Firehawk's N2 racecar project

[firehawk]

Widar Wrote:How are you doing, my friend?

Fine, thanks. Managed to fix most of the problems with my MR2 last weekend (well, it still needs some paint here and there but at least now it runs and drives) and will now start working on the hachi at full force. I started by stripping the body sealant in the front wheelwells and engine bay to prepare for seam welding. Used a steel wire brush on an angle grinder - what an awful mess it makes with the molten sealant flying everywhere. Sandblasting would probably be a bit easier but I'm afraid that it might take too much metal along with it..

[SuperHessu]

You propably wouldn't even get the them off by sandblasting, because the sealant is so flexible that the sand won't eat it at all I found out that trying to sandblast them of from my hachis rear-end, had no affect on it... It's the same thing with bitumi-soundproofing, sandblasting doesn't work on it nearly at all

[Jan Pedersen]

Sandblasting will not do the trick... You need to do this by hand

[firehawk]

Oh well, I should've known that there's no easy way out of this. I found that a stainless steel paint scraper works pretty well for chipping off the sealant and the braided steel brush can then be used for cleaning up the remnants around the panel seams to prepare for welding. Now I'll either need to build a "rotisserie" for getting good access to the underbody or just turn the bodyshell over to it's side on top of some tyres or something..

[Widar]

Good to hear that you're taking good care of her!

[firehawk]

Yay, summer is here and this project is gaining some speed again. The front third of the body is just about stripped clean of all body sealant and black goo and I can start welding the seams and a few rust holes. The rest of the body isn't going to be as easy since I only have the bottom of the car some 60cm off the floor. Pretty crampy.

All the rubber bushings are now gone - taken care of by a butane torch. I'll need to clean up the suspension arms, crossmember and rear axle housing with a wirebrush and then spray them with some anti-chip coating and a semigloss black on top. The Prothane bushing kit is already waiting to be installed.

I'm also going all-out on rebuilding the diff and rear axle. I ordered a full set of replacement clutch and spline plates, springs and washers from Toyota, all the diff and wheel bearings from a local Koyo distributor and a 4.7 ring and pinion kit from SYM. The service manual section for diff disassembly/reassembly looks a bit scary, though.

Once the rear axle is re-assembled, I'll need to start looking into shortening the front struts for a pair of SW20 shocks. Most of the coilover sleeves I see on eBay and such seem to be aluminium, which I can't weld onto the strut body. Anyone know of a good quality coilover kit with steel sleeves?

[NoHachi]

I believe that the Ground Controll coilover kits are steel. Great quality, any springrate and look purdy. But why do you want to weld them to the strut? two locating point-welds will do the same for alloy.

Dissasembly of the rear axle/ differential is peanuts..not scary at all. The other way round though.....Wouldn't attempt this myself without all the neccesary tools (and you need quite some).

[firehawk]

NoHachi Wrote:I believe that the Ground Controll coilover kits are steel. Great quality, any springrate and look purdy. But why do you want to weld them to the strut? two locating point-welds will do the same for alloy.

Hmm, it seems that GC (or at least some of them) kits use also an aluminium sleeve. The problem is with the finnish inspection (aka. MOT) regulations, which state that home-made repairs on suspension components is not allowed. If the visual inspection shows that the struts are obviously home-built, they may order the struts to be replaced. Using a steel sleeve allows me to weld all around the strut tube and make it look more like a "factory-made" unit.

NoHachi Wrote:Dissasembly of the rear axle/ differential is peanuts..not scary at all. The other way round though.....Wouldn't attempt this myself without all the neccesary tools (and you need quite some).

Actually, we do have pretty much all of the required tools at our garage, except for one - a press. Unfortunately it's probably the one that's needed the most.. I'll probably refer all my pressing needs (haha, pun) to my preferred machine shop so that shouldn't be a problem, either.

And WTF - the service manual says to grind away the rear wheel bearing's inner retainer. That thing is a huge piece of solid steel!

[firehawk]

Ok, I got the diff now disassembled and found some pretty nasty carnage inside. The clutch block with the two gears was split in half, the other block had cracked from its corners and two of the four springs were split. The casing is still intact, as are all four gears. I have no idea what those two clutch blocks cost as OEM spares so I'm a bit worried whether it would actually be cheaper to get a completely new stock kouki LSD instead of buying spare parts to fix the current one...

[BOOMEX]

Bad news

Check the price of those parts...

I thinck it's the first thing to do... :wink:

Good luck with the rest