BlownCorona

this missed out on getting a wof/used this summer because i focused all my spare time on the crown, but shit its good to be dailying the crown again, so well worth the sacrafice. anyway i have recently made some progress on the chevron. my work held its track day last week and i was pretty excited to cut some laps in my first real race car. days before the event we got word that open top cars were not going to be allowed without an MSNZ spec roll bar, so for perhaps a normal person this would have mean parking the car and dealing with in later. but for me, i luckily had 90% of my new roll bar build. spoke nicely to one of the welders and he tigd on my harness bar rady for me to pull a long night, the night before track day, to install it. didnt actually take too long and im very happy, though i still have the 5th removable bar to install soon. cue track day, and it very very quickly became apparent that something in the coolant system is not good enough, the format we ran for the day was 15 minutes cycles of sub 100kmh (passengers allowed), road cars, race cars, bikes. and while the car was happy enough driving on the road to the track, and in the first cruise session, not even one lap into the first proper session and the temps were sky rocketing. i tried removing the thermostat for a band aid fix that might get me a few sessions but it behaved the same. either something in the coolant system isnt up to par, or it may be a head gasket, though i have no surface symptoms of this. however it did get slightly warm on the drive home, i suspect this is probably because it poked some of the coolant out when warm and now has an airlock. still, given the type of car it is, you can still have alot of fun sub 100, cutting through corners are a decent pace, and the passengers all loved it. looks like i might need to lower the passenger seat base some, for some reason its higher than the drivers. after the race day, i also picked up a new drivers seat, id been looking for an affordable kirkey for ages, since i think they look awesome, and no other seat is gonna fit. turns out the seller was aweful and measuring and it doesnt fit either, but i can cut and weld it to take out the extra width at the front, its only slightly too wide.

sorry looks like it was too long ago and the auction details are no longer online. beware that there are about 5 different tail light options of these cars. mine is probably the rarest, but only judging by parts availability. i paid what ever my tail light was going to end at because it was the first LH good condition correct style light id seen. if you want cheap car parts, get a cressida haha

some are stuck on, some pop on with barbs. just be careful you don't break them when removing maybe YouTube some techniques or something

from memory the tail light ran be about 200 bucks, and i dont think this included shipping but it may have.

i got it from the Japanese auctions, there are plenty on there. i use jauce.com to search for parts and purchase, use google chrome with auto translate, and consider looking up Japanese search terms, its a front end to the jap auction sites, as well as a freight forwarder. you pay a fee (they have a calculator for this and shipping estimates) they organize freight within japan to their warehouse, where you get free storage for parts for a few months, so you can ship all the stuff you want to NZ in one box. shipping's not cheap at the moment.

pre charger will also increase the sealing and efficiency (more boost) and help keep the rotors cool (no teflon delamination worries) real pleased the kit went to such a nice car and one that i can follow! cant wait to hear it whining away at a proper boost level, guess i should update my build thread with the new forced induction kit in progress so people dont think i just gave up on it

reasoning behind this? i just ran the externally regulated unit on the corona when i fitted the efi 18rgeu because it was easy and didnt seem to give any issues. but if its gonna cause long term issues id be keen to swap it out during the next engine build

great result

when i did my w55 clutch i had to press off the old bearing and swap the new bearing over to the old carrier (thing that clips to the clutch fork) but if you say the alignment tool dosnt fit, does the clutch plate even fit the gearbox inout shaft?

Just add a fuse?

found a pic of our one for inspiration. they are heaps of fun to drive. i took this on my rapid crash course in learning to drive LHD. from carterton to Christchurch. finding somewhere to park it in wellington CBD where my company booked a hotel for me was an absolute bastard. ended up just using the hotel valet

weve got a single cab/facking mahoosive tray '97 that we bought of the certifier in carteron to crash test. did its job and wasnt too banged up so we had it repaired it for a work vehicle. its so mint, can carry a whole dodge rams load of crash repair parts including a hood laying flat in the tray. and i cut half the exhaust out so it sounds like a muscle car, with its matty b D Windows, it looks the part too. its not great on gas, but its also not awful, really depends on if you mash the gas pedal or not. its got the spider injector 350 in it which i assume is what you have.

you can hear mine but its very subtle.

thats exactly what i want. i wonder whats been done it it. will have to send them a message!

need to fix the failed muffler so i can even hear the blower first! the blower isnt very loud, i fitted a pod filter even though i usualy dislike them, just to let the sound out some more, but i want to look into how i can make it louder again. options include, more boost and the kits you can buy (or just make) which run a hose from right inside the blower inlet into the cabin, with a sealed drum like mebrane over it, which transfers the sound into the cabin and makes it howl.

wow havnt actually updated this thread in a while! the reason why it wouldn't start was because the starter motor fuse was blown. other things ive done since the last post include fitting the handbrake and having the cables modified to suit. as well as fitting the manual handbrake centre console. i also borrowed a commercial upholstery cleaner and went to down on the seats and carpets. they've come up really nice. i then had issues with idle, which turned out to be the ISCV super gummed up, aswell as the timing was set way too advanced, it now idles good, but i may look to install something like an apeci SAFC II to fiddle the fuel at idle just a little. after the idle was sorted and id kinda run out of other jobs that didnt involve sanding the car down again, i set to colour sanding out the orange peel, now i elected not to sand the paint glass smooth, but to leave an even and subtle texture to the paint, mostly because i did not want to run the risk of taking all the clear off, aswell as alot of oem japanese cars arnt glass smooth. i dont have any bar one photo of sanding the clear, but it was boring and tedious. After colour sanding i tested the process of buffing with meguiars 105 and 205 on the hood to make sure i was happy with how the car was going to look. i was happy! and getting pretty excited so i moved onto the rest of the car starting at the front and moving back with the 105 then went over the whole car with 205 which really brought out the shine and colour, i also set to refiting the remaining parts that i held off in order to make sanding easier. Then yesterday this happened, very pleased. the car is going straight back to daily duties. The car is in dire need of a proper wash to get all the sanding and polishing crud off the rest of the car, but here's a couple pics i took today while out. needless to say I'm extremely pleased, and other than the muffler failing, this project is complete. BOSS coffee can high stop light is a tacky feature i quite like. Plans now are to wash it, grab a decent camera and try get some nice photos, and then just drive it every day. oh and probably fit a new rear muffler that doesn't like the current one.

had been running on 95 pre paint job as 98 was not everywhere and real expensive. but recently npd have rolled out 100 at a reasonable price and nearly every station.

Icv clean made it alot better, but still had issues. Got dad's timing light and checked it. Car was set at about 35btdc.. I bumped it a little advanced earlier but into a couple degrees. Anyway it's 99% good now shockingly. I suspect I could get it slightly better if I fitted something like an apexi safc II and fiddling with fuel down low. My brother has one in his lockup which I may fit at some point. They look pretty cool at any rate. The cars still mid polish job so havnt driven it, but am pretty keen to see how it's running on the street now.

Again, I have been spending the day colour sanding while I have the rare opportunity of solid days to myself But the idle speed is significantly higher than it was ~2500 rpm after cleaning the iscv. So regardless if that was the problem, it was definitely its own issue. I'll get under the hood and wind the idle back down later today hopefully and see what happen

Yuck (the throttle body is probably like this too)

i got bored home alone on new years and the bourbons just weren't filling the void inside me, so i went out and pulled the iacv off. i started to clean the rubber pintle valve with carb cleaner only to discover it wasn't rubber, and was actually half the size it started once id cleaned all the shit off. given it was nearly 12, i couldn't really run the engine long or rev it heaps, but a quick test felt positive. i probably should have waited till 12 and all the fireworks would have covered the noise lol. will see in the morning

idle up reminding me of a symptom i forgot to mention. when it was idling by itself and i hit the ac fan on, it stalled out so it didnt seem like idle up wasnt working, not sure if this means somethings not operational or just part of the whole issue. id really like the car to function as if it were factory, but not at all against doing non factory things to get it there. can you get aftermarket IACV controllers that would have more adjustability?

some slight progress/investigation today, but since i had a good block of time i mostly focused on colour sanding the orange peel out. but i noticed that the secondary exhaust manifold gasket was leaking, i forgot that during the manual swap we went to remove the exhuast from the headers back and one nut rounded off and and seized after a few turns before snapping off. the o2 sensor is directly in front of the leak. its a 1 wire sensor so not super flash but cant be helping. it needs fixing anyway so have ordered the gaskets and will do that first. for idle control these have a 6 wire ISCV. i dont know anything more than that. all i can really do is check its getting power. while i was out ordering the gaskets, i grabbed a can of throttle body cleaner, and will look to give everything involved a good scrub up. the idle speed when it wants to idle is just fine at around 900 - 1000. but its when its idleing down from a rev that it doesnt catch itself.

oh outstanding! super glad you got it over the line man

Gonna grab dad's but thanks for the offer! Would stale fuel do this? Its been in the tank for over a year... Not a quick paint job It's on e so will be getting some fresh stuff real soon