Firehawk's N2 racecar project

[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.