Roman

Yeah so the trigger code for the 2gr lets it run as wasted spark / batch fire until it gets a cam trigger signal. So originally i had timing 360 deg out, then it would work as wasted spark but then cut out when it found trigger 2. Ha. Yeah so there are 4x cam angle sensors for vvti, one gets connected as trigger 2 then the other 3 to DIs. According to some old posts on the link forum the trigger decoding only works if set to falling edge. As otherwise the timing of crank vs cam overlaps in a weird way for vvti range. Will do some checks with a multimeter tomorrow.

Yeah, pullup according to documentation.

Ive been making good progress on getting everything wired into the fusebox and controlled by ECU rather than hardwired. I bought 2x 500mm coby hotdog mufflers which are currently just sitting pushed over the ends of the pipes on each bank. Quieter than just open manifolds but should be better once welded. Have wired up ECT, wideband, fuel pressure sensor. The motor was still idling really high (like 4200rpm...) with fully closed throttles, even after setting everything to fully closed. I couldnt figure out why until I noticed that my 2x lower intake manifolds dont quite cover the edge of the circular holes which must be an idle air bypass. It was only by a smidge, so gooed the gap with some silicone and solved that problem. My current issue is that the cam angle triggers arent being picked up properly. This motor uses hall effect sensors on the cam angle sensors, and the voltage they output is too low for this ECU to register correctly. So pullup resistors are needed, which I have wired in. But stilk not working it seems. Some people have suggested wiring them to the 8v power supply rather than 5v supply, and this boosts the output voltage. But this stuffs up my loom a bit, as the 5v supply on that plug branches to a few other things as well as the triggers. So, another annoying problem, but not insurmountable. Just soaking up more time on little bits and pieces than expected. But thats always the way I guess!

Ahh ive always wondered what the point of those drag specific front tyres was. (For rwd)

Agreed, looks so good! Love this car. Going to come to the night speed final next Friday?

Went to pickapart and replaced the missing air bleed hoses. Fixed a few other coolant leaks. Now it's good. Bought a big syringe pump thing to fill the gearbox with oil, managed to do this notoriously messy job without spilling a single drop of gearbox oil! Miracle! Until I realized that the drain plug wasnt screwed in properly, and itwas on an angle - so I had to undo it and quickly straighten it and tighten it up. So gearbox oil everywhere still. Damnit, haha. Then I think I've still got some fairly massive air leaks, I dont have any gaskets or sealants at the moment so I'll pull it all apart and sort that a bit better. I managed to get it idling at around 1000rpm, but only because I've leaned out the fuel table so much. Again an easy fix, just time consuming. Then another cool milestone, and to be honest something I was dreading a bit - testing the clutch. Everything's good! I drove the car forward about a meter, then reverse about a meter. Which is officially the furthest it's propelled itself in about 6 or 7 years. It's still ear splittingly loud, and dear god it sounds like a straight piped RB or something dreadful currently. Ugh. Will buy some mufflers this week if I can, so I can keep making some progress without making my brain bleed. Then also have enough of an exhaust on there that I'll be getting okay readings on the wideband. Small steps but all in the right direction currently. nother

Yeah will probably merge into a single 3" pipe to back of the car. Probably better to go even bigger, or have separate pipes for each bank all the way to back of the car. But it sounds better if you merge them. Also it gets a lot harder trying to have some decent mufflers under the car once the pipes start getting bigger.

Nah, I think I punished him enough with non 4AGE related work already. Apparently he stays up late at night washing his hands, still trying to get the stink of 1NZ off them... For now it'll just be the factory manifolds and then try do the rest of the exhaust nicely-ish to suit end goals. Then flanges to suit putting some nicer manifolds on as things progress.

Yeah I bought a delorian in another 10 years time. Ive had it for ages

It's taken longer than I hoped to get to this point, but damn it sure felt good to hear it fire up. Even though all it can do at the moment is idle (poorly) at 2000+ rpm haha.

Alright alright alright! So I pushed the car outside this afternoon so I could reach some wiring inside to try fire it up. I filled the car up with coolant, by which I mean water because I was expecting things to leak. Sure enough each head had a hole up the front where water started leaking out. I couldnt remember what these were for, then found out that they are like an air bleed channel that goes back to the thermostat housing. So, these seem to have gone AWOL when moving house so I'll need to pickapart some more. I must have removed them when taking the heads off to clean them. Easy fix. Then I got the fuel pump working and fixed a few fuel leaks. It turns out that AN fittings arent very good at sealing if you havent tightened them up? Crazy. Then I got my tune somewhat sorted, and tried cranking the motor over.... and the bloody battery died! Ugh. I mucked around to get another battery, it sort of spluttered a few times but not quite. I had a look through the tune settings. Engine size was still set to 1500cc from using this ECU in the Echo - woops. I needed to disable the fuel pressure sensor allocation. As since this isnt wired in yet, it took 0v to believe that the motor had zillions of psi worth of fuel pressure. Then when I cranked the motor it was registering the crank trigger, but not cam trigger. Checked the settings, had this wrong. Both were set to VR sensors, but the crank is VR and the cams are hall effect. So once that was fixed... Bam! We are running. It was absolutely awesome to reach this point. So whats next? Lots. Get the coolant system functioning properly. Make an exhaust for it. A lot of wiring work, get the fusebox setup all connected nicely and mount all of the wiring nicely. Need to put some gearbox oil in the box, will do this before running the engine any longer. Pull the fuel rails off, and do tests to work out the CC rating and deadtimes for the injectors. Calibrate all of the sensors Mount a radiator fan Check intake for leaks (I think all of the air bypass screws are currently all the way out) Install the wideband Finish wiring up the alternator And a bunch of other little similar jobs. Most of these I can peck away at over winter with limited space. Making an exhaust will be difficult when weather starts getting darker and wetter and I can only really work outside. Will push ahead as best I can. Super excited for first start though!

If you can only find one with right geometry but too small a bore, you can get them bored out and put bigger guts in Bit more of a pain than finding an off the shelf option though.

Sidetrack to your build and sorry/not sorry. But the biggest tragedy with the 2ZZ was that they made the 1ZZ and 2ZZ completely different engines. They were trying to make a competitor to the B18C but totally missed the point in that regard. Like how good is the B18C, on account of that even the peasant versions can be awesome, with just different cams and so on. Can you imagine if every single turd car out there with a 1ZZ, had 2ZZ potential? Would be incredible! But instead we have zillions of 1ZZ turds and very few of the cool motors around.

When I took my 1NZ with cams etc for a WOF with the standard intake manifold on. You could not have believed it was the same engine. Holy crap, it turned into a slug haha. Totally choked out by ~5000ish rpm. If the 2ZR was similarly designed, it would be a night and day difference with some bolt on mods. However yes - I must concede that some motors like 1NZ and 2ZR do in fact totally suck in factory form.

2.4m stud height, definitely not tall enough to be useful for a hoist. But not worried about that. One thing I've learned is that no matter how fancy and comfortable your garage is. Whenever you go to an event you still end up lying down on the ground trying to look for your 10mm spanner or something. Haha.

2GRFE / 2GRFXE This is a 3.5 litre V6 that I guess replaces the 2JZGE engine. Has good aftermarket support, aftermarket cams etc but the engines cost a lot. Popular for engine swaps into MR2s and similar, because the east-west variants have a bellhousing pattern very close to a 3SGE. So they bolt up to a factory gearbox. Unfortunately ends up being pretty expensive all up, though. This guy made 405whp with an NA setup, using high comp factory pistons, aftermarket cams and valvesprings. and some bolt on mods. Pretty sweet to be banging past 100hp/litre at the wheels with a fairly big engine.

1NZFXE I think we've covered this one well enough - but definitely earns a mention. It's a pity that available aftermarket cams max out at 264 deg / 9.5mm lift. As I think this motor would give a lot of older 1600cc motors a run for it's money if bigger cams were available. Wins the prestigious Goez hard 4 wat it iz award.

2ZRFE / 2ZRFXE This is a similar era engine to the above, but a smaller 1.8 litre 4 cyl motor. When the 2ZZGE stopped production, Lotus used a supercharged 2ZR engine instead in the Lotus Elise. So there's some alright aftermarket goodies. This was also the 1.8 litre engine used in the 1.8 litre prius, hybrid and non hybrid versions in corollas. So they're fairly common. There's a prius version on trademe for $700. Perhaps most notably though, this engine was used in "Yaris Hilton" by Mighty Car mods as their cheap and cheerful turbo car. They eventually blew the motor up, it was shitloads of fun and zero fucks were given. It's pretty awesome that this engine spans all the way from being in a $$$ Lotus, to the basis for an absolute shitbox car minimum spend build for max lolz.

Just worth mentioning that there is also a slightly older version of the same thing, called 2AZFE / 2AZFXE. Not quite as good but possibly cheaper and more available perhaps. This one is cool.

Hello, Maybe it's just my age, and to do with the cars that I learned about when I grew up. However I seem to be stuck in thinking of all of the motors from the 90s or early 200s as the "golden era"? Where anything before that was a bit primitive, and anything much after that is too modernized and hard to do anything with. So only things from around this time are good. Legendary little rippers such as the 4AGE, 4G63, 2JZ, 1UZ, 13B, LS1... Gotta love em! Cheap, plentiful, great potential, great aftermarket support, and so on. However a lot of these older motors are getting hard to source, expensive, and a bit less fun when it costs 10x what it used to. However I feel like there are some good modern options which are slept on. So, what are some cool modern engines that should have some potential for swapping into shitty old cars? @shrike noted a few cool options in a recent project thread. I figure it's a worthy topic of it's own, going into some more detail on each type of motor. I will write a few posts below that I've seen some success with, with some different engines and pros/cons. In my mind what made those older engines great, was a combination of few factors -Easy to make power in factory form. -Good modding capability. -Good aftermarket support. -Plentiful engines / not too expensive. Now to be fair I am Toyota biased, not because I think these motors are best, it's just what I know about from top of my head. Feel free to spam other alternatives if you know of something cool! First up Toyota 2ARFXE engine This is a 2.5 litre 4 cylinder engine with a 90mm bore and 99mm stroke. This is normally found in a hybrid car like a Camry. There is a non hybrid version too (2ARFE) Think of it as a slightly less good Toyota version of a K24 I guess. Why consider it? It uses all of the Toyota hybrid engine tricks, for good economy - that are good for power too when modified. High compression ratio, huge ports, big standard cams, somewhat bolts to a 3SGE gearbox (Easier for FWD than RWD though) There's currently one on Trademe for under $900. How does it go? These motors have a really big factory intake cam, and this can fit on the exhaust side too. So you buy a 2nd one and fit it on the exhaust side for a cheap and easy upgrade. Then retime the cams away from atkinson cycle, and you make big stacks of power with some basic bolt on mods. This guy was making 270whp with an NA motor with 2x factory intake cams fitted. Pretty awesome! It somewhat bolts up to a 3SGE bellhousing pattern, which works well for transverse engine swaps. Downsides are that it's a fairly tall engine, some people have had to cut their bonnet to fit in smaller RWD cars. Okay so that's cool for a low budget throw together, but does the aftermarket support scale up? How about a full $$$ turbo build? As this motor was common in america, there's heaps of stuff available. Papadakis racing made a 1000hp variant.

Shrike thats all great and everything, but... Have you considered a 2ZZ?

It is tantalizingly close. I probably could have done that a week ago. Except for that I've been in the South Island for work, and we found a second hand garage for removal that is a significant upgrade over the tiny one I've currently got. (New one 9x6m 2.4 stud height) So have had zero free time for car stuff. I'm picking up the last of it tomorrow, then hoping to do some carina stuff in the afternoon. I want that start up damnit!

Ahh yeah thats where I'm stuck at the moment too. I've got about a dozen new points in the fuel system where it could potentially spray out of, at tank end and engine end. Need to find the time to clear all of the crap off, and push the whole car out a safe distance from the house. haha. I'm loving the progress on this! Shame about the bumper bar, intercooler setup looked cool.

Aahhh so these injectors might be okay, at least for starters. I left them all to soak in CRC overnight, then made a up a lead to tap them on/off straight onto a 12v battery, and they all clicked. So then I setup the injector test mode in the ECU to run them through 10,000 cycles while they were full up with CRC. Then tested all 6 outputs on my loom and they're all working. So they might have just been ever so slightly stuck. They still might be partially blocked or whatever, but I'll flow test them first to make sure they are balanced and that the spray pattern looks okay. If I can avoid a $500-600 bill for new injectors, that's money this month for stuff like the exhaust which is much better!

Just pump gas, E85 is just too much hard work.