I have a 89 S/C AW11, since I bought it almost 3 years ago now I have been working on it (or waiting for parts). For all this time I have some "progress" to show hahaha. First its important that you know that when I bought this car i had no knowledge of cars... seriously I didn't know how to change an oil filter (or where the sump bolt is). This pretty much sum's me up at the time. The car is an endless sauce of stories and trouble but never fails to have a smile on my face by the end of the day. I bought it down in Parmy and my god has it been hard to get it clear of the mistreatment by previous owners. I live in Auckland and saw the car on trade me for $2000 on a Friday, started hassling my mates to road-trip down with me to get the cars home. Didn't have much luck till I called the mate i should have prolly called first (by now it was midnight) and he was "I'll see you in 20 min". So we cannon-balled down and slept in my Corolla (now decided) to sleep in the car park for three hours out-side a Bunnings before heading over to view the car at 8:30. Got to the car and it was an MR2 AW11 for 2 grand, was a bit of a mess but was 2G and I was poor so money was exchanged and we were back on the road. That trip I was pretty sure I loved the car, watching my mate drive as he overtook me and a turbo Legacy (any Legacy with GT badge is turbo) through the Desert Road like we were sitting still.
Looked shabby when I got it (still looks shabby). There were 14 tacky stickers all over it (as if there are stickers that aren't tacky, ha!), the seats were worn, the PO was a smoker, a cripple (so there were hand controls in it), and at some point someone had decided that the car needed new paint and using from what i can tell a paint brush to do this... As well as this it was an auto and a few other things that don't come to mind immediately.
So i knew that the first task was to get a manual gearbox in it. Short story is it took me 5 gearbox's to finally make it work! First i got a 6 speed 4AGE box but the shifter linkages are on the wrong side and it was $450 to have the leads extended, I just decided to buy my second gearbox. Second was a n/a AW11 box from Spartan auto, drive shafts would not fit from the auto box. So i imported one from Japan (which took MONTHS!). This was the right box BUT as of course it would be our beloved cars have different drive shafts for Auto S/C, Manual S/C, and N/A gearbox. i was ready to spit tacks but instead just bout a full manual conversion set from CHCH for $1300 bucks plus shipping. So smacked in the axles and pulled it all back together and turned the key!!!... Nothing happened. Why would it? I mean i should have known that it wasn't gonna "just work". So after working out how to trick the automatic ECU into thinking that it was in park to let the car start i tried again. Still nothing. Luckily for me one of my mates loves Alfa Romaos making him an electrical fault expert given the shoddy electronics in Alfa's. The cable that ran from the positive on the battery to the starter was totally rotted out with corrosion and with a new cable the car roared into life without crash starting
. But the troubles of the manual conversion weren't over! There was no third gear... This was an easy fix though as you can just adjust the linkages at the gear stick and it worked. (If you ever attempt a conversion and like me have not ever worked on a car before i recommend that you PM me for a list of what you need, if i were to do it again i could do it in a weekend, seriously i have only said a couple of the issues i ran into).So now i had a Manual S/C AW11. Next on my build agenda was to get the car road legal and improve handling and general "Drivibility". Which I don't think is a word but to me it means "anything that makes the car different without modifying the engine or drive line". This includes seats, suspension, steering wheel, short shifter, steering rack ect. So i set to work buying things from a new friend "2sRUS". Those guys are heroes. Suspension bushes, tie rods, short shifter, brass shifter bushes that stuff. At the same time i went to Barry Manon and bought a set of AW11 Coilovers. It is important to mention at this point that there were some issues with MRP, Barry though is very easy to deal with and a great help so despite the complications i would still recommend dealing with these guys as the have a good product. Put everything in (eventually) and went for cert with Clint Field. Once again i recommend Clint. He's a pretty cool guy and will give you an honest cert if your cars safe. The last place that I would recommend is TTT Auto and Tim who works there for any rust work (or any work seriously this guy is onto it for making cars go fast without the enormous price tag, best of all though is that he is genuinely passionate about cars and particularly Toyota's).
So now got WOF, Reg and CERT!!!! Little car is legal! List of mods atm is Coil Overs, Bucket Seats, Manual G/box, removed hand controls, moved battery to front, short shifter, replace (most) suspension bushes, Rear Tie rod ends, braided break lines, removed A/C, Boost Gauge, fixed a ton of rust (and still more to find).
Next stage will be a new engine. This took a lot of thinking, a LOT. When I got the car I i planned to swap in a 3SGTE because i liked that it was the engine intended in the SW20. The advantages to this swap would be more torque, more HP with the disadvantage of more weight and a longer stroke cause a much less revvy engine. I want a revvy (and responsive responsive) engine but i don't want a Honduh. So other options as i saw it was 4AGE, 7AGE, 5SGTE (because torque would be worth it). So 4AGE is cheap with little work (comparatively) with the lowest displacement and best reving
7AGE is awesome in concept. It is a true TUNERS engine in my mind, but really its only 200cc over the 4AGE and looses the revvyness that is really most central to my build concept. 5SGTE man this would just be a laugh. I would want it to rev as i go past people and make them think what the F@#K is in that little car. Also dat TORQUE! Ironically after months thinking about it and being sure of a different option being the best every week i finally settled on a 4AGE Blacktop. Next decition was N/A S/C or +T. N/A is cool, i mean no-one does it these days! However even wringing the balls off it you can only make 250 HP out of a Blacktop (in before formula Atlantic only made 240HP talk to the top engine builders in the country and they will tell you the the 20v makes way better power than the 16v which could only make 240). An admirable power but that is at like 9000RPM and has about a 30 hour life span, I wanna be able to drive around town so even a more mild N/A build will be a little weak on power. S/C was my next favorite choice, once again no-one does it any more! Especially on low displacement engines like the 4AGE. So the research commenced. There are actually 3 very different types of S/C (scroll type too but doesn't count), Roots type, Screw type and Centrifugal S/C. Roots type is good for Drag racing, but creates too much heat to be practical in circuit racing (or street power). Screw Typetype is the most "super-chargery super charger. By this i mean that this will give you like 12psi of boost at 1500RPM, which sounds MAAAAAAD! but think about it a little more. That's pretty sweet, 4AGE has good up top in N/A form and with this is would be good all round right? Well not quite. This would give you WAY better low down, no argument there, but this type of supercharger has the biggest parasitic effect on the engine, what this means is that the higher you rev the S/C takes exponentially more power to keep up causing the engine to actually be weaker that if it didn't have it, as well as heating your charge. Cool in theory but i would suspect a lot less exciting in execution 
. So centrifugal S/C then? Well, the centrifugal supercharger is actually a belt driven turbo. Sorry but it is. Its just a turbo that runs off the crank and isn't as good. (I will say though that it has the least parasitic effect of the S/C's, generates the least heat, and is able to create the most boost so is actually the best for a 4AGE but still... turbo is just better I'm not happy about it either!). So 4AGTE Blacktop? 4AGTE Blacktop! So i already have the engine and all the parts for a practice rebuild that will go into my Carib. Then rebuild the Carib engine with slightly better parts and more experience and pop that into the MR2, find a turbo and make up a manifold and work though turbos till i find one that suits. then cams to suit that turbo!
. The reason that I wanted to shorten the intake, is that I suspected that shortening the intake would improve throttle response. My reasoning being there would be less air that needs to accelerate in order to get to the engine. The intake in the AW11's is ridiculously long (at least in the S/C models, not sure about N/A). The factory system has a nice K/N air box but no practical way to keep it with the amount of work I was willing to put into this. So to start off I removed the I/C followed by pulling out a WHOLE LOT of piping from the boot (as well as the carpet and sound dettening which revealed some pretty serious rust). Then I pulled out the AFM and looked at the engine bay for a while to get an idea of what I could do. I wanted to spin the metal 90* bend that goes into the S/C by 180*, and have the intake next the the little vent in the side of the chassis. However that looked like more work than I was willing to put into this engine given that I plan to swap it pretty soon for a Blacktop. So I went for a much more simplistic option! By unbolting the AFM and rotating the join just downstream of it I was able to angle it across the top of the gearbox, next I just put a pod filter on the end and BOOM! Shorter intake! This removed about 1.5M of intake piping and three 90* bends as well as keeping a consistent pipe diameter. Given the amount of work (and money) involved in this I was happy with the theoretical improvement (even if it not a cold air intake) so now just to test it out! I work on this car out at Beathells beach and there are some fun roads about there so after putting it though some twistys I had a opinion. What the ass dyno told me was something quite different to what I had hoped to get from this mod. Rather than any increase in response (which I thought I felt but not enough to think is was anything more than wistful thinking) was that it ran a LOT nicer towards redline. What I used to feel if I shifted at redline was a massive kick in the ass as I moved into the next gear. I believe that this kick was as the engine dropped back into peak torque, this opinion was backed up in my mind by the way that the car seemed to accelerate a lot slower if reved to redline (and past where the engine made most of its power) rather than shifting earlier at 5000 or so. Well now that the intake has been shortened there is no longer a kick when shifting from redline. So now I wasn't sure that torque had just been lost due to the hotter intake charge (given proximity to I/C and other hot stuff). So there is only one half way near strait away along the Beathells road from my place to the beach and I have made it my goal for a while now to get as fast as possible along this straight before breaking as late as possible, not the most reliable test but a test none the less. I was able to reach 15km faster along this straight, before breaking, with the new intake compared with my previous record. This is enough for me to believe there is a improvement from the mod 
Engine back in and everything plugged in and turn the key..... CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK *&%$#@! neutral. So after lots of fiddling and mucking about the decision was made to crash start it. AND IT STARTED!!! Only it sounded like shit. Timing is off somewhere but I can't work it out. And bloody starter is not being as helpful as it was in my head either (what with the CLICK CLICK CLICK and all)
