Firehawk's N2 racecar project

[banpei]

You're quick. Only three days in Finland and already busy on the car.

[Yonzie]

firehawk Wrote:Well, on paper the 20v engines make too much power (only 20% increase is allowed, stock is 124hp so up to 149hp is allowed) to be legal in an AE86, but one thought I had was telling them that only the head is from a 20v but the block+bottom end is stock - I'll be damned if any of the MOT guys can tell the difference between 3-rib and 7-rib blocks. This makes the engine a "home-made" one, and the power on paper is no longer valid and needs to be established with a dyno plot.

It's the same here in Denmark... With the added twist that you actually have to PROVE that the car still conforms to the emission specs it was born with... And it's not good enough putting it on a rolling road with a tester up it's exhaust. Apparently it's a 10k€ test, or ~3-4k€ if done in Sweden or Germany (Not including travel, etc.)...

Consider yourselves lucky.

[firehawk]

banpei Wrote:You're quick. Only three days in Finland and already busy on the car.

Hehe - I believe that by the end of this coming weekend, I'll have the interior and engine bay stripped completely bare, leaving only a body on wheels.

Anyway, yesterday I started taking the engine apart in place since our engine lift is being borrowed and I'm too impatient to wait for him to return it. After taking off the alternator and intake manifold, I noticed that the block has 7 ribs! The head is, of course, a bigport one so I'm a bit confused on what kind of an engine this actually is. The way I see it, there are three alternatives;
[list]
[*]If the entire bottom end is from a zenki AE92, it should have 9.4 CR pistons with 20mm gudgeon pins and a crankshaft with 42mm big ends.
[*]It could also just have the 7-rib block and standard AE86 crankshaft with 40mm big ends and 9.4 CR pistons w/ 18mm gudgeon pins.
[*]Finally, it could be a full kouki AE92 bottom end, using 10.3 CR pistons w/ 20mm gudgeon pins and a crank with 42mm big ends.
[/list:u]
Well, I guess I'll see which of those is true once I get the engine pulled off the car.

[banpei]

firehawk Wrote:

banpei Wrote:You're quick. Only three days in Finland and already busy on the car.

Hehe - I believe that by the end of this coming weekend, I'll have the interior and engine bay stripped completely bare, leaving only a body on wheels.

As we dutch say: You're not allowing to grow grass over it. But in Dutch it sounds better...

[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

[firehawk]

Ok, a quick update on the state of my project. The body is currently waiting in the garage for me to start driving all over it with a rotary sander and a wire brush. It's currently on a borrowed garage spot, so I'd rather not start exposing too much metal yet in case the guy needs to use his space and I have to put the hachi outside. As soon as I have my MR2 fixed, I can shove it outside and start working all-out on the AE86 body.

The engine is now disassembled into tiny bits for rebuilding and upgrading. As I noted above, the block is the 7-rib one but the crank, rods and pistons are the "smaller" ones (48/40 crank, 40/18 rods, 10.0:1 CR pistons). At first, I was thinking about changing over to the stronger ones but then found out that the older crank is a about a kilogram lighter and the rods are ~70g lighter. I love ultra-responsive NA engines, so I decided to go with the current internals. Therefore, I'm going to modify the rods as per TRD instructions and smooth out the sides, then balance them. I don't have the equipment to balance both ends separately, but getting the total weight of the rods within one gram of each other should be good enough.

I quite dislike the press-fit wrist pins, though, so I'm now trying to find a nice set of pistons with 81mm diameter, 18mm pin (with circlips) and a slight dome top which would give me a CR around 11.0:1 with the TRD 0.8mm gasket. So far, the only ones I've found are by Toda and cost a bit too much. Any suggestions?

The bigport head is now sitting right next my computer as I've started cleaning up the combustion chambers and smoothing the ports - again, following the instructions in the TRD Levin&Trueno Bible. It's nice when I'm able to watch TV while sanding - my roommates must think I'm crazy.

Oh yeah, I managed to find me a set of original side skirts and the rear bumper add-ons. They're a look a bit different than what I've usually seen - instead of having two triangular ends, the rear end is much longer and comes all the way to the door. ZaX's silver coupe seems to have the same kind of skirts as the ones I have. I've also seen them a few times on other coupes as well - never on a 3-door, though. They are flexible plastic, just like all the original Toyota side skirts I've seen - not glassfiber.

My webserver is crashed at the moment, so I'll slap a few images onto this post.

[SekiguchiUeno]

wiseco pistons is the answer, nice kvality and good price,

http://www.wiseco.com/PDFs/Catalogs/SC06_Toyota.pdf

edit: they have only overbore for 4ag

but my friend has wiseco pistons for s13 without overbore and with circlips

[banpei]

firehawk Wrote:Bigport head, meet AEU86.

LOL!

[Rio_Cyber]

i notice a gits manga lying on the table

[Widar]

How are you doing, my friend?