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Jukka's AE72 Corolla Wagon


Jukka

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For the past year and a bit I've been toying with the idea of starting a new project with an older Toyota. I spent many hours on the internet looking for a suitable candidate and 2 weeks ago I managed to come across my perfect project. I picked up this AE72 Corolla Wagon from a kid about an hour away from my place in Calgary who had bought it, but decided not to do anything with it. It has some issues and the kid just wanted out before getting too deep into it.

 

Anyways, so here's my Corolla, also known as Project Coral! (Walking Dead joke/reference)

car 1.jpg

She's a Canadian Spec 1983 Corolla Wagon. Has only 130xxxKM on it, all original except for the fog lamps, an aftermarket radio and some speakers in the back trunk area. interior.jpginterior 2.jpg

 

Interior is in great shape for the year, seats could use a good cleaning/reupholstering and the carpet is burn and stinks like cigarettes, but over all no complaints.

 

The exterior is another story. Due to living in Canada, and living in a part of the country where we have massive swings in temperature (we can go from -30C to +17C in less than 48 hours, or from +30 to -1 and snow in the same time frame), cars up here usually rust out. This little rolla is actually in great shape for the year. The rear arches are pretty bad, but are solid underneath, the worst spots are the rear arches, the driver's side rear apron, a small patch on the rear apron behind the bumper, and the chunk in the hatch.

rust 1.jpgrust 2.jpgrust 3.jpg

 

She's a bit rough, but this will be a long term project.

 

My plans for it are going to be fixing the body work, deleting the side mirrors and putting on a set of fender (I guess they are also called wings?) mirrors, rear bumper delete, a set of early TE tail lights, and figure out the front end. The lamps on it right now from what I've figured out is a USDM/CDM specific front end for 83, and the side marker lamp lenses are broken on mine, and are like hens teeth to find. The right side is discontinued from Toyota North America, and the left side is still available, but about 2 months turn around for it. I do have some questions about front end's that I will post in a later post.

 

Interior: I have brand new aftermarket carpet coming in next week, front seats are going to be replaced with a set of RA64 Celica seats and for when I want to have fun I have a rare Tommy Kaira Recaro Speed seat sitting in my garage to go in. Rear bench will be reupholstered, and anything that is currently brown on the interior will be painted black. 

 

Suspension: I'm either going to run the OEM front suspension and get a set of weld on coilovers from Techno Toys Tuning, or I may see if I can source out some AE86 front suspension. Rear leafs are going to be repacked, adding a leaf spring into it and add in a panhard bar eventually.

 

Wheels: I managed to snag a pair of 14x6 Enkei 92's and a pair of 14x6.5 Riken Mesh wheels for $200. They will be refinished and slapped on the car soon.

 

Driveline: Canadian market cars were sold with a 4AC engine with a T50 gearbox behind them, so it makes swapping in a 4AGE or a 20V a lot easier than if I had the 3TC in it. I'm thinking I'll go Blacktop 20V eventually and run a Supra rear differential in the back.

 

But yea, that's my little corolla project. I'll be posting more soon.

 

 

LINK TO DISCUSSION:

//oldschool.co.nz/index.php?/topic/55618-jukkas-ae72-corolla-wagon-discussion/

 

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Since picking her up, I've had a little bit of time to play around and work on it. I have a new born at home, so time is mostly spent taking care of her. One of the first things I did was pick up the wheels I mentioned up top. The guy had them listed as Enkei's and SSR's. When I got to his place and found out they were Rikens, I pretended to get upset and told him that they weren't worth the $400 he was originally asking for them, and bascially worked him down to $200. Works for me.

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One thing I hate about buying used wheels here, for some reason apparently people can't drive and find a way to rash wheels easily. You can see in the picture of the Enkei's above where the lip is slightly bent and rashed at the top. I'll be sending these out to get straightened and the rash fixed, then I'll be painting the wheels.

 

During my time working on it, I decided to clean the car out of all the old junk and cigarette butts the previous owner decided to leave me. My buddy was giving me a hand and saw this big bubble wrapped thing in the back seat and decided to pull it out. He unwrapped it found this thing in it.clean out.jpg

It's for tobaco use, I swear.....

 

No other major surprises, but I did manage to get $4 back from loose change, so car only cost me $746. I also got rid of the stupid ugly fog lamps and head lamp grills.

 

The engine is in good shape, runs great except the car flood out when it reached operating temperature. I have a carb rebuild kit on order right now too, so once it comes in, I should have the car drivable.

engine.jpg

 

Here is my headlight/front end question. So, the front end currently on the car has 5"x7" sealed beam headlights and as i stated before the marker lenses are broken and one side is discontinued from Toyota. I've done a bunch of looking around online and it looks like the TE71 panel vans have a similar lens for the marker. We never got the panel vans up here, so does anyone have one they can measure the lens to see if it will fit??

 

car 2.jpg

Second question is I've been looking on ebay for the marker lens and have come across parts to do a flush face conversion. Since my front guards have the angled cutout from where the markers fit, I don't want to try and track down some earlier model guards to do a quad conversion to it, so i was wondering if anyone knew if I could do this front end without modifying the apron??

insperation.jpg

also already have those same mirrors on order too.

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Got some new parts yesterday. I picked up a set of mint RA65 Celica seats for $50, ordered up the flat front headlight conversion from ebay, received my first box of parts for the car which included new drums for the rear and my carb rebuild kit. Still waiting on my drum hardware kit and replacement carpet.

The collection of seats that will be going in the car at some point. 

seats.jpg

The Tommy Kaira Recaro needs to have it's nylon bushings replaced, there's a bit too much movement back and forth.

 

The Celica seats are in great shape, just needed a good vacuuming.

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The grey just doesn't cut it. I'm going to be doing a full black interior conversion on the car, so the grey had to go.

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Much better! Still needs a few more coats of dye before it's done.

 

Biggest piece of the puzzle to get this thing on the road. 

carb rebuild.jpg

 

Going to be rebuilding the carb sometime mid week and hopefully have it good to go for next weekend.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, had some ups and downs with the car since the last post.

I managed to get a few hours to do some work on it and found some really nice surprises and a really shitty one too.

The nice surprise was that I pulled out the old musty, super dirty, cigarette burned and ash filled carpets. The car smelled a million times better after doing that, but the best surprise was the floor pans under the carpet were absolutely mint. No rust, no mold, no nothing. My 2002 WRX had more rust on the floor pans than this thing does.

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Still needs a good deep clean to get rid of the dirt, but I'm so happy with how clean they are.

Speaking of carpet, my replacement carpet showed up the next day.

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Fully formed, has the heel plate, just needs to have the holes for the shifter plate, hand brake, and seat holes cut out before I put it in. 

 

The last bit of good news is I got my new headlight setup in from Asia. 

headlight 1.jpgheadlight 2.jpg

I couldn't find the replacement lenses for the marker lights, so I decided to pull the trigger on the JDM flat nose headlights and bezels. I mistakenly only ordered the right side bezel/marker light, so I need to order up the left side this week.

 

The bad news of all of this, went to go rebuild the carb last week and found this.

carb 1.jpg

Hairline crack in the carb body. It explains why the carb would start puking fuel out when it got up to operating temperature. Since finding parts for older Toyota's up here is like finding a needle in a haystack, so my buddy is going to take it home and see if he can either seal it up using a special epoxy he has, or see if our other buddy can just do a quick weld on it. Either way, carb should be taken care of soon and hopefully wont flood out.

 

I also had a quick question for anyone else who owns a KE/AE Wagon. I'm going to start working on the body work in the next couple of weeks, and one of my first things I'm going to be doing is pulling the glass out of the rear 1/4 windows and the hatch window. I had a question about removing the rubber seal outside of the window. I took a quick look and it looks like for the rear 1/4 windows the rubber seal pulls out, is that true? I know for the hatch window I need to pull the chrome trim off, then the seal.

 

I also checked with Toyota over here and the hatch glass seal is discontinued from Toyota, should I just use a thick coat of urethane when I replace it?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, a couple of small updates. We managed to get the carb rebuilt, sealed up the crack with epoxy, slapped it back onto the car, fired up and ran great....for 10 minutes... It's still doing the same thing as before where it runs, but dies off after it gets up to operating temperature. This time, we decided to do a bit more diagnostics into it, and found that when it stops running, it's not due to lack of fuel, but lack of spark. We pulled the distributor cap off, it has a new coil, cap, rotor and wires, but it looks like the ignition control module and pickup are fairly old. I've got a new set of them on order, as well as a new distributor o-ring, so once everything comes in, we'll be pulling it out and rebuilding it. If that doesn't fix the issue, I'm not sure what's going on.

Also managed to get a couple hours to work on the car this past week after work. I decided it was time to get rid of the disgusting original carpet out of the car and install my new replacement one. The carpet company gives A LOT of excess material, and even though it was "form fitted" it needed some massaging and a lot of trimming. After about 2 hours of fighting with it, trimming and punching holes in it, it was finally in.

carpet.jpgcarpet2.jpg

I still need to clean up some of the holes, punch out the holes for the seatbelts, the under dash box, kick panels, and the trim around the bottom of the seatbelt, but it's technically in. I did the initial install on Wednesday and haven't been back in the car until yesterday afternoon and the car smells a million times better. I also used some DEI spray-on Boom-Mat sound deading material on the floor pan to help seal it up and to reduce vibrations through the pan it's self. I've used it on a number of projects before and for the $8 per can I buy it for at my work VS $150 worth of materiel, it does as decent enough job.

 

Next week's job is going to be fit the new flat-face headlights, hopefully fix the ignition system, and get on to making the patch panel for the rear 1/4 and the rear arches. Once that's all taken care of, I'll be plating the car and bringing it to my house and my buddy's house to do the rest of the work on it.

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tiny bit more progress. The weather finally started to turn around and we had a couple of days of +16 degree temperature, not bad for still being "winter". I decided to spend one of my lunch breaks at work and decided to fit the flat face head lamp lenses.

headlights 1.jpgheadlights 2.jpg

Still need to order up my drivers side marker lens, but they are at least in and fit great.

 

I also took a few minutes at work at fitted a new stereo. The car came with this old crappy Sony unit that was poorly installed where the factory radio was originally located, it also had an aftermarket cruise control unit mounted above that which looked hokey as hell. I picked up a spare gauge surround and am going to fill in the original stereo hole with a panel, mount a gauge or 2 in there, and a switch to adjust the electronic bolster in the Celica seat. I decided to pickup a new Kenwood stereo from work and fit it in the cubby hole below the dash in front of the shifter.

stereo.jpg

Best part of the stereo is that it has programmable time delay for the rear channels, so I can tune in the stereo to have a surround sound feel to it.

 

On a side note, all the replacement ignition components are on order and should be arriving next week, insurance inspection is done and insurance is going to be put on the car by early April. I'm thinking of getting some vanity plates made up, but not sure if I want to spend the extra money on them, or just register the vehicle and get whatever plate they give me.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Had some time this weekend to keep tackling the interior. Managed to get the door sills plates, door seals, kick pods, trunk panels, c-pillar panels, cubby, e-brake cover, and steering column cover cleaned, and dyed black. Also got around to installing my new tachometer, steering wheel, front speakers, rear speakers, and headunit.

interior 1.jpg

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I bought another cluster surround to see if I could deal with the poorly installed old headunit, but the one I purchased was from a coupe, which has a slightly different dash, so I had to use my original one. I drilled out the old cruise control plate and pitched it, then fabbed up a block off plate out of some acrylic we had kicking around the shop. I'm going to use it as a spot to install my phone mount.

trunk 1.jpgtrunk 2.jpg

 

I also took out the severly weather beaten old 5.25" speakers in the rear and modified the panel, plus the sheet metal behind to accommodate a set of Rockford Fosgate 6.5" 3 way speakers I had from my old Subaru. I also mounted them with a foam BoomMat basket on the backside to give them a bit more clarity. Sound system sounds great, just needs some low end. After I get around to mounting my celica seats in, I'm going to go shopping for a slim subwoofer to put under the passenger's seat.

Still needs some work on the interior. I still need to figure out what I'm going to do with the cracked dashpad, and dye the rest of the brown black. I also tried to remove the fake wood section around the climate control, but it is stuck in place, so I may just leave it as is. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Not much to update, finally got the car home from my old work. Downside of quitting is no longer being able to park the car up there and use their shop at will. Oh, well, better job now which gives me more time and money to be working on it.

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Forgot to upload this earlier. But it's amazing how small this thing is. When I parked in the garage, this is how low the roof line sits compared to my lowered WRX roofline.

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I do have a question, I already asked it to no avail, but for people who have removed their rear 1/4 windows (furthest ones back on the car on the sides), do the seals pull out? or are their clips holding them in place? I've got some rust work I need to do on the driver's side and I want to pull the glass, but don't want to risk damaging the seal, or glass in doing so. I also need to do the hatch glass as well. Can someone provide some insight so I can get working on that?

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Picked up another set of wheels this week. I have no idea what brand they are, there are no markings I could find except for on the rear inner lip there is the wheel sizing specs. They are 15x6.5 ET20 2 piece. The hardware that bolts the faces to the lips on a couple of the wheels look like they were gold plated at one point. Picked them up for a really good deal, 2 wheels are mint, 1 wheel has 2 minor bits of crub rash, and the 4th wheel has rash about 1/3rd of the way around the lip and has a slight bend in the lip on the backside.

58fc224e164bc_finwheels1.jpg.c1fdd8ca5dd94829dfa6851f2886d912.jpg58fc224fd3670_finwheels2.jpg.c0d4aaf1470a2274642558dfad17b840.jpg

58fc225163e39_finwheels3.jpg.742ddf68756213a2d84c0e425196e281.jpg58fc22532a4fa_finwheels4.jpg.140b92e1b5eda09637413b7f85a8ac08.jpg

Any ideas on what they are? I've rules out they are SSR's, Works, Weds, Takeshi Projects, Crimsons. They have the valve stems on the backside of the wheel face, and no bolt holes for a bolt-on center cap.

EDIT: Figured out what they are after spending a few hours in the depths of the internet and getting my mate who has been selling wheels for almost 20 years and loves old Japanese wheels to take a look. They are Super Star Racing Nore Super Fins. And yes, I said Super Star Racing, which is not SSR. Super Star is now better known for their luxury branded wheels, Leon Hardiritt. I managed to figure it out from a guy who had a set for sale posted on the Honda Tech forums that he took pictures of them without the center caps and it had all the same markings as my wheels, same hardwear, and same engraved wheel measurement specs on the rear side of the barrel. Here's what they would look like in good shape and with the center caps.

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I'm going to strip them down, refinish the barrels, and probably either paint or powder coat the centers in gunmetal. 

This is kind of a cool option too...

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Matte black center with a bronze lip/barrel.

 

I also picked up a mig welder, some sheet metal, and all the other good things I`ll need to start the body work. Hopefully I`ll get a chance this weekend to start on my first patch panel.

I'll be posting another update tonight with my collection of new parts that came in and some interior updates.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Only got about 40 minutes to work on the car this past weekend. I decided to keep working on the interior and keep cleaning things up. I had the bottom cushion of the rear seat out of the car for when I was installing the carpet and I had noticed that the seat cover was only held in place by a pressure fit into a channel around the bottom of the seat. I decided to pull the cover off and give it a clean. 

Before...

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Super stained, covered in dog hair, smelled like cigarettes and only god knows what. 

The seat back

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After taking the covers off the rest of the cushion, I threw them in the washer with a couple scoops of Oxyclean and some detergent, put it on the heavy duty cycle and waited for them to finish up. A little over an hour later pulled them out and threw them into the backyard to dry in the sunlight.

Bottom cushion installed after cleaning

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Top cushion after

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They came out mint! I was debating on just throwing them back into the car, but instead I'm going to dye them black like the front seats. Hopefully will get some more time this week to work on this thing.

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  • 2 months later...

Wow, its been awhile. Life has been nuts with the kiddo and new job, but finally got a chance to do some work on the car. I re-upholstered the front door cards last week.

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I pulled the old vinyl off the door, pulled the old foam that basically fell apart when I pulled the vinyl off and cleaned the the pressboard behind it, then sprayed down some spray adhesive and laid the vinyl down. The vinyl is "artic" vinyl, so it can handle temperatures down to -45C, but is also UV resistant, stretched nicely and was super easy to work with. I also painted the vent piece black to match the rest of the interior. I'm not 100% sure I'm happy with the way it came out because you can see the outline of the staples where the pressboard and the metal trim at the top meet and the outline of the clips. I may pull the vinyl back and get some thin foam to put inbetween as a buffer layer.

 

I also built some nylon webbing door pulls.

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I measured and cut the nylon with a 1" fold over, punched the holes and pushed in the eyelets. I then had my mother-in-law who was visiting at the time stitch them up for added strength. I'm still waiting on my window crank handles to show up, went with a brushed with a black clear coat over top aluminium set. They should be here in a few weeks. Once they come in, I'll mount the door cards and finish cutting the remaining holes. I'm going to paint the door handles black too and get some nice stainless hardware with a chamfered washer for the hardware for the pulls to keep everything nice and sleek. I have another idea, but I'll see how each option looks before I decide which one to do.

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  • 1 month later...

wow, it's been awhile since I had an update to post. Life has got in the way of the car too much. I'm trying to switch careers and work out life, plus sleep train the little one, but I managed to find some time this past weekend to work on the car.

 

First off, I found one of my local auto wreckers happened to have an '82 Corolla listed in their yard, which is like hens teeth up here. I decided I needed to go check it out and see if I could score any parts off it. The car was really really rough and nothing was really salvageable on the exterior of the vehicle. The inside held a nice little haul. Someone had removed the transmission from the car and in doing so, damaged some interior parts, but they were salvageable.

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I picked up a damaged center console (needs to be plastic welded back together), a black e-brake handle, new fuse box cover (mine I had to repair previously), black window cranks...

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Toyota branded rubber floor mats, interior fender trim pieces in black, and a set of rear marker lenses that were mint. The best part..$40!

 

I also got around to start working on my wheels I picked up. I spent about 30 minutes straigtening the one wheel that was slightly bent. I forgot to take a picture of it before the repair, but it had a nice bend in the rear lip. I used a propane torch to heat the wheel up for about 10 minutes, then used a 2x4 and a mini-sledge hammer to get the bend out, then used a body hammer to bend the lip back straight.

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It's still a bit rough, but i'll take care of it when I get around to refinishing them.

 

I also gave the faces of the wheels a good clean, they are in better shape than I expected.

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I probably won't have any updates for awhile because I have a super busy 2 months a head of me, including flying 3200km across the country to go write a test for a new job, which may require me to move that 3200km, but I'll see if I can post updates as I have them.

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  • 1 month later...

It's  been a super busy month, but I actually did some work!

First off, I refinished my Riken's and Enkeis. I painted the mesh centers in gunmetal and started to polish the lips. So far I only have tires for the rear Rikens (free tires from work).

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The problem now is the stock 13" steel wheel is pretty much rust welded to the drum on the car, so I've been soaking the hub in penetrating lube for the last week and I'm going to break out the sledge hammer on the weekend to get it off. 

 

I also started working on the interior. I fixed the broken center console.

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Got a new shiftknob (its from Killer-B motorsports, so it's actually meant for a Subaru)

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Also wrapped my heater controls with some DiNoc carbon overlay. I also took the dashpad off and started working on filling the cracks and missing vinyl on it. It's coming along pretty good, but I'll save that for another post.

 

The biggest progress is that I started cutting out the rust work to start building patches for it.

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Don't mind the miss-matched paint, my wife wanted to see how a colour looked on the car. It's suprisingly not that bad in behind, just need to make a small patch in the rear fender liner section, then just basic sheet metal on the outside. That'll be a job for over the winter.

 

And last but not least, I got my front suspension sorted. I found a guy about 400km from here who had a set of AE86 front strut housings with newer inserts, Tein lowering springs and a set of Silver Project (?? never heard of them) Camber plates listed for sale for $200. Since I have an account with a couple of courier companies at work, I got them shipped in for cheap. 

59e7e9df421cb_ae86struts.jpg.f92019ade4c3088a144da5ca20125873.jpg

They are in pretty decent shape as is, but I'll probably disassemble them and clean up the spring perches and camber plates.

 

Thats all for now, I have a week and a half where my wife and daughter are on the other side of the country, so I should be making some progress in the next few days.

cf.jpg

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

The old Subaru shell is gone. Got picked up about 2 weeks ago so it left me with so much room for activities in the garage. I decided it was a good time to start cleaning up the garage and get organized. I've had my Subaru in the garage for the last year and a half, and the corolla in the garage next to it for the better part of the last year, so it's nice to have some room to work..for now. The wife is going to park her car in there once the weather gets really cold (-12 to -30).

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It also gave me a chance to go through everything in the bins of stuff I got with the engine..

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Not a bad haul if I do say so my self. I've managed to sell some of the parts off already for $160, so I've almost broken even on purchasing everything. There is more than whats listed on the lists like a 20R distributor, stock flywheel and clutch, factory exhaust manifold, etc.

With the new space, I did manged to pick up an engine crane and engine stand to get the new 4AGE off the ground for the time being.

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I've done a bit of work on the block so far, mostly draining any remaining fluids, vacuuming and wiping up the mouse shit, and starting to strip back some of the brackets. I'm hopefully going to crack the oil pan off this week and start disassembling the head.

 

I also lined up some other good deals this week too. I picked up a stock spark plug valley cover (mines missing), a set of Pacesetter headers that have been cut and welded a few times (going to use them to mock up my new exhaust and clean them up), and an old school authentic TRD horn button for $80. 

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I have a crazy couple of weeks coming up with work and family visiting, but my wife and kiddo are heading back to our home town in early December, but I have to work until the 22nd, so I'm going to have at least a week and a bit by my self to be able to work on the car/engine without interruption. 

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Managed to get my new parts over the weekend. My buddy brought the headers, valley cover and horn button down from about 3.5 hours north of where I live and I couldn't be happier with them.

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The headers are going to need a good wire wheeling and some paint to clean them up. They are also going to need the hackjob at the end of the headers to be cleaned up and flanged properly when I go to do the installation.

 

The horn button is awesome though.

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I need to change out the connector on the hub adapter to fit the wider spade terminal on the button, but soooo nice. Matches the interior nicely. Just need to put the dash back together.

 

And my search for an alternator bracket is over. I found a local guy who races AE86's and had a spare one. His shop was awesome. He had 6 AE86's in different states of race prep, a mint AE71 hatchback that's his winter beater and parts EVERYWHERE. He was super nice and pretty much said if I ever need anything to let him know and he'll be willing to help.

 

Also managed to finally break one of the rear wheels loose. The factory steel wheels were seized to the hubs, so I've been spraying the drums/wheels every weekend with penetrating lube. Even with that happening for the last 4 weeks, it took 5 minutes of bashing the wheel with a 4lbs club hammer to break them loose. Once they were off, I HAD to fit the riken on there.

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They fit pretty nicely. Might need a small spacer to make them flush, but we'll see once I get the fenders repaired.

 

I also made working on the car much eaiser. I found a guy locally selling "100lbs of tools for $125". The ad showed bins of sockets and some specialty tools, so I pounced on it. This is my haul from it:

Metric Sockets

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Metric Wrenches

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screw drivers

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Most of the stuff was a brand called Mastercraft thats sold though a Canadian chain of stores, they are okay. But, I did get about 30 snap-on, bluepoint, or MAC sockets, screw drivers, or plyers. I still haven't gone through the 1/4 sockets, all the plyers, hex keys and drill bits I got, but it looks like there is still some good stuff left over.

 

I'm going to take the dash board over to a local upholstery shop this week and get a quote to get it re-covered and see if I can knock that off my list. I'm also going to look for some cheap front tires for the Enkei's I have because I really want to see the car sitting on a set of nice wheels sooner than later.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Minor updates. It's been a crazy busy month so not much work has gone into the new engine or car. Did get some cool finds though, but I'll get to that in a second.

One of the first things I did since the last post was did some work on my cheap $30 headers. I took a look at the cutting and hacking that's been done on them by the previous owner and it actually wasn't too bad. The metal was actually in decent shape, just lots of surface rust from not being coated and being exposed to typical Canadian climate. I ended up hitting the entire thing with a wire wheel on my grinder and it cleaned up nicely. 5a4bf4c61e9de_headers3.jpg.e76d0a1d52e02587d54a38fd05102136.jpg

That was about half way through the first passes.

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you can see the layer of surface rust that's been built up. so satisfying watching it all disappear.

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End result. Not too bad. Next step is going to be cleaning up the welds and cutting off the tail section and welding in a 2 bolt flange.

I also got my gasket kit and new oil pan, along with some other small parts for the engine so I decided to knock the dented OEM pan off to make sure there wasn't any damage to the pick-up. Pan came off easily, no damage to the oil pick-up which was good. I decided to run a magnet through the oilpan to see if there was any debris. Didn't come up with any metal shavings like what you'd see from a spun bearing, but did find some junk in the pan..some of which I'm still trying to figure out what it may be.

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That's everything that came out of the pan. The globs on the left are chunks of silicone that the PO used to seal the pan/windage tray, same with the couple little scraps on the right. The mystery pieces are the two metal chunks. They seem very pourus metal, non magnetic (fished them out by hand between the baffle and the edge of the pan it's self). They don't look like they are bearing material and don't look heat scored. They are also pretty small too.

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Little oil pan pecker. Any ideas?? I'm wondering if they are brazing slag from the original construction of the pan?

Last thing I had a chance to do in regards to the engine was go through the bins of harnesses and figure out which harness does what. I got 3 of those plastic milk crates full of harnesses, but no idea which one was what, so I pulled them out and layed them along the garage floor to see their condition and see whats what.

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Found the engine bay harness pretty quickly. It's seen better days. The wires going into the fuse box look pretty crusty and some have had some sketchy patch wire put in place. One of the connectors also looks a bit melted, but all in all, it's all there. From all the write up's ive read, I don't actually need this harness for the swap, just need to grab the alternator plug off it and wire into my stock 4AC harness.

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Also found the engine harness. All the connectors are there and in good shape. Only thing I've found so far is one of the retaining clips on the TPS was broken, but it still held tight on the sensor. The question that I have to figure out now is if this harness is an AE86 harness or an AW11 harness. The amount of wire from where the harness looks like it'll come off the engine to the ECU looks very short. I've also got to double check the ECU to make sure it's a bluetop ECU. Oh, and I cleaned the K&N filter that came with the MAF, as well as the ones out of my daily and the wife's car.

 

Moving onto the actual car it's self, I pulled all the windscreen trim off to remove the old cracked/broken windscreen and fix the rust on the top of the dash panel.

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Only broke one clip that holds the trim in place, but me thinking ahead, ordered a bag of replacement ones from RockAuto.

Also decided to check out what the Recaro will look like in the car.

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She's a tight fit, but looks sooooo good. In all the boxes of parts I got I had a set of OEM AE86 seat rails that I attempted to try, but they were just slightly off in length and mounting location. I'm going to pull the stock AE72 seat rails off and weld them to a bracket/slider set I have for the Recaro that came out of a Subaru. 

 

And last but not least, I have no idea where I'm going to use these or if I'm going to, but they were way to cool to pass over. I went scrap yard hunting a couple weeks back because we had beautiful weather (+16C in early December, that went away very quickly, last week the average high with windchill was -35C), and came across an 85 Camry that had these mounted on the parcel shelf..

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The speakers are pooched, but the housings were just so cool I had to grab them. They are OEM Toyota too. I may mounted them on the back of the bench seat in the back facing out into the trunk, or may mount them on the plastic panel of the tail gate so when I open the tail gate they will be right there and have the Toyota logo pointing out. We'll see though.

The weather is supposed to be pretty good in the next couple days, and my wife and kid are still away, so I may have some time to do some work.

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  • 2 weeks later...

:compress::compress::compress::-D:-D:-D

Got one hell of a deal today. One of the guys on a Canadian based old school Toyota forum/facebook group very casually posted at like 1am that he had replacement E70 Wagon rear 1/4 pannels for sale in good shape. I messaged him right away and we worked out a great price for these guys...5a593e76a1016_newquarters.jpg.ddd95bf56dfa5bb68157b9e91eab7fe1.jpg

They are off an 82 Wagon and are actually super super clean.

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Small hole on the left side guard, way smaller than the giant one I have right now.

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Small bit of rust on the front of the arch, but easily fixable.

 

Price for the pair? $150!!!! The guys is also going to cut the big chunk of rocker sill and B-pillar off for me too since I don't need them. They are kind of far away from me (about 1000km), but I have a friend of mine who hauls cars back and forth from where they are on a weekly basis, so he's going to pick them up for me for cheap on his next run down there.

 

So once I get these guys, it'll be easy to cut the sections out and replace them on my car, which means I should have the car on the road for our spring time in a few months! Man I'm excited! 

Funniest thing about all of this is the whole reason I found out about the post was my friend told me about it as it was posted. This is the same friend who helped me out with that massive haul of 4AGE stuff a few months back. I think he's my good luck charm for this car.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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Look what showed up over the weekend! They are in fantastic condition too. The guy even included the E-VAP canister on the right side and washer fluid bottle on the left side. They are in way better shape than I was expecting. There is a bit where the rust has completely eaten it's way through on the left side behind the arch, but it's maybe 2" x 2", so nice and easy to replace. Also the cuts came with the inner fenders too, so I can literally cut the spot welds out and replace the rusted ones on my car too! God I'm happy about finding these.

I picked up some spot-weld cutters and some cut-off wheels last week, so I'm set to start cutting and hacking up. Just need to rent a gas bottle and regulator for my welder.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Had some decent time to work on the car over the weekend. Haven't tackled the 1/4s yet, but decided to finish up a project I've been working on slowly for the last couple months. 

 

The factory dashpad was really really beat up when I first bought the car. It had a massive crack all the way around the pad above the cluster, a couple other big cracks around the side, most of the vinyl from the top of the passenger side was missing, it was rough. 

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I ended up filling most of the cracks and missing vinyl with flexible bono designed for bumper repairs. Filled, sanded, filled again, sanded again. Got to this point.

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I priced out getting the whole thing reupholstered and most of the places I talked to wanted to trip the dash back to the metal skin underneath, re-do the foam, then redo the vinyl or upholstery at a cost of $450 or more. I decided to go a different route. I decided to flock it.

 

Flocking kit was cheap (about $42), looks great, easy to clean, no glare on the windscreen and give the interior a more updated look too. So the wife and I tackled flocking it last night.

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It came out really well. It filled in a lot of the uneven areas and built up nice and even. We ended up using 3oz of flocking material, which we had to stop about 3 times to refill the applicator and near the end had to pull together excess flock that landed on the drop sheet. I have to let it sit for 24 hours before handling it, so I should be able to clear the excess flock off it by the time I get home from work this evening. Really excited to see what it looks like when it's installed. 

 

We also started to cut out the windsheild, which is about half way done, still waiting on some more time to get my wife to help the spots that I can't reach due to the length of my arms.

 

Also broke out the new welder for the first time over the weekend. I started working on some seat brackets for my Recaro seats to use the OEM sliders and needed to make some spacers. I haven't welded in over 2 years and this was my first time using my machine. The first pass was...welll...yea..

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It took me a minute to remember what I was doing, but the second bead was much better/prettier.

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Still need to get used to the nuances of the machine, but should have the Recaro put in the car by next weekend. The stupid offset seating position and width of my Recaro is a bit of a pain in the ass to get everything lined up, but I'll make it work.

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