Mitch's 1982 GX61 chaser

[Mitch.W]

Its been a long time coming, i've been wanting to get back into the X chassis game for a few years but finding a nice spec car these days is super difficult. i decided my only otion was to try and hunt down some of the ones hidden away in the corners of nz with owners that don't know what they have. 

2 years ago on a motorbike trip around the south island i was told of a gx51 in Invercargill that was sitting at a workshop, so i stopped by and there it was, door rusted off, fist size rust holes in panels, weirdly rego on hold for the last 20 years, i decided not to pursue this and still no sign of this blue chaser i had heard of. 

I had seen and been sent photos of a blue and silver gx61 chaser and a friend had met the guy at a swap meet 6 or so years ago but at the time he wanted "too much" by todays standards it would have been a steal. funnily enough, if you google search "GX61 Chaser" this exact car pops up on the Wikipedia page as the main photo, unsure who actually changed it to this car. 

 

so i had a rego number and knew he lived in southland somewhere, i started investigating managed to pull some strings and got a name, good start. 

I went onto the white pages and started cold calling everyone with the same last name with not much response, until i was met with an older lady on the other end of the phone, i had the name of her father that had passed away 20 odd years ago (turns out this car was still registered in his name), She mentioned her brother looks after it but he is very hard to get ahold of, she gave me his phone number and just hold me to keep calling until he picks up as he is useless at answering the phone, after a day or so of calling each hour he picked up and after a bit of an awkward conversion he started to come around and was interested in selling, he said he had 2 other cars that i have to take with it also. Turns out he also owns the gx51 i went and found years prior to this. He sent some photos through, we talked numbers and managed to convince some mates it will be a great way to spend a weekend driving to Invercargill with car trailers to pick up a bunch of rusty toyotas. 

when i arrived i wasn't disappointed, the car is incredibly tidy for something that has 340,000k's on the clock and has been used to tow trailers around most of its life. 

one of the parts cars the rear end had rusted completely off, we salvaged any good parts and scrapped the rest and dragged the "good" parts car home

Bruce the owner for the last 30 years or so kept it garaged, fish oiled it everywhere and kept it in pretty good condition overall, i didn't really let him know my true intentions with the car, he had a garage full of 20-30 perfectly restored american cars and some in the process. 

 

 

Discussion - 

[Mitch.W]

Got the car home and unloaded it, first thing first was to clean up the interior which looks like it hadn’t had a clean since it was new.

after a good water blast and bissell, with some other chemicals the difference is unreal. got really pedantic with it and cleaned the floor under the carpet, still happy to see no rust. 

other boring stuff like polishing the car trying to make the paint look as good as it can while I’m waiting for my savings to grow and parts go arrive. it came with a really cool old TRD gearknob that he said it had been in the car since he owned it

Thats about it all Caught up, working on finding another pair of SSR mk3 for the rear but i want original lips 9j A type which is proving difficult but OEM lips are so much nicer, also saving for an airbag setup because im too old for low cars now. 

If anyone has a good 1gge kicking around it would be great too. 

[Mitch.W]

Picked up a blue top 1gge the other day from some guy on Facebook out of an a70 supra that had 140k’s on the clock which hopefully means the motor is good, popped a cam cover off tonight and the head looks really clean, will give the aluminium a vapour blast and rezinc the bolts and other hardware cambelt and water pump and chuck it in and try my luck.

 

 

also picked up some cheap s13 coilovers, these will get cut up and I’ll use the sleeves to make some platform coilovers just need to measure up suitable sized shocks 

 

[Mitch.W]

So after stripping the motor down everything got sent to powder coat/zinc plating/vapour blasting. 
Ordered all new timing gear and a full gasket kit to freshen the motor. 

also managed to score a digital dash from japan, the dash is the easy part. Finding a digital fuel sender and repinning my loom to suit is the harder part.

now the puzzle of finding where everything on the motor goes and i can think about swapping it, maybe paint the engine bay first?

[Mitch.W]

Slowly chipping away at this, got the motor 90% complete, just need to pull apart the accessories to vapour blast all them and it’s ready to drop in.

Big shoutout to @HighLUX for sending me down a lower timing belt cover in good condition as mine had been mangled when it was pulled out of the original car.

I’ve also been in the hunt since I got this for for a pair of 14x9j A type (-25) ssr mk3 with original ssr lips to match my pair of 8j A type mk3, finally found some on yahoo when they arrived they looked wide and I measured them up and they turned out to be 14x9.5 A type (-30) which is wider than I wanted and a little annoying, but have decided I’ll just make em fit, will need a little more guard work but that’s no biggie. 

I stripped the paint off the centres and a thinking I will vapour blast and clear coat the faces? If anyone has any suggestions on the best way/any other ways to keep a raw face nice that would be handy, and they are getting sent off to get the lips all polished up and tidied. 
 

[Mitch.W]

So I’ve been in a battle with these back wheels, 14x9.5 -33 doesn’t fit well in stock rear guards as I wanted and I still had no luck trying to find factory 9j A type mk3. 
I got these polished up and painted them in a krylon glitter blast paint which was a pain in the ass to spray. 

after much deliberation I decided to stick with the ones I have, I then decided I should try and narrow the subframe to fit, I friend mentioned another old Toyotas axles weee slightly shorter and could work, so i set about jigging up the subframe and moving the trailing arm mounts in 12mm or so.

Before

After

Both images on an unrolled stock guard which worked great. 

while I was there I decided I might aswell raise the diff and make a bit of an exhaust tunnel. I’m terrible at taking photos as I do stuff so here’s the finished result, only needed to fold the lip up of the guard and it fits great. 
needing to drop a tire size in the front to 165/60 and get it lower all round but it’s starting to get there. 

 

I also got a custom made Jeff emporium steering wheel which turned out great and he also refurbished the trd gearknob that came on the car too. still need to clean to OEM floor mats and get them back in the car to tidy up the interior
 

[Mitch.W]

Managed to pick up a pioneer lonesome car-boy component stack which consists of a kp-707g cassette player, cd5 equaliser, gm120 amp, I already have a gm4 amp too, and a pair of ts-x9 to top it off, it also came with a pair of small ts-1655 speakers and a Kex-70 tape player too.

spent afew hours cleaning with a tooth brush and metal polish to get rid of some corrosion and got it looking presentable.

tried to bench test the setup but it doesn’t seem to be playing ball, I got it all connected up, the tape gear spin if I falsely load it without a tape, but as soon as I load a tape in it doesn’t seem to have enough juice to spin the tape. I don’t know enough about this stuff to pull it to bits. I also need a volume knob as the one on my cassette player has been snapped off so if anyone has a spare sitting around would be much oh appreciated. 

also pulled the original floor mats out of the boot this weekend and 40 years hasn’t been super nice to the rubber on these and the drive side is starting to crumble apart but they are near impossible to find so will do for now, gave them a scrub up and they came up pretty nice.