Roman's 4GR V6 Toyota Carina

[Roman]

Oil pan activities!

Absolute GCs @Stu and his workmate Sam found some time in their incredibly busy schedule. To spend a night programming some cutting paths and cutting a big slab of alloy down into an oil pan. 
I went along to watch and learn some things and it was awesome. 

Firstly, start out with a 22kg block of 32mm thick alloy plate. 

 

Then align this onto the bed of the router, and the it gets sorta vacuum sealed against the bed. 
Then one side was machined, making an absolutely hectic amount of mess.

Then it was flipped over, and a a template was cut to align it onto the bed again. 



Making zillions of glitter carving out the other side.



Then once it was all cut, we are down to around 1.8kg from 22. 
So there were plenty of chips for me to sweep up, haha.
we needed to look at drilling the oil galleries for the filter, that I mentioned a few posts ago.
Problem - the depth needed was too long for any available tooling and the height of the machines etc. 
So we decided to mill two slots in, and then weld a cover plate over the top. We made the slots do a bit of a zig zag, so that they would avoid one of the threaded holes for the oil filter housing. Which previously penetrated through into the oil gallery as there was no other way.

Then Stu on the tig to zip it all back up:



Then ready for a test fit. How good! 
(It still needs the welds flattened off and some threads tapped, havent done this yet)





Much to my relief, it fits up great. 





Just zip tieing the oil pan on for now, until I can tap the holes. 



and back in the car... everything good! 




So that's one of the last remaining big tasks mostly sorted. 
And a big relief that it looks like everything is going to work as expected.
Hugely grateful for the time spent by Stu and Sam to help get this done. 
I think its the most complex and coolest car related thing I've ever drawn up.

Next steps are to thread a few holes for the oil pan and oil filter, flatten off the welds, and make an oil pickup.
then I can fit it on for good, and fill the motor up with oil. Getting closer! Exciting.
 

[Roman]

Sump Stuff

I managed to get the sump finished off, in place and gooed up.
Since I am not exactly sure about how much oil it can hold, and it's probably a good idea to iteratively mark the dipstick as I add 1 litre at a time. 
I just poured 5 litres straight in, because, fuck it. 
This worked out reasonably well, the high tide mark is just below top cover of the pan. 
The oil pump and filter will hold a bit more oil when it's turned over, and the external oil tubes that run up to the cam covers for VVTI and oil spraying the cams. Actually have non return valves in them, so hold a bit of oil up there too. 
Then, some amount of oil stays in constant circulation while the motor runs, more so at high rpm. So hopefully that's around a good amount. 
It's not weed its oil all over the floor, it's still good. Exciting! 

Digidash Fuckery 

So my replacement LED screen turned up, aannnndddd... I just cant get it to work properly. 
It only displays the top 4 lines, then skips 4 lines, then next 4 lines, etc.
The way these work is actually really complex.
I think this particular screen is incompatible with the only available library for controlling these screens, which is a real pity. 
This doesnt photograph well, but this looks absolutely AMAZING in person. It would be absolutely incredibly awesome as a dash. 
So I think I might need to buy some of the smaller screens that are supported, and daisy chain them together. 
As they have different chips controlling the LEDs, or some crap like that. Dunno. But it's way over my head to try and troubleshoot what's going wrong here. 

However, In the meantime I can still figure out how it works, and draw some graphics on it. So long as I dont mind everything can only be 4 pixels high, haha.



Flywheel Stuff 

Dad got the ring gear machined to the right dimensions for shrinking onto the flywheel. 
However when skimming down the back of the flywheel, the tool ugga dugga-d itself into the part. or something.
Nothing catastrophic for the part or the machine, but bloody scary apparently! 
Luckily he's smarter than me, and this happened only a few mm from the top, we wasnt trying to cut the whole 10mm out at once.
He said once he found better tool speed and feed rate that suits the chromoly, it cut amazingly nicely.
So hopefully this isnt far off, anyway.
I'm excited that his mill is running. It's damn cool.



Intake Stuff 

I swapped intake setups with @Hurmeez so now I've got the V10 throttles. 
This solves some problems, but adds some new ones. 
Firstly, it solves all of my height and fuel rail issues which is a big win. I'll now have some space up top for a nicer shape trumpet, and a sweet looking airbox. Which will also help give some rigidity to each bank of throttles by tying them together at the top.



Unfortunately the factory throttle spacing is a little closer together than expected - But, these are a lot easier to space apart.
I was considering just leaving it at current spacing, so I can use the fuel rails etc - But nah. It would just nag at me that I'd half assed it.
So to space them out I just need to redrill some holes on the rails, to rebolt the linkages in a new position.
Otherwise, if it's close enough I might be able to slot or extend the linkages to just push them across a bit.
Then I'll need some new fuel rail extrusion, and drill them. But this is all easy drilling stuff that can be done no prob on a manual mill.

The center to center on these throttles is 98mm, not the 107mm I was expecting. (Could old forum information be wrong?! shock horror etc) 
Also they have a highly oval outlet, and the throttles have a 24 degree curve. 
Despite have a big entry size and quite big throttle, somewhere around 50mm. They taper down to the cross sectional area of a 42mm circle at the exit. 
However there's enough meat around the perimeter that they could easily be ported out to the area equivilent of at least a 48mm circle no problem at all. 

 

In order to get the top of the throttles standing vertically, I need a manifold that cancels out the 24 degree angle. 
Here's where I am currently at for prototype shape: 



Since can align each throttle central over each port, all of the port shapes are now identical which is nice. 
The engine they are from (S65 V10) makes 500hp from 5 litres, so around 50hp per throttle. 
So that's equivalent to 300hp using 6 throttles. So hopefully injector size, airflow etc all plenty suitable for the application.

I'll also have 4x throttles left over, so it might be interesting to see how these look against the port shape of 1NZ or something.

Engine Weight 

 @flyingbrick loaned me his scales (thanks) so I could get a ballpark weight for motor.
I've not gone quite to the level of @Hyperblade's awesome post about engine weights at this stage - as I still dont have some parts to put on. 
However, with the motor and box put together. Engine mounts on. No starter/flywheel/manifolds. Like so:



Total weight came to: 



184 kg.
A J160 is 38kg, putting the 4GR around 146kg. A little lighter than expected, given the service weight was listed as 165kg for engine. 
So this puts it at slightly heavier than a beams motor once it's fully dressed. Much heavier than a K20, and the weight of almost 2 1NZs. Ha!
So I'm not gonna win any awards for worlds lightest engine, unfortunately. (Did I ever mention how great a 1NZ is? Cant remember)
However I'm also relieved that it's not going to be massively different to the beams setup.
The fact that the weight is further back and lower down will hopefully help offset the extra podge.

For some less discouraging context - comparing to a previous generation Toyota NA 2500cc six cyl engine, the 1JZGE.
This was 207kg for the engine alone. So my motor and gearbox weighs 25kg less than just an NA 1JZ. ha!
Before @xsspeed mentions RB in my thread again, an RB20DET is supposedly around 245kg which I assume is with turbos etc mounted. 

So lots of different things going on, the most exciting thing on the to-do will be getting the flywheel in place. 
As once that's done, I can crank the motor over and get some oil circulating through everything.
I need to assess if my tiny lithium battery is going to have enough grunt to turn the motor over, before I waste a bunch of time building my wiring etc around a battery that might not be suitable. 
Hopefully it's good though, as it cranked the 1NZ way faster than the regular battery did.

[Roman]

A little progress

Unsolicited general Life update 

Things have been a bit frustrating at the moment.
It felt like I was right on the precipice of having the motor firing up, and on a roll after getting the sump fitted.
However seemingly simple things have been getting complicated and house related stuff has also been sapping my time/energy/life.

I dont think there's any chance of attending oldschool drags in this car now, just dont have enough time left. 
Current goal is just to try get my car moved to my new house. 
Just getting the car movable has been surprisingly time consuming.
A few years ago I was planning a fairly decent overhaul of a few things on this car. 
Swapping SW20 rear brakes for MX5 stuff, swapping booster setup for a pedal box, redoing fuel lines and front calipers etc. 
So I ended up pulling some stuff apart, figuring it'd be coming out for good.
So I didnt bother putting bolts back in the right place and all that. Which I'm usually fairly good at. 
So, I've chewed up a massive amount of time just looking for bits which is annoying. 

I managed to get the handbrake working, after lots of rummaging through boxes etc to find parts.
Still need to spanner check a lot of the suspension stuff.

New intake stuff

This has also been a lot more complicated and time consuming than expected.
I've definitely pushed my timeline back a whole lot by swapping throttles.
I ordered some fuel rail extrusions, 12mm rod, and some bearings.
I've finalized the drawings to drill new fuel rails and actuator rods and have done a few test prints before chopping anything up.
For the fuel setup, I was initially wanting to feed into one fuel rail, link to the other, then have an FPR on the back of the second rail.
However its too crowded up front to link the left and right banks together. 
So I'm going to use the Corvette fuel filter with the built in FPR, to make it a returnless setup.
That will split to feed each bank and have a pressure dampener on each rail.
I'll mount a fuel pressure sensor near the tee, to see if there are any weird things happening with having the FPR down the back.
However that's how a lot of cars do things now, so hopefully it's fine.

I've decided it'll be a good idea to have some support plates that link each bank's rods together and hold them straight etc.
As each bank tries to pull itself in towards the center of the vee when rotated against spring pressure. 
I'm just going to run a cable pull setup as it's seeming a lot more complicated to get an e-throttle setup working for now.
It might still end up a dual e-throttle setup, as this will actually make balancing the left and right banks a lot easier.
Do it digitally rather than mechanically.




I'm going to drill the fuel rails and rods on my dads manual milling machine, which has encoders on it to output X and Y coordinates. 
So it's easiest if all of my dimensions are relative to a zero point on the parts. Hopefully get some of this done tomorrow night when I'm up in Auckland.






With some printed mockup parts on the engine it's looking like this. 
My throttle pull wheel thing will go down the back of the motor instead, as it's already quite crowded up front. 
Annoyingly, for whatever reason the BMW TPS's stick out quite far off the end throttles. 
However I'll keep both of them, as it'll make it easy to diagnose if I've got any bank to bank imbalance for whatever reason.
It's been finnicky to get right. But once I've got the new rods drilled, it will be a lot easier to test etc.
As it all binds up a little currently as the linkages arent spaced apart properly.
Although it's all been a pain, the amount of room to the bonnet that I've gained, will make all of the extra trouble worth it.
The final version will have the pulley arrangement fully enclosed so there's no chance of it getting jammed up with stuff falling in somehow.
These linkage rods I've got are no good, they'll vibrate the ends loose easily by the looks.
So I might end up loctiting the threads to the exact right lengths.
Or find some better ones.




Digidash fuckery part deux 

After a lot of frustration troubleshooting this LED screen, which would only display some of the lines on the screen.
I found that my Teensy board was the actual issue. Replaced that, then it started working properly. 
It doesnt look so great on photo/video but the appearance in real life is ssweeeeeeeeet! 
And it's super bright too, and the boot time is almost instantaneous.

So I've started working on some basic graphics for it. 

Fuck knows why there's a radar looking thing there, but there ya go

What I have learned from previous efforts, is that any time spent adding some structure and scalability to things pays dividends really quickly. 

All of the stuff shown above is movable/scalable in real time. 
To generate one of the vertical bars on the screen, I just need to run this line of code and it generates the borders, level, colours etc. 

VerticalBar(6, 25, 25, 30,0,100, temp); 

Where the values are: 
VerticalBar(Xposition, Yposition, Width, Height,Min value,Max value, CAN Variable);

Then for the indicators, its just like:

IndicatorLeft(10, 7, 1);
Where the values are X position, Y position, and 1 or 0 for on/off. 

So if I have some context sensitive screens, where some of the features need to move around. It's incredibly easy to reposition them.

I could even move them around in real time, for whatever reason.

One thing that is great about how these LED screens work, compared to the Nextion LCD screens I have been using in the past.
Is that the LCD screen, there was an onboard (slow)FPGA and (slow)processor which handled graphics stuff. 
So it was cool that you could load fonts and bitmaps etc to the screen itself, and using a GUI to design things on your PC it would just load all of the graphics, fonts etc.
Then you just had to send it serial commands to update values or whatever.
However the problem was, any time you send a command (for example, update the temperature value) 
It would start that command, pause the unit while it refreshes/rewrites all of the relevant pixels. Then when finished it would send an Ack command back over serial to say it is happy to accept the next command. 
The problem is that even the smallest quickest command has quite a high overhead in write time.
So if you want to update 10 things at once on the screen, you end up waiting while the stack of commands sequentially run. 
So it ended up that whatever you could do to minimize the amount of pixels that updated, paid dividends. 
But it was annoying, and ultimately a bit too slow.
The refresh rate was too slow to have anything like a shift light or shift bar as part of the screen. 

With this LED screen instead.
The only onboard hardware is essentially a few buffers which hold the current RGB value of each pixel.
Whether you're updating anything or not, It rewrites all of the lines over and over from the buffer at a very high rate.

Instead of sending each separate command, like to update the temperature value. Then requiring a confirmation that each command has finished.
My controller board (Teensy 4.0) has a copy of the entire screens RGB values stored in RAM. So any update you make, first happens just to update these values in RAM.  
Meaning you can absolutely stuff it full of changes and there's no external communication, it's near instantly changed.   
Then when have changed everything you want, it sends the whole screen's new image over.
Whether you have made 1 pixel change, or all of them. It's exactly the same speed either way. 

So essentially, complexity is free. which is super awesome, and means I can have as many layers or stupid animations or star swipe or whatever the hell else. 
Any animations or generative graphics can be scaled and reapplied etc as much as I like and it'll have almost zero impact on performance.
If I use the Teensy 4.1 arduino board, which has an onboard SD card. I can load bitmaps or GIFs onto it to display on the screen as well. 

Basically, in conclusion, I've found a digidash option that is an animated, low res version of MSpaint.
Who'd have thought that in the year 2023 there are such glorious technologies available for those of us wanting to draw pointless low resolution graphs in real time. 
Living the dream!
 

[Roman]

Rethinking my throttle situation a bit more.
My e-throttle ITB setup on the echo worked well with a printed manifold, because the throttles were a single solid assembly. 
So there was no force applied to the manifold apart from the hanging weight.
For the BMW throttles it is back to a two bolt flange on each throttle, and each throttle trying to twist itself off in various ways like the 20v throttles do.
Also, it's very important that I have each bank of throttles perfectly(ish) aligned. So it seemed like life was unnecessarily hard having 2 separate manifolds.
So I printed a big single one as a test fit to see how far off I was... the port spacing was about spot on, but a few of the bolt holes needed moving slightly.





So I started from nearly scratch again, modelling a big slab looking thing.
The idea is that it will have a layer or three of carbon flat over the top, and the bottom. So I wont try carve out the shape at all, simple is better. 
I've cut some channels into the underside, that will link all of the throttles together. A layer of carbon will seal this all off.
Then I will tap into it for brake booster / IACV / PCV / whatever. So all that messy stuff will be tucked up nicely on the underside and come out the back.
I'm gonna use recessed M8 cap screws to bolt it down to the heads, as bolts end up too close to the throttles.
Hopefully this ends up strong enough to work as a printed part, and easy enough to make. 
Even if I do end up wanting to make a final part from alloy, it's good to have a reasonable scheme for making prototypes. 
This will be too expensive to get printed on the MJF machine via 3rd party though. Maybe for a final one.
Another benefit of this is that I dont need everything bolted onto the motor to figure out the linkages, can work on it on the bench.
The total assembly height is only 35mm though, so it would be feasible to cut most of this out of a big slab like my sump. 
So this might be a project for Dad's CNC one day. But the port geometry is very difficult, would need hand finishing as you cant reach a lot of the areas with a 4 axis machine.
If I do that, I'll cut the shape down to just have a lot of ribs between throttles and remove most of the material, as it would weigh heaps like this.


It looks like my flywheel got damaged beyond repair when the cutting tool caught it in the mill.
My understanding is you cant really weld chromoly safely so dont think it can be built up with material then skimmed flat again.
So will have to look at other options again. It might be feasible to skim it down further, skim all of the outer part off beyond what the clutch plate needs. Then run a standard flex plate behind it.
No stress though, shit happens - chalk it up to the learning budget.

[Roman]

Flywheel situation 

Since the flywheel was otherwise a write off anyway, we decided to just skim it down until the damage was gone/negligible. 
Sooooo that actually works out alright. 

So test fitting it, first thing I notice that I havent allowed for at all or given any thought what so ever.
Is that the end of the crank sticks out a bit past the bellhousing flange, then there's an upstand part which sticks out further again.
3S motor isnt like that.
The end of the crank almost fully fills the hole where the spigot bearing is supposed to go. Crap.
However, there is a hole in the middle of the crank to fit a smaller bearing in.
Which is interesting as none of these v6 motors run a spigot bearing from factory.

So, the 3S spigot bearing was 40mm OD and pressed into the flywheel. 
Other engines like 4AGE or 2JZ etc use a 32mm OD bearing that presses into the crank. 
Looks like that will work for this.

Second panic attack - Was the nose of the input shaft going to bottom out into the end of the crank, or be too short to reach the bearing when fitted into the crank? 
Fuck. No idea, cos I hadnt given this any consideration at all. I'd picked a fairly arbitrary length to shorten the bellhousing by. 

So doing some measurements, it looks like I've managed to bullshit my way through this one successfully. 
The 10mm thick spigot bearing will be alright.





I've never heat shrunk a ring gear onto a flywheel before.
Dad machined the OD of the flywheel and the ID of the ring gear to the appropriate sizes for heat shrinking on. 
Some calculations showed that ideally the ring gear ends up 0.6mm too small to fit over the flywheel when cold.
Then it expands to larger than the flywheel size when heated to 150+ deg. 
So this was stressful. As it cools really quickly, and if you dont get it in the right spot I'm not sure if there's a non destructive way to remove it.
It took a few goes, because I'd not had it hot enough to slip over. So when it finally did, it caught me by surprise a bit.
However I managed to get it in the right spot, and tap it straight before it had fully cooled in place.
Not something I want to do again any time soon TBH.




Then the next issue that steers this project one way or another. Was going to be whether or not the tiny lithium battery would be able to crank over the motor okay. 
 

Turns out its no problem at all, and ring gear distance/engagement is fine too.
I also managed to build up some oil pressure, which proves that the sump is doing sump things.
So the next steps are to buy some more flywheel bolts that suit the thinner flywheel (4AGE ones are now the right length, which is handy) 
Then put it all together, put the clutch on. Mount a slave cylinder. 

Now that I know the battery will work out fine, I can start making a battery box, and connect everything up.

I'll theoretically be able to fire it up once my intake is finished!
I'm sure my neighbours will be delighted to hear some open headers 350Z trumpet noises.

 

[Roman]

After a big bunch of mucking around trying to work out the right offset, I think I've got the concentric slave setup right. 
Thanks to @Sungai Sungai for the slave cyl and @flyingbrick for machining me a spacer on the lathe. Much appreciated! 
I'm just waiting on some 3AN line to arrive, and the adapter to connect to the master cyl. Then I can test it out. 
However now the motor and gearbox is hopefully bolted together "for good".



Next problem is that the clutch MC wants to hit the back of the motor.
This motor normally has the direct injection pump running off the back of one of the cams, and the pump would sit pretty much exactly where the MC lives. 
So I removed the pump as I'm not using it anyway - but this rear area of the cover that mounts the pump is still higher up than it would otherwise be, and reinforced. 
So it doesnt need to be strong here anymore.
I chopped the back of the cover down, and smooshed some carbon over the top. 



I also got the brakes working, I had to remake a few of the lines that I cut when I decided I was going to run a reverse mount pedal box.
My lines are ugly, and I might need to remake them when I finish the firewall.
However this will let me move the car to my new place which is the main objective.
Once I've got this cover back on, I think I'll be ready to weld the engine mounts in place finally.

Fingers crossed I'll have my car moved to my current residence in the next couple of weeks, and it actually fits in the garage.

I downloaded a program called Engine Analyzer pro, where you enter a big bunch of variables about your engine.
This seems to think the motor should be able to make around 300hp with the big cams in it. 
Would be sweet! But probably not. I'm surprised it thought it would flow that well with what seem like tiny valves in this motor. Time will tell. 

[Roman]

I put my timing cover back on, and then tried to crank over the motor while it's in gear with all of the drivetrain connected.
So I can find the clutch point to put a stopper when the wheels stop turning.
Overextending the concentric slave can mean it dumps its guts into your bellhousing. Do not want.

I try turn over the motor - clunk. nothing. damnit what. 
I try cranking the motor via the front pulley, and it just goes super tight. hmm.
Soooo I put the engine in neutral, and try turning the rear wheels. Thats fine. no noises.

So I pull the motor and box back out, thinking there must be something jamming to do with the release bearing or clutch as that's all that's changed.
Or maybe the lines were dragging on the cover plate or something.
However, no obvious signs of issues.
Just to eliminate it as a possibility I removed the starter motor - then sure enough the problem stops. 
Put it back in, then its a problem again. Which is very weird, considering it's worked fine literally just days before. 
So it looks as though the starter pinion thing either isnt going as far back into the housing as it used to, or... fuck knows.
If I put some washers on the starter motor bolts to space it back slightly, then everythings fine again. But I'd prefer not to be point loading it when it's otherwise supported by the full housing.
Damnit. It's only by the smallest amount, maybe 1mm. I'm tempted to just dremel back the pinion in the starter slightly.

The clutch and release bearing all seemed fine though, which was good.
Here's a trick for avoiding needing to bleed a concentric clutch when you pull a motor out - Just bring the MC along for the ride haha.



Alsoooooooo something else interesting that I've just discovered. 
My understanding was that the 3GR and 4GR heads were the same. 
However I just stumbled across this pic.

The top picture is the disgracefully weeny 4GR exhaust ports. Second pic down is the 3GR exhaust ports. 


Much bigger exhaust ports on the 3GR, and circular. Interesting.
So finding some more pics, looks like the 3GR has bigger valves too.
Look at the difference in the amount of space between the exhaust valves in particular. (3GR on the left, 4GR on the right)



Checking on Toyodiy.com and it confirms that the 3GR has different part numbers for valves on both sides.

The 4GR has a slightly smaller bore size (83mm vs 87.5mm)
This pic below is how a 3GR head would fit onto a 4GR bore size. So the valves would fit without conking the bore.
Based on my dubious scaling the valves are approx 33mm on intake side, 28mm exhaust side. 
Compared to from memory 31mm intake side, 25mm exhaust side. 

It would be interesting to see if the intake side geometry/port sizes are any different as well.




I'm broke as shit currently, but if I see any more 3GRs come up at pickapart I'll go pull a head off and measure it up. 
Then I can decided if it's worth putting 3GR heads on.
I'm sure as hell not looking forward to cleaning all of the shit out and porting some more heads though.
What a mess! 

For the meantime though just carrying on down the critical path items towards getting the motor running.

EDIT: There's a whole 3GR engine on Trademe for 300 bucks. Ha! Would buy if it was more local, and a few more months down the track.
God bless these shitty unloved engines.

https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/motors/car-parts-accessories/toyota/engines/listing/4519312323

[Roman]

Throttle bank balancing 


I've had covid this week, which has sucked.
But while my brain juice has been boiling like a stuck kettle, I had a major revelation for how to balance the two banks of throttles together.
Most setups that I see use a pair of push/pull rods, mounted on a round disc (like my previous setup)

However the problem with this, is you get a non linear angle vs distance pulled.
Not necessarily in a good way either, like you could have a random patch of acceleration at half way throttle or where ever. Depending on how it's setup.
This in itself isnt the problem, it's that if any of your geometry is slightly out, even if you match them at 10% throttle or 1% or 100% the rest of the range wont match. 

However, I saw a picture where someone used a cable to link the banks, and thought "The hell would you do that for" Then realized it's a brilliant solution.
Because you end up with an angle vs pull amount that is 100% linear through the whole range.
So the only thing that is really important is to get the tension of the cable set correctly, so both sides are open the same amount.
Can do this by having an adjustable tensioner wheel pushing against the cable half way between, will be able to fine tune it really easily.
It seems like a minor detail to have solved but this is actually a huge problem if you cant get the banks to balance nicely. Stoked about that!

So I've ordered a cable repair kit for a motorbike (or something) that comes with one cable end premade, and the other is a screw together end for making it a custom length. 



I also had the fuel rails drilled on the CNC machine, which was fun to watch! 
I need to get some fittings welded onto the end of the rails, I'm glad I didnt do that before having the "aha" moment about using the cables. 
Because my fuel rails would have bonked into this space that I need to make this work at the back of the motor.


Gearbox stuff

I've realized I've got a bit of an issue that might be annoying, if this motor actually revs out as well as I hope.
It's fairly well known that the closely stacked gears on a J160 box are 3,4,5,6. So you want to have your powerband/ speed band operating in this range. 

However, if you are doing 30% more RPM then all of your gears get 30% taller. 

With a 4.3 ratio, I've effectively only got only a 3 speed gearbox for most activities... and using all of the wrong gears! 

Look at the RPM drop from first to 2nd... 10,000rpm right down to 5600. That is NOT going to be a quick gear shift when needing to drop by that much. Gross.
It's not too bad from 2nd to third, but you can see how nice the 3-4-5-6 is by comparison.

 



Now if I change to a 4.77 final drive (I've got a 4.77 ready to go in) and swap to a 195/50/15 for a smaller rolling diameter. 
Then things are a bit better. At least managing to use 4th gear now under 200kph. But 5th or 6th gear are still in fairly unusable territory for full throttle in a car made out of bean cans.




To make the 3-4-5-6 gear stack as useful as I'd hope it would be, I need to have something around a 6:1 final drive ratio. Yikes! 





So another option is to disregard the idea of trying to use the 3-4-5-6 stack and try improve the early gears. 
TRD made a gear kit that changed the ratios of 1-2-3 so they are more evenly spaced. However it's discontinued, and cost a fortune as well. 
So one improvement could be to fit the S15 Silvia first gear, change it from 3.874 to 3.626.
However this means instead of dropping to ~5600rpm you drop to 6000rpm. Hardly a life changing difference. 

If I could find the NISMO 1st gear for the S15 box then it would only drop to 7500rpm which would actually be awesome. 
However, I suspect these are also NLA or hideously expensive.
Maybe one day need to spent 10x my cars value on a sequential box...

[Roman]

I finally got my car to my new home, rather than being an hour away. 

Sweet! 

I've only got a small single garage for now, but, thankfully it fits in better than I thought it would. Still a little bit of room around the sides. 

I'm stuck for progress on a few fronts until my old house sells, but at least I can keep chipping away at a few small things.




So speaking of small jobs. 
My fuel rails needed some mounting brackets, and needed some threaded ends for the banjo bolts and pressure dampers. 

The problem is that I need an M12 thread for the Toyota fittings, but the rail has something around a 16.5mm hole. 
So I found an oxygen sensor adapter that has the right inside and outside threads to adapt this down.
As it goes from M18 to M12.
So problem solved without needing any welding. At the other end of the rails, it's just a straight M18 threaded fitting with no holes to blank them off.
I will epoxy these in place so they dont rattle loose when the engine block is vibrating into the 5th dimension trying to do too many rpm.




Then, fuel rails also need some brackets. 

So drew them up 



Printed them and test fit 



Then printed a compression mould with a 1.5mm gap, and a decent amount of draft angle on all sides this time.
Turns out that 1.5mm is pretty good for 6 layers with this sheet I've got, everything just popped out awesomely!
Managed to reuse it 3 times. (First time, didnt have enough layers in there) 



So these get cut in half to make 2 each. I've epoxied these to the fuel rail to hold it in the right position. 
Then once my fittings turn up, I will wrap the whole rail in carbon, draping over these so they are nice and secure. 
Which should also look a bit nicer than plain aluminum in the engine bay, seeing how they are visually prominent in the engine bay.

Annnnnddddd thats it for now, but I can keep chipping away at some wiring tasks etc over coming weeks now that the car is home. 
Excellent.




 

[Roman]

Alright so as of yesterday I'm finally out of mortgage prison!
I finished moving house with heaps of time to spare, I definitely wasnt biffing trailer loads of stuff onto the lawn the night before settlement.




I got some throttle pulleys cut from stainless. I'll put a radius on the inside of the pulley edges and deburr a few spots, but on the whole they came out really nicely. Quite heavy though, probably could have made some parts thinner. 
(Everything 2mm stainless)




It's looking like it'll be fiddlier than expected to balance the cable length and pulley positions to get the banks even. 
One thing that I didnt take into account is that there is no tolerance for having a cable that is "overlength" as you physically cant slide the protruding end of the cable into the pulley.
However I could probably chop out the relevant section of the pulley to allow this without any issues, as these are still significantly beefier than they need to be.
I need to make some end stops of some sort to stop the throttle rails moving forward or backwards so everything stays aligned correctly.
You may notice that in this photo I've got the linking cable on the wrong way up.
It looks dumb having these on the front of the motor, but down the back is getting very crowded and I've got ants in my pants to get this damn thing fired up.

I got the throttle rails drilled, took about 3 hours to drill 6 holes! We had to grind flats onto the rod to get through the hardening. Otherwise carbide bits didnt even make a dent.

Next jobs are to print a final iteration of the manifold from Nylon, get fuel lines connected up, and keep working on the exhaust. Then I'm preeeeety close to firing it up! 

[Roman]

Radiator situation 

I've got the Mark X radiator in there currently, and although it made everything nice in a lot of ways in the back of my brain I know it's just not going to work quite right. As the top pipe sits too high.
You can see it sits a little higher than the top crossmember too, and this isnt on any mounts yet. Just sitting hard against the bottom.



The motor's radiator cap (in blue) sits a little lower than the radiator, and the top hose to the radiator flows uphill towards the radiator.
All bad news for ever trying to bleed the air out of this thing.

Another issue is that I'd love to have a front facing intake airbox that goes through to the front grill, like a lot of the BTCC type cars have. 



The best option I've found for a low, wide, twin core radiator that doesnt have a radiator cap (and does have an air bleed) is from an SW20 MR2. 
Being so much shorter, I can dedicate all of the front grill area for the intake.
And they're a common upgrade item for MR2s, so cheap and plentiful. 
The radiator is 5mm wider than my chassis rails, but the end tanks are alloy and on the sides. So will just need a little slice and reweld to fit at the bottom.






If I dedicate the top grill to doort noises, then I dont have a huge amount of frontal area for the radiator coming in from just underneath the bumper.
Possibly need to remove the bonnet catch as well, but I'd prefer to keep it over having bonnet pins or whatever.




This is a rough approximation of how much space I've got for each thing
Red is intake stuff, blue radiator stuff, white is the open area that the radiator can get air through.




So a lot of the radiator area will be fairly useless if hard mounted against the front of the car, as it wont get any air flow. so I'll try mount it as far back as I can towards the engine.

All of this stuff is a bit off topic to my path towards getting the engine fired up, but I've been working on that too. 

Last night cut the fuel rails a bit shorter, so there's more room at the back. for the fuel dampers without hitting the body.
Then also had the underside of the rails milled down so the throttle linkages dont hit the rail anymore. 
So that's just about all finished once I've retapped the ends and remade the AN lines to suit.

[Roman]

The SW20 radiator turned up, and thankfully it was indeed 755mm wide, not 770. So just needed a small snip up one side to fit. 
There isnt actually too much in the way of the fins being shrouded by the front panel, because those side parts are mostly the end tanks. So ended up better than expected, it will mount up to the front panel nicely.
This is the amount of room to the crossmember level:




My next problem was that the radiator outlets are 32mm, but on the motor they are 38mm. 
Wellllll, turns out that you can buy flexi hoses with 32mm at one end, 38 at the other. At what looks like good lengths (400 for one side, 300 for the other). So ordered some. Too easy! 
I'm glad to not need a join in the hoses this time.



I printed some lower radiator brackets which bolt onto the crossmember similar to the ones I had for the Altezza radiator. 
I remember we made the altezza ones out of aluminium, and it seems like it took forever and was a really hard job. 
Now with a printer it's just incredibly easier to test print and test fit a few iterations within hardly any time at all.




I've also got all the fuel lines connected, throttles are now mounted on carbon nylon manifolds, throttles are balanced and connected. 
My to-do list for getting the motor fired up is rapidly shrinking!

[Roman]

A few hurdles...

Only one side worked for the hoses.
The next size up is 495mm long and sounds like it would work good.
It's over $100 for the hose which is spendy.
But for once in my life I want no joins in the radiator hoses damnit.
So will just do it. (The non fitting side is currently 305mm)




Then I've been making good progress on the wiring, a new roll of DR25 turned up so I finished the injector loom and tested it. 

Injector 1 - working fine 
injector 2 - working fine
injector 3 - nothing 
injector 4 - nothing 
injector 5 - nothing 
Injector 6 - working fine

I figured I must have derped the wiring somehow, so I pulled my loom back off and test it, traced wires back, blah blah. All seemed okay.
Well, turns out that the wiring wasnt an issue, but the injectors are. 
7 out of 10 of the BMW injectors are seized.
BMW life! hahaha.

No big drama, as it's probably a good idea to start with some slightly bigger injectors anyway.
Internet says these factory injectors are somewhere around 248cc which might have been borderline for high rpm, depending on the deadtime.
For interest's sake I will chuck these in Dad's ultrasonic cleaner and see if they unjam at all.

Anyone got some suggestions on a good set of long pintle EV14 injectors? Over 250cc and under... say... 500. 
If there's some common 6 cyl car that is pickapartable I'll go grab a set. Needs the long pintle.

[Roman]

Alright alright alright! 

So I pushed the car outside this afternoon so I could reach some wiring inside to try fire it up.



I filled the car up with coolant, by which I mean water because I was expecting things to leak. Sure enough each head had a hole up the front where water started leaking out. 
I couldnt remember what these were for, then found out that they are like an air bleed channel that goes back to the thermostat housing. 
So, these seem to have gone AWOL when moving house so I'll need to pickapart some more. 
I must have removed them when taking the heads off to clean them. Easy fix.

Then I got the fuel pump working and fixed a few fuel leaks.
It turns out that AN fittings arent very good at sealing if you havent tightened them up? Crazy.

Then I got my tune somewhat sorted, and tried cranking the motor over.... and the bloody battery died! Ugh. 

I mucked around to get another battery, it sort of spluttered a few times but not quite. 
I had a look through the tune settings. 
Engine size was still set to 1500cc from using this ECU in the Echo - woops. 
I needed to disable the fuel pressure sensor allocation. As since this isnt wired in yet, it took 0v to believe that the motor had zillions of psi worth of fuel pressure. 
Then when I cranked the motor it was registering the crank trigger, but not cam trigger. 
Checked the settings, had this wrong. Both were set to VR sensors, but the crank is VR and the cams are hall effect. 

So once that was fixed... Bam! We are running. It was absolutely awesome to reach this point.
 

So whats next? Lots. 

Get the coolant system functioning properly. 
Make an exhaust for it. 
A lot of wiring work, get the fusebox setup all connected nicely and mount all of the wiring nicely. 
Need to put some gearbox oil in the box, will do this before running the engine any longer. 
Pull the fuel rails off, and do tests to work out the CC rating and deadtimes for the injectors. 
Calibrate all of the sensors
Mount a radiator fan
Check intake for leaks (I think all of the air bypass screws are currently all the way out)
Install the wideband 
Finish wiring up the alternator 

And a bunch of other little similar jobs. 
Most of these I can peck away at over winter with limited space.
Making an exhaust will be difficult when weather starts getting darker and wetter and I can only really work outside. 
Will push ahead as best I can.

Super excited for first start though!

[Roman]

Went to pickapart and replaced the missing air bleed hoses. Fixed a few other coolant leaks. Now it's good. 

Bought a big syringe pump thing to fill the gearbox with oil, managed to do this notoriously messy job without spilling a single drop of gearbox oil! Miracle! 
Until I realized that the drain plug wasnt screwed in properly, and itwas on an angle - so I had to undo it and quickly straighten it and tighten it up. So gearbox oil everywhere still. Damnit, haha.

Then I think I've still got some fairly massive air leaks, I dont have any gaskets or sealants at the moment so I'll pull it all apart and sort that a bit better. 
I managed to get it idling at around 1000rpm, but only because I've leaned out the fuel table so much. 
Again an easy fix, just time consuming. 

Then another cool milestone, and to be honest something I was dreading a bit - testing the clutch. 
Everything's good! I drove the car forward about a meter, then reverse about a meter. Which is officially the furthest it's propelled itself in about 6 or 7 years. 

It's still ear splittingly loud, and dear god it sounds like a straight piped RB or something dreadful currently. 
Ugh. 
Will buy some mufflers this week if I can, so I can keep making some progress without making my brain bleed.
Then also have enough of an exhaust on there that I'll be getting okay readings on the wideband.
Small steps but all in the right direction currently.
 

nother 

[Roman]

Ive been making good progress on getting everything wired into the fusebox and controlled by ECU rather than hardwired.

I bought 2x 500mm coby hotdog mufflers which are currently just sitting pushed over the ends of the pipes on each bank. Quieter than just open manifolds but should be better once welded. 

Have wired up ECT, wideband, fuel pressure sensor.

The motor was still idling really high (like 4200rpm...) with fully closed throttles, even after setting everything to fully closed.

I couldnt figure out why until I noticed that my 2x lower intake manifolds dont quite cover the edge of the circular holes which must be an idle air bypass.

It was only by a smidge, so gooed the gap with some silicone and solved that problem.

My current issue is that the cam angle triggers arent being picked up properly.

This motor uses hall effect sensors on the cam angle sensors, and the voltage they output is too low for this ECU to register correctly. So pullup resistors are needed, which I have wired in. But stilk not working it seems.

Some people have suggested wiring them to the 8v power supply rather than 5v supply, and this boosts the output voltage. But this stuffs up my loom a bit, as the 5v supply on that plug branches to a few other things as well as the triggers. 

So, another annoying problem, but not insurmountable. Just soaking up more time on little bits and pieces than expected. But thats always the way I guess! 

 

[Roman]

Definitely experiencing a combination of wins and losses with things right now. 

I fixed the wiring on my cam angle sensors, and then it actually looked fairly easy to change the wiring to an 8v supply so I did that too. 
...Then the motor wouldnt start at all.

It looks like it would work well with an 8v supply, if you use pulldown resistors instead of pull up. 
So pulled the loom back out, changed it back to 5V supply.
Once I got this fixed, the motor would fire up again. Sort of. 
I guess "fire up" is probably an accurate description:
 

What the hell is going on? 
How can the timing be obviously so bad, but the motor still runs at all haha.
Well it looks like the polarity of the crank angle sensor is back to front. 
So every now and then it thinks its doing a zillion RPM and then ignites on the intake stroke.
So some fairly rookie mistakes going on. But I'm slowly sorting through them. I think it should be idling and running properly pretty soon, hopefully.
I've not had any time to fit the exhausts on properly so my 1 stroke external combustion engine / fireworks machine is still pretty bloody noisy.

 

[Roman]

It turns out the crank sensor polarity was indeed the right way around, but, maybe the shielding could have been better? 
So I remade the wiring, and rerouted it away from the alternator. 
Still flames out the intake... hmmm. Everything was looking good on the trigger scope so it didnt make sense.

So maybe time to start checking for mechanical issues. 
I run a compression test, one bank is getting between 130-150psi... However the other bank was zero zero zero. 

first thought was that I must have bent some valves, or the valves arent seating correctly and need lapping in or something.
I pulled the rocker covers off, and found that all of the rockers underneath the intake cam on that side had fallen off...




Not 100% sure why yet.  It may relate to me doing a half arsed version of bleeding the lifters before installing them. As I only found out the proper way after I'd put it together.
You need to stick a needle down the hole until air stops coming out, while the lifter is soaked in oil.
So maybe it was the combination of starting a motor with no oil in the VVT pulleys, no oil in the lifters, and then the extra heavy valve springs making things whip around more than usual, and flicked things out. 
Not what I was expecting. I will triple check the cam timing next. If that's good, I'll see if I can manage to pop the lifters back in without removing too much stuff.

One thing that sucks about this motor is that the front timing cover can only come off, by undoing some bolts that are inside the sump. 
So hopefully that's not needed, but see how I go. 

In terms of removing everything to get the covers off, the motor passes the serviceability test for the most part. 
The only annoying thing was having to disconnect the clutch MC in order to have enough room to get that side's cover off.
I think once I've got a rear firewall in though, some tasks will be a bit harder. 



 

[Roman]

For god knows what reason, the VVTI pulley on the cam that spat the rockers had lost its bolts.

Whether this is cause or effect, I am unsure. 

But im now concerned that maybe the valves conked into pistons or something, then all of this stuff is just a consequence of that. So I need to do a bunch of checks.

I definitely hadnt touched these bolts, as they are a weird 5 sided internal hex that I dont even have a tool for. 

Weird! 

So this has now officially escalated into a full blown fuck-around. As the bolts have gone part way down the timing cover. Also one of the valve caps has made its way to the sump by the looks. 

So no shortcut options, its all going to have to come apart. As I cant get the timing cover off, without the sump off. I might get lucky and its just the lower oil pan that needs to come off. 

Not stressed about it, but just more annoying stuff to sort out.

I cannot overstate the peace of mind that comes with using a cheap and replacable engine.

I think id be at stress level 5000 if this was anything more expensive or uncommon. But no stress.