tomble

Guess I need some JIS in my drawers

I totally planned to before reassembly but just got into the flow of things. I will still make sure it all tests OK before it goes back on the car. The injector section is easy to remove and put in a jar or whatever

Hell yeah! LMK when and where. I'll PM number etc

Meanwhile, I turned my attention to the ECI injector / throttle body thing. While I'm going for 'get it running', trusting a 40 year old carb that's been neglected for 20 years to still be fine is asking a bit much. I mean, this isn't exactly a good sign of health. One thing I noticed is that while I love having clean parts, I hate cleaning them. Having a dirty work space reduces my enjoyment and my motivation to enter said space. I have a lot of dirty parts to clean. And I've always wanted an ultrasonic cleaner... so... It's a 15L unit and to be honest I think I went a little overkill. I'm still playing with it but it seems that the most effective thing is to put the part in a glass jar/container with an excellent degreaser. Kerosene/fuel is considered to do wonderous cleaning in less than a minute. So the ECI injector unit. I'm no knowledgable expert but I believe this is a somewhat early attempt at electronic fuel injection and combines it with a carburettor. But with electronic bits. Like a cyborg. I have a PDF of a training guide for it, but no rebuild instructions. Fortunately, a man called @ProZac made one a decade and a half ago and it can still be accessed via the wayback machine. He even reverse engineered what orings and seals to buy. Thanks mate :0 Purchase for $43.41 from http://www.sealinnovations.co.nz/ who replied to my website message with a personalised quote so fast that I thought it was an auto reply. Delivered the next day in a collection of baggies with hand-written part numbers. Damn. The gasket is obviously well out of production. 'Zac says now's a good time to harvest the old one to size up a new one so that's where I started. Mine is in bits and is quite fucked as you'd imagine. I utilised my inner 5yo to sketch out a template... ...then I spray-glued it to a piece of 0.8mm oil gasket paper. I punched out all the holes and curves, and used a craft knife to get the rest. I then realised that the spray glue worked really, really well... far too well... Oh well, I now have a template for the next one Disassembly. The skode was real. Every surface of this was covered in black residue. Almost every fastener was a phillips and got to the absolute breaking point of stripping before giving way. Two I did end up having to break out the impact driver for. The butterfly valve came out without any headaches. It's slightly chamfered to go in one way, almost invisibly, but fortunately the markings make reassembly easy. The shaft gets a soft blow to knock it out, and the retaining clip brings the seal with it on that side, handily. The previously photographed water port got a clean out. These injectors have some moulded seals, which fortunately are intact (I'm sure they're meant to be less plastic though) as they are no longer produced. Once everything was clean, reassembly ensued. I lightly greased all new orings and seals to make sure nothing caught. A quick before and after for the fuel injector assembly. The fuel pressure regulator gets new orings... The idle up controller gets reassembled (after a mild panic where I wasn't sure how!). Unfortunately, the rubber bellow thing has a smallish tear/hole in it. And probably should be softer. But it's at least adjustable, so hopefully can be compensated for... if not, it is at least readily accessible if I were to find a new one. Then the butterfly shaft goes back in with new seals on either end. The valve plate is massaged in and fastened. Everything gets blue loctite. The reinstallation of the Finger Fucker 9000 removes any remaining play in the shaft. Then after re-attaching all the various bracketry, TPS and key, etc etc we have a nice healthy new ECI injector unit. I'll likely take some readings and do some tests on it before it goes on the car, but for now, it can move to the 'don't have to think about it' shelf <3 <3

I stripped down the block and had a better look. Honestly, it didn't seem bad to me. The bores looked ok, maybe a hone would fix it, but Kelv reckoned maybe it needed oversized pistons. The crank had a mild scratch I could see, and the rest of it was just dirty and gross. Rusty water passage ways. Seems saveable. But only the engine reconditioners could know that for sure. One further question I had was what to do about the 'silent shafts' / balance shafts. One turned freely and is connected via the main timing belt to the head. However, the other one was locked solid and its dedicated belt was missing. I used a slide pull to get it out and the bearing/mating surface looked totally munted. I know that these are often intentionally deleted, so I wasn't too worried, but needed guidance there. So I took it all down to Kerry Lindsay's and they surprised me yet again by having a much better outlook on it all. Mr Man was happy to see that two of the bores still had cross hatching, and believed that the other two may well just hone perfect. He also hand-waved the balance shaft seat, "oh yeah we can fix that np". We formed a plan: hone the bores, see if we can keep the pistons, buy some if not, polish the crank, skim the deck, fix the balance shaft seat, clean it all up, and as with the Alto I asked that they do the rotating assembly for me. The guesstimate ballpark price was reasonable. I got the proper quote a little later. Good news! The bores honed up nicely. Don't need new oversized pistons! Bad news! The pistons are fucked and out of size due to overheating. Need new pistons anyway. :\ So, that ended up costing slightly more than rebuilding the entire alto engine with new parts, heh. But I got a peanut slab with it. Anyway that's all back now. They even painted it for me. I guess my engine colour is decided now. Apparently they spent a while cleaning out the waterways, as there was a buttload of rust in them. He reckons they've got it and that it'll be fine but to expect the odd red fluff to fall out here and there :') That's currently just sitting on my bench while I juggle everything else in my life and my ass into gear to do the next bits. I've got almost everything I need now, just need to tear apart the head and get that looked at too. Since the pistons were fucked from heat, and the block got skimmed, and my 5-year-old Alto had some valve seat repair, I think it's only smart to make sure the head is OK before I go further with it. The other thing I need that's making me cautious is documentation. I have an '83 workshop manual but it's for the USDM (which uses a different 2.6L engine), and Kelvin is doing his magic his side to get me some stuff, but I'm really in need of something that goes into detail on the head, silent shafts, all the seals and gaskets and where RTV should go etc etc. So putting a call out there for anyone with SOHC (4)G63(b) material! :X

We good Zero (excessive) play in the shaft.

I found a guy on marketplace with a $100 starion turbo already but if that falls through I will totally hit youses up. Teaches me to not hit the old school hive mind first. My current plan is keep stripping the block down, see if anything gets worse give it all a clean bring the block and rotating assy to engine people and see what they think if it's all a go, apparently the genuine gasket set can be made to order ex japan, but the lead time is 24 weeks, and might not actually go through. There are some other aftermarket full engine kits I've seen from Ajusa and Endurote, the brands seem to be well regarded, so might do that instead, we'll see. @kws is not confident that those bores can be honed out so might need some oversized pistons too... but we'll find out at step #3

No idea! They supposedly are one of the first things to clog up. There's stuff like this to delete them. I'm hoping that I won't find anything further wrong with the engine. It seems salvagable?

Or maybe turbo housing/impellor shavings? We couldn't separate the two halves of the turbo, either - pen fluid, heat, massive pipe wrench, percussion. Wouldn't move a mm. I found a turbo that's supposedly fine on facebook marketplace so should hopefully be fine there. But I'm keen to hear thoughts on the engine. I'm very reluctant to consider a swap at this point given the goal of the year and the amount of problems I'm juggling already. I'm also somewhat reluctant to source another starion turbo engine, it's likely to just be another loot box to gamble on after 40 years unless I shell out for a known good one from a reputable source. So currently I'm leaning towards rebuilding this one. It'd be OEM or OEM-like grade stuff, I don't have the spare money for anything crazy. I haven't checked all the bearings yet but so far vibes say that the crank is saveable. There's no heat discolouration anywhere I can see, and the engine did technically run without any obvious noises. The bores look like they can just be honed, to save myself buying new pistons. I'm hoping this is just a case of new bearings + new rings + honed bores + polished crank.

I'd rather put the engine off for longer and unload other stuff from my brain first, but best to crack into this earlier in the year to (a) maximise the chances of being done this year and (b) enable a motivation boost when it becomes a running car. So, here we go! It's a G63B, the predecessor/early version of the 4G63. Sometimes called the 4G63B for that reason. Mitsi gurus likely know all about how interchangable many of the parts are between these engines, and a common enough mod is to swap a DOHC onto it and convert to EFI etc. Something for a future year perhaps. My goal going into this is to just freshen her up and put her back in. Explore just enough to figure out what seals and gaskets and whatever I need, spot anything that's broken, be able to clean in the nooks and crannies, all that. Definitely not separating the head, honing anything, doing a rebuild or anything like that. Just in and out, a quick 20 minute adventure. First task is to get it on the stand. And that means removing the torque converter and flex plate. The bolts for the converter require the removal of this access plate I'd left on. The bolts are then accessible, turning the engine to access each (and fighting the crank wanting to turn with the ratchet while the whole engine wobbles on a pair of chains suspended in the air) I had to run off to the bolt shop to get some suitable bolts; the stand needs to bolt directly to the block this time around, whereas I was able to just sandwich some bolts through the alto's transmission holes. So I took some accessories off while it was dangling. I don't think I'l put the A/C system back on for the initial rebuild. It has its own dedicated belt so easy delete there, and that's a lot of radiator and line bits that I can just ignore for now. Bolts acquired. Speaking of bolts, my system till now was to use sandwich bags to contain everything, with sharpie labels. Initially I'd also punched bolts through cardboard with a drawing of where they go, which I think works well built is more of a temporary thing. Bolts kept coming out when I moved the cardboard, it took up space, not great. The bags were better but they're annoying to sift through and can get separated. I found that I could find any given bolt bag at any point in time, except the one that I currently needed. Employing a suggestion from the Croker vs Rover channel on YT, I organised everything into... organisers. I used masking tape for labels because my label maker ran out :\ Everything is now super easy to find and it's all still visible without opening the organiser lid. They're stackable so can take up very little space, very hard to lose or separate, won't rip, it's easy to swap out bins once they empty... should have done this ages ago. Back to the engine. It's old, it's tired. The coolant passages are crusty at best, blocked at worse. There's evidence of leaky stem seals. The oil is a bit toasty but there's nothing obviously wrong under the cover. Note the little jet valves, an early emissions/efficiency thing (MCA-Jet). With the timing cover off, there's evidence of more oil seepage. The oil pump seal (not pictured but behind the bottom right toothed wheel, which is also for one of the balance shafts) is leaking and there's no doubt some oil coming in from the rocker cover. More interesting is that the second timing belt which drives one of the balance shafts is completely missing, and that the shaft can't be turned by hand. I think it was intentionally deleted, and the other shaft is only still connected because the oil pump is a part of it. Water pump is gross but no obvious play in it. It'll get replaced anyway. After sleeping on it, I decided that those valve stem seals should probably get replaced. All the gasket kits seem to come with a head gasket anyway, so it seemed reasonable. I'm trying to be careful about scope creep but this also lets me check the bores properly. So a mate came over and we separated the head from the block. #1 and #4 look fine, you can still see the cross hatching. But #3 and #4 have some markings that can just be felt under nails. It doesn't feel particularly bad, going purely by vibes it feels like a hone would clean it up just fine. The underside of the head holds no surprises. The gasket has held up fine. Here's a closer look at the other end of the jet valves. Apparently their smaller diameter means air/fuel rushes through them faster than through the normal intake valve and causes the combustion chamber mix to, uh, mix better. Then engines started staggering two intake valves to achieve the same effect, making them obsolete. Supposedly these are liable to clog up or get stuck so there are delete kits out there (basically bolts with o-rings on them) which I will possibly make use of. I want to remove the oil pan (which is a bit banged up) so figured I might as well pop a cap or two while we're in there. First step is to forget to put down anything to catch the oil and water before turning the block. Grandad's old scraper comes out for another job MMmmmmmm. Uh-huh. I see. Okay. That's a conrod bearing and a cap bearing, each from the centre of the engine. The conrod bearing catches on the nail, though the crank surface is smooth. At the cap bearing, there's some texture on the crank as well. There's no magnetic bits in the burnt toast, but scrunching it between ragged fingers reveals shiny metallic fragments. Bearings? Possibly.

@yoeddynz took offense to there being too few holes in my firewall. I uhh, forgot to drill a pilot hole. Or back off after slipping. After kicking myself I deburred, put some rust converter on to protect the steel, touch-up painted and it doesn't look like something heinous happened there at a glance. To the point where, seeing that above old pic, I'm surprised it started out that bad! The other side looks perfect though so let's focus on that. Then I printed out a grommet in TPU - I'll find some bolts for the other two holes before I gasket seal it all in. But yeah definitely blame @yoeddynz

So we did the driver's side and that went all fine. This seat had a glued padded thing instead of the push-through wire thing, so I guess it got some love at some point in the past. I reupholstered the black leather/vinyl onto it using the old method. It's all 10000% faster when you know what you're doing! The wires in rear seats were simply too fucked and dangerous to put back in as-is. With a fair amount of wrangling, I got the rusted remains of the wires out of the edges and centres of the black leather. Not many pics sorry! I also removed them from the grey leather seats and was able to re-use them, falling back to some stainless wire where I ran out of good sections. There were 5-6 looped sections on each side to get in, which was a bit of a wrangle. This seat also still has pretty fucked loops as well, but not bad enough to outright replace, so I consider this a somewhat temporary job - there's rust flakes etc embedded and they'll probably interact with the wires in fun ways, but that problem is for next decade. No pix of it in the car just yet because I want to clean up a couple brackets first...

More rewinding, I was put in contact with a nice fellow in Auckland got in touch about some black leather bits he had available. Now that the car is going to be grey, I'm even less enthused about a grey interior, so I snaffled it up. The leather is in decent condition, or at least MUCH better condition than the cracked and damaged original grey leather stuff. The catch: it must have been introduced to a flood at some point in time, because the metal bits in the bottoms of the seats are absolutely fucked. Fortunately, the grey leather seats' metal stuff is in good condition. So I get to add upholstery to my list of fun things to learn and suck at. I disassembled the black and grey passenger seats early on and set about restoring the bits. It immediately started to pay itself off. The top half of the seat is alright. There's corrosion on the bottom brackets, but nothing crazy, and I didn't feel the need to disassemble much here. Just the back of the seat, which revealed further rusty bracketry, but not enough to really do much about. I simply painted what I could see with rust converter, and the main brackets got wire wheeled, masked and painted black. The rails are all riveted together, and I just don't want to deal with that stuff (yet). So I simply dunked it all in evaporust, cleaned, rust converter'd, wire wheeled and painted it. I made sure to move the bits around after painting so nothing bound up, and vowed that I'd fill it with grease later. The black seat leather was then carefully extracted from the base. The leather at the site of the bolt holes etc is pretty rough. Mostly intact, some thin or ripped bits. The rust impregnated itself quite well to a lot of it. I used a combination of careful evaporust dipping and some soapy scouring pads to remove the crusts. You can see where some of the internal seams (where wires once laid) are torn, I'm curious as to what physical stuff went down to cause that. There'd be some mechanical forces involved, after all fabric doesn't like moving across jagged rusty wire, but I don't think that explains all of it. Fortunately, theres very little of these places actually visible once all the trim etc is on. The... uh... leg thingy also got some treatment. I was going to use the grey seat's bracket but it was such a straight-forward hunk of metal that I just re-used the black one. A long pause happened here because of life and procrastination, but eventually I put my A back into G... and pressured girlface to help. There are a few wires that run through the seats in loops to pull the centres of them in, and these loops had mostly been destroyed by the rusty wires. Girlface fixed these by hand-sewing new fabric in. Gorgeous. The black vs grey base, uncovered - I was really impressed at how good the grey base was. I didn't do too much to the grey base; just slathered on some rust converter and used our steam mop to restore the foam. Then it's time to use my aliexpress upholstery set! Was not looking forward to this part but it was probably one of the easiest parts tbh. The clips are surprisingly non-fiddly. I managed to re-use stiffening wire from the grey seat and get things buttoned up okay. The hardest part was actually just wrangling the leather (which has shrunk with age) onto the base (which i'd fluffed up the foam on). Getting this lever into the hole took half an hour alone. Eventually, after a lot of cross-referencing the other seats and some repeated steps, the bracketry was on and lubricated with lithium grease, and the top went back on it. Looks great I need to fix up a couple things, the leg thingy lever is a bit tight and doesn't want to disengage. Also the slide-everything-forward-for-passengers-lever is a bit touch and go. For the driver's side I might just be a bit more frugal with the paint as it could be adding extra friction, but I'm hoping it's just a spring or something that I've mis-configured.

I haven't looked too hard at it, but I think the brake mount is the same, so I guess it has its own one. It could be another firewall sandwich affair that just attaches to those two (currently missing) holes. I hope it is now obvious to all why I'm doing the manual swap later

I'm not sure what the process is re: vinning, it's been registered in NZ in the past. The donor is a turbo starion that had a NA 4g63 swap. I believe it was always manual, but the new engine required a narrow bell housing which used a cable clutch, so they mangled things to remove the hydraulic stuff and make it work. I have the "correct" bell housing for the OG starion turbo engine, which is set up for a hydraulic system. I think all I need to do is source the cylinders and tehy should just bolt up