Logan's rides

[Logan]

Another day, another story about a long lost 2.

Bought this one in Dargaville in about 2014 and trailered her home. She was running a bit rough and died on me several times while driving it around. But after a bit of tlc it was a fun experience driving my first AW.

This car made me really like the look of the MR-S wheels on the AW. Although I struggled to get used to the feeling of spirited driving in such a small car after owning mainly big GT coupes. The engine bay wasnt overly pleasant to work on after working on mostly NA SW's either!

[Logan]

By 2015 I had slowed down on the buying and selling of cars and was still working on PURPL. I had the MR2 itch and it needed scratching. I saw this black turbo up for sale and knew a bit of history of the car.

Definitely looked unique with the Tom's spoiler. It felt good to get back into an MR2 again and attack some twisties.

One day I ambitiously took it on an MR2 run where it managed to overheat. Found that the radiator was thoroughly blocked and gave it a good flush which seemed to set it straight again. An old 2 with over 200k kms on the clock with overheating issues, who would have guessed?

[Logan]

Small life update for this thread. After buying a house with not much room in the driveway and undertaking a full restoration on another car, I had to put my last remaining MR2 into storage for a while. I was lucky enough to sell my other project the day after lockdown so the MR2 could reclaim its place in the garage once and for all. I'm glad to finally only have 1 project car now that i can focus my attention and funds on.

I have a few things I want to resolve before getting a new WoF on the 2 so heres a progress update for this week:

In my last update I mentioned I added some new whiteline swaybars and end links. Since then the endlinks bent quite badly:

It looks like they have made contact with the swaybar, as can be seen in the photo below:

Seems like maybe they should have been mounted on the chassis side of the bar rather than the wheel side? Or maybe they aren't long enough to use on this position of the swaybar.

So to replace them I bought some hardrace end links from australia which look substantially better quality (for around the same price now the USD is so low):

Due to the size I could not mount them inside the mount of the coilovers. I've tested using the jack that they dont seem to foul in any position. So hopefully they work out better this time around.

Next on this list is to fix the differential issues. The car is fitted with a Cusco 1.5way which seems too aggressive for the street and makes it very hard to downshift without losing traction. Not ideal for an MR! It might be able to be tuned but I really just want a bolt in and forget kind of deal. So on recommendation I bought a new Quaife which is awaiting to go in:

In order to fit my new wheels, I needed to be able to remove the bolt on 15mm spacers and fit new slip on hubcentric 10mm spacers to get the offset right but still clear the big brakes. I ordered these spacers in specially from Australia so they can be hubcentric with both the hub and the wheel. In order to fit them safely extended wheel studs needed to be fitted:

The ARP studs might be a little too long but will definitely do the job.

While the front end is apart, its the perfect time to install poly bushes all around, even more work lined up for the press:

And finally, watch this space for some changes under the front :

[MIKEP]

Thanks for the update .Always enjoy seeing what cool stuff your up to. can't wait till your rolling again

[mickeyduck]

can't wait till your rolling again

+1

[Logan]

can't wait till your rolling again

Me to! i have a few stages of things I want to do, so I can fit some runs in between!

[Logan]

Heres another update.

To follow on from the previous thread, I had some aluminium parts cut in order to mount the radiator:

The bottom fitted very easily even though they messed up one of the bends on one side, it still managed to bolt in without too much fuss.

It kind of looks like they are bent with the weight of the radiator but there is a slight (intentional) bend after the two front bolt holes to come down below the radiator. They are very solid once bolted up!

The top was not so simple. Due to the radius of the top radiator mount, the mounts had to be pressed and then trimmed to suit. I laid the inside of these brackets with thick foam tape to offer some support and then had to put nutserts into the front cross member.

This process was fairly straight forward but once mounted up the top bolt hold was nearly impossible to fit a bolt into, should have made them longer I suppose! One bolt will have to do, its very tight in there now. The end result looks great. Also due to the new location the horns had to be moved, so you can see they are now mounted on the side of the original radiator cross member. Fits nicely behind the bumper and gives a clear path to the radiator core.

Next on that part is to get the new hoses and wire the fans up.

While getting those cut I also had a new fan shroud made up for the engine lid. The current lid had the stock shroud with a fan crudely shoved into it:

Now it will have a nice aluminium shroud with dual fans. I went with a design a bit different to whats out there but I think it's come up really nice.

Will need a bit of tweaking as it seems my engine lid center mount piece is wider than the factory engine lid I measured off, so the fans don't quite sit in there correctly yet. I'll also need to modify my wiring to allow for the 2 fans vs 1. Another thing on the to-do list.

Finally, I replaced the tired old custom floor mats. The drivers side has been worn through since I purchased the car and I've never been a huge fan of the wiry mesh type of material they were.

Looks great, matches the seats nicely and the drivers side mat has a wear pad on it to hopefully prevent what happened to the old mat!

Next time will be an update on the gearbox since it's been sitting out of the car for a long time awaiting parts that have just arrived.

[GlanzaAtHeart]

Awesome SW20 Logan!

I love your interior, the carbon fibre, the seats, the mats, all of it.

Where'd you get that gauge pod above the clock? I've been looking for one for the past 5 weeks and found nothing...

Any chance you know where you got yours from? That's awesome.

Cheers

[Logan]

Another update this year..how about that!

Not quite back on all 4s yet but getting very close.
Gearbox build hit a snag as we broke a few parts on re-assembly, all of which I had spares for except one! Had to order this from Partsouq and 3-7 days shipping turned into 23 days, what a pain. Heres a shot with the new diff in place:

Luckily I had a spare early model non-lsd diff as the quaife diff would not allow fitment of the late model speedo drive gear. So we were able to pillage this and leave the speedo gear attached to the cusco diff that was removed.

The front gearbox mount has always been an issue, on closer inspection both holes in the gearbox had damaged threads. Timeserts were installed for a larger M12 bolt to replace the M10s that are used from factory. The mount now goes up nice and tight, no more copious amounts of loctite and prayers required to hope the bolts stay tight. While messing around with these mounts I took the opportunity to install some Kirkosaurus mount inserts, what I deem the holy grail for street MR2 engine mounts. Link for reference: https://kirkosaurus.com/development/

One issue of relocating the radiator is with the bleed port. So I made up a small line to enable access to this while the bumper is fitted. I have yet to receive the cap for it which is quite a pain as I'm getting to the point where I will need to test it. Unsure if it will work at this point but time will tell!

Finally I spent quite some time fiddling around with the new wheels for the car.
Changed from the TE37s 17x7.5"/8.5"to some Advan RG's 17x8.5"/9.5".
They fit much better with no spacers required on the rear. The fronts still needed the 10mm spacers as specified earlier, but not for big brake clearance, but because I couldn't get more than about 0.5 degrees of camber dialled in with this width. As you can see in the pictures below, everything is close including the end links and wheel to coilover distance, but actually even though the rim is 1" wider, with this setup the wheel is more tucked under the front guard.

Next up is to finish reassembly of the top of the engine bay and fill with fluids.

[GDII]

With the speedo drive, there is blue and yellow ring. Blue is non LSD and should fit all aftermarket LSDs and yellow is LSD and will not fit aftermarket LSDs.
Is this what you came across?

Aren't the end links meant to go inside the mount, not outside like you have it.

Swaybar mount front SW20 MR2.jpg (191.07 KiB) Viewed 4007 times

[Logan]

With the speedo drive, there is blue and yellow ring. Blue is non LSD and should fit all aftermarket LSDs and yellow is LSD and will not fit aftermarket LSDs.
Is this what you came across?

Aren't the end links meant to go inside the mount, not outside like you have it.

Swaybar mount front SW20 MR2.jpg

Yea that's correct with regard to the speedo rings, the yellow ring fits the cusco LSD that was removed but would not fit the Quaife, so had to use the blue (non-lsd) one. Cusco diff for reference below:

These hard race endlinks are too big to fit inside the the mount on the coilover, total length is about 55mm, and the inner distance of the coilover mount was 48mm or thereabouts (from memory, I did measure it a while ago), no way I could get it in. Trust me I tried!
Also believe that having the end link on the outside of the swaybar is what caused the previous ones to fail as the whiteline bars seem to flare out at the end. You can see on the earlier images that the damage on the end link is inline with the end of the swaybar. Although maybe that is because the heim joints on the other end links kept the link a lot closer to the swaybar than the factory style and this style.

[Logan]

Another big update, a lot has happened since the last one.
As usual with the MR2 just when I think I’m wrapping it up, other stuff always seems to decide to happen.
It took about a month for the broken gearbox part to arrive, fortunately nothing else major happened with this. We were able to finish assembly of the gearbox and took the opportunity while it was out to fix the damaged threads on the front engine mount bolt holes. We inserted timeserts to take it out to an M12 fine thread. Hopefully the larger diameter bolt will make sure it doesn’t get damaged again during hard launches and gear changes. I also fitted some Kirkosaurus engine mount inserts I’ve had for a while which I consider the best engine mount upgrade for a street car.

I pre-emptively fitted the clutch slave and bracket to the gearbox before fitting to the engine, remembering what a pain I the ass it is to do afterwards. Of course it appears this is the wrong way to do it as when I went to bolt the gearbox to the engine, I couldn’t get one of the main gearbox bolts that bolts to one of the lower tabs on the engine block. So I tried to cheat and disconnect one of the clutch bleed lines to do the bolt up. Naturally somehow when I tried to put the line back the fitting stripped immediately. So I ended up having to pull the whole bracket and slave out anyway.

I replaced the line with a similar looking one I had laying around and bolted it all up again. Once I had finished this I decided I better try bleed it in case something went wrong. And of course it did! What a surprise. I could not get full pressure. It got enough that the clutch pedal wasn’t sticking to the floor, but not enough to engage it. Scratching my head I ended up replacing both the master and slave and still had the same issue. Finally I pulled the slave out for the 3rd time and decided to check that line, it appeared to have a minor leak from the fitting that I didn’t spot earlier….So I replaced the line again, this time with a new line and fittings. After doing this I STILL couldn’t get pressure and decided its time I adjusted the pedal. Amazingly about 5 turns on the pedal clevis made the clutch work perfectly, even though I originally matched the pushrod length to the one I removed.

If all that wasn’t enough, while I was underneath the car I noticed the downpipe was loose at the turbo. So I began to investigate that from the top. The first step was to remove the turbo beanie. This completely disintegrated as soon as I touched it…Guess that was a waste. Once I dug a little deeper I could see a visible gap between the turbo and downpipe, obviously the exhaust gas was escaping here and must have been cooking the beanie. It was also apparent that a bit of extra exhaust gas doesn’t go well with rubber water hoses around. In hindsight this is possibly the root cause to my overheating issue!

On further examination I could also feel the gasket had blown out on the block side. Replace the gasket and tighten it up…sounds easy enough, except no one I contacted or took the turbo to had ever seen one like it and couldn’t help…I couldn’t even find a part number for it.

In the end I got a contact of a guy who runs a drag car and works at a machine shop. He reckoned the wire gasket would probably just blow out again so ended up making me one out of thick copper sheet.

While there I replaced the studs and nuts and fastened it up nice and tight.
So close now, only a few things left to check. I filled her up with fluids and started to bleed the radiator, looks a bit funny with the radiator bleed hose coming out the bumper, but in the end it did the job.

Replaced the thermostat with a SARD high flow, low temp version and a new radiator cap to boot.

With fluids bled, the last part I had to sort out was the radiator fans. As the AC has been removed they were running full time. All the literature online said to loop the 2 pin connector on the AC switch in the frunk. However just to be difficult mine was a 4 pin. I eventually figured out how it works and saw that the outer pins needed to be looped to resolve the issue.

Finally after a long slog of finding new issues around every corner I was able to take her for a WoF (and pass). I’ve been finding excuses nearly every day to drive her again and thoroughly loving it.

Since changing the diff, wheels and bushings, the handling and driveability feels simply amazing. It’s night and day to how the car felt before. Though it probably still needs a decent wheel alignment yet it’s definitely time to get some more seat time in it.

[Soleman]

Update