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So with my trip to the USA in late 2016 me and a few others met up with their buddy scott. so after talking for abit and spending some time with him and inspecting a car i liked which had too much bog for my liking we both decided i would leave him some cash and when i found a car i liked that met my budget i would get him too inspect it. then many months went by searching craigslist couple times a week with no luck. then a mid 60s Chrysler newport popped up in my price range so had it inspected but ended up needing a full interior and had missing parts all over so that was a no GO few weeks later a 64 galaxie comes up slightly out of my price range but there was nothing else that i liked worth inspecting at that time. so a deal was done to purchase it. sent scott some extra coin to get some parts that it needed also along with getting some cherry bomb mufflers. about a month and half later it started its trip back home starting from phoenix AZ to LA about 4 months later it arrived into nz and being cleared by maf and customs Ready for collection As i go over to collect it from its secure yard the person informs me the paperwork says its a non runner what!? soo it has a flat battery well after swaping a charged battery into it it fires into life meanwhile while i move my car out of their yard and the shipping company (Non reflective) employee moves the galaxie out of the storage lot he starts to crunch a few gears then almost hits the wall a few times trying to park it. By then i was ready to throw him out of the car. then he asks the question on how im going to take it away? well im driving it mate And too much surprise he replies in shock it has no brakeees. oh yeah algood mate guessing he just has no clue about cars. so i hop in and brake pedal goes straight to the floor this is going to be interesting so i crawl up the road a few kilometers by changing from neutral to drive and trying to use the useless handbrake when needed soo a right turn comes up that i need to take ah not going to make that stop so i keep rolling in the median strip to the next street on my right. the next T intersection i roll through slowly followed by another right turn I have now arrived at my old mans workplace to check the brakes out so i can drive it home So i top up the empty brake reservoir and bleed the front brakes and we are good to go! so i cruised on home

made it home in great condition so i put the dog in the front with me and backed it out the drive way to turn it around then as i pull out clunk!! drive forward and look whos here fuel strap decided it did not want to be on no more although the car is abit long and low in the ass end which makes me have to go on a angle to get in the drive way. FT my mums not so great camera skills so the ol girl is running a 390 FE big block mayte with yet to confirm exactly what but i suspect running a cruise o matic trans.

also did a two second peeelout on the drive way when hard for what it is along with a cloud of smoke.

Pumped up the 32s today and they hold air which will be sweet to keep it rolling, they're bald though so I've got a set of 31s to go on. Looking pretty boss though!

Been pushing along... 5 lug rear end rebuilt with eaton tru track for 11's. Driveshaft rebuilt and balanced, although I screwed up the size on the last U joint. All the mounts are now fully completed and in, firewall painted with extreme rattle can goodness, fuel lines 90% there. Interior stripped out. Full week on it in a weeks time, hoping to smash out wiring and get the front end on.

Spoke too soon, GC's at castrol sorted me out with a few oil packs. Pretty happy to get a bit of a reward for all the hours been put into it \

Then within an hour off having it off the trailer I had the front torsions wound up and test fitted one of the wheeeeeels The grub approves too.

Made this a while back. All old school, traced a badge, marked out a grid and transfered it to the ali, then carefully drilled all the holes.

The passengers door lock actuator seized at some point, only noticed it last week. When I was pulling the door apart I noticed there was a bit of rust coming through the front inside of the door, and since the door was basically half in bits I thought I may as well fix it now. Looks like there may of been a previous repair done here. Now I just need enough courage to fix the rust that will most likely result in a respray haha

So umm, yeah, this is now mine. Discuss here Partners grandparents have had it the last 20 odd years and it failed it's last wof on a bit of rust in the tailgate area so asked if I wanted it, being that these are fucking rad I obviously said yes! Went down to oamaru and picked it up this weekend, actually runs pretty good too, bit spluttery on startup but once it's going she's good, is a 1.8 g62b so it's pretty gutless. Has rust especially around tailgate hinge area but I grabbed a mint tailgate a few months back so that's half the work done. The old fella has barryfied it nicely, has a big fuck off vacuum gauge on the dash and a oil pressure gauge sticking out of a hole in the dash. Has been painted a beautiful shade of "fence paint green". Plans are to fix rust and get it a wof, lift it a bit, mud tyres (which I've already got along with some sweet 15x8 alloys) not gonna bother trying to tidy it up, it's pretty rough and I kinda like it like that. Eventually kit it out as a camper but lada takes priority over this. Check this flash Shit out, Still works too!

Sold. The car is going to the British car museum in Hawkes Bay. If anyone happens to see it on its journey up in the next week or when its in the museum feel free to post pictures. Happy to have it going to a good home.

http://www.pirate4x4.com/forum/shop-tools/2530753-400-cdn-cnc-plasma-table.html

Swapped the 175/50/13 yokohamas onto the starsharks. It's so slammed now haha. It's also nicer to drive in most ways because it sits at slightly higher revs, apart from high speed cruising which still isn't too bad. Speedo is waaaay out now though!

Only took five attempts. The one on the right is the rusty original. 2nd from right is the closest I could get it. I made the up-bump on the bottom by bending it 90 degrees, then trying to un-bend it again. To do the folded over lip, I used a 8mm plate as an anvil and hammered the edge over, then kept hammering until I got it flat. I also made it long enough so I have enough for the other side of the car.

.056 or 1.4mm wasnt big enough , went to 1.5 as have no drills between 1.4 and 1.5 ( nothing imperial , no number drills or gauge drills... need actual jet drills ) ... it was slightly on the rich side ... drove sweet when hot but still stuttery when cold... might have a bung plug after all that... will throw plugs at it this week and see what happens... if it fixes all my problems i might have to kick myself in the face

Instead of having to fire the "bait launcher 240" (240 because thats how many meters the frozen sinker that i made went) by squeezing an air gun, that was attached to the top of the irrigarion valve, that I built earlier, I decided to make a electric trigger system for it. Used a 24 volt solenoid and a couple of switches. Works wonders. Just about blew the window out of my conservatory with the 80 psi I had in it.

So its Labour day and I have a low R31. 1.5 coils removed from front and adjustables in the rear. Still rides decent enough too.

today i bolted it all together and set it up as best i could with a tape measure and a straight edge and then i drove it. the car is transformed. no more diving when the road has undulations and the steering is heaps lighter too. tomorrow im going to try and get the settings better but its pretty good now. im definitely calling this a win. i didn't take any pictures because im useless.

experiments with scrub radius. so the front end is less than perfect with the 245s on the front and a really positive scrub radius its pretty twitchy. i couldn't get the wheel any closer to the strut, its basically touching now. i started thinking about the clevis type mounting of the strut that lots of modern stuff has. that design would allow me to move the wheel inboard and decrease the scrub radius right? so, choose one that has lots of parts available and is really well supported by aftermarket shit. S15. parts for days. so i bought some S15 front hub carriers and LCAs and had a bit of a measure. straight away its clear that the Nissan design moves the ball joint 30mm closer to the centre line of the tire. whilst all other things remain basically the same. win. on first inspection it looked like it could work. there were a couple of things that might throw a spanner in the works but i rang the guys at Techno Toy Tuning and they could supply me with a fabricated lower control arm that would bolt into the AE86 crossmember and have the right balljoint taper for the S15 hub. good. so with a bit of fucking around i amassed the following parts that in theory would all come together seamlessly to make it work, S15 hubs S15 Tein coilovers MX70 cresseda inner tie rods TTT LCA's made to adapt S15 to celica/AE86 (ring them, they make heaps of them apparently) complete with castor arms stock S15 tie rod ends bolt it all together then attach it to a celica and it all fits. bump steer measured at +2mm from ride height to full bump and + 2mm from ride height to full droop. a total travel of 140mm and a total toe change of 2mm positive. that will do me just fine. have i fixed the scrub radius? well its all theory at this point because i only trialed it today. i need to get the struts rebuilt and find the bracket that came with my front brakes that will bolt my calipers to the S15 hubs. but, the ball joint is 30mm closer to the centreline of the tire. at 2 degrees camber the strut top is much closer to the center of the car that it was before. when you draw it all that change in line angle makes a big difference. also there is now a 20mm gap between the strut and the wheel so i could move the wheel in by 20mm and decrease the scrub radius even further if i need to. im calling it a win. im going to get the struts rebuilt and find the brackets then bolt it all in and see what happens. here are some random pictures of things. 2017-09-30_04-59-07 by sheepers, on Flickr 2017-09-30_04-58-57 by sheepers, on Flickr 2017-09-30_04-58-39 by sheepers, on Flickr 2017-09-30_04-58-30 by sheepers, on Flickr 2017-09-30_04-58-21 by sheepers, on Flickr 2017-09-30_04-58-05 by sheepers, on Flickr

I have bought a poorly treated, unloved 1981 KE70 Toyota Corolla, with the vision of restoring and also upgrading it to the 3SGE Beams Black Top. I want to set the car up so it can be taken to the track and also used as a show car. I have bought a 1999 Toyota Altezza with a 6 speed manual box and the donating Beams engine. Will post photos and discussion as the project goes on, please feel free to ask questions

Alexpress? I'm also interested as I love cheap stuff

Chur guys, Have made the decision to continue onto the 45 path. Increasing intake port size to 41.5mm, will need to fabricate a manifold to taper down to this size.

this is actually barry genius*, its easy to work and shape holes to suit, and dead flat when installed, will insulate from heat soak and over time will expand to fill any gap and prevent airleaks. *Untill it catches on fire

Total board was like $1 and a pack of standard zenner diodes is fine for estimating a few L left Don't complicate it

Ooooohhhhh shit yeh. These give me a semi. Colour is perfect and will look so rad with big tyres!!

pop on over there mayte spin some yarns

Oh hey, this thread has photos again! Unfortunately, this post doesn't bear a whole lot of good news. The venerable Escort has been doing daily duties for a year, the new engine is sweet, and goes as well as can be expected from a 1300 Kent. But... Sadly, it failed it's WOF last month on rust in the L/H A and C pillars. So after being inspired by @Hurmeez efforts in rust repair on his Mk2 i figured it was time to start digging at the rust. Over the long weekend, I watched more and more of my Escort disappear into dusty piles on the floor... It started off so nice. After removing layers of bathroom sealant from behind the dash, I found a small hole in the inner guard, by the firewall seam. Figuring this was the rust the WOF man was talking about, I decided it would be fairly easy to patch with the front guard removed. After drilling out the spot welds along the upper guard seam and watching most of the headlight surrounds disappear into thin air, I found the centimetres of bog in the front valance, and after the guard came off, the dodgy looking bits at the top and bottom of the A pillar. At this point there was no going back, so out came the poky screwdriver (with results illustrated below): This is the bottom of the passenger's A pillar. The driver's side isn't as bad, it only has a hole in the pillar, the sill on that side looks intact (at the moment, anyway) After finding the fist-sized hole in the floor, I threw caution into the winds and attacked any other dodgy-looking bit of the car I could find. This is the rear wheel arch, which looks like it's had a repair in the past and has continued rusting. There are a couple of small holes in the driver's A pillar section, and the guard seam is pretty sad. The heater bubble has yet to come off, but there is serious work there too judging by the holes around the base of it... This was Dad's contribution: leaving Psychedelic Furs lyrics on my car while my back was turned... So yeah. I've never tackled any kind of rust or metal forming on this level before, so any tips and advice are greatly appreciated! Discuss/offer advice/sharns/tell me it's fucked here:

Rust work came out a treat.

3 coats later it looked like this; After a full day piecing it back together, and prior James/Horndog kindly lent the services of his works guillotine. I then seam sealed the deck, along with blind stainless rivets both the ramps and deck... (Blaine kindly helped after a day of blasting for him)

Old school meet at your place so we can play on all your sweet toys?

I drilled the spot weld holes and cleaned up where welding is going to happen. I also added some holes so I can stick some more paint in the back of the seams once welded. And just in case, I added some drain holes. The original had a hole in the top, that let water in but no way for the water to get back out, so the bottom rusted out.

I got the old gal some new boots. Always planned on wider and 13in anyway. mate sold her van and kept the wheels so had no use for them, I’ve always liked Jilbas so once I test fit and they cleared, we struck a deal! Two were pretty grubby and brake dust starting to eat into them but they cleaned up pretty well with some truck wash, my electric toothbrush and a fine steelo pad. SSR Jilba 13x6.5 Type A. Nankang 175/50swith decent tread. Now I know how much I need to lower it, the front especially. It’s quite high at the x-member.

E1 TE1 it http://www.troublecodes.net/toyota/

Been doing mantenance at a local mill for quite a few years in return for timber for home renos. Decided it was time for a new outdoor ale consumption suite. grabbed half a dozen slabs of macrocarpa and set to them with chainsaw, belt sander and paint brush. Took a month of weekends but not a bad result for a alcoholic with a roofing problem

Man, it's looking great! I'll chortle if your neighbours ever get jealous, smash their house down and do the same thing - leaving only a hidden brick wall and some concrete from the original structure.

hello internet (if that is your real name), three weeks after they were supposed to start the gib putter uppers finally turned up and putted upp some gib. and well fuck, they smashed it out in two days. what the fuck are you going on about sheepers, get to the fucking point! never in the history in of human house building, has so little, built by so few, transformed to lives of this two. 2017-10-07_08-25-08 by sheepers, on Fli its a house now. just like that its a house, before it was a bunch of sticks with some wires and shit but now its a house. we can see it. its real and it feels like any minute now we can live in it. this morning if you had have asked me "how long before you move in sheepers? " i would have said "umm i guess about 10 weeks?" but now, tonight, a mere 8 hours later its a 3 week journey of paint and laying carpet and were done. *actual times may vary* but its REAL now. hard to explain. but anywho, its a happening thing and its happening to us. shuddup.

Okay soooooooo as awesome as it was living in a beautiful place and having a cool Automotive related job, life in Cromwell/Queenstown wasnt quite right for me. It was awesome fun working at HPA, made some friends and great memories which will last a long time. But, it just didnt quite feel like somewhere I wanted to settle down and in some ways it wasnt the career direction I wanted to take. So for a variety of reasons I ended up coming back up to Auckland. Being landlocked so many hours away from the ocean just didnt feel right! It was a bloody awesome experience though and it felt like it reinvigorated my life and got me back on track after some hard times lately. But anyway! It was good that I never got to the point of attempting to drive the Carina down, as the new driveshaft combination wasnt good. It took a bunch more mucking around after I got back to get this right again. But sadly it looks like the previous incident may have stuffed the bearings in the gearbox as it's pretty noisy now and leaks fluid out the rear main seal even after replacing it. Pooz. But it was great to get back home and be able to go drive it around again! The R888s are on my normal wheels so I've been driving around with a 15x6 running 205/50/15 and have noticed no negative effects to handling. Possibly because the sidewall of the AD08R is so stiff. Since I've been back, I started with a fresh sheet of paper on the tune file in the ECU. As it had some old junk in there, as well as some stuff that I setup when I ahhhh knew less than I do haha. The staged injection seemed to work well enough in terms of delivering the right amount of fuel and blah blah... But it was always a bit crappy in transient conditions. I decided I would turn on the outer injectors 100% of the time and try tune the car using just those, and get the accel enrichment and so on working as best I could. But it just felt boggy. When I reverted back to 100% inboard instead, holy moly the throttle response difference was amazing. And so the pull out of corners was much better and it felt like you could more accurately mash the gas and know what the car was going to do. So I ditched it and put a standard manifold back on. My theory is that since my intake manifold is thermally isolated from the head, it is not able to use the heat of the runner walls to evaporate the fuel so you have massive fuel pooling issues... Which means you lose control of your fuelling as some fuel you squirted in several cycles ago is only just entering the combustion chamber as it evaporates. So fuel you add at say 5800rpm only enters the cylinder by the time you get to 6000rpm and so on. And so if you tune your car with the acceleration rate of say 3rd gear fuelling isnt right for 1st gear anymore. Just lots of headaches that you cant really address well enough with the accel enrichment available on a G4+ In the documentation from Toyota on their wall wetting experiments they note that on a cold port (engine cold starts) fuel can take over 1.5 seconds to evaporate and contribute back to fuel in the engine so even if it was only half as long on the runner walls. It's a massive surface area covered in fuel which is always going to be a ball ache to compensate for. Going back to a standard manifold looks to have cured a vaccum leak or two as well, haha so the idle and so on is much better too. I've been playing around a bit with a few variables such as injection timing and VVTI advance as well. I have found that changing the injector timing so it's injecting fuel as the intake valve is open helps a lot with cold starts, and results in a lower fuel consumption when the engine is hot too. Since it's been cold I've also spent a bunch of time getting the cold idle really nice, closed loop lambda adjustment works really well if you set the adjustment rate to 1hz so its only slowly adjusting it. Otherwise it makes the idle surge if you try to run closed loop at say 20hz like you could if you were doing 4000rpm or whatever. Under cruising conditions it seems that advancing the intake cam at all just means worse economy. This may relate to the tuned length of the primaries and secondaries of the exhaust causing some undesirable something something at cruising rpm compared to a standard exhaust manifold... But for whatever reason, it isnt beneficial to advance the cam. And at high rpm low load, rather than retarding the cam I figure I may as well keep the cam advanced so when you stab your foot back on the throttle the cam is not having to "catch up". And this seems to have made the throttle response even better as well. So the engine response is better than ever! I picked up a cheap Altezza engine, planning to give it a freshen up and at some point swap it over. I'll be losing the fancy ported head of my current engine, but will be gaining: -Exhaust side VVTI -Higher compression ratio -better alternator position -Better water line setup -Better engine mount setup -Better PCV valve arrangement -And a few other minor advantages so I think it's worth the trade but will be interesting to see. The state of the oil and colour of the coolant in the altezza engine though is bloody disgusting though so it'll need a strip down and hot tanking or whatever before doing anything with it. So might be a while until it's ready to swap in. But looking forward to having a play with the exhaust side VVTI. I think I'll wire in an exhaust pressure sensor when I do an overhaul of the loom to suit some of the changes needed. Will be interesting if this will show anything relating to tuned lengths of the primary and secondary pipes. In the immediate future however I'm just really enjoying living at the start of Scenic Drive in Titirangi now and being able to go for some awesome drives on some backroads making doort noises again

c'mer girls!

Replaced the front wheel bearings, and it's now all road legal and still owes me sub a thousand. Now the boring bits over time for some fun. Also took it back to the old owner and he said he still has its original black plates and will dig them out so I'll hopefully get them back on the car

if your ever up this way stop in and it will all make perfect sense.

Not a lot has happened to this thing, still drive it as a daily. Bought some 13x6.5" and 7" Hayashi Streets from Japan a year ago. They were fully powdercoated black so I stripped that off and gave them a polish. Only recently purchased some tires and fitted them. They're too wide for the guards without pulling them out, which I don't want to do. So I'm selling them if anyone is interested. Also after another pair of starsharks in 13x6.5" if anyone knows of any.

Started on my cuts as I have sourced all of the replacement sections that I am needing Found a patch on the car, shame it's rusted through. the whole thing will come out After many hours of using paint stripped which did absolutely next to nothing, i went with a wire wheel on a grinder. Will continue more next weekend after I drop the subframe out etc. Discussion https://oldschool.co.nz/index.php?/topic/56136-pbaines-1977-toyota-corolla-ke30/#comment-1844319

So Manfield finishes up... And I'm enjoying doing superlap and the camaraderie between competitors. Buuut everything else in life was starting to feel a little stale. I have been daydreaming about moving to the South Island for the last few years, but I'm not a planner person... I figure if I wait until I have a plan, I will never do it. So I made a bold move - To just hand in 30 days notice at my IT Manager job, with no idea what I'm going to do next. I knew this meant sacrificing the remaining rounds of Superlap, and would probably lead to some hard times financially and otherwise. But it was just what I felt was necessary. All I knew was that I wanted to move out of Auckland for a while and start on a fresh page after some tough times over last year or two. A few days after this, I see an ad pop up on facebook... "Remote Dyno tutor/manager at HP Academy in Queenstown" Awww hell yes, could that be any more the ideal career/city change, at exactly the right time?! I applied for the job - and got it Then not long after, thanks to Bigfoot, I had some accommodation sorted too. It was the most low effort career/city change ever! Within the course of a week it went from my family probably thinking I was a bit of an idiot for quitting my job without a plan. (and a fair bit of doubting myself as well) to, "God damn it you're a jammy bastard Dave" To anyone who has along the way thought "David why not just take your car to a tuner instead of wasting your time doing all of these stupid tests/graphs/etc" Well, all of these things that I've done were a major contributing factor towards me getting the job. So there's probably some motivational message there about following your dreams or something. But end result is I'm pretty happy right now, and working at a company where drawing graphs and looking at datalogs etc is par for the course. Which is bloody exciting. So I packed my echo full of essential stuff and drove on down to start a new way of life down here. So far so good! Keeping some relevance to this thread though - My Carina is still back up in Auckland. It's packed full of "want but dont need" items, it's ready to hit the road as soon as I've organized a place down here that has a garage to store it in. I've been learning so much from Andre and the team, it feels like getting an apprenticeship from one of the best engine tuners in the southern hemisphere. I feel like I'm only just smart enough to be on the cusp of understanding some of the stuff Andre talks about. But I think I know just enough, that he doesnt feel like it's a waste of time explaining things to me. I expect that by the time I've got the Carina down here, I'll be ready to redo my tune from scratch using the new knowledge and tools now available to me. Cant wait! A new southern chapter of graphs, nerdiness, and awesomeness awaits the Carina. The next post in this thread, when the time comes. There will be graphs, oh yes, there will be graphs.

The last few trackday events I've done, they have all been on very hot tracks in summer time... lots of grip for R888s which were coming up to temperature nicely, very quickly! Thanks to all this grip I've had, I've been able to wind the brake bias heaaaapppssss more rearwards than I ever have been able to previously. Which is awesome, it stops the car up great. Then, the Manfield round of Superlap... I was greeted by an intially damp, very cold track. First run out, feeling a little too confident... by lap 3(?) I still had almost no heat in the tyres, was pushing it a little too hard, and the brake bias caught me out. I spun off turn 1, ending up stuck in the kitty litter which was embarassing, and I felt bad for delaying the session while I was towed out. I went back to the pits, took a few winds out of the brake bias (it isnt adjustable in the cabin) Second session, wowzers! Track came up to temp nicely and the car was running great. I was still getting familiar with things as I've never driven there before. But had an awesome time. I was driving conservatively as I didnt want to be "that guy" that crashes twice in a row haha. Feeling confident lining up for the third session of the day, and ready to push a bit harder. I get waved out onto the track and my driveshaft makes a clunk noise. Try go forward again... same thing... shit. I head back to the pits, and it looked as though the hanger bearing had crapped itself, so the centre of the 2 piece driveshaft was free to flop around. It felt okay to drive "normally" so I said my good byes to friends at the track and went back to accomodation (Thanks Lachlan) I packed the car up and started driving home. I got about an hour out of Manfield, and driveshaft noise was getting bad going up a hill when it was under load - Boom! The front UJ broke, and the driveshaft went smashing around in the tunnel like a MFer! Lucky I had driveshaft loops in place or it would have made a bloody big mess. Once I got safely to the side of the road, and had a look under the car. It dawned on me that I am 6-7 hours drive from home, with a car that's fucked haha. About 1/2 an hour later, something magic happened! Some other competitors saw my car on the side of the road, and stopped up. They couldnt really help, but wanted to see if they could assist. Then some more competitors came past - this time with their track car on the trailer behind tow vehicle. They stopped up, unloaded their track car from the trailer so they could tow my car home - and drive their track car instead. These guys lived near Hampton downs, but drove all of the way to Glendene in the pissing rain to help me get my car home by about 2am. Which meant they didnt get back to theirs until 3 or 4am after a very long day. Absolutely blown away by the help. Big thanks to Jakke and Matt for being awesome well beyond the call of duty. Sometimes when you're up to your eyeballs in shit, and someone helps you out - The sort of thing you remember for a very long time. Some good memories and good friends, made by a bad situation.

Oh right, so you wanted the rest of the story too? Sorry, here goes.. Repower, pt.3 So I took a Friday off work, parked the car in the garage and started stripping stuff out of the engine bay. A surprisingly short amount of time later, all the mechanical bits started falling out. Oily, broken 1100 begone! Sorry, I didn't get any air guitar shots, it was too hard to take selfies while lifting the motor out... And it's in! After fitting the ancillaries, filling it with fluids, fitting the manifolds, timing it and winding it over to get oil pressure, the moment of truth arrived. It fired up and ran sweetly, so I had to take it for a cheeky test run sans bonnet. Excite! The valve clearances had closed up a bit, but after adjusting them and checking the head bolt torques, it's been fine. I also replaced the starter solenoid, because one of the terminals broke off. And the Hitachi carb works alright too, I might still play with jet sizes if I can find some others to experiment with. The difference between the engines is night and day though, like it actually goes up hills now. The transmission is smooth, and all the fluids seem to be staying in their respective places, so i'll call it a win. Since then, it's continued to provide effective, reliable daily transport. I gave it a polish and it came up pretty nicely, considering it's actually six different shades of orange And I took it camping at Whatipu over the New Years period. Had to stop on the way home for an obligatory gravel road shot: discuss/tell me to put a rota in it: //oldschool.co.nz/index.php?/topic/48306-mk2martys-1976-escort-moredoor-discussion/

Oh yeah, so this happened. In truth it happened back in August, but we'll overlook that. A broken Telstar and other stuff got in the way, so the promised rebuild kept getting put off. But eventually it happened, so sit down and i'll tell y'all a tale In the last update there was a melted Kent that looked like not a lot more than some gunk-encrusted, blue-painted scrap. I didn't have high hopes for it initially, but upon further investigation, some not-so-bad bits started to appear. Once I pressure washed all the oily crap out of it, it was actually beginning to look useable. The thing that saved it, though, was when Dad found a set of NOS pistons in a box in the basement, that he'd had since the '70s. He says he'll never own another 1300, so they were mine. Cheers Dad! The bores, surprisingly, were standard size, so i guess it was made to be. Otherwise, aside from the lipped bits at the top of No.3, the rest of the engine was serviceable, I made sure the bearing clearances were within spec and inspected everything visually and it all looked OK. Sure, if I wanted to do it properly I would have rebored it, ground the crank and thrown some bearings at it, but that can wait until I do the original and matching-numbers block (which in all truth will probably end up with a 1300 crank and rods anyway. Who can tell from the outside?). So with a bit of a hone and some new rings and gaskets, I put the engine back together. Thankfully all the melted alloy came off pretty easily, unfortunately the lack of a flexi-hone meant that the straight hone I used makes the lipped bores seem worse than they actually are. Oh well. While i was there, I fitted a new water pump, timing chain kit and associated ancillaries too. There was a slight hiccup with the new timing chain and sprocket, it turns out that some bright spark at the factory put the timing mark about ninety degrees out. However, after a little thought, it's pretty easy to tell where it should be in relation to the dowel. So after some comparison with the old sprocket I made a new mark, and all was well. I cleaned the head up, checked the mating face with a straight edge, and cleaned and lapped the valves in. And after many, many kerosene baths to get all the encrusted grime off, I put the valve gear on. As an aside, thanks to a donated manifold from Dad i've decided to run a Hitachi 2-barrel carb (found as standard equipment on a myriad of '80s Japanese classics), removed from a Mk1 facelift Laser 1500. It has a manual choke and a vacuum secondary, and is mounted on a modified Kent manifold. Two venturis must be better than one, right? I torqued the head and set the valve clearances, attached the inlet manifold and hoped like hell that it would run without any nasty noises. If it was going in anything more than just my daily transport i'd have thrown more time and parts at it, but as it is it should last for a while. Up next, the gearbox...

Did a little photoshoot

Made some coilovers. Ended up getting MR2 inserts I think, they weren't really short enough and 5kg springs. I shortened the struts and TIG welded them up. Applied paint Test fitted and the springs were too hard, didn't go anywhere low enough unless I pulled out the keeper springs and wound the collars right down. De-sprung the rear to see how low it could go. Removed the bump stops as well Did some calculating and figured some 3kg springs would be better and shortened the insert shaft a bit. Bought some cheap evo camber plates and drew up some new top hats to get laser cut. Cut another coil off the rear springs and installed some shorted shocks, so this is how it sits now. Hopefully settles a bit lower. Bought another K50 shifter housing thanks to enzee. Shifts much smoother without the one that's been brazed and welded!

Had a cert recheck yesterday. Also went to get a wheel alignment and got beached twice, once on the driveway and once on the hoist, I felt like the man with my tail hanging out on a two lane main road revving my 107dB exhaust trying to get free. Found that the exhaust is really loud. Testing rpm for a 4age is 4950rpm and is allowed 95dB. I reached 3500rpm and was at 107dB. Retested today at 94.5dB, success! Using baffles in the exhaust flanges which are easily removed for track use. Also need to sort something better than a mizone bottle for a catch can. Pending a drive tomorrow and photos being passed by Wellington it should be good to go.

All right then. Fairly soon after I got it: Came on these wheels: Some sweet bog work by the last owner (post coilovers) - EDIT can't find this picture, here's the rad patch it was covering Mating up the W55 with Doin Donuts. Also note Uterus and my old van. Nice. EDIT: Can't find this one either, have a bonus pic of the van. Lookin' nice (just the car) Wishful thinking A few weeks ago: