Roman

Cool, cheers! Ideally I'd like to get something that could widthstand hoonage on semislicks as well, so a different set for road or track probably makes sense seeing how it's easy enough to swap pads on the 4 pots. I might make a big pliers type tool to push the pistons in though, that's the only part which is time consuming or cumbersome compared to the rest. Another thing that's a pain at the moment though is that I've got a hardline running to the calipers, so they cant come off without a brake rebleed. So might get braided lines and make the whole thing flexible instead of half hard line and half rubber. Will make any issues with the hubs/rotors/whatever easier to work on. What kind of brakes do you have on the 86?

Cheers guys! I'll look into those reccomendations. I have considered a 2ZZ, but then I realised that driving with an erection is dangerous. Come to Nats this time around, and witness some hoonage/blowups/whatever at Hampton! Does anyone have a compression tester / leakdown tester / whatever that I could borrow? There's a bit of a tapping noise that the engine has had for ages, I'm thinking it might be a valve or something but want to do some troubleshooting without yanking the head. Will check the valve clearances first of all, as I only ever checked them initially/when cold.

No idea on pressures, havent checked since tires were fitted haha. Tire load was a lot more balanced than mr2 though, once rears got hot in that you were screwed... in this you could notice it but grip balance stayed about the same. Yeah semis are the way to go! Once the brakes are sorted anyway.

Cheers, yes everything just came together really well. Gps shows that I shortened the track by 10 meters with better lines too. Main area of improvement was the sweeper, straightening up the braking zone. Had spome interesting tire wear on the fronts,the tread blocks that were 'square' are now sawtpooth shaped from wearing the inside edges of the blocks. Camber was good though as its no longer nuking the outside edges, even wear across the tire.

What's the bet that he will iteratively improve every part of the car until it ends up being a starlet This is awesome.

Woot! Just had a Taupo trackday today, and had a blast! First time using the truck for track duties, it's my Dads for towing his fishing boat - but we fitted a towbar so it can double up for track duties too. The recent changes (add front camber, adjust LSD, new tires) have made a HUGE difference... Last trackday I was running the 'fast' corner off the straight, this time the slow one... Yet I was still over 6 seconds a lap quicker now. Awesome! The car was handling sooo good, it was really neutral handling and for the first time ever it was not scary when it starts to oversteer. A few times when pushing hard I was oversteering in a rather precarious direction but it just composed itself and got back to business. Which really helps give you so much more confidence. In absolute terms, my new PB of 1.57.3 isnt earth shattering, but it was so much fun and we just had an absolute blast. Surprisingly the weakest link this time was the 4 pot brakes - the brake pads were getting nuked, I'll need to spend a bit more cashmonies on some decent pads for next time. Anyone got hookups on pads / reccomendations on pads for the R32/33 4 pots? They're easy enough to swap pads so I dont mind buying a set of track dedicated pads. We ran the car the whole day though with no real problems, my clutch started slipping on one run as I think we'd done so many stints back to back with ruthless gear changes that the whole thing was just getting rather hot. After a bit more of a cooldown it came right again. But I'm happy to leave the clutch as the weakest link in the car as I'd rather blow up a clutch than anything else. I've had a few pointers from some good drivers on where I was going wrong on a few of the corners, my gps shows that with some revised lines I was holding a solid 15-20kph higher speed through a lot of sections which is great. Maximum speed was 186kph and it felt really stable at that speed, and nice under braking too. So the plan from here is to get some better pads, perhaps some ducting to the front brakes and then do some more trackdays over summer Grin factor 99! Had the best time Fred

Under the tray! What's the point of a ute if you cant chuck shit in the back.

It's easy to miss things in the Projects section, but god bloody damnit I am so glad that I subscribed to your thread. A++ would live vicariously through your awesomeness again

If the parts are available, that sounds like the easiest possible option! I'd only bother making custom shit as a last resort when there's no other option.

But then how does it know if it's on the firing stroke or exhaust stroke with only a crank angle sensor - Aahhh wasted spark and batch injection, problem solved haha. Is that a Straight six engine in the beemer Dave?

Ugly cars are the way of the future though! Yeah if the Gemini was too bigger a project then I guess it makes sense to scale things back a bit. If you give up on this one though I am going to revoke your mancard, give you a kick in the balls and ban you from any further projects!

I think it's more to do with difficulty in controlling super small pulsewidths? As in, your ECU cannot control below 2% opening time. (for example) That might be fine for 350cc injectors as 2.5% pulsewidth gives you correct idle. But 560cc might need 1.5%, which your ECU cant do. Or whatever.

Aahhh shitballs, my exhaust hanger rubbers broke while doing some Scenic driving today. This might expedite my exhaust remake, but at the same time I'm not keen to reinvent the wheel just before trackday next weekend. So I'll just get some replacements, they last about 5,000kms before breaking haha. It would have been the highish speeds on bumpy roads that did it, the rear muffler is reasonably heavy and was probably jumping around a bit to make it break. I've come up with a good idea for an easy way to make exhaust hangers though, I'll use nylon blocks or something to replace the rubbers while I'm making it, so it's not wobbling around and I can try fab everything to the same distance between upper hanger and lower hanger thing that the rubber bush will go on. If there's consistently a 50mm gap or whatever then it will be less likely that there's just one that's taking more of the load than the others.

Haha yep. It makes driving a toyota echo considerably more entertaining on long trips. Im all like "4.5l PER HUUNIT, CHEAH BOY!" *gang signs*

Yeah, stock ECU. Torque is such an awesome app! I've got a few different screen presets setup which are handy. One I use when I'm trying to be stingy driving my Echo, with realtime and average fuel usage values, a tacho and one or two other things. However I've got a few other screens with like ignition advance, intake temp, coolant temp, tps, etc etc which are infinitely useful for troubleshooting and figuring out what the ECU is 'thinking'. Even if you use only one gauge it doesnt really update quick enough to be used in realtime as a tacho or whatever though. I've found that in any car that I've driven, about 80-85kph is the most economical speed... It's the cross over point between keeping engine rpms low in top gear, aerodynamic drag and keeping the speed high for the amount of fuel you are using.

Only in first gear, as that's the only time you're out of the powerband. But there's generally an abundance of torque in first regardless. After that you're at the mercy of your gearbox ratios and how many rpms it drops between gear changes. If the problem is that at 5500rpm you've got no power, and it dips to that rpm, it's the gearbox ratios that will fix the problem not the final drive. If you shift at redline each time, it's still going to drop by the same amount of revs per gear change regardless of final drive ratio. A 4.66 helps you get out of the slump in first gear, but that's it. It moves the peaks, but it moves the troughs too. I'll put together a technical illustration later with MSpaint to explain further

If you fit something like a 4.7 ratio but your gearbox isnt able to shift any faster than it did before you have this problem: It's normally (for example) 3 seconds accellerating through 1st, 1 second gear change, 4 seconds through 2nd, 1 second gear change, 5 seconds through 3rd, 1 second gear change, 6 seconds through 4th. total time 3+1+4+1+5+1+6 = power to the ground 85% of the time. Then with a modified final drive you end up with: 2 seconds accellerating through 1st, 1 second gear change, 3 seconds through 2nd, 1 second gear change, 4 seconds through 3rd, 1 second gear change, 5 seconds through 4th. total time: 2+1+3+1+4+1+5 = power to the ground 82% of the time. Since you're spending less time putting power to the ground, if my shoddy maths is correct then in the above example it's the equivilent to losing 4.5hp across your powerband on a 150hp engine. You get the illusion of more power since it gets through each gear quicker, and feels racier, but you end up slower overall. It gets even worse if you were previously topping out your speed in the 1:1 gear (fourth) but now shifting into an overdrive gear instead which has a higher transmission loss. Race cars which have close ratio gearboxes and high final drives generally do so in conjunction with a gearbox that can smash through the gears almost instantly, and an engine redline that's much higher than a standard one. Also the top gear is generally a 1:1. As otherwise it's not worth the extra time spent chopping through the gears. It's a bit more complicated when it comes to a track with corners, but personally I dont think changing final drive ratio acheives as much as people tend to think.

Do you still have the gemini as well?

I've had a mix of problems for a while, where the engine runs good under full load, but is a total dog at cruising or idle. I've been chasing around just about everything trying to figure this out. Well, it turns out that I've had the wrong knock sensor, which has been causing the chaos! When knock happens, it makes a certain frequency vibration in the engine block. The frequency differs depending on the bore and stroke, similar to how a trumpet makes a different sound to a big tuba or something. So the problem that I had, was that I had a knock sensor from a smaller engine. It was listening out for knock on a different frequency, and not hearing it when it happened. The ECU thought everything was dandy, so was smashing in shitloads of ignition advance because it thought I was running some wizard magic fuel that appreciates 50 degrees advance in all scenarios hahaha. Today though, I managed to find a knock sensor from a gen 3 3SGE at Zebra. Got home and swapped this over, reset the ECU and disabled all changes from the fuel computer. Took it for a run, and... sweet jesus! Idle problems and low load problems instantly solved. Idle has gone back down to 10 or so degrees advance, and the idle is stable at 950-1000rpm when previously it was running 12-1300. At low load cruising it's now doing 30-35ish degrees advance instead of high 40s. I took the car for a bit of a run out to the airport and back, the average for the trip was 8.5litres per 100km. Which is a lot better than the 11/12l per 100 that it was getting before. It can now sit in 6th gear trundling along at 1600rpm or so at 50-60kph with no worries. Previously I'd have to go to 4th or 5th. Pretty happy with the economy! It's a lot quieter in the cabin when the motor is running properly too, so pretty happy all round. An unexpectedly successful fix! Taupo trackday is next weekend, and I caaaannnnnn not wait

How did it fare with the different ratio for the diff? Do these run some wizard magic imperial handspan type wheel PCD, or is it easy enough to get a second set of wheels. I'm down in Taupo next weekend I'll come say Hi if you'll be around.

Wheel size of 260mm dia means it travels 816mm per rotation 1225 rotations per km To go 30kph = 36764 wheel rotations per hour 612 wheel rotations per minute So if your engine can do a max of 3600rpm (3600 / 612) You would need a 5.88: pulley ratio between the motor and the wheel. Assuming you had the torque available in the lower rpm range to get you there.

Keen!

Yeah I didnt notice that last time I bought a set, (On MR2) but they did feel a bit squishy on the Carina until I added the camber. It's kind of like going from an old set of skate shoes where you can feel everything, to full soles again. Heh. Either way, gave them a bit more of a scrub tonight around scenic drive and the car is going sooooo good! 4 weeks till Taupo trackday, if it's dry I'll definitely smash my 2.03 Carina lap record and hopefully come close to / beat my 1:57 MR2 record on full track. I've had a moment of clarity about a few corners I've been doing wrong as well, and will bring a pyrometer to bump the camber in or out a bit on the day depending on what the tires are doing.

Lice Lice Baby?

Keep the spoiler for sure! Any idea on colour you'll go for.