Firehawk's N2 racecar project

[firehawk]

Phew, I'm finally done with stripping down the body - both the interior and the engine bay are completely empty, barring the steering equipment which I still need for pushing the car around. Here's a few photos I took yesterday after finishing up;





The rest of the photos are here;

http://paranoia.tuug.fi/gallery2/v/jh/ae86/nov29/

A few observations;
- The engine looks really good on the inside, the cross-hatch pattern from honing still visible on the bores. It most certainly hasn't been driven 320000km, so apparently the whole engine has been changed at some point. I still need to check the bearings but I don't think there's any surprises there, either. I think I'll just clean it up a bit and put it back together for now - then maybe once the car is up and running again, I'll look into some modifications.
- The transmission, on the other hand, is probably original. The input shaft has quite a bit of free play as it moves over 1mm to every direction - left, right, up, down, in, out. That's probably not normal so I may have to see if I can get it rebuilt. There's a good thread on it over at Club4AG but it looks like a very expensive task. One alternative would be to find a good T50 from an FR Carina (which ones have the same input/output shafts as the AE86 T50?) and bolt the bellhousing and rear extension from the current one to it.
- Is the standard AE86 exhaust stainless? The pipework looked almost like brand new!

Anyway, next I'm going to start looking into building a "barbecue" rig to make it easier to work on the underside of the body. This looked quite interesting as it's a rather universal design;

http://winston1.home.mchsi.com/rotisserie.htm