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'80S KID redux: 1986 Toyota AW11 MR2 Super Charger


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Shit me dead, what have I got myself into... remember when I jokingly said "what you find next will shock you" and only half meant it? Well, it's not that funny anymore.

For starters, this is the old cambelt. Looks perfectly fine from a distance. It's even TGP, which is great.

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But on closer inspection... this is what freaked Karl out enough to decide the engine was getting pulled.

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And that squealing accessory belt? This is why.

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Actually... make that TWO accessory belts both on the verge of crapping themselves.

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Anyway, here are the two new TGP accessory belts, ribbed for her pleasure. But I'm probably going to have to send them back, read on to find out why.

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Pulled into the workshop on Saturday morning to drop off a couple spare bottles of supercharger oil, in case the guys needed to top it up before reinstallation. "Guess what?" Karl said when I walked in the door. "Your clutch is fucked as well!"

Again it was a case of thinking, "shit me dead, it was going to have to be done eventually but I didn't think it would need to be done this soon..." Then I saw the horrendous scorch marks on the pressure plate and flywheel and it made me cringe, just a little.

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And the clutch itself? Yeah, there's not much meat left.

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Even the release bearing has seen better days.

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With a quickly mounting repair bill looming, I mentioned that I'd noticed the engine had been doing a bit of the old knocky-knocky rattle-rattle on startup, and could sometimes hear a faint rattle at highway speeds in top gear under very light load. Sure, it could have been that release bearing, but being a 4A-G that's done just over 100,000kms I figured that with the engine out of the hole we may as well pull the sump and check the bearings, perhaps whack some new shells in if needed. Cue the next clickbait, shock news moment...

Fast forward to this morning and I'm sitting at my desk at work, wishing I'd taken the day off like everyone else, when I get a cheerful call from Karl asking if I'd had a good weekend. Immediately I knew something was up; sure enough his next sentence was "I'm here to ruin your week, we pulled the sump off and you won't believe what happened next!"

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Yeah, so the number 4 big-end is spun right round like a record, baby. No idea how long it's been that way but I suspect a long time before I even got the car, and now I realize that all of the weird rattling sounds weren't just a screwed release bearing. The only saving grace in all of this is I'm very glad the engine didn't fall to pieces on, say, the Desert Road, the Gentle Annie, or any one of the multitude of back roads I've driven in the last 18 months.

Needless to say I can't blame anyone but myself for 1. buying an old car, 2. buying an old car sight unseen out of Japan, 3. trusting the word of the dealer that the cambelt had been done, because clearly it hasn't been done and a whole host of other problems are now making themselves known, and 4. not waiting a little bit longer and buying a different one without all these hidden problems.

Huge sigh!

In light of all this I've made a decision to park the car up long-term and chip away at it when I feel that the funds deserve to be spent. For now though, I have the fun task of organizing to transport one immobile car and a whole host of parts somewhere safe, and because my brother's TX3 is now occupying the space in the garage that's usually reserved for the AW11 (since he's gone overseas for work) I'll need to find an alternative home for it.

And to think this all happened because I failed a WOF.

Discuss the colossal fail here: //oldschool.co.nz/index.php?/topic/49412-80s-kid-part-ii-eds-aw11-sc-chit-chat/

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