My First Build

[Tosh21]

After 3 years of saving up no claims I can finally afford the insurance on an altezza so I bought one recently.

This is the car when I bought it



Not too long after..



Managed to get her to work where she's been for a few weeks now



Somehow I got away with it and the only damage was: front bumper in 4 bits (planned to get rid of the bodykit anyway), bent lower arm, dented wing, dented bonnet and broken rim



Welded the wheel back together so that I can roll her in and out the workshop



Wing before



Wing after I hammered it back out, quick skim of filler and sanding. unmatched paint just to seal it for now untill I can get matched paint



New lower arm is fitted just waiting for payday to buy a set of alloys, do the tracking and get some paint.

In the next 2 weeks I plan to finish the bonnet, replace the plastic front floor thing with a nice aluminium one I'm making and make a PAS cooler.

End goal is to have 250bhp N/A, individual throttle bodies, custom air box, custom full stainless system maybe Inconel if I can find some lying about :p ported head and good remap but that's probably going to take a while so will update as things happen!

An advice or opinions welcome, I tend to overcomplicate things

[mlcoolj]

nice project! Lucky you to work at that shop! About porting the head.. I don't know if that is of any use, the 3SGE in the Tezz is already tuned pretty good. Remapping the stock ecu won't work, you're better off going standalone or piggyback, especially now that you want to go ITB's

[Tosh21]

Done some general bits on the car while waiting for wheels and tyres to arrive. Replaced the thermostat which turned out to be the hardest thing in the world! For anyone planning to do one I'd suggest dropping the manifold out, gives you lots more space and you can just pull the whole hose up with the housing attached to it.
Finished up the bodywork and considering I've never done body panel panels before and didn't have matching paint she looks alright!



Finally got some wheels. Look 100 times better than the old ones



Way bigger than before!



How she sits now and probably where she will sit for another few weeks I do plan to get the same wheels for the front too eventually.



Next problem was finding wheel nuts to fit. Had a mad rush trying to find some tuner nuts local. Eventually got the wheels on and thought finally I can drive it after a month of walking past her every morning! But no....from one problem to the next.

Went for a little drive and engine kept going into limp mode. Instant panic but after a chat to the engine department they instantly noticed it was a misfire pointing to a faulty coil pack.
Great. turns out they are really hard to get hold of! Unless I get them from Toyota and pay a small fortune. Going to try a facelift one and see what the difference actually is between the 2, there doesn't seem to be much info about them apart from one being longer but that's easy to get round.
Also turns out my coils need one hell of a refurb. locking rings are completely gone and one fell off when I touched it! Hopefully Tein can supply me with bits at a decent price or I'm going to have to pull a huge favour from machine shop.
Hope I can get the car back on the road soon and fully built up with a new front and rear bumper and spray the damaged parts so I can start my proper drift build.

[Tosh21]

Been a busy few weeks for me! Got under the car to have a good look over stuff, coilovers needed some urgent loving.

The rings on my dampers were slightly corroded



Bit fell off when I had the impact gun on the bolt holding the damper to the lower arm!

Rear topmounts were fully shot too



Rings cos £130 and I couldn't find topmounts so would have to call up tein and probably pay a small fortune.
Decided to screw that idea and went to machine shop. Got some topmounts and rings CNC'd The guys in machine shop decided to use some aerospace grade aluminium and then i got them anodized so they will probably outlive me! Happy days.

This is what I got back from anodizing





Also cleaned up my dampers as they were very rusty and the threads were horrible so cleaned the threads out, sandblasted the body, primer filler and a bit of paint. Also put them on the dyno and they came back absolutely mint!



Next it was time to fit them back on the car!

The new setup



Set the height so that there was a tiny bit of preload in the springs, thinking it would sit at a nice height. Worked well for the rears but the front is MEGA slammed.

Got enough rake?



Excuse my friend in the car being an idiot... lol also not keeping it as is, I will raise the front a bit and maybe lower the rear a touch.

So all seemed good at this point. Went for a long test drive got everything hot and ran it for about an hour mainly crusing with a few hard blasts. Exhaust stopped smoking, car stopped stalling and coolant stopped draining. All sounded very nice too and very healthy.
Very happy! Until the day after. Turned it on after work and suddenly there is a HORRENDOUS noise from the engine. Looked under couldn't see anything obvious, it's like a very loud knock coming from the camshaft on the right. Sounds like a diesel... :S It did this on my test drive so I left it for a while and started it again and it went away so I assumed the power fc's shitty map retarded or advanced the timing too much for idle as it did seem to sound a wee bit better with some revs. Also, I replace a coilpack a few weeks ago with a post facelift model which seemed to be ok but noticed today it's actually not firing so I'm running 3 cylinders again...

Gonna see if I can find a proper pre facelift pack and see if it sorts out the noise. If so, I will be driving it daily for a week to give it a proper test and put some miles on it see if I have any issues. If that solves it, I will look at sorting out other little bits and bobs like the lights behind the center console and other little bits. Plus a front under tray.

Fingers crossed!

[beamsteza]

Pity I just sold two preface lift coils to an other member they were in the for sale section.

[Tosh21]

agh gutted! Hopefully toyota can get me one at a fairly decent price

[Tosh21]

Called up toyota, £120 for a coilpack :O had a wee heart attack! Got that on the car and it still sounded really bad. I was sure it was a timing problem and right enough there was a huge split all the way along the timing belt. Got a new belt and changed that on friday. Did some poking about to see if there was a reason why it was sounding like a diesel and I noticed a stone wedged in one of the teeth of an idler pulley! I am so lucky it didn't skip timing and blow up. After double checking and double double checking again to make sure I was timed up got the new belt on and fired up. Sounded very healthy got an awesome full days driving over the sunny saturday but unfortunately that was it. Was dropping my friend off and suddenly she jumped into limp mode. Luckily I was close to work so managed to get her back safely. Engine sounds as good as my mums brand new lexus so I'm putting it down to a sensor or just the power fc panicking otherwise I'd hear something wrong. I'm going to have rebuilt the entire car by the time it's driving again

[Soiled]

If you're looking for genuine Toyota parts, email Nick the site trader. He'll do much better prices than £120 a coil!!

[Tosh21]

Not done much work on the car, been to busy making an exhaust system for someone on the forum but I took a day out to work on mine and she's finally back on the road running a standard ECU as I took the power fc out so I could run a diagnostic on the car, put it back in after a few days and it wont rev past 2K.
Also got an IS200 bumper, It's nice to be able to leave the car really low but still be able to go over speed bumps.



No more updates for a few weeks probably as I'm away pretty much all of summer so need to get the exhaust out the way asap. She's booked in for a map first week in June, can't wait to see what it's putting out and run the power fc again, the standard ecu is so dam slow!

Have to get the car mapped, bumper filled and painted, wing and bonnet painted, gas struts on the bonnet, some wiring for the heaters sorting out and a front undertray/sumpguard so the car is finished and ready for the very long drive to lemans n june.

[Tosh21]

Finally s got some time to work on the car. Fixed the heater issue so now I finally have A/C! Was getting pretty toasty blowing constant hot air in this hot weather. Also attacked my headunit. The old one looked like it was from the stone age so I got a nice double din touchscreen unit which my friend had lying about.

The wiring was an absolute mess! Also figured out why I only had one working speaker...some retard only wired in one speaker and left the rest of the loom in bits.



About 3 hours later we managed to find out which wires were speakers and got it all wired nice. Got rid of all the excess wiring and now it's nice and tidy.



Had to cut the facia back a bit to fit the unit but it fits pretty nice. Needs a bit of filler and paint to clean it all up but will do for now.



Bumper is away getting fixed, mapping getting done in a few weeks and that's pretty much it. She's starting to come together quite nicely.

[Tosh21]

Totally forgot about this. Fitted a PAS cooler in anticipation of drifting and it boiled quite quickly just from a hard drive. Got myself a little core and got my friend to make the tanks and weld them on with fittings because I didn't have time to do it myself (wish I done it myself now. Have to cut them off and re-do it now) For some reason he decided to put both fittings on the bottom instead of one top and one bottom like a normal cooler so the oil only runs through the bottom few veins (which turns out is ok because It's incredibly efficient at cooling) So I got it mounted, fitted some braided hoses to it and machined an adapter so I could go from the standard fitting to the -6 fitting on the hose.

Looking nice



Made a reservoir




Filled it up with some super high quality ATF at about 3 A.M and ran it. Kept filling and trying to bleed but there was loads of air in the system and It refused to bleed. I spent AGES trying different things to make it work but to no avail so come 7 A.M I gave up and went back to my bench to start my shift. Pretty dam hard to fabricate after 25 hours working flat out that's for sure. Eventually I realised it's because the fittings are both on the bottom so the top of the core wasn't getting any fluid it just circulated air so I turned the cooler upside down (had to mount it with fittings on the bottom, can't remember why but there was a reason) I ran the car for a while and kept topping the tank up until finally it stopped making noise and the fluid level settled. Flipped it back over, mounted it and took it for a test happy to say it was all fine and working. Haven't had any problems with it since and it's doing a pretty amazing job. the tank is right above the manifold and even after a hard drive I can touch the oil, going to have to blank it off over winter I think..It's probably freeze!

[Tosh21]

Finally got my bumper back from repair. It's not amazing, slightly flatter than before and a bit wider but considering it was in 4 bits It ain't too bad.



Got some paint and just rattle canned it. Not too bothered about it matching as I will go full respray at some point anyway. Plus going to finish the engine before I bother with making it look super nice.



Looks alright for a wee spray with a rattle can on the drive.

Going to try build the engine fully in a month, pretty big task but worth it! Head is coming off next week for a wee port and polish, polish the chamber too try and reduce carbon build up, give everything a good clean. Probably take the pistons out and give them a decent clean and inspection too so the engine is all nice and sexy inside. Plus it will be easier to make ITB's fit.

Got loads of cooling to do. Already have a big ass rad so just a case of getting it fit and making a header tank, PAS cooler will now be an oil cooler and will use a small transmission cooler for the PAS, need to find an intercooler, wideband, dump valve and a MAP sensor.

Going to run ITB's with a plenum and a turbo so I'm looking to run 280bhp, Using the ITB's to bring power up so that I can keep the boost a bit lower.

Hoping to build one hell of an engine for next to nothing and just go from there. Always wanted to own a car that's a little bit insane

[Steve86]

U making some good progress mate!

[Tosh21]

Just back from lemans...what a weekend! I was the only one playing about which kinda sucked but was still pretty good. Definitely got in a bit of trouble that's for sure

Took some spare wheels to shred and give the car some serious abuse to see how she holds up (testing in france instead of at home, crazy I know) She didn't miss a beat. Sat on the limiter alot and at 5-6k rpm for 8 hours on the motorways so done pretty well!

There was alot of this going on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjmiDWEsjI

Eventually bits of rubber started flying through the window so I thought I should stop and check em out.

oops



Love a clutch plate lsd in these situations, absolutely perfect.

So finally made it back somehow and got straight to smashing a turbo on my car.

Started by taking the head off to give it a proper clean, get rid off all the carbon, smoth the combustion chamber, lap the valves, new seals etc just for piece of mind that the engine is mint before I go throwing a turbo at it.

It was quite the mess!




Nice looking head. I can see how they get so much power out the engine now, that's a very well built head!



Engine looks tiny with just a block! Not too sure how I'm going to put it all back together, my car is rammed with bits of engine. Going to be fun figuring that bad boy out!



Going to start stripping the head tomorrow and polishing the exhaust port. Hopefully be at a stage where I can start mocking up a manifold after my holiday.

[j0hann3s]

Great topic. Good updates, looking forward to see your engine-rebuild progress and turbo'ing it.