Roman

I got my throttle pulleys machined down to a smaller size, so they can open the throttles all of the way (Thanks Dad!) So this is all now working GREAT. and it's super snappy. So I started doing some tuning to try figure out the area just off idle, and why its such a bag of crap. I found that adding considerably more ignition timing helped a lot, and increasing injection timing to around 600deg (usually 400) However, at a fairly early stage I managed to blitz one of my ethrottle motors with about 100 amps too many haha. It still worked, but smelled funky. Well, it ended up crapping itself. So I've ordered another one but it's still a few weeks away which is annoying. Since I couldnt do anything else meaningful for that stuff, I figured probably a good idea to take all of the exhaust completely off and check it. I found a worst case scenario leak for my extractors on both sides. There were signs of a small leak coming from somewhere between the 3 pipes, up the middle of them. Blargh! Impossible to get to this to fix it without cutting everything up. I was fretting about it for longer than it actually took to fix. I cut off the collectors just slightly up past the 3x pipes. Then fully welded both halves, flattened it off, then welded back together. No more leaks and it solved what one of the ticking noises from the motor was. Even if these extractors eventually crack or something. I'm still absolutely stoked to have made these myself. My new fuel rails turned up, but I havent had them machined yet. But fits a lot better. Given the available space I think I'm gonna give up on having a front feed airbox. So thinking dual sides instead. I guess these could both rejoin around the front and grab some air from on top of the radiator. Or I could have air intakes behind the headlights, and go back to a full height radiator. Which probably isnt a bad plan. I cant fit the entire thing on my printer but I can do half at a time. So just banging one out to test fit. 2GRFSE Scheming "Since I am doing this, may as well do this" Since I need a custom rod for the 2GR destroke scheme. Has made me consider piston options. The factory piston is typical Toyota stuff, fairly big and chunky/strong. But for high rpm the lighter the better... No point in reinventing the wheel if something else already exists? I found a 94mm piston from a 400cc quad bike that runs 10k rpm from factory. Cheap and easily available, and nice and light! It has a 22mm pin so might even fit the 2GR rod (apart from that the rod is too short) So I've ordered one of these to test fit and see what sort of compression ratio will be achievable. A destroked 2GR doesnt end up tooooooo far off the geometry of the Opel Calibra DTM car which was absolutely hectic. I wonder if you could grind the journals down to lose another 9mm stroke out of it... Would only need 4.5mm taken off one side I think? Just to be 100% clear though, none of the above are detracting from getting the car onto the dyno ASAP! Once my ethrottle motor turns up, its ready to go. 2GR Destroke comparison for future scope creeping:

Yeah I am thinking later on I will probably do an X pipe and 2x pipes to the back. All of the good sounding 2GR MR2s are X pipe and 2 pipes to the back. However, in the fairly immediate future I just need to consolidate what I'm doing and get the car to a drivable state. The current exhaust is good enough to get the car onto the dyno and so on. I'm keen to put down a baseline number, then put big cams in, then see how it's going. I've been very lucky that Stu has loaned me his tig setup over the last long while, but he needs it back to make some progress on his own projects. So no more exhaust stuff for now. So I'll be putting a tig setup into the budget at some point. Super 5000% glad that I persisted with it and can now weld alright. Invaluable skill.

A friend in Auckland has a 2MZ for me, just have to organize a time to grab it. Been sick with flu last few weeks though so not much going on. Still waiting on an ethrottle motor to turn up before I can carry on with much else.

Bloody good work Dave! Stoked

It's going to look amazing once that radiator shroud is powdercoated! Annoying to have to cut the airbox again but at least its on the underside.

So funny story about those, I was talking with Nathan about them about a year or so ago. He said something like "What? Nah no way you bought one, they stopped manufacturing CRTs in 1996 or something like that" and I said "Well, I bought one brand new, so you must be wrong" Then it had a QC sticker on it from 1996. (or whenever) Haha. There's an arduino library to interface with them, seems like a simple single wire output and you can do some cool stuff. However one of my cats knocked mine off the desk and it chipped the housing so never got around to having a go with it. I think VFDs are probably the coolest looking retro screen type. But quite expensive & usually small

I have one of those already haha

[scope creep trigger warning] Have you considered going full retard, and using an RB30 block? Assuming the 30 block is taller "up" by the extra stroke length. You would need a 9.65mm longer rod over standard RB20, if you use the 28mm compression height pistons. End up with a 1.88 rod ratio instead of 1.8 I made this little script type thing in Fusion360 that will generate engine geometry when you type in all of the appropriate variables. I put in some numbers for a standard RB20 and a Steeb spec motor to see how some things like rod angle look before and after. Then seasoned to taste with mspaint

Pretty sure its staying turbo. And can confirm that ITB with 6 cyl is nightmarish, although more so on a v6. Love your work Steeb! Be interesting to see how this goes. I guess the crux of projects like this or mine. Are that even if things are mechanically decent for lots of rpm, still need head/cams/etc that can flow decently. As that American guy found out. Maybe not such an issue with turbo though.

Hey come on, no one needs that sort of pressure

2GRFSE pull down I finished pulling the 2GRFSE to bits, and found that the total sum of damage was: 1x exhaust VVT pulley starting to push its guts out 1x chain tensioner broken 2x big end bearings damaged 1x big end journal on crank looking damaged So the great news here is, all of the damage is confined to bolt on stuff, or, relating to the crank/rods that I am planning to bin anyway. Perfect! If anyone has a 2MZFE motor kicking around, or just the crank, let me know. Keen. Exhaust noise rambling part 2 I thought I would try come up with some practical testing methods for further isolating and confirming what "good noise" is, and isnt. So I can quickly make some iterations and see if they meet objectives or not. Keeping in mind that this is nothing to do with what makes best power, just sounds "better". At this stage this is just testing at a constant idle speed. Which obviously isnt indicative of full throttle performance, or noise. However I'd prefer if it does not sound like a clattery bag of dicks at idle too. So its a relevant test. I will do some medium and full load testing once my ethrottle setup is sorted properly. For a TL;DR version of this considerably overlength post. Here's a video of me just putting a Coby hotdog muffler on or off the back of a 2" exhaust pipe. It sound different with it on or off. The end. Rest of post here:

100% keen for this! Gonna be good

Nah I bet its like in The Shawshank Redemption, where they are using their pant legs to get rid of the dirt from digging their tunnels. But Kris is slowly getting rid of 20v engines by sneaking the parts into other peoples cars

He's got the best evasion tactics for shit posting. "Police! Hurry! There's a guy on OS named Dave, and we need to arrest him" "Uhhhhh you're gonna need to be a lot more specific there bud"

Definitely interesting that "4-2-1 does this" and "4-1 does this" is less important than having either of those with the right lengths. Really interesting to see how hollowed out the low rpm power is, by those super long secondaries. Would have expected the opposite. Cant wait to see results for the new head/ports!

1700rpm idle too, god, he's never going to get good fuel economy acting like that

Another motor? Be rude not to A friend had a customer's car come in with a seized 2GRFSE engine. It was deemed uneconomical to try and repair, so they replaced it. Being the local V6 weirdo, I was asked if I would like the seized engine for V6 activities. Why, yes I would! Thanks. I've mostly stripped it down, and found nothing particularly wrong so far. It turns over smoothly except for a small portion of rotation where it "sticks" for some reason. I found a broken chain tensioner, but this looks to be a symptom rather than cause. With the chain fully off, it still does the same thing. With a camera stuck down the spark plug holes, all of the bores are looking good as best I can tell. I am guessing either it's a main bearing that is stuffed, or maybe a piston has cracked a ringland, so it jams when it first starts going up (or down) But it's looking though its still going to be a useable engine with a minor fix hopefully. So, what to do with this motor? Well, it looks like a good candidate for destroking with the 5GR or 2MZ crank. Hopefully the heads and the bores are 100% okay on this motor. As the crank and rods get binned anyway. Once I've confirmed its all okay, I'll just put it mostly back together and park it in the corner of the garage for now. The only "downside" of this motor is that the ports on intake and exhaust are incompatible with my existing manifolds. However it'll be no stress to make some new ones later on to test. Throttle Pulley problems It seems I messed up my measurements for cable length for the dual ethrottle setup. So it's now working amazingly, and both banks are getting to target and really quickly. However I can only reach about 70% throttle before it runs out of cable pull. So my pulleys are off with Dad to cut them down a bit with the CNC machine, so I can reach full travel. Ahhhh well shit happens. Airbox stuff Height of airbox to the bonnet is still the main issue I'm contending with. Rhys had a suggestion to try trumpets that are parallel to the roof of the airbox, to gain a bit more clearance. Good idea! So just printing some of these out. Thermal camera side quest I last had a thermal camera about 10 years ago. Technology has come leaps and bounds since then. My last one was very low resolution, and limited to either 5hz or 10hz refresh rate. It could only read up to 200ish degrees, which wasnt hugely useful for things like brakes or exhaust stuff. My new one is a little device the clips into the bottom of my phone. It can record video at 25hz, has 256*192 resolution, and scales up to 600 degrees C. Considerably cheaper than last time too. Bloody awesome! The thing about it that will be absolutely magnificent though. Is that I've confirmed it works with a decent quality USB-C extension cable. So this means I can mount the tiny device somewhere in my engine bay, wheel area, brake area, or whatever else. Then record and view results from in the cabin. Gonna be awesome. But obviously I need to have all of the bread and butter parts of the car sorted before this will be much use. Although 256*192 resolution seems low for a modern type of camera. It's awesome when you think about what it's replacing. If you put a temp sensor into something, you only have 2 datapoints. temperature and time. This has over 50,000 datapoints instead of 1. So instead of "radiator is hot at this particular spot" you can now see the temperature gradient across the whole thing. Interesting to see the temp gradient on this SW20 radiator, which has both its inlet and outlet mounted at the top of the radiator. It's cool to be able to see the exhaust pipes without maxxing out the sensor instantly. The bright areas are because of the different emissivity of the material, not because my welds are bad. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Ha, thats awesome! Sounds amazing.

Thats pretty cool!

Cool thanks I'll take a look. Ahhh, made by that dude Baldur. Seen some of his posts, he's a smart guy. MaxxECU is looking like it's got some nice features and plenty of flexibility too, a few guys here that are tuners seem to love them.

I remember ages ago there was a Cressida in a paddock that I needed some engine mounts out of. So I tied a rope around the B pillar and flipped it over back and forth until I could get them out. The first time I pulled it over onto its roof, the A pillar just absolutely folded in like it was cardboard. Man it was pretty sobering to think my car was built the same way. Haha.

Nah I'm good. Although the low-ish weight is cool, it also shows what an absolutely hopelessly thin bean can early 80s cars are. 50kph crash and this thing will fold like the warriors at a semi final

Yeah I'm happy with that, should be heaps of fun. I was a little worried that weight bloat from things like needing 2x exhaust manifolds. Might tip the scales towards this all becoming a fairly pointless exercise over keeping the old motor.