Supra (2JZA61) daily project - Its alive... its ALIVE!

[takai]

Spent most of the weekend out at UPullIt getting bits for the Supra. But first i rolled it into its home for the next little while:


Making good friends with the Sprinter now. I also hooked up a battery so i could see how the electrics were, and given that nothing went smokey i went further and hit ignition and was happy to see that pretty much everything i had expected worked. Aircon is a bit weird, but thats ok, because im ditching the automatic AC and going to a manual setup. Digi dash worked, but im not entirely sure that ill end up using it. Power windows worked, but a bit sluggish, which could be just the battery being low.

So onto the bits that i got at UPullIt:

Picked up an analog dash, which should be relatively compatible with what i have, although it will require rewiring completely to work. The CelicaSupra guys have a whinge and say its too hard, but with <20 wires to swap around im sure it will be fine.


Picked up a fuel pump bracket and the lines associated, to finish off what was missing in my fuel tank, as well as an analog level sender. Which ill need if i use the analog dash.

Onto the suspension, i picked up everything for both of my options:

MX83 Cressida steering arms, and RA40 tie rod end tubes.


GH Sigma (left) and MX83 (right) lower control arms.


MX83 struts, and hubs.

I also found another Cressida with a black interior, so i picked up a few things which i had missed out in my car. Adding to my big pile of black bits:



Bonus boot carpet:


Plus there was an EF with a trans cooler hanging out the front, so that came with me too. If i stick with power steering ill end up using it as a power steering cooler:


Also some pretty pics of the engine which will be powering it:


VVTi 2JZGE, pretty standard atm, and ill have to do a bit of cleaning up of the wiring loom and sort out what the other ecu plugs are.

Plus on the downside of the weekend was finding a touch of rust here:

As a bonus its in the removable cowl, so not in the body which is nice. Ill cut it out and a bit of fibreglass and things will be all good.

So onto the suspension. Currently i have a few options, but the one which appeals to me is using the MX83 struts at the front for the 5stud. However, the kingpin angle is different between the MX83 strut and the MA61 strut, with the MX83 giving positive camber (signfiicantly) if used with the MA61 lower control arms.
The MA61 LCA is 295mm eye-to-eye and the MX83 LCA is 330mm eye-to-eye. Which is all well and good on paper. However, going from the GroupA cars the Supra works best at about 4-5deg neg camber on the front (and the AE86s seem to support this with 6deg neg working really well).

I havnt figured out what the static camber will be with the MX83 strut and LCA, so that is first thing to do on the cards. If its looking to be too high, then ill have the following options as i see it:
- Get the struts rebent to add more negative camber
- Find longer LCAs (dont want to do this as it adds more track at the front, and given that the GroupA cars ran 50mm extra at the front i dont want to add more)
- Find MS65 hubs and use the stock MA61 struts with the GH Sigma LCAs.

Thats about it for options, but i guess the first thing is to figure out the effective king pin angle and get cracking with some trigonometry and figure out what the camber adjustment is.

[thechuckster]

you can use a cowl from a RA65 or similar Celica - the rest/stops for the wipers look a little different but otherwise they're interchangeable.

While you have the cowl off, remove the plastic grills over the air inlets and clean out that cavity and make sure no gunk/leaf matter/mulch is hiding up towards the ends. They seem to collect crap there and by the times you see the rust on the firewall, it's too late.

[takai]

you can use a cowl from a RA65 or similar Celica - the rest/stops for the wipers look a little different but otherwise they're interchangeable.

While you have the cowl off, remove the plastic grills over the air inlets and clean out that cavity and make sure no gunk/leaf matter/mulch is hiding up towards the ends. They seem to collect crap there and by the times you see the rust on the firewall, it's too late.

Yeah, and there are heaps of celicas out at UPullIt which is good. I might see if i can fix the one i have now, but ill probably slack out and just get a new one.

[Supercrown]

chris - I'm off to perth till friday - but get in touch about picking those mounts up this coming weekend as well as the jigs. (Haven't made them yet, but will on sat probably)

[takai]

Sure thing Sean, although i dont need them for a while. Still gotta pull the boat anchor out, and with RallySA this weekend and HQ Enduro next i dont know if ill get the time.

[Supercrown]

That's cool - As I'm working in perth 1 week in two at the moment, extra time suits me too.

Let me know when you want em and we'll work to that.

[takai]

Depends currently on whether i can get it ID checked without changing the engine.

[takai]

I had a bit of time this afternoon to get the car up on jack stands and measure the king pin angle (angle between the mounting face of the hub and the strut tube) of all the struts that i have in the garage.

Now the long and the short of it is as follows:
MA61 strut KPI: 10.5deg
MA61 LCA length: 295mm
MX83 strut KPI: 13.1deg
MX83 LCA length: 330mm

Thats a 2.5deg difference in KPI angle between the MX83 and MA61 struts which would mean that if i just bolted the MX83 strut to the MA61 LCA i would probably get roughly 2.5deg positive camber (assuming 0ish camber stock on the MA61)
This seems to be roughly what Norbie got when he did his:


However, with the MX83 LCAs i gain an extra 35mm of track on each side. But what does that translate to in terms of camber. I dont have enough time right now to do the trig, as i have to go meet Gav for dinner before the IPRA meeting. But anyone want to try before i get back?

[Gammaboy]

how long is the strut?

[Dave75]

Chris.... If you are still interested in that Kelsey brake controller & you will be at Malalla /HQ Enduro on the 15th ,drop into the Scrutineering office ...ask for me..DAVE S. [not Fat Dave...I'm the thinner one with a beard].I'm Chief Scrute for the meeting.I'll throw it in my bag .If you want it you can give my son Chris a "reasonable donation " to go into his "Mini Building Fund"[Hill climb car].

-----
Dave


ps. are you driving or crew???

[takai]

Dave: unsure on the Kelsey controller, and to be honest i havnt had a chance to look at it. Also isnt the Enduro on the 8th?
I probably wont be driving or crew, but probably going to be Media.

Anyway, after that slight discursus, back to trig and strut angles.
Last night i sat down with a pen and paper and a scientific calculator and made some pretty diagrams with numbers on them. I made some pretty bodgy assumptions, such as the LCA being horizontal, and when the LCA is horizontal the stock camber is 0deg, neither of which are particularly true. But on the other hand it does let me treat it all as a right angle triangle.
If anyone is interested in the maths its basically "Given strut angle (90*-AoI) and LCA length, solve for other sides", then "Given shock length (from part A), and LCA length, solve for strut angle" then subtract strut angle from AoI to give effective camber.

Now with my bodgy assumptions i came to the rough conclusion that i would have about 0.9 deg negative camber with the MX83 suspension bits.

And then i woke up at a ridiculous time this morning, given that my wife is on an ambulance shift and had to be there by 7, and went out to the garage to test it. I basically dropped out the strut quickly, and then put the strut top onto the MX83 strut and bolted that in. Now i buggered the thread on the already stuffed steering arm at UPullIt getting it off so i had to just let it sit together to see if it worked. Onwards and upwards with the jack.
I took a measurement of the hub to guard distance on my Cressida for a
rough guide, and jacked it up to that height (350mm).



Breaking out the inclinometer i measured the angle:


1.3deg negative camber, not bad at all for some bodgy trig. Now the 0.4deg difference im putting down to the stock camber not being 0 when the LCAs are parallel to the ground.

I then had a bit of time on my hands and went and got the spare out of the Cressida to just have a quick test fit:



Looks about 1.3neg too:


I cant jack it up any higher, because i havnt removed anything from the other side, including the swaybar, so if i try to jack it up higher the swaybar just binds up the chassis and lifts the entire chassis off the stands. Ooops.

Thats about it for now, i might get a chance to fiddle later if i go home early from work, as the stupid workmen are drilling again and i cant hear myself think.

[Dave75]

Dave: unsure on the Kelsey controller, and to be honest i havnt had a chance to look at it. Also isnt the Enduro on the 8th?
I probably wont be driving or crew, but probably going to be Media

HQ Enduro 15.08.09


HQ , Formula Vee , IPRA , Elfin Regularity [includes any/all FACTORY BUILT open wheelers 1950's to 1980.

--- Dave

[takai]

There you go. Ill change it in my diary then

[takai]

Picked up some calipers and a couple of discs today. Complete bargain price. Couple there for Gav as well. As a bonus it looks like they come with Endless pads, or at least something with a blue coloured backing.

[takai]

So, in the ubiquitous words of Martin Lawrence:


I headed out to RallySA yesterday, and came home all geed up to do some work on the car, but without being able to turn on the air compressor and really get stuck into the engine bay i settled for doing this:

Was basically a matter of sitting there with a few screwdrivers and sockets and figuring out which screw came out of which area to release the whole shebang.
Finally got it all out and this was the pile of screws and bolts to go back in:


Dash looks half decent, and will get a clean up and sprayed black in the near future:


And there was a crap load of other stuff which is probably going to be ditched.

Unsure about the heater core at the moment, as im not sure if ill be able to reuse that box or if ill need to get a manually controlled one for the manual controls.
The annoying bit was disconnecting the hundreds of wires which go into making the climate control work. So glad all of that is gone.

The old starwars dash is also out:

Awaiting me playing tracing time with it and the analog dash to figure out what needs to be repinned where in order to make the analog dash work.

I then got stuck into removing the cowl, and looking at what was under there:

Honestly i was expecting the worst, to see rust at the bottom of that area and lots of crap filling it up.

But it really wasnt bad at all:

No visible rust and i poked around a bit with a screw driver and couldnt see anything either.

So then without having much more time or stuff to do i got the engine ready for removal:


And treated the rust on all the under dash bracketry:



Seriously, i dont understand why Toyota didnt bother to paint those bars, in every Toyota ive had they have been rusted to all hell.

Sunday rolled around and brought with it some glorious sunshine. In addition to a few other progress bits which i wont post up until they are finished, i got stuck into the drivetrain.
No interim pics, but the engine bay now looks like this:


With the 5M unceremonially dumped outside. The W box is sitting underneath the front bumper:


As Gav was around we decided to drop the rear subframe so i can get started on the camber bolt mod for it. After a bit of shifting stuff around and undoing some bolts it came out nicely:


Toyota wernt kidding around when they wanted to attach the snout of the diff to the subframe

8xM10 bolts, 2 in each side AND 4 on top. Makes me wonder what the engineers were thinking when they thought a single snout bolt on the MX83 was a good idea.

In addition the rust conversion from yesterday turned out quite well:

Its had a second coat and waiting for it to dry.

I bought a present for the car as well:

12 cans at $1.50 each, quite worth it I think as the cans seem to do a much better job than the concentrate.

Next on the agenda is finishing off the subframe disassembly, testing the LSD, and starting the subframe mod for the camber adjustment. That should keep me busy until my 5 stud MS123 hubs arrive, and then i can start putting together the rear brake upgrade. While all thats happening ill be waiting on some shocks from the US and on some local suspension stuff for the front.
On the interior front im not going to do a huge amount for now, mainly checking the heater core and starting the manual heater control conversion, and also repinning the dash loom to use the analog dash.

That should keep me busy for now.

[takai]

Tonight i had some time before dinner and got stuck into one of the rear trailing arms, preparing them for bigger brakes and the MS123 5stud hubs. After dinner i went back and did the other one in like 10min and took some photos.

Take one stock rear trailing arm:


Remove brake lines


Attack with rattlegun:

2x 14mm bolts holding the brake calipers on, and 4x 14mm nuts holding the driveshaft to the hub.

Looking in under that driveshaft shows a nice large 27mm nut holding the hub to the driveshaft flange, staked nicely, its probably been like this from factory.


Thankfully the staking has a little taper in the counter clockwise direction and the rattlegun makes damn short work of it:

You can see here where the slight deformation in the nut is.

And once you pull off the hub and disc, you get something like this:


Ok i cheated there slightly, thats the predone one, which has also had the guts of the handbrake removed for the R33 brake conversion.


Onto the more interesting stuff, the R33 brake upgrade.

Firstly, the obligatory comparison between the R33 disc (underneath) and the MA61 disc (ontop) Its not a huge difference, and to be honest i dont expect it to really add much in the way of braking effort. That said the little twinpot caliper is MUCH lighter and i do expect that to add a touch.


Thickness wise its much the same story, both being 18mm thick.


Where they differ on the other hand is the handbrake area. The R33 is a huge ~190mm ID for the handbrake:

Wheras the MA61 is a stonkingly 22mm smaller:


This will cause some issues with the handbrake, but from some reading most people have overcome this by simply getting extra material bonded to the shoes, 2-2.5mm extra is what i have read so an extra 5mm OD, and then i assume extending the adjustment for all its worth.
Luckily for me my handbrake shoes are rooted anyway, so theyll need to be done regardless, hopefully the rebonding isnt too expensive over new shoes:


Now, onto the bracket. I had a very minor dilemma with the fact that the brake rotor is a 5stud rotor and the hubs are still 4stud until the MS123 ones arrive. However, they are the same stud pattern, so the problem is easily solved with a 2lb mallet. I quickly bashed out 3 of the studs and left the 4th to act as a locator along with the central hub flange.
Slapping on the R33 rotor and securing it with a spare wheel nut and then holding the caliper onto the disc (while juggling the camera) yielded this:


The verniers say a 5-6mm backspace to the stock mounts depending on how the caliper is mounted. In addition the disc when just bolted to the hubs on its own fouls on the back of the handbrake, and wont sit completely flat. This would be a bit of dilemma, apart from the fortunate nature of the already backspaced caliper. What i shoudl be able to do is add a 5mm spacer to the underside of the disc (between the hub and the disc) so as to space the handbrake mechanism away from the disc face, and also as a bonus give a completely flat surface for a brake caliper adaptor.

To test this i pulled a couple of 3mm washers out from my box of washers and installed them:

Trust me, thats 6mm.

With them installed and the disc over the top, with the trusty random lug nut holding it all together the caliper spacing was about 1mm positively offset:


This seems to indicate that i can just create a caliper bracket which bolts to the back of the standard mounts (you can see me testing a bolt clearance in that picture too), as the standard mounts are not threaded (the threading is in the caliper). That bracket will then bolt through the "front" outwards to the R33 caliper and it should all line up.

I dont see any reason why this should be overly hard.

While i was out there before dinner the angle grinder with a sandpaper disc made very damn short work of the Nissan logos on the calipers:

and


So off to source some 5mm spacers i go. Next project is to look at the camber eccentric bolt conversion for the suspension subframe.

[takai]

As per one of the things im going to do with this car is convert the starwars digi dash to an analog cluster. Which is relatively easy, but some people seem to think that repinning the 24 odd wires in the cluster is too hard.



Thats the repinning, and only 6 wires need to be cut and soldered, the rest are straight repins.

[takai]

Phew, the Supra just occupied another full day of my time.
I was intending on getting up at a lovely leisurely time of 10am, but that was interupted by the need to call a BMW parts dealership in the US before they closed on the Friday. What you might ask do i need from a BMW dealership?
Quite easy really, M12x98mm eccentric bolts. Which come conveniently from the arse end of a BMW E39 5-series. Now the BMW dealership locally wanted $38 per bolt set (one side) and i needed 2, and 2 for Gav, so that was getting a bit expensive. All hail BMA parts in the US, who want only $9.35 for them, and postage for 8 sets (4 for BMWTurbo) is around $30. Laughing.

And then i got a call from Repco and threw down a coffee before ducking off to pick up these:


Brand new MS123 crown rear discs. 269mm and solid rotors. Completely useless, apart from the handbrake assembly. If you remember from before i was going to run a 5mm spacer under the disc to make for a flat caliper adaptor. Well in this case there is no need, the MS123 disc will sacrifice itself to provide me a handbrake drum, and the 5mm spacer all in one.
As a double bonus these discs are on clearance at Repco for $22.50. The only reason i bought new ones.

So off i trundled to TKs to borrow the lathe:


Just a matter of machining the rotor 99% of the way thorugh, and then hit with a hammer to seperate from the hat/drum. Believe it or not that disc is currently spinning there.


After smacking it with a persuader and now im just cleaning up the sharp edge left behind.
I did the first disc in 1hr, and the second in about 20mins. Not bad i dont think for not having used a lathe in about 6 years, and the last time i used it i had a guy standing over my shoulder the entire time.

And this is what im left with, one MUCH lighter hat/drum from the MS123 Crown Royal.


And here it is sitting pretty on the hub, now im still using my MA61 rear hubs as im testing. More on the MS123 stuff later.


With the UZZ30 disc placed over the top and tightened down.


And this isnt a duplicate, thats the same clearance as before Yay, all the theory works.

And then i set about making a caliper adaptor template. I grabbed a bit of 3mm alloy plate i had lying around and started hacking into it. After a few minutes i had this:



Now all i have to do there is clean up the bracket for duplication into either 5mm or 10mm steel plate. Havnt decided which yet.

Next on the agenda was pulling the hubs so i could fit these:

They are complete MS123 rear trailing arms. Thanks CLG for the hubs, and accessories.
Now they are reputed to be quite a little bitch to pull the hubs out and fit the new ones with many people opting to use a 20t press to get them apart. But the Toyota Repair and Service Manual says you can use a slide hammer to do the job. So i thought i would give it a go.


On the way back from TKs i ducked into JMS and picked up a junker S13 rear disc:

Once i had it on the bench i bolted it to a 5x114.3 disc and marked out the holes to be redrilled. With that done the drill press made pretty damn short work of the holes, and you then have what you see there, a double drilled disc, fits both on 4x114.3 and 5x114.3



A bit of 25mm SHS was then the donor for a crossbrace


And then i welded a nut for my existing slide hammer onto it.


After assembling it all on the MA61 hub

I proceded to try and slide hammer it out, to absolutely no avail, despite trying as hard as i could. So i gave up on it for the time being as it was annoying me too much.
In hind sight i can see the essential step that i missed. In that TRSM on Step5 it says you need to remove the axle flange first... duh. So ill get onto removing the axle flange tomorrow. Hopefully the hub will come out then.

I continued on by making up some jigs for the engine mounts:

And then realised that i had completely neglected to buy the 5mm plate i needed for those mounts... DOH. So that will have to be done when i can get some 5mm plate.

I then finished stripping and degreased the entire engine bay, and got it all ready for painting tomorrow. That was an entire day of work. Scary.

[takai]

And just to top off today ive drawn up the rear caliper adaptor. Now to just transfer it to CAD


Numbers removed until i find out whether its the right sizing.

[takai]

Now in CAD too,

[takai]

Now with one painted engine bay:

Not too much to say, just plain old "Aluminum" Wattyl KillRust, thinned slightly and sprayed. Now i cant go into the garage because of the fumes

Will take a while to dry, but thats ok, nothing engine wise just yet.

[Gavatron]

Way too ricer

[HoonBoy]

Is that an oil cooler in the engine bay?

[takai]

Yeah, very effective oil cooler. Takes 2.4kw of powahz and dissipates it into the atmosphere.

[takai]

The 2JZGE VVTi that i bought for the Supra helpfully came with the ECU for it as well. But i have no idea of what car it came out of, and hence the pinouts on the ECU. Here it is though:





Engine is a stock front sumped version, and the wiring looks to be power through the body loom within cabin, rather than the Supra style of power through the body loom near the fusebox in the engine bay.
I cant see any alternator wiring on the engine loom, so im going to assume thats body loom too (makes life easy ).

Anyone able to identify what ECU it is? Better if you can give me the wiring diagrams for it too, but ill settle for knowing what ECU and car it came from.

[tim510]

did the plates arrive? all good?

[takai]

Plates havnt arrived just yet, assuming they will probably arrive today

[scrad]

could it be from a soarer?

i have a 2jzge soarer and i can check numbers if you want (not vvti though, so its probably different)

[takai]

Seems that it is a JZS155.

Now how about those wiring diagrams.

[Deus Ex]

holy crap Takai,

Your a machine! I wish i had these skills...