kei KwS Gets Another Kei - 1990 Suzuki Alto Works RS-X

[kws]

After selling the Alto Works, there was a tiny little nugget shaped hole in my life, so I had no choice but to fill it with another Kei car.

If you were following the previous Alto from the start, you might remember this one from here.

Long story short, there was an auction (maybe an estate sale? Can't recall) a couple of hours north of where I live, and when browsing through the list of what was going to be available, there happened to be a Suzuki Alto Works listed. Weird thing to have in a barn, I thought, but hey I'm keen.

I went up to view and bid on the car, and as soon as I saw it, I fell for the little nugget. Who couldnt love that little face.

It'd been off the road for 11 years at that point, and had been sitting the whole time. The interior was foul

The exterior was also filthy, top to bottom, so it was hard to get a good gauge on the condition. Poking around with my torch though, I found a couple of spots that needed attention

The front of each sill, where the jacking points should be, had some rust, including this hole on the passenger's side.

The boot lip had been trapping moisture under the seal too, and rusted along there (and causing a leak into the boot)

The only real damage to the exterior, other than a couple of small dings, was this dent in the front guard. I suspect since the door hinges are bent, that the door over extended forward, damaging both

But otherwise it appeared fairly solid, and most importantly, mostly complete

No one knew if it had run, when it last ran, or if it was previously a good runner. I found the keys on the keyring in the car next to it, so moved them to the Alto, but otherwise it was all an unknown.

The auction rolled around, I did my best but ultimately got outbid. For me, the risk of the unknowns at that point were just too great, so I kept my top bid reasonable.

Fast-forward almost two years, and I get a message from a friend saying, "I put out looking to buy a Kei car, and got offered a car I read about on your very blog. It's too much of a project for me, but do you want me to put you in touch?" Heck yeah I do!

So he passed my email on and the owner dropped me a line "Hi, I have a Suzuki Alto Works for sale, would you be interested in a project"

Of course, I held back my excitement and asked for more details

He came back with a couple more details, but more importantly a couple of photos

Undeniably the same car, car club sticker and all. Unfortunately, he also mentioned the engine was rust seized, and had been sent off to a rebuilder to be stripped and assessed, which resulted in it being declared completely kaput (and a "$10K" quote to rebuild it).

I replied asking for more information about the engine damage and condition of the car and heard nothing but crickets.

Me, being me, couldnt leave it well enough alone. The damn thing was rattling around rent-free in my head, so 7 months after I heard nothing back, I flicked him a quick email asking how he was getting on with the Alto.

"Good timing, I was just thinking I should do something with the car or get rid of it"

After a lot of back and forth, the stars aligned and on my way to the track in the BRZ the other weekend I detoured an hour or so out of my way and went to look at the little nugget.

It was pretty well as expected; the front of the car was all in bits, the engine was spread across a few shelves, and the car was looking a bit sorry for itself.

On the plus side, he had cleaned the car inside and out, and honestly, the interior clean alone was worth having him win the car in the first place instead of me

The engine was pretty dire, but we'll get back to that later.

Anyway, it all checked out, everything was there, the rego was still on hold, and after going away and doing some more research into what on earth I was doing, I made an offer.

We settled on something in between what both of us were thinking, and a friend of his was roped in to bring the car and multiple tubs of parts down to me.

Yesterday the car arrived.

Here is my latest project, Nuggie, the 1990 Suzuki Alto Works RS-X CN21S

I had been super anxious all morning, but actually seeing the car roll up on the trailer, looking ridiculously small, just wiped all the anxiety away and replaced it with excitement.

Whilst discussing the transport with the transporter beforehand, we had been coming up with plans to get the car off the trailer and down into my garage, since my driveway, although short, is very steep. I think in the end it was going to be a case of using the winch on the van to winch the car down into the garage.

But thankfully that didnt matter. As it turns out, not only does the handbrake work, but so do the service brakes. So with a little push, the Alto was off the trailer and I gently guide it down into the garage using the handbrake to control it.

We unload all the parts, and after bidding farewell, I stand back and see the Alto in its new (temporary) home

Theres a couple more spots of rust than I could see at the auction (one of them is the front edge of the bonnet in the above photo, seems to be a common spot), and the paint is flat as anything, but it will hopefully polish up nicely. I won't do that yet, I want a good before and after in the sun.

I couldnt help but check out a couple of the cool little things about the early cars. One of them is visible in the photos above; the vertical door handles. These were only on the early cars, as they later replaced them with normal boring handles when they decided safety was more important than being cool and added side intrusion bars. This even necessitated changing the quarter panels since they have cutouts for your hand on the vertical handle cars.

Cool handles

Boring normal handles and "safe" doors.

The front seats are pretty wild too. Such late 80's vibes

You can actually quickly remove and flip the shoulder support on the backrest, for either higher or lower support

Another early feature I'm a big fan of is the super retro dash and the gauge cluster, both of which got "modernised" in 1991.

Moving on, spread across the tubs were all the engine components, and now that I had time to have a decent look at them, it was grim

The main journals on the crank are very unhappy

There are a couple of less than happy valves too. I suspect even if the engine didnt drink a bunch of water that it wouldnt have run very well with a burnt valve

But the block is the least happy

I'm looking into options currently, and have a potential lead on a complete engine that would be a better base to rebuild, otherwise I could bore this block out and use oversize forged pistons. We'll see.

Either way, I want it running fairly quickly (without compromising too much, I want it done properly), so have a roughly 6-month plan to be back on the road, and I want it out of the garage within a month or two as I'm very limited on garage space.

Parts have already been ordered, and I'll be making a start on the rust soon. Plenty more to come. Keep on moving.

[kws]

So, I've had the car just over a week now, and it's been a busy old time.

The more I dig into the engine that came with the Alto, the more dire it becomes. I'll go into detail as I go, but I'm starting to think the $10k quote the previous owner got for the rebuild might not have actually been that far off, considering almost nothing is reusable.

In a huge turn of luck, I was very fortunate to be offered a Suzuki Cappuccino engine by a friend in the local Kei group. It was a spare for his race Cappo, but had been a good running engine when it came out of the donor. I never thought I would be able to source a donor, let alone it being local.

So of course I jumped in the parts hauling Honda, and loaded it up

I got it home and with the help of my wife we unloaded it, and I managed to rig the engine stand to work on the tiny little engine. It's pretty much at the limits of the stock stand.

It had been stored in a workshop, so is pretty dirty externally, but before I bought it we stuck a borescope down the cylinders and checked them out. We couldn't see much because the cylinders are so small, but they didn't appear rusty.

The timing cover came with it, thankfully, as mine had been cut in half for some reason

The exhaust manifold has cracked and been welded, which is better than my current one which is still badly cracked

Interestingly, the Cappo runs a 90 degree adapter on the oil filter, whilst the Alto runs the filter straight into the block via a cooler

I wasted no time in starting to strip the donor engine down. First was removing the oil filter adapter. Three bolts and it pops off

Next was the exhaust manifold, which has two nuts and two bolts holding it on. One of the bolts is hidden up under the turbo flange

Came off suspiciously easy

Next was the intake manifold. There are a couple of other things to remove first, like this long guy coolant neck

I tried to get the small hose to the intake manifold off without damaging it, but in the end it wouldn't give up, so got chopped

The intake manifold is held on with a series of 9 little nuts. This was made a little easier by the injectors and fuel rail having already been removed by the previous owner

Fairly easy to remove, really

Instead of the massive thermostat block the Alto has, this engine just had a small block off plate with a coolant temp sensor in the middle of it

The engine was looking pretty small with the manifolds removed

Whilst the tub of Cappo parts was filling up. Note the ziplock bags, labelled, with bolts in them... something the engine rebuilder that stripped the Alto engine was lacking.

The next day I started on the actual tear down. My plan is to completely rebuild this engine from the bottom up, so it's all new, and will last. I probably could've run this engine as is, but I didn't want to risk it (with good reason, as I later found out)

Removing the timing belt was the first thing I needed to do, so using the manual, I set the timing at TDC, making sure the cams weren't 180 out

Next, I removed the spring and bolt from the tensioner. This was a real prick to remove, as the little pin it pivots on was seized in the front cover. I had to tap it with a hammer back and forth to get it to move and then slowly wiggle it out

Once the belt was removed, before progressing further, I set the crank to a certain position as per the manual. As it says, this sets the pistons in a certain height to prevent the pistons hitting the valves.

I could then remove the cam pulleys and rear timing cover

The cams on the F6A engine aren't actually in the head, they are in cam boxes on top of the head. Annoyingly, it means if you have a "valve cover" leak, you have to remove the camshafts (and timing belt) to change the gaskets. After removing all the screws, I carefully lifted off the cam boxes

This gave me clear access to the head, with the rocker arms and hydraulic lash adjusters (lifters)

I carefully removed the rocker arms in their pairs, and placed them in an organiser

The lifters just slide up out of their bore. I started with some needle nose pliers and a rag, but in the end just pulled them out with my bare fingers

Intake side done

A good reminder to limit how much sealant you use. This orange RTV was all over the place, and in the case of this lifter, inside it too

The Alto reconditioner didn't seem that concerned, since they dumped all the rockers and lifters from that engine together into a container with no care

but in my case I'm keeping everything labelled and organised

Next was to remove the head, which caused a slight issue... my hex socket was too big to fit between the valve springs. Nothing a visit to the bench grinder couldn't fix though

Head bolts removed. They always have a very distinctive burnt oil smell

Head removed

Finally, the treasures inside have been revealed. Stock/OEM style head gasket present

The bores looked good, considering the unknown ks

Number two has some slight marking in the walls. Cant pick it up with a fingernail though. Hopefully a hone will clean it up

The pistons were looking good too, quite clean, with no missing bits

As you can see in the photos above though, the coolant passages were a bit crusty... so when I removed the water pump... it was nasty.

I gave it a clean up, and I will have the block cleaned by the reconditioners, so it should be fine.

Flipping the engine over, it was time to remove the sump and gain access to the rotating assembly

Looked pretty good inside. Nice and clean, no real burnt on sludge. I suspect this engine was looked after

I removed the oil pickup

Now it was time to remove the pistons. One by one, I undid the conrod nuts, removed the cap and pushed the piston down and out

The bearings have some wear, but were fine. Most important was that they were consistent

It's bloody hard to show, since it's so shiny, but the crank also looked great

The main bearing caps needed to be removed next. Once again, bearings looked pretty good (darkness on bearings is just old oil)

Crank also showing no signs of damage

And compared to the thrust bearings I removed from my last Alto, which were almost completely worn out, these are great

I got a little stuck here thanks to a rear main seal housing that didn't want to come free, so moved onto testing the head overnight. With the head upside down I poured some coolant into the chamber on the head. It didn't immediately leak through the valves, so that was a good sign

The theory is that if the valves are sealing, as they should, there should be no coolant leaking past them.

Leaving it overnight showed that two valves had a slight seepage

You could trace the line of coolant from which valve it was

I marked the valves for future checking. I'm sure it'll just be some carbon on the valve seat

So, back to the stupid rear main seal housing. It is held in place with a handful of bolts, and two philips head screws. Dumb idea. I managed to round one off by trying to use my rattle gun to shake it free (which I have had success with before), so for the other one, I used the recommended impact screwdriver

After a few good whacks, it came right out

My only option was to drill the head off and hope the rest came out without too much of a fight. I used progressively bigger drill bits until the head popped off

Which meant I could finally remove the crank

The remains of the screw did just wind out easily

The main goal here was to thoroughly clean all the gasket surfaces, and measure the bores and pistons before the block and head have a date with the engine reconditioner this week.

Cleaning the sump flange on the block gave a nice half and half

After much scraping, and some wire brushing, I moved onto checking the bores. There was no point in sending it out for machine work if the bores were over spec

Its not the best way to do it, and certainly not the quickest, but I bought a micrometer and set of T gauges

It was a pretty steep learning curve getting the T gauges to measure properly, centered in the bore and not reading too high or too low.

The manual calls for four measurements per cylinder. Two at 50mm from the top and two more 90mm from the top; two inline with the crank and two perpendicular. I marked the two depths on the T gauge since I was sick of using a ruler each time

The trick was to line the gauge up in the cylinder, and then locking and unlocking it whilst gently wiggling it around to center it first, followed by unlocking it, tipping it so one side goes down into the bore further, locking it and then tilting it up straight again (which pushes the gauge slightly closed, accurately measuring the bore) and lifting it out to be measured

You can see from the sheet I made that it took a few tries before I got repeatable results. I started with cylinder 1, so had to go back and redo it once I had refined my skills a bit

The last measurement I wanted to do was checking the piston skirt. To do this I had to remove the conrod. This is where my first real surprise came about. I began with piston 3, which I had noticed was a little stiff to move when wiggling the conrod back and forth, unlike the others which were smooth.

I used a pick to remove the retaining clip

And then using a short extension bar, I carefully hammered out the pin. Piston 3 took a bit of force to hammer out

This was why. It turns out the gudeon pin is cracked end to end, right through to the center

Unfortunately this has also damaged the little end of the conrod, marking it up

Thankfully all the others came out fine, but I will need to buy a single new conrod, which ain't cheap.

Moving on to measuring them, this was a bit of a pain once again, until my technique got better.

All pistons were within spec

I had a quick idea to use one of the conrods that came with the Alto, so I grabbed the best looking one and stripped it down

I don't know what kinda of horrible pain and suffering this engine went through, but the two good rods both suffered from massive heat in the little end. Both pins were discoloured from heat, as were the top of the conrods.

I decided not to risk running them, so back in their box they went. Speaking of a hard life, check out the skirt wear on the Alto piston vs the Cappo one

Interestingly the bigend bearings in the Alto were non-original, so I'm guessing it was bearing slapped at some point before it all fell to bits

Cappo bearing left, Alto bearing right

With the block stripped, I did a quick comparison against the Alto block. Other than the bolt-ons, they are the same block. The only real difference noticed is that the Cappo block is drilled and tapped for the oil filter adaptor, whilst the Alto one isn't. The Alto oil cooler seal should still be on the outside of the holes.

Alto left, Cappo right

Why I'm not using the Alto block, its badly pitted

The last job I needed to do this weekend was to strip the head so that can also be skimmed. This means valves out, springs out, stem seals out

It was a bit awkward to do with my cheap new spring compressor, but it did the job pretty easily

A small magnet on a stick was used to fish out the collets

Again, the previous rebuilder didn't care

But I do

The last few valves being removed

Job done, I removed the seals with some pliers

I will send it all out to be cleaned and skimmed/honed this week. I'm still a little while off having all the parts I need, but at least I wont be relying on anyone else to do their bit once the parts do arrive.

As a bonus, I wanted to quickly pop the front bumper back on the Alto, just to keep it safe. This required refitting the slam panel and bumper support

It turns out having all the bolts in your slam panel is for chumps, broken off bolts are where the cool kids play. I'm a chump though, and not cool, so I drilled out and tapped the broken bolt

There is shockingly little in the front of an old Kei car. To be fair, I don't believe late model ones are much better, certainly the HA36S Alto wasn't.

With the frame in place, I juggled the bumper a bit and fitted it

It's got its little face again, likely for the first time in a year or two

I know it'll need to come off again to refit the engine, but that's a future me problem.

[kws]

Since the engine was in limbo, waiting on parts and machine work, I started to hunt to find all the rust and fix it.

The first place to start was to get the car in the air and have a good look under it.

I knew there was rust in the LH front sill area, so I started there. This is the hole I poked in the sill at the auction when checking it over. The jacking point has also been flattened.

Moving backwards to another common spot, the rear floor pans were thankfully very solid

As is the "trans" tunnel. This bracket has some paint flaking from it, but otherwise is good

The shifter assembly and rods are pretty manky, but I have new bushes on order for this. A quick paint will make it look spiffy

The boot floor is good

There is a bunch of surface rust on/around the fuel tank. Nothing a wire brush and some rust treatment can't fix. I need to drop the tank and see what state the inside is. I hope it's not rusty.

Even better, another rust area I was worried about, the rear spring mounts, were perfect

A loose bolt on the fuel tank. It's OK, not like it needs to be properly secured or anything...

Moving to the driver's side, the floor was a bit on the thin side here too

There were some definite holes, which later got the poky poky screwdriver treatment to see how big they were

Finally, the rear tailgate seal lip is very crusty on the bottom. This has been leaking water into the boot when the car was washed, so thankfully, it's been stored indoors for its recent life.

So in conclusion, the body is surprisingly solid. There is a fair bit of surface rust under the car, which will need to be brushed back, treated and painted/undersealed, but mostly it's actually just covered in mud under there; It needs a darn good clean.

All the troublesome rust I need to fix is in the floors, one of the sills, the boot lip, and there is a small amount in the bonnet.

The next logical course of action was to lift the carpets and see what was to be seen from the inside.

To do this, I unbolted the seats and tipped them back into the boot, on the folded-down rear seat

The carpet has a bit of a smell. The previous owner cleaned things like the seats and steering wheel, but I don't think he cleaned the carpets. I will give it a wet-vac before reassembly. The seats came out easily enough.

With the seats removed, the carpet comes up easily enough. I needed to unbolt the lower seatbelt anchors as they go through the carpet, and there was a surprise screw under the LH side of the rear seat base (which was a pain to access with the front seats on the back seat...). The dead pedal was a pain too; I thought I could just unbolt it, but it turns out it's bolted in a million places under the carpet and not possible to do, so I carefully stretched the carpet around it to get it out.

This gave me the first glimpse of the floors and inner sills

The rear, as suspected from seeing the underside, was solid. Dirty, but solid.

Yes, that is a massive nail...

The fronts were hiding their rust

In the photo below, you can see one of the other common rust spots - the seam sealer where the A pillar meets the inner sill. In this case, it's actually bursting out. I knew about this fairly early on, as I checked it when I got the car after watching the videos of when Garage Kei was pulling his Alto apart.

Also visible in that photo was a reason for my potential death had I not lifted the carpet...

What's that, I hear you ask? Well, it goes here

It's the fricken clevis pin from the brake pedal. Instead of firmly pushing the brakes, the clevis just slid up and down the pedal. This definitely was not on top of the carpet, so I can only presume that when they had the pedal box out, the pin slipped down behind the carpet and wasn't seen again until now.

I quickly grabbed a new split pin and refitted it how it should be.

I also found the circlip on the end of the pivot for the clutch pedal was too big and fell off when I touched it. Needless to say, it is all going to get a thorough going over.

Anyway, back to rust hunting.

The driver's floor doesn't look too bad, just the one hole (for now)

and the rust is doing its best Alien chestburster impression

So, out with the big screwdriver and start poking

Onto the other side. Thankfully, the pillar/sill, although showing some surface rust under the sealer, was solid

There were a couple of holes in the floor here

I got out old mate paint pen, and started marking them out

Moving back under the car, I had a look at the LH front sill

I started by using some big grips, a hammer and dolly, and straightening out the jacking point.

To check how far the rust hole in the sill went, I had to remove the sill cover. Thankfully, with some gentle persuasion with the impact screwdriver, all the screws came out without too much issue.

Other than the obvious rust hole, the sill and bottom of the guard are actually in good shape

I also straightened the driver's side jacking point while I was at it

Around the back, after some investigation, the seal lip was looking pretty substandard

I'm not particularly looking forward to working out how to fix that, but it's gotta be done.

The bonnet didn't escape some poking and paint pen

That was all the excitement for that day, other than quickly whipping up a blanking panel on the 3D printer for the hole in the firewall where the old Auto shifter cable went

I used the old dirty finger on paper method to trace out the hole

I then imported this into Fusion, and traced around it

After extruding it, sending it to my printer and printing it in PETG to withstand heat, this is what I had

I'll get some nicer bolts and sealant to seal it in place, but otherwise it should do nicely.

Moving on to last weekend, it was time to deal with the rust. I dug the welder out from the dungeon under the house, found my trusty grinder, body saw and finger sander, and set to work.

I started on the passenger's side, and of no surprise, the scope crept once the abrasives touched the metal

Until I ended up with a much bigger hole

I cleaned up the edges, and zapped some nice new steel in place

Despite good penetration, I decided to weld the underside too, just to make it nice, strong and tight. As close to seamless as I could

It was hard to get a photo because it was so shiny, but the holes in the sill got the same treatment

It still needs to be seam sealed, but I coated it in epoxy primer to protect it. It's not pretty because I don't like completely grinding down welds if I don't have to, as it can make them weaker or introduce pinholes, but the seam sealer will cover it all anyway.

Moving to the other side, the holes got a lot bigger here

I zinged this patch in with a few plug welds to tie the sill and A pillar sections together, since it's an overlapping intersection of panels. I cut back through just the sill, so there was exposed A pillar metal to weld to.

The holes in the floor were next

Once all the holes were filled with new metal, I epoxy primed them and then hit them with a coat of zinc-rich primer over top. I also sprayed this into the sills wherever I could access

The next day, it was time to finalise all the work. I started by seam sealing everything, making sure there were no gaps or holes.

This side was a little different. On one side of the pinch weld is the floor, the other is the sill. On the floor, I seam sealed it, on the sill I used some body filler to smooth it out

The filler was sanded and then primed. I wasn't aiming for perfection, just to smooth out a couple of low points from grinding the welds back.

Once the seam sealer had cured, it was all covered with an epoxy top coat. This will seal and protect it all. The majority is either under the car, hidden by the carpet, or under the side sill cover. Only a small section will be visible. This is the same basic treatment the Marina got, and I'm happy with how that's holding up.

I still need to tackle the boot lip and the big hole in the bonnet, but I need to get the seats out of the boot before I can work around there.

All this messy work needs to be done and dusted before I can even consider building an engine in the garage, so with parts starting to arrive, I need to sort it soon.

[Goat]

Shit yes. Good score and good save. Can't wait to see this go back together!

[kws]

So uh, things escalated slightly.

[kws]

In my last update, I pulled the seats out, carpet up and fixed the rust in the floor/interior. Now it was time to put the carpet down, reinstall the seats and work on the rear rust.

Before I could reinstall the interior, I really wanted to give it a good clean, so I pulled the Big Green Machine from its hiding place in the basement

This guy is a beast. Heaps of suction and a heated solution sprayer. It's better than my favourite Little Green Machine for cleaning upholstery, but its size and weight mean that it doesn't get used anywhere near as much. It's more for cleaning house carpet than car seats, but it does the job.

I put the carpet back in place and gave it a good vacuum with the shop vac to get the loose stuff off it

And then I got stuck in with the cleaner. So much forbidden coffee was sucked out of the carpet

It's not perfect, but it came up a bit nicer after a few passes. It's a bit more blue.

You can kinda see the difference here, compared to the untouched driver's sid,e which has more of a brown tinge

So, of course that side got some work too, pulling more mystery juice out

A slight difference from how it was before

The carpet is pretty thin and a bit worn on the driver's side, so eventually a set of nice carpet mats will go in, but that'll happen later.

This is the liquid I removed from the carpet

Now that the carpet was clean and smelled better, it was time to pop the seats out of the boot and back where they belong

I didn't do it on the day, because I was stuffed after doing the carpet, but a couple of weeks later I did give the seats a good clean with the Big Green Machine too, and they came up much better (and smell better)

Let's not forget the interior looked like this at the auction

I think the previous owner had wiped the seats down, but not really cleaned them, as they too were full of forbidden coffee juice

I'm pretty happy with how they have come up, including the rear seat. I might give them another going over once the car has been used a few times and the dirt has been shaken around.

Now that the seats were out of the boot, I moved the speaker shelf out of the way, folded the rear seat and moved all the boot lining out of the way

This meant I could safely work on the rusty boot seal lip. I started by wire brushing the area, and boy did it not get any better! No wonder it leaked!

I started by making up the repair panel, using my cutter/folder. This strip was at the limits of what this little machine can do.

Followed by my new toy, a shrinker and stretcher. I should've got these when I was working on the Marina, they make shaping metal so much easier

Which gave me a strip of metal with the basic shape I needed.

A bit more tweaking and it was pretty good.

Next, the cutting wheel and chisel were used to remove the bad metal. Thankfully, the lower lip was in very good shape, so I could just peel the top lip off it and be left with a good flange to work with

I tried to remove the rear bumper, but the fixings are all Philips head screws, super tight, and all seized, so that's a job for another day. I did my best to cover and protect it as I went.

Next, I trimmed the patch down and metal-glued it in place

I trimmed it all up nicely, plugged the holes on the other side of the opening and then primed the whole lot with epoxy primer

Once the primer was cured, I then used seam sealer to seal it all up. It's more than you should probably use, but this is a "wet" area, and I don't want to risk any water ingress through a pinhole in a weld that I missed or anything. The seal covers the majority of this. I also seam sealed the back of the joint, inside the car.

Finally, once the sealer had cured, I painted it with an epoxy topcoat. This is durable and a rust inhibitor. If the exposed boot ledge gets scratched up, I will likely wrap it in carbon vinyl or something.

It looks a bit nicer without all the junk in the trunk, and the seal cleaned and refitted

It could do with a skim of filler over the welds if I were picky and chasing perfection, but for now, it'll do. I also seam sealed the complete boot opening, since some of the old sealer under the boot seal had perished or was just gone, so hopefully that stops any moisture tracking in under the seal.

That's the end of the welding. I have a couple of small areas of cosmetic corrosion to fix up in a couple of places, but since they are in the middle of a panel, and aren't structural, they'll get treated and then touched up with some filler instead of risking warping a panel with weld.

One of the other interior things I hated was the sun-damaged and gross-looking steering column shrouds. You can see them in the photos above, a pale, flaky grey that was scratched to death.

I originally tried to scrape all the dead plastic off, making a mess in the process. The idea was to paint them and hope they would come back, since the genuine ones were obsolete.

It turns out the later C chassis Alto (CR and the likes) have slightly different covers, but are basically the same. The difference is, they are available new, and even better, they are available second-hand in good condition (in Japan), so that's what I did.

There is a slight difference in the shape around the ignition (the bump is longer), but it all still fits together nicely

Makes a nice difference

Progress on the engine has been happening in the background in fits and starts, with many issues in the meantime. That'll be covered in another post soon. The goal to have it running over Christmas is probably not going to happen now, but I have plenty to get on with in the meantime.

 

[kws]

The big rebuild has kicked off, but it's the kind of kicking that also includes screaming.

In the last update of the engine, I bought the Cappo engine, stripped it down and got it ready to be sent for machining.

The basic instructions were for them to skim the head and block for the metal headgasket, and to hone the bore on the block, ready for new piston rings on standard pistons.

I also had them clean both, which resulted in them coming back looking very good.

Unfortunately, that's where the issues with the engine began. I got a call before picking it up to say that they had found corrosion in the bores, which the honing wasn't able to remove.

I was thinking the spots in the circle would be my issue, as I noticed these before it went for machining (it's just staining), but I should've been worried about the line with the arrow instead, which is rust pitting.

I was told by the machinist that if I built the engine like this, I risk it smoking slightly or using some oil. This was totally unacceptable considering the efforts I am going to to rebuild this thing, and my utter hatred for engines that smoke, so I picked it up, brought it home and started looking into my options.

As if by magic, shortly after, my bank account was looking a bit lighter, and these arrived on my doorstep via Japan.

Trust Greddy, by OS Giken, 0.50mm oversized forged pistons

Having the block bored out half a mm oversize will remove the corrosion pitting in the bores, give me a slight bump in cubic capacity to 667cc, and result in stronger pistons that can handle more power in the future.

So, I packed the block up again, with the pistons, and sent the lot to the machine shop again, this time to have the bores resized, and I got them to check and set the ring gaps and install the rings on the pistons for me.

Once again, the block comes back looking great, and this time, other than some light marking from them measuring the ring gaps, the bores are spotless.

I thought, "Heck yeah, I have everything I need to assemble the engine. Let's go!"

The first step in any engine build, once it comes back from the machine shop, is to give it a thorough clean. Doing a ton of research, I ended up with the plan of hosing the engine down with a garden hose, through all the oil and coolant passages, and then quickly blowing all the important surfaces down with an air gun and then either using WD40 on them (to displace water), or in the case of the bores, scrubbing them down by hand with a clean rag and ATF. The oil galleries also got hosed out with brake cleaner, and all the blind threaded holes were blown out.

After flushing out the coolant passages, this was what came out of them. I'm quite impressed how clean it all is after two rounds of machining, no metal chips came out of anywhere, just these old dry flakes that would've ended up in the coolant anyway, which isn't the end of the world.

Once I was satisfied the block was thoroughly cleaned out and dried, I masked it up ready for some paint

and gave it the old "rattlecan rebuild" in satin black. I did about three coats, making sure to get up under the various sticky-outy bits.

The sump got a quick rebuild whilst we were there too. Looks like the guys that stripped (and ruined) the original engine tanked and cleaned the sump as the inside was real clean and not oily.

Once it was dry, the block was taken inside and the tape removed. Gotta say, you should always paint blocks when building an engine, man, it looks nice!

I quickly refit the oil gallery plugs with some Loctite

After chasing the head bolt threads (which were pretty clean after being blown out)

I carefully taped the machined block deck so it didn't get scuffed, and then flipped the block over

The main bearing caps had all been cleaned, too. Fun fact, you can tell it's a Cappuccino engine by the hole in the number 2 cap, as this is what a support for the oil pickup screws into. The Alto cap doesn't have this drilled, as the pickup doesn't have a support, since it's shorter and comes down pretty much under the number 1 cap.

The bearings I chose to use were some aftermarket but OEM Taiho Standard spec bearings. Taiho is the manufacturer of the genuine bearings, and the bearings that came out of the engine, so it should be right, right? I've seen a couple of F6A builds online that also used these bearings, and they are sold by specialists (and Partsouq) as direct replacements for the genuine part number.

I cleaned everything thoroughly and then fitted the shells to the block

Followed by the clean and dry crank

Which meant I could check the bearing clearances with Plastigauge (or the knockoff Flexigauge in this case)

Cut a small section off and place it parallel with the crank, across both halves of the bearing surface (the middle is the oil channel and won't crush the Plastigauge at all)

I carefully fit the caps, torqued to spec, removed them again, and checked that the Plastigauge was squished.

Using the paper that the Plastigauge comes in, check the thickest part of the squished plastic on both ends of the journal.

Unfortunately, despite many attempts, I could not get the squish into spec. It was showing 0.064~0.076mm, which is far too much clearance (not enough squish, the gap between the bearing and crank is too big).

As you can see in the spec below from the Alto manual (and the EA11R Cappuccino manual is the same), the clearance should be 0.020~0.040mm with a limit of 0.065mm. Outside of that limit, Suzuki recommends replacing the crank, as they do not offer oversize bearings.

The lower numbers are the measurements for the crank journal, and what size it should be. I got out the micrometer and measured the crank in as many places as I could. Everywhere measured 43.99mm +/- 0.01mm, well within the spec, so it wasn't the crank that was the issue.

After tearing my hair out (or what's left of it), wondering what was going on, I sent the block, crank and bearings off to the machine shop. In my mind, there was no reason for me to suspect the bearings, as when I measured them with my calipers, they measured the same as the stock bearings that came out of the engine.

As it turns out, everything measures in spec, except the bearings. They are a hairs width undersize, which explains the readings I was getting, and also why my calipers didn't detect a difference; it's literally a fraction of a mm thinner, and my calipers aren't that accurate.

Speaking of bearings not fitting, these don't fit DOHC turbo F6A conrods

You actually need F8A bearings for the conrods, the "F6A" bearings are far too small

I ordered some more OEM ones that were recommended, but since having the news that the OEM main bearings are junk, I will be ordering genuine bearings for the lot. It's a significant cost, about $500nzd for the set (vs about $100 for the set of OEM), but it'll be worth it if they just fit and work.

So that's where the engine is currently. The machine shop is looking into genuine bearings for me now, and I'm doing my own enquiries in the background, just in case they come up short and I need to get them out of Japan. There's basically a zero percent chance I will have it running over the Christmas break now. In hindsight, I always should've got the genuine bearings and not skimped on them.

That's not the end of the world, though. I have a ton of other work on the Alto to do, such as building the head, rebuilding the brakes and suspension, and a lot of cleaning.

In slightly different news, other things I have obtained...

We did a 6-hour round trip to pick the front exhaust pipe up, as this was missing from the car when it was delivered. Thankfully it turned up at the other engine builders, so the guy I got the car from managed to save it for me. Saves me a few hundred buying a new stainless one.

Thankfully, someone has already chopped out the restrictive '90s cat

I also obtained a nice Monster Sport Type SP-X rear muffler to replace the very rusty OEM one on the car

Another important piece of the puzzle was to get a replacement turbo. I will eventually upgrade to a bigger one like the HT07A, but for now, I need one that will play nice with the stock ECU and get the car going.

My original little IHI VZ15 (on the right) has a huge amount of lateral play in the shaft, so I bought a spare VZ24 Cappuccino turbo I found online (on the left). They seem to share the same basic frame, and the intake side seems very similar in terms of size

Interestingly, the exhaust wheel on the VZ15 is bigger than the VZ24. I don't know enough about turbos to know if that's a good or bad thing, but it is what it is

This turbo has near enough no play, so hopefully it won't smoke and will make choo choo noises in the meantime.

Speaking of ECUs, I spotted a CN21S Manual ECU on Yahoo Japan, so I grabbed that too. I don't know what the difference is, I'm presuming it'll have a higher rev limit to match the manual cluster with a higher redline. There is no boost control, but it may have ignition and fuelling differences since it doesn't have to account for a slushbox sucking all the fun out of it.

Long term, it's getting a Speeduino ECU anyway, but this will suffice for now.

Heaps to get on with, not enough hours in a day.

[kws]

Moving on from the bodywork and engine for a bit, I thought I would have my first look at the brakes.

I knew from when I first looked at the car that the brakes were in dire need of work, the rotors looked like they had lived under the sea, and the fluid was old and dark. By some miracle, they still worked when the car was delivered, but the RH front locked on soon after.

So I ordered some bits from Japan and set about rebuilding the calipers

The first job was to remove the calipers. These are quite a simple design; the whole caliper is held to the knuckle with two bolts, and that's it. No bracket, so separate slider pins, just the two bolts

Before I could remove the caliper, I had to remove the pads. This is done by pulling out the little spring pin and knocking the locking block out of the side of the caliper

The pads should slide out after that's removed

BTW, the manual is very strict about not touching the "pentagonal bolts" which hold the front of the caliper to the rear. It's the first time I've seen something like this used. I believe these are thread-locked in place too.

Now the brake hose can be disconnected and removed. These little hose blocking clips come in handy again.

The two bolts in the rear of the caliper can be removed now, and the caliper removed from the car. This really highlights the dire state of the rotors. No amount of skimming would save these, so hopefully the replacements I ordered are right.

As a small note, the manual mentions it, but obviously whoever touched these brakes last didn't read it, as this retaining plate on the rear only fits one way. One side was right, but this side had it upside down, which made it interfere with the pin on the rear of the caliper. They just sent it anyway.

The calipers were looking a bit worse for wear.

Being such a simple design meant they were quite easy to strip down. First, I used my tyre pump air compressor to slowly push the pistons out. The RH side, being the sized caliper, took a bit of back and forth to push the piston out, but eventually it came out with a bang.

Always use a block of wood or something to catch the piston, particularly if it's stuck, as it will come out with a lot of force. Also, make sure to use PPE; no one wants to catch a face full of brake fluid (again)

To my surprise, the pistons are aluminium, which means they have some surface oxidation, but no rust.

Using CRC as a lubricant, the oxidation was quickly removed using a scotch pad.

The bore inside the caliper had some gunk built up inside it, as well as some oxidation of its own. A quick clean and gentle scrub had the bores looking good again.

Next was to remove the two slider bushes. Both of these, on both calipers, were seized and required hammering to remove

These slide inside a bore that has a pair of o-rings inside, with grease between them

All the seals were removed next.

Now it was time to clean them up, ready to paint. I soaked the main body of the caliper in the ultrasonic for a bit, and they came up pretty good, but the fronts, which is where I was painting, were too big for my ultrasonic so were wirebrushed and brake-cleaned.

Being an Alto werido, I wanted to spice the calipers up a bit, and give them a bit of a forward homage (if that's such a thing) to the brakes of the later HA36S Alto Works, which come factory red.

My old Alto Works, featuring my big brake upgrade

So out came the rattlecans

First coat

Second coat

Having actually read the instructions for once, I noticed that there was an "IMPORTANT" step, which involved baking them at 93c for an hour to cure the paint, to make it more durable and solvent resistant.

So after three coats, and the required drying time beforehand, out came the BBQ for the first time this season.

After an hour of baking and then cooling off, the calipers were looking pretty good.

Now it was time to build the calipers back up again. I started by cleaning the slider bushes.

The new piston seal was next. Grease it up good, and then slip it into the groove, being careful not to twist it.

The piston comes next. This should be fairly easy to press into place by hand and slide smoothly.

The piston boot takes a bit of wrangling to get into place, but I found careful use of a pick helps a lot to get the lip into place and then using the back of the pick to push the lip into the groove.

Now the o-rings for the slider bushes can be fitted. Once again, grease them up good and slip them into the grooves. I found it easiest to use a finger from one hand to keep the bottom of the o-ring in the groove and then push the top of the o-ring into place with the other hand.

The channel between the o-rings is just a groove to hold grease, so stick a greasy finger in and pack it.

Now the slider bushes can be pressed into place. They take a bit of a push to get through the o-rings, but otherwise should slide pretty freely and smoothly.

Next up are the boots for the slider pins. These are a bit of a pain to fit and very fiddly. It also helps to notice that there are two different-sized boots, as the retaining groove on the calipers is bigger on one side than the other.

Each side has its own boot, one with a narrow lip and the other with a wide one.

After much faffing about, I got all the boots on. Once again, careful use of the pick helps get them in place, along with lots of pulling and squishing by hand. I found it easiest to push the slider bush flush with the body of the caliper on the side I was working on, get the boot in place, and then push the bush through the boot and clip the boot into its groove; otherwise it just gets in the way.

And there we have it, one rebuilt caliper ready to refit

Rinse and repeat with the other caliper, and that's job done. This caliper needed a quick tickle with a file and sandpaper to tidy up some burrs on the piston, which a previous butcher had made for some reason

But otherwise, it was exactly the same deal

Until I replace the rotors, hoses and wheel bearings, the calipers will just chill in the boot, with the rest of the parts I have collected.

As a quick note, I believe, other than the handbrake mech on the Cappuccino rear calipers, these are basically the same thing, and it's the same procedure to rebuild them.

The seal kit I used was from Pitwork, which strangely, is a Nissan brand, and included Toyota rubber grease, to fit a Suzuki.

Parts Used

Brake Caliper Seal Kit - Pitwork AY600-KE009

Please note these parts are specific to my car and may vary. Please check before ordering.

 

[kws]

Following on from making the calipers all nice and shiny, the rest of the front suspension needed to be refreshed to bring it up to the same standard.

The first job to refresh the suspension was to bring out the mighty slide hammer and bash some hubs out.

I don't love the design of having the rotor behind the hub like this. The Marina is the same, but at least it has tapered bearings, instead of roller bearings like this.

Using the wheel studs and nuts, I attached the hub puller fitting

Then the slider hammer was threaded into place

After a few good whacks, the hub came free

Even though I do own a press, the manual says this is the method for pulling the hubs, and I do believe this is easier than trying to press the hub out of the knuckle off the car.

As a note, on the Works cars, there is a little spacer in the back of the hub. Make sure not to lose this, and that it's fitted the correct way around, with the taper facing the hub. It normally sits right at the base of the shaft and spaces the hub off the bearings.

Because the wheel bearings were noticeably rumbly and I wanted to replace the bearings while here, I also had to pull the knuckle off the car.

The tierod end ball joint was pressed out

And the bolt securing the lower ball joint was also removed. This left two bolts holding the knuckle to the strut, which were easily removed.

The sad-looking lower arm. The ball joint felt as bad as it looked, so replacements had already been ordered

As it turns out, there are actually heaps of aftermarket options for these arms, as they were used for years on a few different Suzuki models around the world. I grabbed some Meyle ones from Spareto.

They did come with new bushes for the swaybar, but I believe due to a change in design, they need some tweaking to fit, and since I'll be removing the swaybar to fit the engine, I have put them aside for now.

The lower arms are held in place with a single 14mm head bolt through the inner bush

And then the swaybar. I removed both arms together, as it was easier than trying to wrangle the swaybar out of one arm

Replacement was as simple as just sliding the new arm into place in the front mount and sliding the bolt through the bush

As not to stress the bush, I did tighten the inner bolt up at about what I expect the ride height might be, but since I have never seen this car on its wheels with an engine fitted, I had to guess. Worst case, it's pretty easy to access the bolt to redo it once it's on the ground.

Annoyingly, the manual offers no torque spec for the front suspension at all, so everything was just done to the Japanese equivalent of Gutentight - グーテンタイト (blame Google Translate).

The new arms are a bit nicer than the old ones

With the arms fitted, I moved back to the hubs and knuckles. The first task was to knock off the rotors and hope the replacements I ordered were right (they were). Four bolts and a tap with the hammer, and the rotor comes off.

I wirebrushed all the mating surfaces and then installed the shiny new Brembo rotor

I popped that aside and moved on to the bearings. Everything was covered in grease, so I guess I'll need to take a good look at the CVs before I reinstall them.

I couldn't get my seal puller in under the seal, but a small pry bar worked a treat

Which then revealed the inner bearing. There are two bearings, an inner and an outer, which are separated by a sleeve between them

You can see the sleeve here

I started with the inner bearing, as it was easier to hammer out since it didn't sit nearly flush with the front of the knuckle, as the outer bearing does. Carefully using my punch, I tapped the sleeve between the bearings off to the side, giving me access to the inner race of the bearing (the rusty lip visible in the photo)

I then wailed on the bearing with my hammer and punch, taking turns on alternate sides of it, until the bearing came out with the sleeve

The outer bearing was easier to press out on the press. I used an old inner bearing race from a previous job, and a big socket to press it out

Notice that only the outer faces of both bearings have seals; the inner faces are open to the inside of the knuckle, which is why it's packed with grease.

The new bearings I got have seals on both sides, so one seal per bearing needs to be removed. I know some in Japan that do this job, pack the bearings with grease and then seal them up completely, but I didn't like that idea, so I went with the OE style of having them open to the knuckle.

There were two recommendations I came across in my travels. One was to use C3 spec bearings, which have a little extra clearance, and the other was to make sure you replace the grease in the bearings with new, proper wheel bearing grease, as they barely come greased from the factory.

I popped the seals off the bearings, and yes, they barely have any grease in them

Using the old lump-of-grease-in-the-palm method of greasing bearings, I packed the bearings with high-temp wheel bearing grease

And one seal per bearing was then refitted

Next, I cut up one of the old bearings to make the outer race into a pressing tool. This allowed me to hammer a new outer bearing into place without putting pressure on the inner race

But it was more important on the inner bearing, since it's deeply recessed. The cut in the old bearing stops it from getting stuck in the knuckle as the new bearing gets hammered into place. Both bearings will bottom out against ridges inside the knuckle to set the depth. Don't forget to pack the inside of the knuckle with grease and refit the sleeve between the bearings.

I also used the old bearing race to knock the new axle seal into place

The final job was to mount the knuckle in the press and press the hub into the bearings. There was no way to support the inner race of the bearings to do this, but since it took little pressure to press through, they should be fine (and it's better than what the manual recommends; bashing the hub in with a hammer)

Which ended with a nice shiny assembly with a new brake rotor and bearings. I couldn't help but test fit a caliper

Looks good to me. Now to give it something to hang off and then I can reinstall it.

With the knuckle gone, the strut is only held in with two nuts on the top mount and the brake hose. Remove those, and the strut comes right out

These are the shocks listed in the parts book as "RED" and appear to be made by SHOWA, a well-known supplier of genuine accessory/uprated shocks in the JDM market (and motorbike shocks, but they aren't my thing).

I had to scrape years of crud out of the top mount before I could access the top nut

I cleaned that out, stuck some spring compressors on, and zinged the top nut off

I forgot to take a photo, but the top rubber mount was compressed to about 3/4 the height of the new one. Unsurprisingly, the old shocks were completely poked, with little resistance to compression and zero rebound.

I did find it interesting that the top bearing on these is nothing more than a plastic piece that rubs against a metal disc with a loose rubber seal to keep grease in

There is meant to be grease in the grooves to lubricate the lot, but I hadn't cleaned that, and both came out like that, with no grease inside them at all. I probably could've greased them up and reused them, but I ordered new bearings instead.

These are aftermarket, but even the new genuine ones are the same updated style, which is a self-contained version of the same thing.

I popped one apart to see what was inside it. I know the Honda version has metal bearings inside, so I was surprised to see this was nothing but grease and what appears to be a coated (Teflon maybe) plastic disc with grooves in it, like the old bearing.

I did fit the new bearing whilst retaining the metal disc from the old bearing. Without the old metal disc, the new plastic bearing would have all the pressure on just the outer edges where it backs up to this cap

The metal disc mostly covers that recess and gives more surface area to support the bearing.

Moving on from boring bearing things, this is a nice shiny new KYB "New SR Special" shock

Here it is again with all the gubbins reinstalled, including new top mount rubber, new bearing, and new boot/bump stop

Surprise, here it is again, back in the car this time

The hub/knuckle was then refitted. I presume that the unused tab on the right is for cars that have ABS, which mine does not.

As a fun little thing, these camber bolts, which came fitted to my old HA36S Alto Works (and were incorrectly fitted, so got removed when I first got the car)

Fit the CN21S Alto Works perfectly, so they got fitted and set to max negative camber, because race Nugget

With both shocks renewed and both knuckles refitted, I could fit the brakes. Two bolts hold the caliper in place, and the pads are slipped into place, retaining the original shims. I got all new hardware for the pads, and used Endless pads

The front hoses got replaced with nice new Spiegel braided lines

There seems to be a bit of confusion online about what pad hardware works. It seems genuine pad hardware isn't available alone, and only comes with expensive new genuine pads.

I can confirm the TRW PFK75 kit fits perfectly.

My calipers only came with one of four anti-rattle clips

So I was pretty keen to get some replacements. As you can see below, the TRW clips are almost identical to the original one I removed (even if my original one is a bit mangled)

The little retaining pins are also the same. The pad locking block is slightly longer, but fits perfectly

With those in place, I gave the system a quick flush and bleed, and the front end (other than the swaybar) was done

It's pretty colourful in there, but it should look a bit less Fisher Price with the wheels back on.

I still need to replace the rear brake hose and the rear brake shoes, but that's a job for another day.

Parts Used

Front Shock Absorbers - KYB New SR Special - NST8006R & NST8006L - Yahoo Japan
Front Brake Pads - Endless MX72K - EP237-MX72K - Blackhawk Japan
Braided Brake Hoses - Spiegel KBS104-1 - Yahoo Japan
Brake Pad Fitting Kit - TRW PFK75 - Spareto
Front Brake Rotors - Brembo 08.D165.10 - Blackhawk Japan
Front Wheels Bearings - 6007 2RS C3 x4 - Local Supplier
Front Hub Axle Seal - 09283-44011 - Amayama
Strut Top Mount Kit - SNR KB690.06 - Spareto
Strut Bump Stop/Boot - Febest SZSHB-WGR - Spareto
Front Lower Arms - Meyle 29-16 050 0012 - Spareto

Please note these parts are specific to my car and may vary. Please check before ordering.
I have no sponsors; all suppliers shown are for reference only, and where I got mine from.

[kws]

Not to forget the rear of the car, I moved on to replacing the shocks there, too.

I knew the rear shocks were stuffed the day I had the car delivered. I noticed it sank a lot when I sat in it, and this is what happened when I bounced the rear end

With the car up on stands, I whipped the rear wheels off and had a look around

Still had the original red shocks

The fuel tank just in front of the rear axle

Solid rear beam and a panhard bar to locate it

The other side is much the same, but with the addition of the brake hose and grotty muffler

I did unfortunately notice that the rear trailing arm bushes are split, so I have ordered Monster Sport replacements for them too

I did have plans to whip the drums off and replace the shoes, but I am going to pick my battles for now and wait until I have driven the car and worked the brakes a bit before messing with those.

Otherwise, it all looked pretty good. Lots of light surface rust from sitting, and a bit of dirt, but nothing too major. I'm very happy all the shock and spring mounts are solid with no signs of rust or cracks.

The shocks were very easy to replace, since it's a divorced spring setup, not a coilover.

I jacked the rear beam up a bit to take the tension off the shock bolts and stop the spring from forcing it down once the shock is removed

The shock is held in with two bolts, one on the bottom going into a captive nut

and the top one, which is a long bolt going through the chassis rail and through the shock. Remove the nut, and the bolt can be slid towards the outside of the car to remove the shock. Offset ring spanners really helped due to a lack of access (or just remove/lower the muffler...)

Removing the old shock showed that it was there for decoration only. It had no resistance to compression or rebound

As usual, before fitting the new KYB shocks, I made sure to compress them fully twice, or priming them, as is recommended.

Refitting is just the reverse. Bolt in one end of the shock, compress it slightly and bolt in the other end. Tighten bolts to spec, job done.

The new shocks do look quite nice in there

Finally, I needed to replace the old brake hose with my new braided one

This turned into a real pain. The top fitting came undone easily enough

But the bottom one was stuck fast, and I knew I was in trouble when the flare wrench started to round it off

Sure enough, it rounded completely off without coming loose. Thankfully its a small section of pipe that leads to the RH drum, so I undid it easily from the drum and removed the whole pipe with the hose

It wasn't pretty

I ended up locking it in the vice, and using a big spanner on the metal hose fitting to finally break it free and remove the hose

It turns out the pipe was corroded into the hose fitting

It didn't help that the flare nut was corroded to the pipe too, and resisted turning. I cleaned up the corrosion and freed the flare nut off from the pipe. I did think about making a new pipe, but it turns out that Suzuki will sell you a new little pipe for $15, so I have one on the way.

In the meantime, I refitted the old pipe. There was still enough shape in the flare nut that a standard open-ended spanner could tighten it up firmly. It looks good with the new braided hose and should give the pedal a nice solid feel

I'll need to do it again when I replace the pipe, but I flushed and bled the system. It now has fresh fluid from end to end

I need to drop the fuel tank next and have a look inside that, and work out why I didn't hear a fuel pump running when I turn the ignition to ON, so that should be fun.

The block is still with the engine builders, having the crank machined for the new oversize bearings. Hopefully, I will get that back soon, and I can get on with building the engine.

[kws]

Since I'm still waiting on the block to return from machining (again), I moved on to fixing some other small issues.

One of them was that the shifter looked haggard. Very rusty, floppy and neglected. I ordered a full set of genuine bushes for it and set about stripping and fixing it.

Since the center console is still removed from the car, it was easy to remove the four bolts from the top and drop the shifter out of the bottom of the car

Up close, it didn't look any better

I marked the directions for reassembly and took some reference photos as I stripped it all into bits

After removing the lower rod, the bush on the bottom of the shift lever didn't look terrible, but it was as hard as plastic

The whole assembly is just a sandwich of parts. It all makes sense when you look at it, but together it looks like a mess

I removed the upper rod from the assembly, removed the nuts from the two bolts in the middle, carefully pushed the boot through the plate and then I could wiggle the shift rod through the plate

Next, I used a hammer and a punch to knock out all the old bushes

All the bushes were very hard, perished and had suffered from sitting around.

With all the bushes removed, I hit everything with a wire brush to get the loose stuff off, and then spray bombed them with some black zinc paint. This should protect it a bit better, and it looks 100x better than flaky old rust.

Reassembly is literally the reverse. Before fully assembling, I thoroughly cleaned and greased the pivot ball on the shift lever. The ball rides between two nylon cups. In hindsight, I should've ordered a pair of these and replaced them, as the ones I have are a bit rough, but with new grease they should still do the job.

I then reassembled the main shift assembly and pressed the new bushes into the bottom of the shift lever

It's interesting to note that they are a different style bush to the green ones I removed.

The upper rod has a single-piece rubber bush, and there is a steel sleeve that also goes through it

The transmission end of the lower rod is a bit more unusual. It has a pair of rubber tophat bushes

, and into those press a pair of plastic inserts

I lubed the bushes and pins up with rubber grease and reattached the lower rod

Annoyingly, someone had obviously lost one of those pivot pins, as on the trans end of the lower rod, where it has a cross joint, an ill-fitting bolt had been used instead. I have a new pin on the way to replace it, as that'll be as sloppy as anything with the bolt there.

The last bush actually resides in the gearbox shift rod

Again, this is one of the green bushes, the same as the bottom of the shift lever (same part). Notice how it's slightly recessed around the center hole.

The replacement bushes are a harder compound, and flat on the faces

The original parts guide shows that for each of these bushes there should also be an o-ring. See my expert MSPaint cutaway drawing below, showing one end of the tube the bushes are in.

Orange is the bolt/pin, green is the green bush, black is the o-ring, and the grey on the left is the plate that the pin squishes against the bush.

The new bush does away with the o-ring and the recess and presses the steel right against the faces of the bush. I knew the part number had been superseded, but wasn't sure why, so now I have a set of surplus o-rings. Oh well.

Anyway, the shifter should be all new and fresh now, and hopefully shifts nice and direct. It's currently sitting in the boot of the car, with all the other parts.

Moving along, in a kinda shifter related task, next was to eliminate the inhibitor switch that had just been clicked into Park and tucked up behind the battery to allow the car to start.

I unplugged it and took it to the bench

After reading the workshop manual and checking the wiring diagrams, I knew which wires I didn't need anymore, so I unwrapped the bundle

Cut the switch off and depinned all the wires I don't need from the plug

Leaving me with two wires for the Park position (black/red & black/yellow - which connects the ignition switch to the starter) and two wires for the reverse lights (red & yellow)

I cut the two thick wires, the black/red and black/yellow, shorter and soldered them together. This shorts the Park wires together and will allow the car to start.

I left enough to be able to heat shrink them

Next, I crimped a connector for the reverse light switch on. I would've liked to use an OE connector, but I didn't have one for this end of it, only the one on the reverse light switch

Which also meant cutting the connector off the reverse light switch and crimping a matching connector on that

I then wrapped my little harness in fabric tape

and finished off by plugging the empty holes with a light smear of sealant to help keep moisture out

It looks much better than having a stupid inhibitor switch hanging around

I did, of course, test it

I was pleasantly surprised to hear it also had a cute little reverse beeper in the car, to tell you you're going backwards.

In a typical ADHD flurry of random progress, next on the hit list was to remove the trans mount and replace the bush with an uprated Monster Sport one.

I knew by touching it that the bush was very soft and floppy. I removed the single bolt through it and removed it from the car

Interestingly, it had these "stoppers" on each side of the bush

There isn't a heck of a lot to the bush at the best of times

And when it's cracked and flogged out, it offers almost no resistance to movement

The Monster Sport bush is still rubber, but a harder compound and a far more substantial build

I marked the orientation of the bush so I could get the new bush in a similar place, and then, using a reciprocating saw, cut through the sleeve of the bush until I could use a hammer and punch to knock the bush out

And then it was as easy as finding the right size socket to use to press the new bush into place, making sure to align it as the old bush was

Nice new uprated bush ready to go

Because of the design of the new bush, you cannot fit the stoppers on each end now, but I guess it doesn't need them

I also have the rest of the Monster Sport engine mounts to fit when the engine goes back in.

As you can see in the above photo, I also replaced the stock rubber bush on the clutch cable with a Cusco one from an HA36S Alto Works. It was a straight fit, other than having to remove the rubber boot to fit it, as I couldn't get the bush over the metal collars that retain the boot. The outboard collar slipped off with the boot and could be reused, but I had to cut the inner collar off and replace it with a small ziptie.

What else. Oh, yeah, the ground cable. I recall from viewing the car at the auction that something was funky with the battery ground cable

There wasn't one. It was a bare stub of a cable bolted to the inner guard. Cool.

So I raided Pick A Part and, after digging around some different cars, found this from a Daihatsu Sirion

Which turned out to be perfect

It's nice not have to use jumper cables to ground the battery whenever I want to liven the car up.

So that's all for now. I will hopefully have the block back this week, but I'm still sans genuine conrod bearings as the supplier in Japan is being... slow.

In the meantime, enjoy this sneak peek of the future

Parts Used

Monster Sport Engine Mount Set - 647500-2000M
Shifter Bushes - 2823160B10 x4, 0930514006 x1, 0930612009 x2, 0932014018 x2 (and o-ring 0928012014 x4 not used)

Please note these parts are specific to my car and may vary. Please check before ordering.

[kws]

I haven't posted much recently, but things have been happening in the background, namely a slow but steady engine rebuild.

To start us off, I got the block back from the machine shop. This time I had the crank machined, so the main bearings were within tolerance, and the new +0.25mm oversize (undersize?) bearings fitted. They also checked the crank thrust run out, which was well within spec with the new standard bearings.

This meant I could finally move onto the rebuild proper. Unfortunately, like everything on this car, I got quickly stopped in my tracks.

I thought, hey, it'd be cool to check the weights of the rods and see if they need any work to balance them and get them close to the same weight. I'm glad I did.

So I grabbed the kitchen scales, and placed the rods on one by one.

Cylinder 1 rod

Cylinder 2 rod

and the new genuine rod for Cylinder 3

Ideally, if you're balancing the rods and matching them, you want them within around 1 gram of each other. The two stock rods were already 2g apart, but the brand-new rod was a further 7g heavier. That made it 9g heavier than the lightest rod and that is way too different for an engine that will be turning to 9000RPM regularly.

For reference, this is the old Cylinder 3 rod that has damaged by the cracked piston pin and had to be replaced

Basically the same as Cylinder 2. Interestingly, despite being the same part number, and looking visually identical, this is one of the rods from the original Alto engine

All of these were way too gone to reuse, but it's interesting to note regardless.

As a side note, the Greddy pistons were all identical at 182g each

Moving along, so what's the deal with the new rod?

It turns out Suzuki superseded the conrod to the later K6A rods, which have a couple of pretty major differences. The first is that the oil squirter is no longer just a hole in the side that vaguely shoots oil somewhere

it's now a bigger, raised area at the base of the rod which points the oil jet upwards

The second major area is in the middle of the rod, where the text is. Its now on raised platforms.

So what do I do? I could replace the other two rods, at nearly $300 a piece, but since they're heavier I would then need to have the crank balanced to match.

Or, I could go full caveman with tools, and make it match.

I chose option 2. Make it work.

Now, I didn't realise it until I went deep into the rabbit hole, but you can't just take material off anywhere on the rod until the total weight matches, you need to know which end the weight is on, and take it from there. This is because the top of the rod only really goes up and down, whilst the bottom of the rod has rotation inertia. The weight at the bottom of the rod is the most important, but it all matters.

To do this, you need a tool that hangs the rod and lets you precisely measure the weight of each end, without the other end affecting it. Normally, you'd pay hundreds for a tool to do this, but because of the advancements in technology, I have a perfectly capably 3D printer sitting at home, and for a small fee I could buy the plans for a tried and tested jig to use. These guys made a great video on how to use it, and sell the files you need to print it. https://2trackmind.com/products/connecting-rod-balancer-jig-3d-print (not sponsored, it's just good)

After some tweaking because my rods were too small for the adaptors, and about 7 hours of printing, I had a tool

I set the jig up and hung a rod off it

There are a lot of variables, and every little thing can change the results, so later on I actually taped both the jig and the scales to the table so I could get repeatable results. I also replaced the kitchen scales with much more accurate scales (for illicit items, according to the guy at the brewing shop, who totally believed me when I said they were for weighing car parts) that can measure a fraction of a gram.

This is the big end of rod 1

and rod 2

They're pretty darn close. Close enough I won't bother to change them.

The new rod 3 though...

It certainly ate all the pies.

I then flipped the rig around and tested the little end of the rods

Cylinder 1 and 2

and rod 3

5 grams heavier than the other rods. That's a lot of weight to take out of the little end.

With a bastard file, a power file and a Dremel with a grinding stone, I got to work cutting the weight out. Now, there are rules about how and where to take off the weight. It must be smooth, and ideally either in dead weight like casting lines, or places that won't impact the strength of the rod.

In my case I started by shaving down the sides of the big end/bearing cap, where there was some extra material, but it wasn't until I started to shave down the casting marks down the sides that I really got the gains. This is what I ended up with

I also carefully smoothed down the text in the middle of the rod. I didn't want to go too deep as that could impact the strength

The bearing cap got a slight tickle too

After a ton of measuring and going back and forth from the messy area

I got the new Cylinder 3 rod identical to the Cylinder 2 rod

The little end was still about 2.6g heavier than the other rods, but I was out of material that I was comfortably to remove from there, so I opted to take it from elsewhere on the rod.

So the new rod now matches both the current Cylinder 2 rod, and the old Cylinder 3 rod, which is good enough for me.

After a real thorough clean, it was time to install the fancy Greddy forged pistons

These little retaining clips for the pistons pins were a pain to install

I have no idea if It's what It's for, but the cutout in side left side and the slight notch on the right side of the hole made installing the clip easier

I placed the clip in the notches, and then using my fingers pushed the open end of the clip down, which got it mostly into place

A gentle poke with a pick and it would pop into the groove. As per the workshop manual, the opening in the clip needs to either be at the bottom, or top, not the side. After lubing up the piston pin, and installing it and the piston on the rod, the other clip gets installed.

I then installed the new big end bearings. I used a genuine set ordered from Japan for these. Make sure the area the bearing sits in is clean and free from any oil and then the bearing just snaps in place.

The cap then got placed back on, ready to be installed on the crank. Take note to install the cap the right way around, it should match the piston. In most cases, the cap and rod bearing tangs will be on the same side too, which is an easy way to remember.

I now had a full set of pistons and rods ready to go

I install these shortly, but unfortunately the rebuild kinda stalled a little after that thanks to the next curveball thrown my way.

I stripped the two oil pumps I have, one from the Alto, and one from this Cappuccino engine

The Alto one was trashed, despite being suspiciously clean on the outside

So much scoring. It must've had a lot of metal go through it

It really does go to show, there are no good parts on the old Alto short block, and it was a good idea to get a donor.

Sadly the Cappuccino oil pump didn't completely avoid damage either

It's significantly better, with no damage to the housing, but I noticed this on the gears. Minor indents where something has gone through the pump

The good news is that you can still buy new genuine pump gears, so I have a set of those, and a rebuild kit for the relief valve on their way from Japan. It shipped about 20 mins ago, so should be here after the weekend. Once that arrives, I can push forward and really make up some time on building the engine.

Parts Used

Greddy Piston Set 65.5mm (+0.50mm) - 13596605
Taiho Main Bearing Set +0.25mm - M658A025
Suzuki Big End Bearings STD - 12181-54A50-0A0 x6
Suzuki Thrust Bearings STD - 12300-60840

Please note these parts are specific to my car and may vary. Please check before ordering.

[kws]

With the rods all balanced and ready to fit, it was time to begin further assembling the engine.

Since I had the engine machine shop fit the crank for me, I checked the torque on the main caps and before fitting the block to the engine stand, fitted the rear main seal (as it's hard to access after fitting the bracket for the stand).

I started by knocking the old seal out of the retainer and giving it a clean

The new seal then got tapped into place

To protect the seal from catching on the crank during fitting, I cut up an old water bottle and used it as a sleeve to slide the seal onto the crank, not forgetting the new gasket, of course

I then refitted the bolts and a pair of new screws, torquing the bolts to the required 10NM.

Once the excess gasket was trimmed off the bottom, the engine stand bracket was attached

and onto the stand the block went

This allowed me to flip the block around when needed, like fitting the pistons, which was next.

The machine shop also measured, gapped and fitted the rings to the pistons, so all I needed to do was spin the rings around and align them correctly. Its more or less the same thing as the Suzuki manual, but I chose to go with the Greddy instructions to align the rings. What you're trying to achieve is having no two rings with the gap in the same place, otherwise oil and compression can slip on by the ring.

I carefully spun the rings around to the required places, and then fit my ring compressor

To protect the crank, I used some rubber hose slipped over the studs on the big end

The piston and rod then got carefully lowered into the block, making sure the arrow on the top was pointing towards the front. Once the ring compressor was touching the top of the deck I pressed down on it, so that all the layers of the compressor were touching and there were no gaps (or a ring could pop out before it goes in the block).

Using the plastic handle of my soft face hammer, I slowly tapped the piston down into the block until the compressor popped off. The rubber hoses guide the rod onto the crank, but it helps to guide it by hand too

I did a quick check with Plastigauge to make sure the new rod clearance was fine, which it was

The rod was then carefully pushed back up and lubricated with engine assembly lube, before sliding it back down and fitting the cap, torqued to 35NM

Mmm shiny

The rest of the rods were lubed up, and fitted into the block

With the rotating assembly finally reassembled, and rotating nice and smooth, I could give the oil pump a quick check and fit the new gears I ordered, to replace the damaged ones found in my last post

This is what I started with. I suspect the donor Cappo engine had a leak or two

Using a mix of the ultrasonic cleaner, brake cleaner and a tooth brush, it got a bit better

I pressed the new crank seal in

I had the new gears, and a pressure relief valve kit to go into the housing

The relief valve is held in place with a circlip. There is spring pressure behind it, so take care when removing the clip

Nice shiny new gears

I oiled everything up, and fit the new gears

You can't really see from the photo, but this is where I suddenly found that unknown to me, there was a supersession to the oil pump in about 1994, which obviously changed the width of the internal gears, as they were thicker than the stock ones and had no chance of fitting. They stick out well proud of the back of the pump.

The old gears were 6.5mm thick, whilst the new ones are 8mm

Old gears on the left.

16130-70B01 does not fit early oil pump housings. Hopefully that stops someone else from making the same mistake.

So that sucks. I have managed to source a new complete oil pump, of the newer updated number, from Japan, and I'm currently waiting on that to ship to NZ. There are some differences with the pump, which I will go into when it arrives, but they have been used on Cappo engines to replace the older pump.

With that disappointment behind me for now, it was time to build the head.

I 3D printed this pretty cool parametric head component holder I found online, after some tweaking to suit my needs

All the valves were pretty clean over all, just some carbon which cleaned up with upper cylinder cleaner and a wire brush

I spun the valves in my drill to help clean them with the wire brush

The head was looking very nice after the machine shop gave it a skim and clean

Speaking of cleaning, I was disappointed to find that like the block, they didnt remove the oil gallery plugs. I flipped the head over at one point and a sizeable chunk of swarf from the skimming dropped out. I removed all the gallery plugs and found a concerning amount of metal in the oil galleries

I hosed all the galleries out with brake cleaner until everything came out clean. There was still a surprising amount of sludge buildup in the feed for the hydraulic lifters too. The plugs all got refitted with some loctite to seal them.

It's a good reminder that even if you pay someone to clean a component, make sure you go through and give it a good final clean yourself. That metal in the oil galleries could've swiftly killed this freshly rebuilt engine.

With the head flushed I set about lapping in the valves. The kit comes with both coarse and fine grinding paste

Basically, the idea is that you put this grinding compound, which is paste with grit in it, on the valve, and use it to grind the valve face into the valve seat, for a better sealing. I had two valves that failed my test before disassembly, so this gives me the chance to fix that.

Grinding paste on the head of the valve. Make sure no grinding paste gets on the stem of the valve, or it'll be grinding into things you dont want ground. I started with the coarse compound before moving onto the fine.

There are plenty of videos online of how to lap valves by hand, so I won't go too far into it, but I will say that when you think you're done, you probably arent. In saying that, you can actually lap valves too far and end up needing them to be reground.

What you're looking for is a nice uniform band of grey around the valve, like the one on the right (left is untouched). The F6A spec is 1.1-1.3mm width for that band.

I had some trouble with the supplied sticks, since the smallest suction cup only just fit the valves.

The ones in the kit were also straight with no shape, whilst digging around in my roll cab I found some that had more of a shape like this, which was much nicer to use

This is the sort of finish you're aiming for when lapped in

I thought I was done on this one, but testing showed it leaked. The dark grey spots are all very fine pitting in the seat, which allows it to leak. Thats what we're trying to remove.

A little more work and the spots were mostly gone, and the valve was sealing

Once all the valves were lapped, I cleaned the head thoroughly to remove any excess grit

To test the valve sealing, I flipped the head back over, installed all the valves without springs or seals, and filled the chambers up with WD40, as this is a very thin oil, so if it was going to leak anything, this should find a way.

I left it for just over 24 hours like that, and it passed with no leakage. Keep in mind last time I tested it before disassembly, with thicker coolant, and springs fitted, I had two valves that leaked.

I cleaned all the WD40 out, removed the valves and cleaned everything again. Now it was time to flip the head over and assemble it

The lower spring seats must go on first, as they do not fit over the stem seals

Next was fitting the stem seals

I've seen people improvise tools to fit these, and damage them, but I couldnt afford to damage any (I had a couple of spares just in case anyway), so bought a tool for the job

I used the smallest fitting, oiled it up and slipped the seal in until the shoulder is supported

And gently pressed it into the head. Two clicks and it will be correctly seated

Very quick and easy to do, and perfect results each time

Lots of plastic waste though, since each seal is individually packaged

All seals fitted

Before going any further, I wanted to quickly swap out the exhaust manifold studs with the new ones I purchased. A combo of vice grips and double nuts removed them

Because the holes the studs go into arent blind, and are open to the inside of the head, the new studs come with thread sealant on them. One went in fine, but one of them actually stripped all the sealant off as it went in, so I removed it and used liquid sealant when refitting.

Nice shiny new studs

Back to the valves. The springs were next. As per the manual, each spring has a top and bottom end, with the bottom end against the head having tighter wound coils

I made sure they were the right way around, and dropped the spring into the head, over the valve which had been oiled up and slipped into place

The top retainer was placed on

And then the spring compressor was fitted and wound down, so the collets could be slipped into place

The collets are fiddly little buggers, but I got all of them locked in place eventually

With the head assembled, there was only one thing for it. I cleaned the deck of the block up, tapped the dowels into place and dropped the new Monster Sport head gasket into place, checking all the oil holes line up correctly

The head was then placed on, along with new head bolts. The bolts were torqued up to the required 60NM, in the required pattern (inside to outside, crisscross) and in steps of 20NM (do them all to 20, and then 40 and finally 60NM),

And there we go, finally looking more like an engine again

I couldnt help but try out my refreshed cam boxes

Love the retro look of them, they should look awesome in the engine bay.

Unfortunately until the oil pump arrives I'm at a little bit of a standstill with the engine. I don't want to assemble the cams until the bottom end is buttoned up, so it'll have to wait.

There is plenty more going on in the background for the rest of the car, but motivation is lacking, so progress is a bit of a grind at the moment.

Parts Used

Conrod Nuts - 09159-08033 x6
Head Bolts - 11117-52E10 x8
Block Dowels - 04211-13189 x2
Valve Stem Seals - 09289-05012 x12
Valve Collets - 12932-24400 x24
Rear Main Seal - 092836-0009
Rear Main Screws - 02122-0625A x2
Rear Main Housing Gasket - 11349-73010
Exhaust Manifold Studs - 14118-81400 x2
Oil Pump Gears - 16130-70B01 - DO NOT USE ON EARLY PUMP
Oil Pump Cover Screws - 02122-06167 x5
Oil Pressure Relief Valve Kit - 16150-60A20
 

Please note these parts are specific to my car and may vary. Please check before ordering.

[kws]

I left off the last instalment with a head on the block, but no oil pump, so I couldn't finish the assembly.

I was pretty pleased when this finally arrived from Japan. A genuine new oil pump assembly.

It came with a new, updated metal gasket

It's interesting to note that there are some casting differences between the new and old pumps

The biggest difference to note is that the new pump doesn't have a threaded boss on the right-hand/exhaust side. I'm not 100% sure, because mine is missing, but I think it's used for the mounting of the AC compressor on the Alto. So if you want to retain AC, you might not be able to use the newer oil pump like this.

It's also worth noting that the new oil pump did come with the thicker oil pump gears already fitted.

Before fitting, I transferred the studs in the front from the old pump to the new one, using the double nut method. It didn't come with a crank seal, so this was fitted too.

It was then just a matter of pouring oil into the pump and rotating it a few times to lubricate it, and then fitting it to the engine. I was careful to make sure the crank seal lip didn't catch on the crank when fitting.

I was lucky to find this bolt pattern someone on Minkara has helpfully drawn out

So I used that and bolted mine on

Nice to see a shiny new pump in place

Next was to thoroughly clean the oil pickup from the Alto engine and fit a new o-ring to it. Interestingly, there appeared to be no metal in it, but some chunks of carbon and more horrible orange sealant were present

This then got bolted to the oil pump, wrapping up the bottom end assembly, other than the sump

Next was to fit the new water pump. I lightly smeared the gasket in Hylomar and slid it onto the studs

Followed by the shiny new water pump

With the bottom end mostly wrapped up, I could move on to finishing the top end, too. These lifters have been sitting in cups of fresh oil for a while now, since the manuals says you have to keep them upright to stop them from bleeding down.

Before reusing them, I had to test, clean and bleed them.

I had two sets, one from the Alto engine (the dirty ones in the white bowl, and the cleaner Cappuccino ones in the clear tray). I wanted to use the Cappo ones if I could, but I wanted to make sure I had some good ones from the Alto engine if I needed to swap any out.

I started by finding a suitable Allen key that fit in the hole and could compress the ball bearing valve inside.

I used this to repeatedly compress the adjuster until all the old oil had come out. I then immersed them in a cleaning fluid (it's meant to be kerosene, but I only had turpentine on hand) and again repeatedly compressed and expanded the adjuster, which flushed the inside of them out.

This was repeated on all the adjusters, from both engines.

The adjusters were then submerged in fresh oil, and using the Allen key, they were all actuated under the oil until the air stopped coming out

It would've been quicker if I had a vacuum pot and could've just vacuumed the air out, but eventually I managed to bleed it all out.

According to the manual, the way to test if they are good is to make sure they are bled, and then pressing the top of the lifter, make sure it is firm and does not compress by more than 0.2mm. If it does, bleed it again. If it still doesn't pass, replace it. Thankfully, after a couple of passes of bleeding, all the Cappuccino ones passed the test, and at least six of the Alto ones passed too (my backup crew).

It was time to fit them into the head. Lining up the oil hole in the side with the oil passage in the head, I slid them into place one by one

The rocker arms could go on next. I gave them all a clean, making sure the oil holes were clear. Unfortunately, I did find that one of the rockers had a damaged cam pad. These are meant to be smooth and shiny. This one had a spot that had worn through the face and was rough.

Thankfully, the Alto engine managed to turn up a rocker arm that, although discoloured from a lack of servicing, had a good pad, and I could swap it out.

The rocker arms were then fitted

The cam boxes were next. I started by replacing the cam seals in the front

Of course, though, it wouldn't be this project if there weren't a setback.

Like, I'm really glad to have a donor engine, I needed it to overcome the issues the Alto engine had, but I'm starting to think maybe this donor wasn't the deal I thought it was.

It turns out one of the cams was also damaged, with heavy wear on one of the cam lobes. Maybe related to the above damaged rocker, who knows.

Again, the Alto engine came to the rescue. Although the cams had some surface rust, I managed to polish it out, and the cam could be used in place of the Cappo one. It is a shame, though, this was the cam on the Cappuccino engine that had been modified to add a pin for a cam position sensor, so I can't use that in future.

I slid the cams into the boxes and replaced the breather hoses between them. The best length for the hose is 27-28mm.

I then fit the new gaskets

I rotated the cams to this position as per the manual. This ensures there is no load from the cams on the rocker arms when fitted.

I then flipped the boxes over and slid them onto the dowels on the head. The bolts were torqued to 10NM in a crisscross inside-to-outside pattern, one cam box at a time.

The new breather gasket was fitted, and the breather box was bolted into place

The front cover got a quick refresh, with some new seals, before fitting

In hindsight, I should've got some new grommets for the cover too, but the best of the two covers were fitted and will have to do.

The cover was then bolted into place

Which meant the cam gears could go on too.

The blue block is a 3D-printed cam locking tool I found online. It was very handy for locking the cams together so I could torque the bolts up.

Once the gears were torqued up to 60NM I carefully rotated everything so the marks lined up

The new tensioner, screw and spring were fitted

And the belt was wrangled into place. After rotating the engine over a couple of times and setting the tensioner, everything was lined up bang on.

Finally, my first-ever timing belt was completed

The sump went on next. I spent ages cleaning this out and getting all the old sealant off the flange.

A bead of Threebond was squeezed on, and the pan was fitted into place. The bolts were torqued down, and that was done

I glued up a crack in the front timing cover and fit a new seal to it

Before fitting it to the engine

The dipstick and tube got a good clean and were fitted with a new o-ring. Funnily enough, whoever worked on this last decided real o-rings were for the weak, so made one from sealant instead

Whilst here, in preparation for the oil pressure/temp gauge that will be fitted, I test-fitted the temp sensor in the new drain plug

Flipping the engine right way up and spinning around, the cap on the back of the cam and the distributor mount were refitted

Looking much more like an engine now, with the breather hose installed too. Loving the wrinkle black and sanded off detail

Since I was here, the thermostat housing studs were fitted

Ready for these bits to go on

The housing that the thermostat housing mounts to had a very rusty heater pipe

I crushed it in a vice, and it pulled free from the housing

I happened to have some spare 10mm steel tube, so I cut a section off that, and using some sealant, carefully hammered it into place. To stop the hose coming off, I welded a small bead onto the end (which got ground down a bit later as I added a bit too much metal)

This housing goes here

But needs new sensors first

This one isn't in the books, and I'm pretty sure is something to do with the AC, which is no longer fitted, so it's pretty much just plugging a hole.

The thermostat housing got a new fan switch

And all fitted up with a new thermostat and ready to go

The under intake outlet was fitted too, with a new hose linking the two

Also, note the sensor under the outlet. These are the stock oil pressure idiot light sensor and an oil pressure sensor for the gauge, fitted to a brass adaptor

There isn't a heck of a lot of room for the gauge wiring, but it just clears it. As you'll see later, the sender has to be upright like this, because on either side of the adaptor are the alternator, and the starter.

Another part of the cooling system equation is the oil cooler/heat exchanger. Because this is from the Alto, not available new, and potentially had metal go through it, I cleaned it within an inch of its life. I started with an ultrasonic cleaner of degreaser, and then flushed it with petrol and brake cleaner. Nothing of concern seemed to come out of it, but at least I'm reasonably happy it's clean.

That process did strip any remaining paint off it, though, so I finished it off and repainted it

After a couple of coats of paint had dried, I removed the tape and fitted a new seal

This was then attached to the block using the fitting

I would recommend attaching it as far anti-clockwise as you can. There is a locating lug that goes on the block, but there is some play. If you have it clocked too far clockwise, the coolant pipes will clash with the turbo later.

A temporary filter to seal it up

And that's the block more or less done, but quickly, before I move onto the bolt-ons, I replaced the mismatched cam box and breather bolts with new matching black ones. I'm just that kinda weirdo.

Moving on, I started with the turbo and exhaust manifold.

I feel like the coolant hoses on the stock turbo weren't original...

Since my stock VZ15 turbo was stuffed (heaps of play in the turbine), I had a Cappuccino VZ24 to replace it with. I need to swap the coolant pipe over

Surprise, the wastegate actuator mount is different and clashes with the pipes

The easiest fix, instead of bending the pipes, was to swap the actuators. I unbolted them from the turbos

Fitted the pipes with a new gasket and bolts

And fit the VZ15 actuator to the VZ24

I had two downpipes, as I bought one from Japan specifically so I could get this bracket that bolts the downpipe to the block, as mine was missing it

And whilst going through all the threaded holes with a tap to clean them up (I did a lot of this), I found something curious on the flange where the exhaust mounts to the downpipe.

Good thread

WTF, where's my thread gone?

I believe someone has drilled out a broken bolt at some point, as the hole was smaller than it should be. I don't know how long it's been like this; it didn't look fresh enough that it was done by the engine rebuilder when they stripped the Alto.

So out comes the drill and trusty tap set. It drilled OK, but didn't love being tapped. Took a lot of time and effort to do, with lots of cutting lube.

But now it has threads again

Which means the new bolts fit (ignore the mismatch, I couldn't get a matching pair)

Moving back to the turbo, pro tip, don't bolt it together off the car (as it's been mentioned, no, the orange isn't more shitty RTV, its high temp copper exhaust sealant to help seal a slightly iffy manifold flange)

You can't get to the manifold bolts underneath with the turbo mounted. I had to remove it and bolt the manifold on first.

Being able to rotate the engine makes life so much easier when fitting this. The turbo oil feed pipe was a real prick to get into place. They always seem so unwilling to bolt up.

And right over we go for the oil drain

I wish I had known about this before fitting the manifold and turbo. A broken off bolt in the manifold for the heat shield

Nothing another quick drill and tap can't fix

The cambelt cover coolant crossover pipes also got fitted, but before they could, I found one of the pipes was completely blocked solid. I ended up running some wire in a drill down the pipe until it cleared it

This is why you need to clock the cooler properly; the pipes are too close to the turbo

I clocked the cooler a bit better and then ran all new coolant hoses to the various pipes

And the intake snout was fitted to the turbo (and the corrugated sleeve was moved to the other hose). It's very snug in there

The turbo outlet pipe went on next

Now the downpipe can be bolted on with a new gasket

Bugger all room here too. I'm just glad I don't have a cat to trap heat there anymore

This is the bracket I was missing that bolts the downpipe to the block. You can't really see it in the photos, but part of the engine mount bracket is also bolted in there

With the exhaust done, I moved to the other side, the intake.

This absolute mess

The first job was to remove the EGR valve. I will delete this as I don't care about emissions on this car, and it will just clog the manifold with carbon.

You can see how much carbon is blocking the passages already.

I then completely stripped the manifold down.

I wanted to test and clean the injectors while I was here. This gave me a chance to compare with the Cappuccino injector rail

Cappuccino Rail

Alto Rail

I think they are close enough that with some tweaks, the Cappo one could work on an Alto, but I'm happy with the Alto one for now, so I'm using that. The main difference seems to be that on the Cappo you can replace the damper on the fuel inlet, but the Alto one is part of the rail.

I removed the Alto injectors and gave them a session in the ultrasonic cleaner, before fitting them to my new injector testing tool

The injectors press into this adaptor, which you stick on the top of a can of brake cleaner. It takes about five hands to do, so no photos of it in action, but as you push down on the blue adaptor onto the top of the brake cleaner, it pressurises the adaptor and injector. The two wires go to the tool and trigger the injector, letting pressurised fluid through it

It worked pretty well. All the Alto injectors have a decent spray (for the ancient type of single-hole injector they are). Interestingly, all the Cappo injectors were actually jammed closed, and required a bit of percussive persuasion to get them to open.

As part of the fuel rail, I removed and tested the pressure regulator to make sure it held a vacuum, which it did

Another part of the intake that got a thorough cleaning was the throttle body. This spent some time in the ultrasonic before a final clean

Cleaning the intake and attached components was hours of work; it was so grotty.

The first part to be reassembled on the manifold was the EGR blanking plate and gasket

The injectors were next. I fit new seals in the manifold

and new seals to the injectors (strangely, not shown, are the top seals, which I did fit)

The injectors were then fitted to the rail, and the lot bolted onto the manifold

A Toyota part is a direct fit for the vacuum filter on the end of the manifold, so that was fitted

I cleaned the wiring harness and fitted that next

All the vacuum hoses on top of the manifold were replaced

I have no idea what the deal with this hose that comes off the tee is. Its factory, and just dangles down the back of the manifold and is blocked with what appears to be a brake pedal clevis

All the hoses were cracking in this area, so it's good to replace them

With a new gasket, the throttle body could be bolted back on

Which allowed me to bolt the vacuum pipes back on

On the underside, the coolant hoses were replaced

This vacuum Eff (the Tees weird cousin) connects the filter on the manifold to the MAP sensor and the fuel pressure regulator.

It's worth noting that for whatever reason, the hose that goes to the FPR has a restrictor in it

I put a new restrictor in the new Eff when I made it

Which goes here

This whole little cluster is for the EGR and the BOV, so I have deleted it for now. The BOV will connect right to the vacuum fitting on the manifold instead of being solenoid-controlled.

Which means the manifold can be bolted to the engine again, and the coolant and wiring hooked back up

I should've fixed this on the bench, but oh well. The coolant temp sender for the dash had been "modified" in the past

So I cut the spade terminal off the harness, and added some new wire

Which I terminated with a new bullet connector for the sender

I also fitted the rear engine mount bracket at this point. The front one can't go on ye,t as half of it bolts to the gearbox, which is still absent

Next was the alternator and its associated wiring. Now you get an idea of how little room there will be around the oil sensors. The starter motor still has to fit in there, on the left, too

This will be spun by a lovely new Vee belt. I love the simplicity. One belt drives one device. No AC, no PS pump, and the water pump is off the cambelt.

The final piece of the puzzle on the engine for now was the distributor. It turns out the old cap and rotor are well beyond their best, which is fine, I have new ones, but the old rotor was rusted to the shaft. It ended up snapping before letting go

I cleaned the shaft up, greased it and fit a new rotor

And with a new o-ring on the base, the distributor was slotted into place on the engine. The engagement dog can only go one way as its offset.

I've refitted the old cap for now, until the engine is in the car, as I don't want to risk breaking the new cap during that work.

So that's it. The engine is built. It's ready to go in the car and be started. Hours of work, thousands of dollars. It better work.

Now I'm prepping the gearbox for its reunion party, and then I'll drop the subframe and see about getting it all together and then up into the car.

In the mean time, as a little teaser, I will leave you with this photo.

[kws]

As mentioned in the previous update, the gearbox needed some attention. Nothing is straightforward, though.

With the box on the bench, it was quite easy to give it a quick freshen up, ready to go into the car.

The first thing that I needed to do was to replace the axle seals. There was a note on the gearbox when I got it that said "driver's axle seal leaky". Interestingly, this one appeared to be rusting under the rubber. Looking at the photo, it looks like it's deformed the sealing lip too.

A quick pop with the seal removal tool and out it came. The bearing appeared fine. Some old gear oil varnish on it in places, but spun ok.

The new seal tapped nicely into place

The other side got the same treatment

The main thing I needed to sort was the clutch fork, though. This particular gearbox setup requires a slightly unusual clutch release bearing setup, involving a retainer (#5) for the bearing (#4) and two clips (#7) to hold it onto the fork (#6). This is so when you release the clutch, the bearing is pulled away from the pressure plate and isn't constantly engaged, or just rattling around.

Annoyingly, when I received the car, it didn't have any of this. Someone had previously fitted the newer-style bearing, which has an integrated retainer and requires a fork with a little pin (#6) for the bearing to slot over, which pulls the bearing away.

Without this pin, the newer style bearing just floats around when not being pressed by the fork.

The solution was simple. Mark the bearing's travel when it operates, and drill a small 2.5mm hole in the fork for a genuine pin.

Before I could do this, I actually had to remove the fork from the box. It's held in place with a lower bearing and seal, which need to be removed.

I have previously done a similar job when I did the clutch on my old Swift Sport, which uses a similar setup. With that, I used a cut-up socket as a driver to knock the bearing out. Of course, I can't find that bit of socket now, so I probably threw it out, thinking I'll never need that again.

I removed the lever from the bottom of the fork, marking its location first.

And then this time, I used a pin punch to knock the bearing and seal out the bottom.

I could only get the bearing knocked down so far with that

So out came the old vice grips, and I twisted it back and forth until it came out

With the bearing removed, unhook the spring, and the fork can be wiggled out of the top bearing and removed from the gearbox

I checked the travel, marked the location and zinged a hole through the fork

Which allowed me to carefully knock this pin into the hole

Which allows the bearing to do this. The pin is just a retainer to pull the bearing back with the fork; the curved pads on the fork do the actual work for actuating the clutch

It was then a case of cleaning the fork and top bearing, greasing the bearing, fitting the fork back in and using a deep socket to knock the new, greased-up, bottom bearing in place.

The bearing needs to go deep enough that the seal can also go in on top

New seal tapped into place

Modified fork refitted, with spring in place

With the clutch lever refitted, there was one last thing to do before we were done.

Which was to fit the nice new Monster Sport mount, modified in a previous post

Moving on to the car itself now, in preparation for fitting the lump back in, I removed the front subframe. I removed the four remaining bolts for the front swaybar (which was previously left disconnected from the lower arms), and removed it.

Only six bolts are holding the whole thing in. Two on either side, and two at the rear. Remove these and down comes the subframe.

There are only a couple of other small steps, with a few more bolts, and you end up with this.

A walk-in engine bay, perfect for sliding an engine up into

Of course, there were some things to fix before that happened, here too. One was a general clean with some cleaner and degreaser, the other was to replace the vacuum hoses on the firewall solenoids

I removed them, and once on the bench, I realised why the hoses had that weird saggy look

The hoses had gone soft, gummy and swollen

I cut up some new hoses to replace them

With a little tweaking of the length, they look much better. Sadly, the pair of moulded hoses are obsolete, so I will need to reassess what to do with them at a later date.

Moving back to the subframe, it was covered in grease and oil

With some sneaky rust under the rubber mounts

Up on the bench, I wanted to replace the worn-out old bushes

The front hardware to the crossmember wasn't looking so hot

The rears were a bit better, but not by much. With all the bushes removed, I took both parts outside and gave them a thorough degrease and scrub to get the worst of the grime off.

Once they were mostly dry, I fit the new bushes.

Working on the front, the bottom halves get pressed into place first

Followed by the top halves, which slot over the bottom half

And finally, a new crush tube, which was slathered in silicone grease

Same deal on the rears, except these are fitted opposite, the press through bush goes in from the top, and the slip over bush goes on the underside. This is because at the front the bolts go downwards, and the rears go upwards.

All bushes have large washers that go under the bolt heads.

After a quick meeting with the tap and die set, to clean up the threads, of which most were a bit iffy

The subframe was reassembled.

Since the gearbox and subframe were ready, it was time to get the engine off the stand and reunite it with the gearbox.

Not having an engine crane, not wanting to buy one, and being a fan of thinking outside the box, even if it'll make life harder for me, I came up with an option for getting the engine off the stand. A block and tackle. I looped a chain over the convenient beam in the garage and rigged it up.

After a few spins of the chain, the engine was in the air, and the stand was removed.

It was then carefully lowered onto its sump and some lifting blocks to steady it.

With the rear of the engine accessible, the flywheel could finally go on. I had this skimmed when I last had the block in at the machinists, and it came out really well.

I cleaned the oil off it and tapped a new bearing into place

The new clutch was then removed from its box, and the pressure plate was cleaned

Using my high-tech alignment tool that came with one of my past Rovers, I aligned the clutch disc to the pressure plate

The flywheel was then bolted to the engine, and the bolts torqued to spec

Next was the clutch assembly, which was bolted on and also torqued to spec

Thankfully, the gearbox is fairly light, so after some wiggling around, it slipped into place and got bolted down. This only just slipped in under the temp sensors on the thermostat housing.

This meant the starter could be cleaned and fitted

Someone had painted, badly, the starter black at one point

I attacked it with brake clean and a wire brush and got it looking a bit better. This lives in the depths down the back of the engine, completely invisible, so who knows why they did that. Same with painting the gearbox, badly, in silver... too many rattle cans, not enough brain cells.

Of course, I'm not a complete idiot, I did bench test the starter to check that it actually functioned before I buried it in the most inaccessible place in the engine bay.

It took some real jiggling and twisting to fit it into its home with the sensor adaptor in place. Very little room

Starting to look a lot more meaningful

This is the elusive manual-specific coolant pipe that a legend on the Old School forums grabbed for me from Pick A Part.

Without being the one who removed it, going by what's left in the tubs, the coolant pipes were previously just bodged together with the old cut up auto pipe and some random hoses.

New Monster Sport mounts also found their way onto the front and back of the engine.

As a side note, don't be like me and forget to install this little brace from the gearbox to the engine mount bracket. It bolts in from the starter side and requires the starter to be unbolted to get the bolt in.

That's it all pretty much complete now. So I thought, "Well, I guess I should put it on the subframe", and after some wrangling with chains, onto the subframe it went, and the engine mounts were bolted down.

To move it around and get it into the engine bay, I screwed some casters a friend lent me to a reasonable-sized board. This allowed me to lower the assembly onto this and secure it with a ratchet strap. It was balanced on there pretty well, and I would use this to jack up with my floor jack.

"Well, I'd better just slide it over under the car so it's ready to be lifted"

And that's where the ADHD hyperfocus grabbed me, and suddenly this happened.

"I wonder if the jack fits under it"

Short answer, yes, it fits. And so did the engine, into the engine bay.

Oops.

Damn, it looks good in there, though

Other than being bolted in place, nothing else is connected. There's still a long way to go, but this is a huge milestone.

 

[kws]

One of the big hold-ups with the Alto was that the fuel tank was... less than ideal.

I knew it wouldn't be in good shape, since the car had been sitting for years, but I had no idea what I was dealing with, so I needed to drop the tank. I couldn't risk the injectors getting clogged with rust.

I could tell there was some fuel in it, and the gauge said it was "full", but could I trust it?

Using a hand pump, I fed the hose in until it was in the fuel (which was surprisingly hard to do), and started pumping

But I only managed to pump out about 5 litres or so. No matter what I did, the pump was coming up dry

The fuel stank. It was old, but not 2012 old, and seemed relatively clear. Given that, I knew the tank wasn't completely empty, but the only option was to drop it anyway. I carefully removed the four bolts holding it in place, cut/removed the fuel hoses, removed the filter, undid the fill hose and breather and then lowered the tank on the jack. Turns out, it was actually pretty heavy.... certainly not empty.

I started draining the rest of the tank by pouring it out through the inlet, and when that no longer worked, I removed the pump and sender and used a small hand pump to pump out the rest.

Turns out, it was full to the brim with 30L of fuel. Stinky old stale fuel.

The fuel pump gave me my first idea of what the inside of the tank was like. A bit crusty. It's also interesting to note that it's an upgraded DW200 pump, albeit it's seized solid.

With the tank drained, I took it outside into the sun and had a good look inside it

The pickup baffle was coated in surface rust, and the rest of the bottom of the tank was covered in a sticky fuel varnish

There was a rusty tide mark about halfway up the tank. I suspect that for the first decade of sitting, it had half a tank in it, and as part of the previous owner's investigations to get the car running, the tank was drained and completely filled with fresh fuel.

So that's where I got up to, for a couple of months. I ordered a replacement fuel pump to suit a Nissan S15 Spec S (non-turbo SR20DE) as I had heard this was a plug-and-play upgrade with a little more headroom than stock.

I also rang the local radiator place to see if they could give the tank a clean out, but they were very non-committal and didn't seem keen to do it without "seeing it first".

In the end, I ordered a KBS tank reconditioning kit to suit a "large" 45L motorcycle tank.

I had previously used this kit on my old Yamaha tank, and it seemed to work well and was easy enough to use. It includes a cleaner, a rust killer and the actual liner, along with some gloves and instructions.

I took the tank outside, and using duct tape, sealed up all the holes except the one I needed to pour the cleaner into first. Pouring in the required mix of 1:1 solution and hot water, I sealed the tank and alternated between sloshing it around and letting it sit. It was a lot of physical work to slosh the tank around so much.

After the required time, I drained the tank and washed it out. I was pretty darn impressed, almost all of the varnish on the bottom of the tank was gone, and the metal was left very clean, albeit the surface rust was now obvious

I did two rounds of cleaning to get it as good as I could.

Before pouring in the next step, the rust killer, the tank needed to be dried out. I did this by stuffing a heat gun into the filler and got the tank hot

Once the tank was dry, I moved onto the next step, pouring in the rust killer and then leaving it to sit, rotating the tank to a different side every 5 mins or so. I did this for about an hour, whilst doing other work on the car. This was then drained out, and the tank was thoroughly rinsed and then dried again

The final step is to pour in the liner and slosh the tank around a lot, to make sure it coats all sides and gets in all the gaps.

It took an age to start setting, and it seemed almost impossible to get the excess out, so I had to keep it moving around for a few hours. When moving it around, I had to be really careful as it seemed to have a habit of pouring through the holes at the bottom of the pickup baffle, and I couldn't risk them blocking up. In the end, I got the whole tank nicely coated, and the excess settled on the bottom of the tank.

As an aside, whilst the tank was hot and soaking, I gave the top half a quick wire brush and blow over to make it more presentable.

After a few days of drying, I was ready to refit the pump and sender. First, I needed to replace the pump and refresh the sender.

I stripped the pump hanger

The old and new pumps and the replacement filter bag (from Toyota, as this is apparently the same as the original Alto one; interestingly, it's the same as the one that came with the new pump). I should mention the reason I didn't use any genuine Suzuki bits for the pump was that none of it is available separately; it's only available as a now obsolete complete assembly.

Checking the pump wiring, and it didn't look that hot. The ground screw was pretty crusty

and the power feed had been badly crimped

I cleaned up the ground screw and threads, and crimped a new terminal on for the feed wire

Using the new little star clip thing, I fit the new filter to the pump

This isolator is pretty old and crusty, but I couldn't find a replacement. Annoyingly, I had a problem where if I mounted the pump correctly, with the O-Ring in the top seated, the pump wasn't sitting on the isolator. It's the same size as the old pump, but if I pulled it down so it was seated on the isolator, the O-ring was barely engaged. I couldn't risk the o-ring leaking and losing fuel pressure.

Looking around at what others have done, the solution was to cut off the O-ring receiver and replace it with a submersible fuel hose instead.

So I ordered some hose

Took the victim to the dirty bench

And using a Dremel cut-off wheel, whizzed it off. Afterwards, I flared the end of the pipe a little by rolling a screwdriver around inside the pipe and putting pressure on the edge, just to give the hose something to bite into, not that it has anywhere to go if it did slip down

This allowed me to mount the pump correctly

A new seal was slipped over and fitted in place

Before fitting it, I also took a look at the fuel sender. Using a multimeter, I checked it and found some wonky readings about halfway through the range. You can also see the tide mark of where the float was sitting all those years.

I hosed brake cleaner through the gaps, and after actuating it, it got a bit better, but I really needed to open it up

Using a small flatblade, I very carefully levered up the tabs holding the cover on and removed it

You can see some buildup on the wires in the middle

Using a fibreglass brush, I carefully cleaned up the wires and the face of the arm that contacts them. Testing showed that it was consistent across the range again

I refitted the cover, gave everything a good clean and used a new seal

and some new screws, I refitted the sender and pump to the tank

As both were fitted now, I could refit the new hoses and wiring

I then refitted the refurbished tank to the car

Including a new fuel filter and new hoses

I haven't had a chance to test anything, other than the pump before fitting, but hopefully I will be able to get some fuel into the tank soon, ready for its first start.

 

[kws]

Of course the clutch pedal assembly had been bodged by a previous owner. Why wouldn't it have been?

I noticed it a while ago, whilst putting the missing clevis back in the brake pedal, that the clutch pedal was a bit... weird. First, it was missing the correct C clip, instead someone had just hung an incorrectly sized circlip on the shaft, which promptly fell off.

It should have a clip like this

Second, the pedal had been welded together. From what I have gathered, looking at diagrams, the clutch pedal is from a first-generation mid-late 80s Alto. None of the newer Altos use this style pedal.

I don't love bodges, particularly on things like pedals.

So, from the same HA11S at Pick A Part I got the coolant pipe from, I also sourced a complete manual pedal box. I had seen on some Japanese sites that the H Chassis pedal box will fit and work, it just needs some processing. What, I wasn't sure of yet.

My original plan, since I didn't want to remove the pedal box from the car, was to remove just the pedal and swap them over. The one in the car was easy, since the clip was missing. I just unhooked the clutch cable, popped the spring off and slid the pedal off

The pedal was way more butchered than I expected

Compared to the replacement pedal I removed

Unfortunately, the H chassis (donor) pedal doesn't fit the (butchered) C chassis (my car) pedal box. The pivot for the pedal is longer on the C chassis and doesn't use bushes. It also has different limiters for the pedal travel, using the arm at the top of the C chassis pedal to stop the pedal, whilst the newer H chassis has limiters further down the pedal, with nice little pads.

This does mean that I had to remove the pedal box anyway. It's held in place by two vertical bolts and four nuts holding the brake booster in. The column center bearing is also attached to the pedal box with two studs/nuts.

Original C Chassis box on the left (with new pedal attached) and newer H Chassis box on the right

It's kind of weird, it almost looks like the clutch part of another pedal box has been welded onto this pedal box...

The brake pedal switch needed to be swapped between the two, as one switch was 2 pin and the other 4 pin. This is just held in with a lock nut and then the switch is screwed into the pedal box

The switch also sets the brake pedal height at rest

Getting the pedal box in and out is zero fun. I hate working under dashes, particularly around the column, which just flopped around and got in the way

After a few tries of getting the new pedal box into place, finding the insulator pad fouling it, cutting some of that away to clear the box, I then found out what "Processing" the box needs...

H chassis on the left, C chassis on the right. The vertical bolt spacing of the newer pedal box is different.

After some measuring, I grabbed the Dremel and cut out some metal. In hindsight, it would be neater looking and maybe a bit stronger if I had drilled an oversized hole where it needed to be cut

Regardless, I checked it lined up and fit, quickly coated the bare metal in some paint, and fit the pedal box. I used a couple of large washers on the upper bolts to spread the load.

Other than those two bolts, it all bolts in place good, everything hooks up fine, and it seems to operate as it should.

[kws]

Alongside all the big work I have been doing, there have been a few little jobs that don't really fit into their own post, so I'll throw a few together here

Starting with repairing the oxygen sensor wiring. I don't quite know what happened here; maybe it got jammed into the crank pulley at some point? It was badly damaged, though

This was a reasonably quick fix. I started by depinning the plugs, so I didn't waste a lot of wire, and then cut and crimped a new weatherproof connector on

Next was a similar fix on the coolant fan switch, which had been bodged before (surprise surprise)

This is the switch I removed from the housing. At some point, it had soldered on wiring, no plug in sight.

Whilst this is the new switch

The good news is that after some digging, I found it's a Sumitomo 6189-0033 connector, which was easily available with a tail on Aliexpress

This is the butchered wiring, hacked into the original harness to solder onto the switch. The original wiring stops before the green sleeve, the rest is all just... garbage. This is after I removed the insulation tape that the soldered wires were wrapped in

I cut the extension off, cleaned the wires up, stripped them and soldered on the new plug

A quick wrap in fabric tape, and jobs a goodun

Next, the new leads went on. I grabbed some nice NGK performance leads, which fit well, instead of the crappy universal ones that had been fitted

Annoyingly, for some reason, despite getting a kit suitable for an Alto with the DOHC F6A, the lead from the coil was too short

The original lead had to be patched up for now and will be reused until a genuine replacement lead arrives

Moving along, since the driveline was now fitted, I could finally refit the shifter assembly. This is fairly straightforward, although make sure all the slotted bolts on the top and bottom are loose when fitting, otherwise you won't be able to fit the fixed rod onto the gearbox.

Bolted in place with the new, correct rubber boot

I never had the shift boot, though, as the car was missing it and had some weird rubber thing instead

So with calipers in hand, Fusion installed, and a 3D printer, I made a little bracket

Which screws into the underside of the console, sandwiching a universal "leather" boot in place

I'm not in love with the cheap knob, but I'm pretty happy with how the boot looks and works. Much better than the stock floppy rubber boot that is meant to be fitted, too

Next on the hit list was to replace the right front fog/indicator lamp, as a stone had hit it at some point and damaged it

It turns out there was actually a chunk of glass floating around inside the light

I grabbed a cheap replacement off Yahoo Japan. It was listed cheaply as "damaged" since the park light connector was damaged. The light itself is perfect

I swapped the wiring, including my less-damaged connector from the damaged lamp to the new one

And fit it to the bumper

Finally, in preparation for the first start, I refit the exhaust.

I started by removing the old rear muffler, as it was patched multiple times, filled with rust and just not going to cut it. It's a shame, I quite like the twin pipe outlet (there is a nice stainless Suzuki Sport muffler with twin outlets, but they are rare and expensive now)

I then moved forward and began fitting the center pipe. Thankfully, the previous owner managed to save this, as when I got the car, it was missing, and turns out it was left with the engine builder who was looking at it, going "wtf does this go to?". I wasn't looking forward to forking out the cash on a new one.

It also appears someone has previously cut out the cat, which is a good thing, given it would be nothing but a restriction these days

I cleaned up the flanges, fitted a new hanger rubber and hung the pipe from it.

Right up the front, I bolted it to the downpipe with a new sealing doughnut and bolts/springs. This was quite fiddly as the genuine bolt was short and hard to get started. I ended up leaving one bolt loose, pulling the pipe to the opposite side, using a jack to hold it there and then installing the other bolt.

Finally, I could move to the back and install this glorious piece of stainless steel

A Monster Sport Type SP-X muffler. This is one of the few mufflers that doesn't compromise ground clearance and goes over the rear beam, instead of under it.

Before fitting, I gave the main muffler and the tip a quick rub down

Being a quality JDM product, it bolted up first time, perfectly

I really look forward to hearing what it sounds like. I have heard some examples online, but it won't be the same as hearing it in person.

I think that's pretty much it for now. I'm waiting on a new radiator to arrive from Japan, and then we'll be going for a first start and run up to temp. Shouldn't be long now.

Parts Used

Fan Switch Plug - Sumitomo 6189-0033
Ignition Lead Set - NGK RC-SE41 (Coil Lead too short)
Ignition Lead Separator - Suzuki 33881-82011 and 09408-00104

Please note these parts are specific to my car and may vary. Please check before ordering.

[kws]

One of the last things I needed to do before I could look at starting the engine was to refresh the axles and refit them.

I wanted to clean and regrease the CV joints and replace the boots. The boots were looking a bit sad, and the joints themselves seemed really floppy.

Using a small flat-blade screwdriver, I popped the tabs on the metal boot retaining bands and removed them

The outer joints appeared to have been serviced at some point, as the grease was different to the inner joint, and the boots were newer and less perished (although both had a few little pinholes in them). The grease on these ends was quite hard and clumpy.

On the other end, the inner joints had really old, perished boots, and the grease was horrible, smelly, slimy stuff. Nothing like cracking open a boot and releasing the smell of rancid fish.

According to the manual, only the inner joints can be disassembled. The outer joints are not serviceable. I could probably pop the axle out if I hammered on the joint, but without a spare, it wasn't worth the risk.

With the boot undone, the joint cup just pops out, and the spider slides out and is free.

I wiped as much grease off the joint and out of the cup as I could, and sealed it in the rubbish bin

To remove the boots, I needed to remove the spider. This is held onto the shaft with a retaining clip. Annoyingly its one of the ones that just has tapered ends, not holes for circlip pliers. I managed to pop it off (and not lose it) with circlip pliers and a small flat-blade. It didn't once become a "Ping-Fuckit", I'm so proud.

The spider just slides off the splines

With both boots removed, I thoroughly cleaned out the outer CV joint, using brake cleaner, rags and a screwdriver to carefully scoop the grease out

Once cleaned, I dried the joint and then packed it with new Redline CV grease and slipped a new boot on. The cheap Aliexpress CV band tool did the job well. You wind the excess band onto the tool using the handle on the left, and once it's tight, bend the tool up and over to crease the band (so it won't just undo) and the handle on the right cuts the band. Remove the tool and hammer over the little retaining tabs. Done.

Rinse and repeat, and you have an axle with nice new boots and new grease. A quick wire bush job gets rid of all the external grease, too.

This is the state of the older-looking inner boots. Very hard and perished. Not cracked through yet, though

I ended up using almost a whole tub of CV grease between the two axles, after packing all the joints and boots

I was sure to clean out the needle bearings on the spiders and run new grease into them

That left me with a pair of nice, clean and fresh axles

With new hub nuts and washers

Fitting them wasn't too bad. I ended up removing the bolts from the struts and letting the hub hang down. Pop the inner joint into the gearbox, wrangle the outer into the hub and bolt the suspension back together

I took a couple of minutes to replace the outer tie rod ends, too, as the old ones were a bit floppy

I rattled the hub nuts up for now, but I will need to properly torque them to the required 150-260NM (it's a really broad range in the manual) once I can have a helper hold the hub still with the brakes.

Now that the axles were in place and the gearbox didn't have gaping holes in the sides, I pumped some nice new GL4 fluid in and capped it off, ready to move onto the next job.

[kws]

The time has finally come, I need to put on my big boy pants and see if all the blood, sweat, tears and money actually worked.

I started with a big milestone - I filled the engine with the startup oil. The temporary filter got binned, and a new, prefilled filter was fitted.

I also poured 10 litres of the finest 98 octane fuel into the tank and flushed the lines.

The final thing that needed to be assembled was the cooling system. The radiator that came with the car was from when it was auto, and unknown to me until a few weeks ago, the auto and manual radiators differ in one critical area; the lower hose fitting is on the wrong side between them

The auto radiator that came with the car

And the new Manual radiator

The lower hose on the auto goes under the transmission up to the back of the engine, and crosses close to the bellhousing

Looking from the front, back. Engine on the left, transmission pan on the right. Coolant pipe indicated.

This is the absolutely wild coolant pipe used on the autos

The previous owner butchered that pipe on my car to make it work with the manual setup. This meant he could retain the auto radiator.

The manual cars have the coolant hose from the radiator go straight up over the gearbox and into the coolant pipe I mentioned in one of my previous updates

Anyway, so once I found out that my radiator was wrong for my whole convert-to-OEM-MT parts thing, I frantically scrambled to see if I could source a manual radiator locally.

Allegedly, one of the local radiator places could order one in for me, at a reasonable price, but I had this niggling worry at the back of my mind where putting a cheap knockoff radiator into the car was asking for trouble. Was it suitable for a turbo car? Would it cause overheating issues? Would it handle a track day or two? Not something I wanted to deal with.

So, I spent a shocking amount of money to import the correct Manual Transmission Turbo spec Koyorad radiator from Japan

After a quick clean and test, I transferred the fan to the new radiator

Much time was spent wrangling the hoses into place. There is very little room between the radiator fan and the gearbox

But finally, the radiator was installed and filled with demineralised water

Wanting to be able to monitor the oil pressure in an actual figure and not just the idiot light, I quickly wired up the gauge and mounted it. I tied into the power feed for the 12v socket above it.

It's pretty bright. I'm going to need to wire in the illumination, I think. It's one of the reasons I removed it from the BRZ

Finally, it was time.

I had disconnected the ignition coil and removed the fuel pump relay. I needed to crank the engine to prime the oil system and build oil pressure. I jumped in and turned the key for the very first time.

 

Yes, the oil pressure gauge was useless since it turned off when cranking... but on the third go of cranking, the oil pressure light went out, so we were ready. I was getting a little worried with how long it was taking for the light to go out, but thankfully, the pump primed itself, and it wasn't an issue.

Now it was time to connect the coil up and refit the fuel pump relay, and go for real. The first start of this engine after a complete end-to-end rebuild, and the first time I have ever heard an engine run in this car.

 

It started like a champ!

I had to cut it off earlier than I wanted as the revs were too high, but after some tweaking, I managed to get that to come down, and it idled fine. There was some lifter tick, which is obvious on the video, but nothing to worry about.

Oil pressure was very good when running, dropping to about 20PSI when idling at operating temperature

By some miracle, even all the gauges work, including the fuel gauge. I'll need to pull the bulb for the cat temp light, since I removed that wire and don't have a cat anymore.

It didn't half smoke though, burning off all the various oils, paints etc

After running it up to temp, I drained the engine oil and the water from the cooling system

The coolant went brown from dragging old gunk out from the heater core and various other hiding places

I filled the engine with proper run-in oil this time, and a 50:50 mix of coolant, which I spent time properly bleeding

I checked and set the timing to the required 5 degrees, with advance locked by shorting the B and C terminals on the diagnostic connector

After the oil change, the lifter tick got a lot better, and with the other tweaks I made, the engine ran and idled quite nicely

 

There's still some setting up to do with things like the TPS and the weird idle valves, but for now, it'll do enough to get it driving.

Speaking off, I need to reassemble the front of the car, get the wheels on, and give it a string alignment, but I'm pretty keen to take it for a closed road drive as soon as I can. I really need to start bedding in those rings.

A huge milestone. The engine runs, and runs well. It seems to do everything it should, with no odd noises and no real leaks (only a small weep from the oil drain on the turbo).