Roman

Aahhh, the good old "Pull off every easily pulled off part and paint it a tacky colour" trick haha. That and the Veilside style kit & dash gauges give off a hefty 90s vibe! Has this been tucked away in a shed for a while? Reminds me of some fun times back in the day. Sounds like you're on the way to fixing it up which is good. This thing should be a little rocket!

gnnnarrrr! I thought there was another twilight session on the 18th of December... So I was lining up an epic weekend by having this the day before my work Xmas trip weekend. However it's race cars with log books only Looks as though the only trackday until next year is on the same day as OS drags, bummer. Drags will be awesome fun though!

And that'll be cheaper than a $7k F20C with gearbox, driveshaft, flywheel, everything? You guys are drunk. But either way, they're both stupid options for someone wanting a cheap motor to chuck in.

Awesome! Some very impressive and well thought out fabrication. Love the 4 link setup.

Yeah even when the airbox was pulling air from the engine bay, my air filter had bugs and twigs and all sorts in it! This isnt *directly* in the airflow because it's tucked behind that lower valance thingy. So hopefully that stops most of the road kill reaching the filter Yeah I'm looking forward to the drags! Main problem though is miserable traction off the line, unless I can be bothered making some traction brackets in the next week or two it will probably be stuck in high 15s.

Man I love this thing! That first photo in your first post is so awesome, makes me want some 4WD Lada goodness to go exploring in.

Sorry I get a bit rambly sometimes, will make the next update something interesting like hopefully some trackday footage!

Oh yeah, so ahhh.... The airbox rubbed on my wheel at full lock to the left. It looked like it had heeeaaapppsss of room so I didnt even bother checking... But forgot that wheel offset + castor means it swings around quite a way. So I spent the whole day today remaking version 2.0 which has zillions more clearance away from the wheel. Tested at full lock and it's miles away from touching now. Cool. I would take some photos, but now that it's fitted it's pretty stealthy, you cant actually see it either from the front or side of the car. I'll take it back out to paint it black though if this one doesnt have any problems haha. So anyway, how does this one compare... Pretty awesomely apparently! Notice the flat spot at the 4-5000rpm mark... This is where the length of the intake runners is helping to push air back out, rather than into the cylinder. All beams motors withs standard intakes do this. When you put quad throttles on with short runners, you dont have this happen... You lose the 'dip' but you lose the 'gain' too. The standard runner length works out to give a (helmholtz resonance) boost at approx 7000rpm, if you fitted shorter runners than factory than this rpm goes up. So most quad throttle setups dont reach their tuned length peak because it would be at like 15,000rpm and its hard to fit runners that are long enough, the factory ones need a bit of a bend to fit. But anyway, based on the results above it's easy to think "Cool I've gained 10hp!" Realistically it's probably because my shitty setup was LOSING me that much all fo this time...I'm probably back to the power that a standard motor should have started with. Alright I'm done with nerding about graphs and stuff for the moment, next update will be something interesting haha.

Ive no doubt youre correct about the link. However ive only got limited car money for the next while, so its pretty much: Trackdays and consumables OR ECU or other spendy bits Trackdays win! I need practice driving more than another 500rpm.

Yes and no... its a bit frustrating banging the limiter when it feels like theres more left in it! But even so its great fun banging through the 6 speed with the revs up.

Bits of alloy shaped so it's got a forward facing mouth (as currently the inlet hole is at the back of the airbox/ facing the tire) However because I'm a noob I've just realised (via the sound it makes haha) that at full lock turning left the wheel rubs on it because of the caster and wheel offset. D'oh. It Looked like had heaps of room when the wheels are straight / serves me right for not checking. Will fix it up tomorrow In other news though the MAF readings are higher than before (so more air in the motor/ MOAR POWAR!) and it is definitely making power right to redline. My MR2 which had 127kw ATW made max power below 7000rpm, this shows peak power 7350 rpm, just below the 7400rpm cut. So might be over the 130kw mark perhaps / probably as higher drivetrain losses than a transaxle. Either way it's running really well, and cant wait for another trackday to pop up!

I'm pre-empting the rust. Haha Will see if I get in trouble come WOF time.

An MR2 normally has the battery in the front and engine in the back. So I used the battery lead from one of those to relocate mine. Although mainly because I had an MR2 sitting there, using some welding cable is a better plan! And just take the cable to an electrician or whatever to get the ends crimped on. There should be a few 'how to's on the web somewhere.

Sooo today when it was nice and hot, I measured some air intake temps while driving 50ish kph with some stop/start: That escalated quickly! So I followed the age old engineering advice, of "Measure once, cut twice, swear thrice" Rotated the airbox so its pointing downwards, and then riveted together some alloy sheet to make a scoop type thing that gets fresh air from the front of the car. Like so: Soooo how did this change air inlet temperatures when left stationary to heat soak? Pretty awesomely! Takes almost 20 minutes of sitting stationary to reach 30 degrees now, and it drops right back down as soon as you're moving. When driving with ambient temperature of an estimated 16-20 degrees, the air inlet temperatures are now between 20-24 degrees where it was previously between 30 and 41. If they say every 10 degrees of intake temp is worth 4% power... Then this could potentially equate to another 5ish hp at the wheels for 'free'. I'll datalog some MAF readings later and see how it compares. But pretty chuffed to be able to see a measured improvement already, I would imaginethere will easily be sub 20 degree intake temps when driving at night time now.

Re: pinion flange... With my car the tiniest specs of dirt were making the splines jam up, so it was torquing up to spec even though there was still end float. Heh. It took about 2 hours of cleaning and test fitting and cleaning etc to make the splines slide nicely, at which point I could actually torque the damn thing up properly.

sofa king sweet

Double post, coupe life

More or less, yeah! So it would pull air from just behind the headlights. Or perhaps have some longer ducting on that far side, if there's an area close by which is naturally at a higher pressure when the car is moving.

Aahh true! Nah I havent seen that before, will have a geez later. Man I'd love to get a tunable ECU - But wont be able to for a long time yet. Maybe by next summer. In the meantime I'll have to stick with satisfying my nerdy urges with trying to squeeze some more out of the motor on standard computer haha. It doesnt hurt to learn how things work in the meantime.

Oooooohhhh aahhhhhhh I just found a new function in my OBD2 program, that can datalog some of the sensors and export to a .CSV file. The air filter box on my engine is a bit crummy at the moment, it's a Celica panel filter box flipped upside down with part of it chopped off to clear the bonnet. More or less like so: So it gets a bit hot - I've noticed intake temps seem to be 10-20 degrees above ambient. Which makes sense since the radiator fan is blowing hot air pretty much straight into it haha. So my next mission is to try and improve the air intake a bit, in a few different ways: -Reduce the % above ambient temps of the intake air under all conditions -Place the air feed in a high pressure area (in front of the radiator panel basically!) -All going well should result in a higher peak airflow meter reading (more power?) Currently I'm not really sure which variables affect intake temperature so time to datalog and get a baseline result. I'm suspecting that possible contributing factors could be: -throttle position -Airflow meter reading -vehicle speed -engine rpm. So datalogged these and then came up with some graphs: They all show a similarish trend, because when you put your foot down the speed & RPM increase as well as the MAF signal. Heh. However, looking more closely at some of the areas where speed is high, engine rpm is high but the MAF signal varies it shows that the temp drops when the airflow ramps up, and but then temperature increses up again shortly after the MAF signal drops off. Even when RPM and speed are high. Currently the intake temp ranges from 25 degrees to 34, on a cold night at 11pm when it's 14-15 degrees ambient. The highest MAF reading was 151.59 grams per second at 7100rpm, the spread of readings looked like this: The 45 degree trend line that you can see is how much air the motor is able to pull in at full throttle. So its a good thing that this keeps climbing and has a peak at 7100rpm - if it wasnt making power anymore this would start tapering off. Factory peak HP and torque looks like this, max hp 7000rpm max torque 6000rpm: so it's possible that the porting to the head and the exhaust design are helping it make a little extra puff higher up still. Or maybe the Altezza manifolds being a little more efficient than the FWD ones. The OBD unit only samples at 1hz so I didnt get any readings over 7100rpm but it's possibly higher again nearer 7400. To get an idea of how well the cylinders are filling with air for each combustion at a given RPM (I think this matches up to max torque?) You can just divide the MAF signal by the RPM at the time and graph it: Since my current intake effectively gets colder air when it's huffing more in, it's perhaps possible that if there was a supply of colder higher pressure air all of the time then the cylinder filling on either side of the peak might improve. It will be interesting to see how these things compare when I've remade an airbox lid... And how it compares to a dyno run when I put it on there some day.

Too low

I ended up getting an aliexpress fuel pump. Time will tell whether this is a bad idea haha. But the factory in tank pump was just a motor with a plastic impeller on it? Hardly seems worth the $250-$300 that people were asking locally for a non genuine replacement. Anyway, one VERY surprising thing about replacing the pump. I'd have thought a dodgy pump just affects when you're going full rpm full throttle and it isnt able to deliver enough fuel. But for whatever reason, now the cars idle, low end, mid range etc is all way better too! Perhaps a fuel pump is under more load when the fuel isnt going anywhere but through the FPR and back into the tank? Or when it starts failing it just means it cant hold pressure anymore. But the car can now idle stable as low as 650rpm. Where as previously it wouldnt hold anything below ~1000rpm. Doesnt make sense to me how this is fixed by a fuel pump, but whatever! I thought getting some GPS data might help see if it's better or worse... Over a particular speed range compared to some data from last trackday, it's 6% quicker since exhaust and fuel pump. So that means previously I must have been losing ~10hp at the wheels across the powerband to either my crappy exhaust, or running slightly lean, or both.

Fuel pump fitted, GPS shows that since new exhaust and new fuel pump the car is 6% faster over a particular speed range compared data on the straight at last Taupo trackday I went to. Awesome! There are some concerning wheel bearing noises though which warrant further investigation before I go for a hoon at Hampton though, so that's me out for tomorrow. Have fun, see you guys at the next one coming up!

This car is the greatest thing.

My fuel pump arrived today, yuss! Might be able to make it.