Congrats on the rego !

Do you have any squeaks or grindy noises ? You must have some :P How are all the bushes ?
I was replacing bushes in mine but this bloody noise wouldnt go away, found 1/2 the subframe was loose lol

Will be keen to see how you go as you fix her up, I feel your pain with the auto, the trimatic isnt much better.
Top end of 2nd gear is as exciting as it gets, if shes in 3rd gear then its all over unless your doing around 80.

Thanks all!

Chances, no squeaks but a few noises from the front right wheel rubbing against the back of the inner fender. I gave it a tap for clearance and now she's perfect. The bushes and shocks really seem in good nick, she drives nicely.

Work yesterday was on the exhaust - I knew it was a bit pinched but didn't realise it was this bad! No wonder she feels breathless over 80kmh. I got some 2" pipe to slip over the stock stuff and its going together fine. The larger pipe just means I can clearance the subframe without losing any flow, although the welding job is a bit more complicated with a bit of fill and patch work involved.

More as it happens.

Yeah that exhaust is not great

And... its still not great haha. The welds are pretty terrible looking as I havent cleaned them up at all after the final pass or two, but its holding together well and doesn't leak... except for the muffler which has about a thumbnail sized hole in it.

I'm probably going to replace almost the entire stock system with new 1 3/4" pipe so I won't face any issues in the future. It'll have a 9" hotdog under the passenger floor and a larger muffler in the rear to keep everything quiet - as much as I love a rorty exhaust note I'd rather it only be there when I'm laying in to it.

Cheers - boingk

The more I tried to locate holes in the exhaust, the more I found and the better the idea of a new system sounded. That's exactly what I did, a 1.75" system with a single rear muffler, nothing special but its quiet and non-restrictive. 

Next, I've been looking at performance modifications for the little beast. Top of the pile is a new gearbox to do away with the Toyoglide. I visited the wreckers and got a K50 box out of a KE70, plus the 4K engine attached to it. I can the flywheel, bellhousing and gearbox to slot straight into my car and go from there.

To complement the gearbox it looks like I've got a few other things lined up, too. I've decided to go traditional with a Sprinter twin-carb intake and individual Aisan carbies, plus a valve-spring upgrade and new camshaft. The specs on the cam look like about .425" lift and 225 degrees duration @ .050" lift. So, a nice peppy fast road type cam. Should be fun!

Now I just need to bolt all this stuff in and see how we go from there.

Did you get that off the NZ guy?  The one in Australia was broken where it bolts to the hot box?

Yeah bought the Aussie one. Not a fan of water-heated manifolds though, they get enough exhaust heat in this sort of setup to solve most problems after about 3 minutes of driving time. Couldn't see if it was broken in the picture, may have been a different manifold you were referring to?

Today I unloaded the engine and gearbox, then set about giving them a quick cleanup and disassembly.

The gearbox came off pretty easily, I only had a short battle with a nut that seized and then stripped on one of the bolts - it came off with the help of a cutting disc, hehe. After that, the flywheel and clutch actually looked pretty good, I wouldn't be surprised if it had a new one at some point in its life. The donor vehicle was a KE70 with about 200,000km on the clocks and it definitely doesn't look like that much mileage. If it is, shes certainly had a gentle life.

Either way, I have a new standard clutch kit from Excedy coming to go into the build. This will give me peace of mind and allow me to keep the old unit as an emergency spare.

More as it happens.

Good to see the site back up and running - I thought it was gone for good. In the meantime, I've made a fair bit of progress on the little KE20.

The old auto gearbox came out okay (bastard of a job if you havent done it) and the new Excedy clutch went in nicely, followed by the gearbox.

I treated the gearbox to a full flush and then new Penrite fluid and some Nulon teflon additive. It really does work to keep the gearbox cooler and shift a bit smoother. The box went in just fine with a bit of surgery to the transmission tunnel to enlarge the shifter hole rearward - easily done with a grinder and drill. To mate the box in underneath I drilled and tapped the old mount to take the new gearboxes mount pattern - again no big deal.

From here on out it was all the little stuff which makes something work better. I sealed the lower shifter boot as the old one had split, I double-booted the shifter to help stop fumes, I made up a plate to seal off the old auto shifter hole... and while I was at it made a drink holder out of some pineapple tins. Seriously, they make great drink holders!

After all that I took her on a 2700km thrash from Broken Hill to Sydney via some family on the coast. It was faultless apart from my ghetto-rigged cluch cable, which was a modified universal throttle cable. It needed a new ziptie on the pedal end after the old one broke on the return leg of the trip. 

Figures for the trip were 2678km, 194L of petrol and 2L of oil (7.25L/100km and 475 miles per pint). Most of that was doing 110kmh indicated for hundreds of kilometres nonstop, hence the oil usage from the poor little 3K.

All in all its been a successful few weeks!

That's awesome.  You shouldn't have told people about the pineapple tins.  You could have started a business and retired on the proceeds!

Great to hear it is running so well.  As a boy, dad and I used to do an annual Melbourne - Labrador - Melbourne trip and his KE20 just ate up the kilometres along the old back route through Dubbo, Goondawindi etc.  Good times