Just to share whats been happening, I will be staying with a 4AGE 16V but it will most likely be a replacement engine. I'll keep my engine for a rebuild in the future. By future I mean long term plans, nothing anytime soon.
Reason being that I thought the car was fun enough with the stock engine and autobox, so with a manual it will be more than enough fun. Also I want to keep the car mostly original with a few light modifications.
I'm pretty busy with uni this year but I have been working on the car little by little, just doing small jobs that need to be done for the manual swap + engine replacement.
The engine and box still aren't out, but its almost ready to happen.
Removed the rear spoiler to make it easier to work on (this was the last time the car was outside the garage):
Removing parts/lines/wires:
This is currently how the engine bay is. I need to remove the axles from the wheels (apparently the wheels should not be loaded after removing the axles according to manual? or maybe I just read it incorrectly since I was scanning). Also need to remove start cable connectors which seems a little difficult, after this I can probably drop the engine and box.
Like I said I'm pretty busy and because I couldn't find time to drop the engine, I did some other jobs instead.
Like removing auto shifter:
Cool to see stuff like this made of metal, now a days everything seems to be plastic:
A while ago I stumbled across a facelift AW at Zebra parts. I shared the find in the parts section, see here:
http://mr2.org.nz/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13544. I got a few bits and pieces from that car...
It was actually kind of unnecessary since after that I just bought a complete manual swap from user "vcut214", his parts were in nicer condition than the zebra parts car too. Thank you vcut214 by the way, appreciate it. So now I have two of certain parts... oh well.
Here are the manual swap parts:
Actually everything above apart from the gearbox was from the zebra parts car, I didn't take pics of the parts I got from user "vcut214" which are the parts I will be using.
NOTE: I know these aren't all the parts required, I just don't have pics of everything.
I wanted the replacement odometer to match the kilometers exactly of my car. So that's what I did. By the way, I want to change to a manual odometer so I can have a volt meter and the cool red stripes on the tacho. That is reason enough for me.
My cars odo reading:
Replacement meters reading:
New reading which matches exactly with my cars reading:
On the back of the instrument cluster there is a speed warning chime often found on old Japanese cars. The cover had quite a bit of surface rust so I decided to clean it up a little:
The method I used was electrolysis because I was too lazy to sand it:
bubbles are hydrogen and oxygen gas:
Finished result, not bad I'd say. It was actually very smooth:
Just on the side, here is a video I took of the chime in action. Again I think its pretty cool to see things like this, never see them on newer cars:
Here is just a random pic I took which I thought looked kind of cool:
Alright so more recently I cleaned up and refreshed the shifter mechanism:
I then looked at the mounting bracket for the shifter and pedals and thought they could also use a little cleaning up. I again used electrolysis to remove the rust and then coated the parts in a rust preventative coating:
Disassembled brake pedal assembly:
Parts cleaned of all dirt and oil before electrolysis:
Unfortunately no pics of electrolysis that I can find but here are the parts after rust coating:
I cleaned the pedal bushings and re-greased, unfortunately no pics of re-greased parts because my hands were too dirty:
Shifter installed into car:
Finally where I am up to currently. The transmission is pretty dirty so I'll be cleaning it up. I made a start but ran out of degreaser and didn't have an appropriate brush.
Okay, that's about it for now. Sorry for all the mismatched photo sizes, hard to keep it consistent with vertical/horizontal shots and different cameras.