My SW20 - Dandism-life

[lasersooby]

Good work mate, looks really good

[GDII]

Should grab a set of Toyota ball joints. Can't go wrong with the right part.

[Swampy]

Should grab a set of Toyota ball joints. Can't go wrong with the right part.

You're 100% right, but unfortunately I'm leaning towards moving on the SW in the future. Though I love the looks and the general feel of the SW, I also have a WRX that puts out more power at the same weight and can be enjoyed in bad weather and gravel too.. and that also needs $$$.

[Swampy]

4AFE SPAM INCOMING

After seeing Thorn's posts about the smartphone dyno app "PerfExpert" I thought I'd give it a go, as I have been learning about tuning more and more, and it seemed like a cheaper/better way to work things out than taking my ae101 to the drag strip after doing mods.

Now I dont want to make 4age power with a 4afe cos that's just expensive, boring and pointless and probably near impossible, but I would like to have a nice complete exhaust and good tyre/suspension/brake package.

Here's my results on 98; I'll probably have to find a better, flatter road for some more tests, as well as test with the stock air box and intake.



edit: disregard this as there is no way I did 7100rpm. Going by other tests on this date it is more in the region of 76hp and 100nm atw

[Swampy]

I really do love the SW, just it's time for me to work a bit harder towards a house deposit. And selling one toy is better than selling two

I purchased sway bar end links from Rock Auto, I think 3/4 of mine had seized nuts and the OEM parts are pretty expensive, so I had a go with Rock Auto. Something must've happened on their end/wrong part in wrong box etc and a different front link got sent to me, but its same length/thread just a bigger body where the ball joint sits so I'm sure it will work. Just need to purchase nylock nuts for it.. and for the top mounts too.





Installed 3/4 dust boots, I ordered 4 but something happened with/at Repco, could only find 3 so I'll get round to getting a 4th soon. I didn't do things properly when I installed lowering springs, but now I'm trying to.



I'm still waiting on an Amayama order, I bought spring insulators for the front, brake hose clips, and dust seals.

This strut mount had a seized, free spinning nut so I notched it with a grinding disc without trying to damage the car too much. It worked!



I'm just going to reuse my strut mounts, and source a second hand replacement for the broken one.

Now time for the dreaded "while I'm there"... I removed the brake calipers for a quick inspection and I will tidy these up as I have time.





I dont remember getting in trouble for brake imbalance or anything related to my rear brakes but that looks bad right? I see a tear in the boot, but might be worth just rebuilding the whole caliper?

Now I'll put everything back together and hopefully I'm allowed to get it on the chassis machine. This is probably the biggest step to getting this car repaired, everything after this is relatively straightforward (except for dropping the engine which I'd like to do to replace timing belt/waterpump/hoses etc), pretty much everything related to the engine is untouched since I owned it from May 2015/197kms apart from oil/oil filter/coolant.

[Benckj]

Uneven pad wear is from sticky calipers or hand brake issue. Really need to rebuild and grease up the sliders plus check handbrake operation. Not a huge job but if you haven’t done before best get an experienced hand to help. There are a few tricks to pulling apart as well as reassembly. Not the sort of job you want to get wrong.

[Swampy]

Uneven pad wear is from sticky calipers or hand brake issue. Really need to rebuild and grease up the sliders plus check handbrake operation. Not a huge job but if you haven’t done before best get an experienced hand to help. There are a few tricks to pulling apart as well as reassembly. Not the sort of job you want to get wrong.

Cheers.. I've disassembled a few calipers before and reassembled, but didn't swap new parts in. I'll definitely do some more research into it.

Also I forgot to add I'll be adding a new clutch. The biting point is super high and it's quite light, and burnt easily.

[Swampy]

Incoming 4AFE spam!

I managed to find a straighter, flatter stretch of road to test my daily out on, just outside Bruce McLaren race track to be precise.



I've been thinking about adjusting certain things to see if they've actually made a difference. Tonight I checked my timing. I found that it was set at 0deg BTDC. This was below spec of +10deg, so I aimed for +12. I found that on my engine, I could not rotate the distributor any further than +10, due to the bolt bracket design. You could probably make custom ones to get more ignition advance but meh.

Chuffed with the results, it actually made a difference!



Next up I'll remove my intake set up and re fit the factory one, and run it on the same fuel (98).

[85AW20v]

Regarding the distributor timing, check the cam belt timing as well - it might be a tooth out. That could explain why you couldn't get the movement you were expecting.

[Swampy]

My amayama order came in - dust seals, spring insulators, and two new brake hose clips. As did my rockauto order, so now my shock absorbers are fully assembled.



Also got some nylock nuts for my strut mounts and front sway end links (one came with standard nuts), got 6 m14x1.5 I think it is and 4 m10x1.25 for $25 from theboltholder.co.nz

I've since decided that doing one caliper isn't sufficient, so ordering parts for rebuilding the other side turned into also getting parts to rebuild the fronts. I spent $100 with rockauto last week on the remaining three, and some front pads. Confident theyll be here this week. Stripped the remaining calipers, and tidied them up.







Admittedly I've invested in a few tools too, namely a caliper wind back kit and a cylinder hone, and a grease gun for the ball joints. They came with nipples, which prevented them from fitting on the hub. So I got some M6x1.00 10mm bolts from Mitre10 and grinded them down til they actually had 10mm of thread and shaved a few mm off the heads due to clearance issues. I thought this would be a better approach than letting the ball joints have an open hole for them to leak grease/take in water and gunk.





Speaking of grease, after much research I selected Castrol LMM for the ball joints as according to the product data sheet it's good for high loads/shock and Ultratak 2 for the brakes as it's a lithium complex silicone based grease and has a high drop point = high temp/good for corrosive environments.



From what I gather it's a superior product to their red rubber grease. Their information isn't as thorough as Penrites but this is what I found on their website:



Also lightly went over my brake rotors with a wire wheel, masked, rust treated with brunox then painted with high temp black. Interesting to note that the fronts are similar size to the rear, they are quite small!







Currently my front suspension is all back together except for the sway bar, took a while but I cleaned up threads of old green threadlocker (I only have red loctite, should i invest in some medium strength stuff?), rust and gunk etc, applied copper grease, torqued to spec.

[Swampy]

I must apologise - I've been thinking about this for a while and I made a comment that I prefer my other car to this because of power etc etc. What I really meant was, that I'm more suited skill wise to the wrx, it's a more forgiving car. I didn't mean that wrx > mr2.. Yes my gf8 is faster in a straight line but that's only because its a comparison between a turbo and an n/a car.. A GT vs WRX/STI would be a better comparison for straight line speed. So I'm sorry, I didn't really think that previous statement out well.

Not really much has been done since the last post - put the SW in storage, I've got a vacuum bleeder that I will get round to using to bleed the brakes, and some other parts I raided at Zebra. I have the money now to confidently approach the boss and ask about getting it on the chassis machine and welding in a new lower A pillar section.


Before that though I want to also get a cheap borescope from trademe and find out why my suspension is making knocking noises. I think it could be arms are touching from being lowered or a bushing or two need replacing.

Mind the license plate placement, its just temporary


I'll keep the other car spam short and sweet but in a nutshell I've got parts coming in for the WRX as I've found the water leak. Initially I planned on replacing all hoses, but I found a few are out of production. So only viable option is having 2nd hand spares handy, though I have done some YouTube research on 3d printing suitable flexible filaments. The plan is to replace as much hoses I can in the name of preventative maintenance.

Ive been busy with the AE101. Admittedly I didn't lock out my ignition timing properly, would've been at like +20 btdc, maybe more with timing belt deflection factored in, but I quickly sorted that out.

Alot of wof stuff I've done, got a pedantic inspector who poked a hole in my wheel arch, and pointed out surface rust. Also rebuilt my rear drums which was a big job. Wheel cylinders were super leaky and rear brakes not performing well was picked up by wof man. Admittedly one night driving home from work I ran out of brake and had to drive really cautiously home. Found out that a wheel cylinder had leaked fluid everywhere.

Fitted NGK spark plug leads. Nothing wrong with mine, just I wanted these and they look nice.


did a sub+amp install which was my first attempt doing so




Basically a mish mash of cheap second hand parts and an amp I had laying round since new.




I soon realised being cheap wasn't gonna work, bought some working speakers from Wavetech.co.nz (who also supplied anything else I needed new, they're great)


I found that wiring my headunit power wire direct to battery worked best. Without it the power wasn't adequate for two speakers and it would cut out intermittently. I also run everything off the amp, with rca y-splitters turning the head unit's 2 RCA outputs to 4 inputs on the amplifier.

I also will likely be doing some bushes+an engine mount soon.

This is because I took my car to another wof man.. But hey it needs to be done and less stuff to fail on future inspections.

I also found these oem option parcel shelf speakers at pick a part. They work, but one is a bit crackly. Would be nice painted and with new stickers?

[Alsw20]

What was wrong with the original wiring harness behind the stereo for you to need to run a new power cable to the battery? You can either just cut the original Toyota plugs up and join the wires to your Sony harness or use a pair of ISO harnesses for plug and play (one Sony to ISO, then one ISO to Toyota)

The only reason your head unit would cut out is if the power or grounds weren’t secure. Little coaxial speakers aren’t going to do anything.

See if your amp can use high level inputs as well as the RCAs and throw away the Y splitters. Use the high level inputs for your two speakers, then bridge the spare channels to make the amp a three channel with the signal for the subwoofer lowpassed into the RCAs on the amp.

Your green power wire looks tiny for an amplifier, especially if it runs all the way to the hatch. Is it fused in-line with the battery?

[Swampy]

What was wrong with the original wiring harness behind the stereo for you to need to run a new power cable to the battery? You can either just cut the original Toyota plugs up and join the wires to your Sony harness or use a pair of ISO harnesses for plug and play (one Sony to ISO, then one ISO to Toyota)

The only reason your head unit would cut out is if the power or grounds weren’t secure. Little coaxial speakers aren’t going to do anything.

See if your amp can use high level inputs as well as the RCAs and throw away the Y splitters. Use the high level inputs for your two speakers, then bridge the spare channels to make the amp a three channel with the signal for the subwoofer lowpassed into the RCAs on the amp.

Your green power wire looks tiny for an amplifier, especially if it runs all the way to the hatch. Is it fused in-line with the battery?

I just tried to do it as cheap as I could, hence the second hand parts. The harness I got with the stereo was cut by previous owner, so I just Solder spliced everything in.

My amp can definitely use high level inputs, good point I'll look into it. Not sure if the headunit can though, it must be about 10 years old.

It's 8 gauge, and there's a fuse close to the battery.

[Alsw20]

Yeah high level inputs are the speaker wires. There should have been a high level input plug with the amp, connect the corresponding speaker wires to the wires on the plug.

[james_zemah]

Damn only just seen this thread and I have to say its a nice build you got going... but where the hell did you find an Original Sard Bumper? I'm obsessed with it