, I would like to have.

image.png.ac6068899e3e27e3ac19da203944dcec.png

I did find this old pic on the ClubK site, which appears to indicate the K2, K3, & KP front cross member dimensions across the enginge bay are indentical ?

image.png.d202324326ddc0a16c10c3343acb2fb1.png

Many thanks !

Cheers Banjo

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23 hours ago, Banjo said:

With it all jigged up there, on the bench, were you able to measure any steering geometry angles etc. ?

Steering geometry, & the ramifications of changing it, is a whole subject all by itself.

 

I did took a lot of measurements, and I think I'm close enough, but as you said, it is a whole subject. I used this site, https://www.racingaspirations.com/apps/suspension-geometry-calculator/ with all the measurements took from the TE27, and trying to be close as possible. 

I just read online that they used KP6* starlet parts for the swap, and given that over here there are a lot of them and parts are cheap, I decided to do it.

34 minutes ago, Banjo said:

Luckily, it still has the rack & pinion clamps in place.  So from what I can measure, without removing the engine, the centre to centre distance between chassis mounting bolts for the front cross member is 75cm.

Could you measure this distance for me on your TE27, as it should be easy, with nothing in the engine bay at present.

I'd be very interested to find out if the Corolla various KE models & the Starlet, used the same mounting point dimensions.  The other useful dimension would be the distance between the bolt holes on each side, of your Starlet front cross member.

Cheers Banjo

Sadly I never took those measurements, and I don't have the car nor the engine close to me to take those measurements that you need. But I have the factory body manual with a lot of measurements of the stock crossmember

IMG_2584.thumb.jpg.e6ff556a11556e30925e12e1df76d007.jpg

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Ok !

image.thumb.png.9ff48d38c3a06c5ecaf79d93275c12c9.pngimage.thumb.png.9ff48d38c3a06c5ecaf79d93275c12c9.png

It appears that your TE27 dimensions for mounting the front cross member, maybe a tiny bit smaller than those on the KE3X & KE70 series.

The drawing indicates the dimension across the engine bay, between the rails is 71.6 cm, where the KE30 appears to 71.8 c. (2 mm difference)

The distance between the holes on each side, in the "chassis rail", appear to be a little bit wider apart than my KE30.  (13.5cm as opposed to 12.5 cm)

When you got hold of your Starlet cross member; did you drop it into the chassis of your KE27, & see if the mounting holes lined up ?

I'm presuming, that the only reason, you cut the rack 7 pinion mounts from the Starlet cross member, was that the Starlet cross member, was not a drop-in option, in your TE27 ?

I'll see if I can find a body dimension drawing on the net for the KE3X series.  I did have a KE55 coupe chassis here, but it had bad rust in it, in the back pillars, so I've cut it up, & it has gone, so I can't measure it.  I'm pretty sure the KE35 & KE-55 shared the same front cross member.

I did come across this drawing on the net from the Toyota Chassis repair manual, for KE & TE Series.

image.png.3ebfbf5dce33719cf8b9901a0111b69c.png

It advises the dimensions for the KE series, between the rails is 71.8cm, & the distance between the holes is 12.5 cm, which is what I measured on my cross member last night.

image.png.ff22c8d3ac90f79751120584620d7492.png

Cheers Banjo

 

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On 2/21/2022 at 9:30 PM, Banjo said:

When you got hold of your Starlet cross member; did you drop it into the chassis of your KE27, & see if the mounting holes lined up ?

I'm presuming, that the only reason, you cut the rack 7 pinion mounts from the Starlet cross member, was that the Starlet cross member, was not a drop-in option, in your TE27 ?

Cheers Banjo

 

Indeed they look like they are close enough, but never considered on using the Starlet frame, I just had read online that some people used the Starlet rack, so I went and got one, cut the rack supports, measure a little and attached to the TE27 subframe the best I could, there wasn't much more thought hahaha

 

And now we start this journey on December 17 

It took a while, but I was able to find some gas for the welder, and since it was on the lighted side I started with the driver side floor and rocker panel. First step is to remove all the rusted metal, so lets turn on the grinder and let the spark fly.
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And after you get to the good metal, it is time to test fit the new pieces. If you look closely, I had to cut the panel in front of the driver floor, and the inner base of the A pillar.
49863788333_d2d082f205_c.jpg 

This is just a rough test fit, to get an idea of how many parts this jigsaw needs and how all those pieces fit together.
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Little pieces like this, that I’ll have to make from scratch, or cut from a bigger part. I could gather a patch from the rocker panel I had made.
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The best way to do this is to make a wooden mold or buck, that will help to give the metal a new shape.
49854783343_ddb51748d6_c.jpg 

You can make it as simple or as complex as you want, as long as it the rough shape that you need, the more complex the more time and materials that you'll need, and as you can see I’m using some scraps of 2x4, it isn't very strong, but for a one off it helps a lot.
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And after a lot of hammering and some cursing, you get a new piece
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As usual, it takes a lot of trimming, test, trim, test, fit, trim, file, but it all pays out
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Then you do the same for the other part
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And again, after a lot of testing, you got what you want
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Some action with the welder, and a lick of paint and it looks much better
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With that done, the work on the floor can continue. It’s all a process of testing, hammering, and testing again until everything clicks in place
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And once you are in peace with the fitment of the pieces, pour some liquid metal over the joints to make them become as one.
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Meanwhile I was working on the floors, I also was working on the base of the A pillar, as a whole with the floors, also checking that the fitting was right.
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Also checking that the door and the fender still bolted correctly, and everything landed on the right spot
49862836083_178745880d_c.jpg 

And again I had to make the indentation for the front fender to bolt correctly. But I had learned a lot since the last part, so I made it again and took a different approach to build it and this one came out much better.
49858927193_2806c0578b_c.jpg 

With the rocker panel in place, weld everything inside
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And then seam seal all the interior and weld everything in the outside
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And done, with the seam sealer it almost looks good and that nothing ever happened. 
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With that done, lets go to the other side
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And ended this part on January 26 and we are on the 2020 
 

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