Lauren's 1985 Kouki Trueno

[Lauren]

More news. Mark has finally got rid of the bit of hand towel cable tied round the vacuum pipes for the idle ups and done it properly, yay!

Now, I can have my headlights on without the idle dropping through the floor and activating the anti-stall on the ECU. Am very glad to get this sorted now my lights are on pretty much all the time.




Also, Mark is now busy fitting an OEM illuminated foglight switch. The car is now currently in this kind of state:





Nearly there with all the jobs ticked off.

As for AE86 life, well I have to say, I'm loving it, the heater works well, it's no probs to use in the cold and perhaps even more fun is to be had now the roads are nice and greasy. Only consideration I'm possibly thinking for the future is to put different suspension on as I really don't think the TRD suspension works well on UK roads. I think the way to go with this may be to look at uprating the ARBs and then running softer springs and something like Konis on the dampers. We'll see.

[Lauren]

Foglight switch now in and working:



This is what someone thought was an acceptable way of taking a feed for the foglight from the rear light wiring:



FFS!

Whilst I was at the back of the car, noticed where some utter bloody aunt has scraped their car against mine, no doubt whilst parked at work:



Fortunately I polished it off okay.

[banpei]

Looks like that someone also thought it was a good idea to create a short circuit for illumination!

[Lauren]

My car has gone off to http://chassisclean.co.uk/ for a 3 day undersealing treatment with Dinitrol being pumped everywhere.

Underside pics whilst car was over the pit this morning:























RCA can be seen here:

[Lauren]

Was quite impressed by the after shots!

[robokill]

preserve them

[Lauren]

The car has developed a misfire of late. Problem found (first thing I looked at) I think!





Exhaust manifold has obviously melted it. There is a make shift heat shield around it, but it's obviously not enough and the pipe from No.1 exhaust is very close to it.

A new one will be ready to pick up on Tuesday. :+:

[fax0815]

Thats a very common problem, I run a headshield and wrapped the cap in heat insulating fibre. No problems ever since.

[Lauren]

Following a compression test that revealed 50psi on No.4, I suspect the rings have gone.

No matter, we have a blueprinted 4AGZE sitting in the shed, so that will be going in!


Went and checked the car over as a few people had suggested that it might have a sticky valve. Started the car after a six week lay up with no issues. It's still obviously running on three cylinders for the most part but it was very nice to drive it again and it was still way quicker than the crappy Yaris. :+:

Also it has character again, unlike the souless Yaris that I'm driving around in.

Anyway, will stop going on about the Yaris, but as many of you know, boring cars and me just do not mix, so I'm keen to get on with sorting the AE86.

So, took the car up to the new workshop and whipped the cam covers off to check for sticking valves. No sticking valve on No.4 on the exhaust or inlet that I could obviously see, though I didn't have a feeler gauge to check clearances, but could see nothing obvious at all when rotating the engine by hand.

Pic of exhaust cam which is a 256, so I've got a 264/256 setup:



Both cam covers off, yes I know not that interesting:


No issues with having room to work then!



Will be starting the conversion in Mid Feb, due to wanting to miss the weather, my fiancee still moving into his new premises and I need another payday!

[Lauren]

Okay, a bit of an update. Despite plans to fit a GZE, I decided to shelve these as it was going to cost me a fair bit in sorting the issues around the GZE, but really I wasn't sure that a GZE is what I wanted in the car at the end of the day.

Yes, I know we have Mark's blue-printed GZE sitting in the shed and that ought to be a good engine with the care and attention he paid when he put it all together, but I couldn't help but feel that an AE86 really is about being NA and though it would mean less power, I prefer the feel and sound of an NA.

Also it was going to cost me a grand or so by the time we had figured out some of the custom bits for a GZE swop and after the car being off the road for three months, I was determined to get it back on the road for the spring.

So with all that in mind, we opted to just do a quick fix. The plan was to whip the head off (hope for a stuck valve) and likely do bit of honing and fit a new set of piston rings. However, it didn't quite work like that as you shall see.

Still, the car is back on the road for the grand total of around £200 and a lot of hard graft!

Here's the tale as it happened:

It all started on the 27th February with a space cleared in Mark's new workshop:



The next day, Tuesday 28th Feb:

Hmm, after a whole day of stripping things down, it looks like the bore on No.4 has some nasty scoring.

You can see on No.4 from here:



And here:



Mark has some much better pics. It looks like the scoring may be too much to repair by simply honing alone. Also whatever we do, it looks to be pretty difficult to do anything with the bottom end in situ due to the crossmembers and steering rack being in the way. It couldn't be worse as far as No.4 cylinder is concerned.

Looks like I'll be taking the rest of the engine out tomorrow, so will need a crane after all.

Not sure what I'm going to do tbh as the car really needs to be out of the workshop in a week.