The Orange Eyesore - 1977 RA23 Celica

[Norbie]

Or, not enough projects?

Not much happened over the weekend, but I did manage to install the new front engine mounts/isolators. The ones they sent me are labelled 90-94 Hilux and they are visually quite different:



Seemed to work though, except that the locating pins don't quite fit so it doesn't sit right. I should be able to fix that with a drill but for now I'm calling it done:



The car is off the hoist now and replaced with the Supra. I just have to try not to get distracted by it for a while, there's so many things I want to get stuck into immediately but I need to be patient!

[Norbie]

I was bored the other day so I decided to investigate the water pump situation on the 18R-G. The new engine doesn't have one, the old one obviously does but fuck knows how old it is, maybe I can re-use it and maybe not. Let's have a look:





LOL yeah nah that's looking a bit crusty. I could probably salvage it but it looks like you can still buy new replacements (the same part is used on certain Hilux models) so I should probably do that.

I really don't like that bypass pipe sticking out the side of the housing though, so I'm thinking I might pop that out and tap the hole so I can use some sort of AN fitting. Hose clamps piss me off!

[Norbie]

Hey I've got a reason to update this thread! Recently on facebook I saw something pop up for sale that I never thought I'd see, some NOS front indicator lenses for an RA23/28 Celica. The price was reasonable so I jumped on them immediately! Here they are:



And compared with my original 43 year old lenses they look a whole lot better:





I'm slowly building up my collection of new bits for this car, I'll have a bunch of stuff ready to go when the project starts for real!

[Mr Ree]

Nothing quite like the smell of NOS parts

[9triton]

Yeah those push in steel pipes.in the water tpump and cooling system. Are the devils work. Just going thru sons 20 year old car as the sequentially get rust pinholes in the steel pipes. And i get a call ' dad its over heating'

Planned obsolescence...

[Norbie]

Yeah dissimilar metals in the cooling system doesn't seem like the best idea. Hopefully I can get the steel pipe out without destroying the housing, but we shall see.

[9triton]

I managed to get one out after trying to twist it out. just ended up with a rooted stub of steel . So cut it flush to the housing , got a tap and cut a thread inside the pipe. put a big socket over the stub , screwd in a bolt thru the socket. With a nut on it. Held the bolt still and tightened the nut down onto the socket and managed to draw the stub out ,up into the socket. ie like a puller. Took about 3 hrs to get All that shit done in the engine bay. And about 30 secs to tap the new steel pipe back in. ...mazda....

[Norbie]

Someone on faceballs asked me about 18R-G EFI maps and I offered to send a copy of the map out of my old Haltech E6X setup. I was sure I had it saved somewhere in my archives but after much searching I could only find the old E6K maps for the Supra, nothing E6X related anywhere. So I had no option but to dig out the old E6X and loom, ghetto rig it on the bench and plug it in to my ancient laptop which is the last bit of hardware I have left which can talk to an RS232 serial port:



It took me fucking ages to get that laptop up and running with the Haltech tuning software etc but I got there in the end and was able to extract the tuning map as created by Matt Spry at PITS some 15+ years ago. It's now safely archived on OneDrive, so in the unlikely event that anyone wants to see a working map for a stock 18R-G, here it is:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AnXBOBq81lxgi-Uf...iqwNQ?e=8GeqQZ

You're welcome.

[Xnke]

The TC06-17C was the same turbo fitted to the GMC Syclones and Typhoons, so it was good enough for a 4.3L V6 in a hot pickup truck in 1991.

[Norbie]

Thanks for the info, that's good to know! Was probably a total lag monster on a 2L engine.

[tim510]

the mighty e6k / e6x, ah memories.

[Norbie]

Yes, mostly memories of shitty DOS software and agonisingly slow serial interfaces.

They're pretty easy to wire up though!