Project Q - Sams 86 (many tech Pics)

[rthy]

its only just the start, let me add some more

[rthy]

well my exhaust fits nice and close, heres a test fit:








UPDATE: I finally managed to do a little bit of work for the first time in about 2 weeks. I have been really sick and have been too sore and lethargic to do anything. I think I am getting better now though.

Also I will soon have another temporary camera on the way.





UPDATE: IT runs!!


I have found a few interesting things though.

- Noise: the noise level is suprisingly manageable, yeah I still plan on making a variable exhaust but I think I can safely avoid it for a while. The Lukey muffler does make an interesting sound though that I can't say I tottaly like, but I might be able to get used to it.

- I have problems with the engine idle. Normally it's fine but sometimes it just dies. After I have driven it it's sometimes more likely to do it.

- Twice it has tottaly cut out on me and I had to turn the key off and on again to get it running again.

- The engine is rough when I get on and off the throttle, I doubt this is due to the engine mount but I will double check.

- The TRD engine mount I am running suprisingly doesn't send much vibrations to the cabin. I will keep it in there and try putting the other one in and see how it feels. It sure holds the engine in place well too.

- My "commercial" brake master works a treat, it's perfect and I see no reason that I will ever have an issue with it.



I have issues which has me bothered but there are some upsides, I have an ignition problem which I am familiar with which limits my power and revs but even still it still has a decent amount of power for the current setup, so I must of done something right.

Also when the engine does idle it does it well, I can place a washer on intake box when the car is running and it pretty much doesn't move.






UPDATE:


- My engine is no longer rough getting on and off the throttle, a quick adjustment of the TPS fixed that (thank to Kev- RIP buddy)

- The TRD engine mount does transmit vibrations into the cab afterall, on deacelleration it's a bit nasty and I will try a normal mount and see how well it works.

- My idle problem is still there, sometimes it's fine and then it just dies. I will look into it soon.

- My car has used an obscene amount of fuel in the 150km I have driven it. I have gone through something like $25 worth of fuel. I just hope it's because I have been giving it hell in that time.

- My fuel pump relay has been clicking on an off rapidly. When I took it apart I found that it was the most unusual relay I have ever seen. It has 2 coils activating one set of contacts. One of the coils was discoloured and had a significantly higher resistance so I thik it's stuffed. I am not sure where to get another one of these, I rang up a toyota dealer and the number didn't mean much to him. I might just run an OR gate though 2 conventional relays and then add some capacitors if it's still clicking a bit.



I plan to shortly:

- Trace back what the spare wire is in my loom

- Change the rear brake pads to some super soft low temp items

- Try the following ignitors: 16V, 20V and Camira and see if it fixes my ignition problem

- Wrap up my body loom a bit more to make it look completely factory

- Replace and rewire the factory fuel pump relay.


I also may have the use of a camera again shortly so I will post some pics up.

[rthy]

I have finally writted the first proper easy to understand 20V to RWD guide that doesnt involve firewall mods, relocated engine monts, cross-over pipes, external thermostats, etc.. you even get to keep your heater running.

I am still working on it but I need to know what people think:

heres the link:




keep in mind this is a work in progress



I finally have sorted things out, so here is how my engine is looking:





and a mean cold air intake:







and a front on pic:





I want to get a recording of this thing reving up soon, as I think it sounds seriously mean.



here is a picture of the bottom of my coil mount:





The heat shroud is a one peice design and does a good job of blocking the heat out.

[rthy]

I have started fitting sideskirts that I bought. I have seen way too many poor installs and I originaly was looking for an OEM set because I was so put off the fitment of aftermarket sets. However Wei came to the rescue and supplied me a cheap set of TRD copy side skirts that are nice and thick (so much unlike streeters kits). Straight away it fitted well but I spent the time to shave it down a little at a time to make it fit really close and it took suprisingly little time. I just held one end in place with my toolbox while I moved it back and forth to shave bits off, I ended up using self taping screws to hold it on. So far I have only done one though and now which I still need to paint.


Heres my mid way dummy fit:




and how it fitted against the body:



I still don't know what I will do about that gap where the step is, maybe it will be un-noticeable when its painted.

[rthy]

I received my first custom parts that were for the first time not done by me. They are my 45mm RCA's:



not finsihed yet though. I still need to round them off, find some locating collars (anyone know where???), paint them black and buy some high tensile bolts.


I finished my RCA's today. Like everything else it's painted black so as to not attract any unwanted attention.





installed:





I also had to cut my grease nipple and weld it up because I didnt have room for it.



Well heres the specs for anyone who is interested:


RCA height: 45mm

Bolt: 8.8 Grade, 80mm, 12 x 1.25


I also got some new spring washers



I also today painted the bottom half of my coil-overs, I have decided to paint the whole lot including the spring black to make it look stock. So far it does a suprisingly good job of hiding the adjustable collar:






quick update:

- I will be getting the following soon:

* H4 6500K HID kit
* Wolf 4
* Wolf 4 20V loom
* Wolf 4 PC link cable and hand controller

I also dropped off the con-rods and pistons of my other engine for crack track testing and shot-peening.

and lastly I think I have dicovered why my engine wont rev out and I am working on it this weekend.

[rthy]

Well I bought some HID Xenon light incerts for my car, unlike the rice up crap globes out there these are pure white at 6500K, Heres a pic with only one fitted:




I have only so far properly mounted one ballast and let the other sit in losely. I am going to get it profesionally adjusted and keep the test paper on me in my car so I will hopefully avoid an officer thinking I have broken the law. Right now they are dipped very low but even so they are amazing.



Heres how it looked against the wall of the garage with the HID on the left and the standard on the right:

[rthy]

made some basic top mounts for now, but I will shortly (I hope!) modify the metal clips on either side of the headlight to keep it completely vertical. Heres a basic pic I took recently:









I was never happy with the big engine connector on the firewall that Sprinters and Ae-71 corollas had. It has five connections on it and just for that it has a huge connector and an even bigger mount to clip it to the firewall. I wanted to remake my engine loom anyway so I decide to replace not only the loom but the connector at the same time. As a bonus I found that the loom tube that the wiring harness goes through on the firewall is bigger thanit needs to be so I downsized it for a neater appearence. To replace the connector I chose to fit 2 smaller watertight plugs instead of one. The first is a two-way connector and the other a three way. Here is how the two connectors are wired:

Connector 1:

1 - Reverse switch
2 - Reverse switch
3 - Starter motor solenoid


Connector 2:

1 - Water temp switch
2 - Oil pressure sensor

I have temporarily cable tied the cables into place but I plan to make a clip to hold them in place in the cam cover channel.

[rthy]

As part of my new engine bay wiring I also decided to hook up a relay for the starter motor solenoid. For those unfamiliar with the problem this is to overcome a problem with a cars ageing electrical system. The power for the starter motor solenoid goes from the battery to the ignition switch, through the contacts and then to the solenoid. The contacts do wear and the extra volt drop is just too much to bring the solenoid in, resulting in just a clicking sound. This is fixed by mounting a relay next to the starter motor and directly supplying power to the solenoid. Although a total overkill I used a high current relay from Jaycar that can handle 70A ontheir normally open contacts. I chose this replay for its low resistance contacts. It is still a conventional size but it does however have extra wide spade connections on its switched contacts to allow for the high current. To match this I also used oversized OFC free cables to transmit the power and mounted the relay very close to keep the cables the shortest possible. I did all this to lower the voltage drop to the absolute minimum so as to hopefully be able to start my car still when my battery level goes down lower than what I could previously get away with.

I am really happy with how it turned out, heres how it looks:

[rthy]

To let me design my strut brace I needed to find out how much room I had under the bonnet. So I bought some plastasine, made a heap of small fingers and proceded to stick them everywhere. After that I closed my bonnet and opened it again to see how far they were bent down. My first attempt showed me that the fingers needed to be bigger so i did that, it looked like this:







and then after I closed and opened the bonnet again:



I found that above the airbox I had an unusually large amount of room, infact I had heaps more room just about everywhere except one part. On one side of the strut top one of the bonnet supports comes within about 30mm. So next time I will do the same thing again however put all the fingers in that one place. It will make it tricky having that support there however I will have to just work around it. I am making a complex design that apart from between the two towers also has a seperate set of supports that go to the middle of the firewall. Well unless I change my mind of course. Funny enough I saw a brace after I designed mine in a magazine of HPI, it was TRD branded but I think I have a better design that I will likely doing.





I thought I would show what my rods look like now that they have been ground by myself and then crack-tested and shot-peened:






Unfortunetly as the picture shows the little end bearing was destroyed in the process and I am having a hard time trying to source another set, anyone know where I can get a set of these?


Forgot to mention I now have a blacktop head which I am going to use in my engine buildup instead. Looks like I will be building up a hybrid engine with the AE 101 - Silvertop bottom end, with the exception of the cam belt drive on the crank. I will also be using the intake from the silvertop. I also plan to shave the head or the block slightly which combined with a 0.8mm TRD gasket will raise the compression.

I also have almost finished matching the intake manifold off the silvertop to suit. This involved fileing the round inside edges as the blacktop has wider intake ports.

From what I hear 20V throttles are far from restrictive so running them will give me no loss in power and possibly a slightly higher vacume signal which will help tuning.

Because the blacktop head has next to no squish area it will initually cause me to lose compression. I thought this would be a real issue but now I have found out the difference is only from 10.5:1 down to 10.3:1. Unless I am mistaken this will automaticly be back to normal once I place the thinner gasket in. I will shave the head to raise it closer to 11:1. Another concern I had initually is that the intake cam gears wouldbe retarded to a point at which it would affect the power, but I did my maths and because the blacktop has such large cam drive gears the difference will be less than a single degree. So that should affect much. Besides I will probably make my own adjustable exhaust cam gear in the future.

[rthy]

I have spent some time polishing my throttles, head and manifold. I also don't know if this does much but I filed down the edges of the 4 throttles to not disrupt the air so much.

Heres a pic (needs a good clean):




I even filed down the pretruding thread from the screws that hold the butterflies in place. Obsessive? maybe but it wasn't hard and I figured why not.





I did another one of my many extractor designs, however I think this one is pretty close to what I will end up with:





It has a very long length to tune it for the RPM that I want, hence it's hard to package. I want to have these full length pipes and still have a flex pipe and my "metal-cat" catalytic converter. Because the cat is as far back as possible I am thinking that it might not heat up enough to catalise. So I think I will make heatsheilds for almost all of it to keep the heat in.


Heres the specs:

Primary O.D size: 38mm (1.5 inch)
Primary Length: 70cm

Secondary O.D size: 44mm (1.75 inch)
Secondary Length: 35cm

Tuned RPM: Approx 7000 revs for the primary resonance





For those who want how to know how to change collets in a twin cam engine that has rececced walve springs then look at this:






I modified the pipe again later to make it longer and wider at the top though for the valve remover to clamp on it.