Headaches

Well I haven't really been doing this blogging thing very much lately, but I've been up here for the past four days slaving away at the Supra, and will be doing a bunch more tomorrow. Basically, right now the Supra is sitting in the garage on jackstands with no rear end, and three partial subframes and all sorts of rear end parts on the floor everywhere beside it. But there is some sort of method to my madness, and hopefully everything should be at least put back together tomorrow, if not back on the car. I'll go over a bit of what's been done!

First, when I got here on Sunday I got straight to work on the car. My uncle grabbed a forklift from down the street and we used that to jack up the car and pull it out of the garage where it has been sitting (easier than moving it 3 feet at a time due to the floppy wheel), and I drove it next door into his garage, which has much more space for working. Then I got working on getting everything unbolted, which was mostly successful except for unbolting the exhaust, where I ended up snapping the heads off of two bolts on the back of the cat.
The only other nuts that gave me any sort of trouble where the axle nuts, which were on there really tight (obviously). I ended up actually breaking the end off of a breaker bar (which is pictured below) while trying to loosen it on the car. Everything else came off without a problem and I dropped the rear end out of the car that night and left it for the next day. It was pretty interesting to get to look at the damage to that lower control arm with it off the car and how bad it really was. There's a picture of that below too.

I spent Monday and Tuesday mainly taking parts off of the JZA70 subframe and swapping them over to the cleaner one that we previously put the yellow bushings in. We ran into some problems with this again with the cam shaped bolts that bolt the bigger lower control arm to the subframe. The bolts have cams on either side for alignment of the control arm, but they're in a really bad location for rusting and seizing just because of all the stuff kicking up into that area from the tires.
I'd previously had a problem with that bolt when trying to take it off of the rear end I got from my friends shop, and we ended up having to cut the control arm out of the subframe and drill out the bolt. So I had to order a new control arm and cam bolt from a member of Supramania, which turned out to be a great help and is now on the cleaner subframe.
However, when trying to get the cam bolt off of the JZA70 rear end for the undamaged control arm, I ran into the same problem. So we had to cut that out of the subframe as well, and drilled the bolt out of the control arm and used the previous one. It's difficult to explain without confusing myself, just know that my rear end is now composed of like 5 different cars.

After all that was sorted out we were left with one difficult task, which was getting the axle out of the hub on the JZA70 rear end. The TT-R with the torsen diff has different axles than a normal clutch-type LSD from the rest of the Supras, so I was forced to keep the same axles, but obviously had to change the spindle due to the damage on it. Just so you can see how twisted the spindle was, here is a picture (hint; look where the LCA bolts at the top of the picture there).

The TSRM says that you are supposed to just take a large hammer and slam on the axle to get it out, which we tried, among many other things, but it wouldn't budge. The axle from the MA70 rear end came out just fine (because I'm using the spindle from that rear end), but the JZA70 one would not move at all. After a bunch of hammering we just got upset with it and got out the sledgehammer. After a few pounds on a punch with the sledge hammer it eventually came out. It took a lot longer than expected, but it eventually got done. The wheel-side end of the axle ended up popping off and coming out of the boot, but that's not really the end of the world, we're just going to put it back in tomorrow and get everything ready to go back in the car.
The rear end that I got from the shop didn't have the brake dust shields on it for whatever reason (did it actually have anything useful, though?) so I had to use the back plate, including the parking brake stuff, from the JZA70. So we had to press out the hub and bearing and all that and transfer everything over, which my uncle Rick had done in no time in his amazing garage of endless tools.

So I returned back to my Supra's home with a trunk full of rear end parts tonight (picture below) and tomorrow will be tackling putting them all back together and onto the rear end, and hopefully getting it back into the car. I'm not sure if that will actually all happen tomorrow, but it would certainly be nice.
In the picture is the spindles and such from the MA70 and JZA70, one axle from the MA70 LSD, and the axle from the torsen in two pieces.

Overall it's been going pretty well, and if everything goes to plan I will actually get to reverse my car more than three feet for the first time tomorrow. Maybe even take it for a short drive and get it out of first gear! I'm not too sure about that though, because I'd still like to change all the fluids in the car before I get it on the road, the oil is looking pretty bad... Anyways, I'll stop avoiding this blogging and will make another one with the progress tomorrow. In the meantime, I will leave you with a picture of how the car is sitting right now without it's rear end, and my awesome helper for all of this, Lady! Whenever I take a break from working on the car I go and play soccer with her, she's much better than me!

Well, this blogging thing wasn't working on Thursday so I wasn't able to write anything on here, but I got a bit done. The rear end that I picked up from the shop near here turned out to really not be in the greatest condition. I started going at the surface rust to clean it up, but the rust underneath it was just too bad for my liking. I don't want the rust to spread onto my car, and for something like a subframe I'm just not comfortable having excessive rust on it if I'm going to be making decent power. I probably should have noticed this when picking it up, but you win some you lose some. Here's a picture of that rear end:


So I ended up using the subframe that Nanci and I had picked up in Ohio a while ago because it was much cleaner. The bushings ended up being incredibly easy to get out and in. The whole thing took my uncle and I about 5 minutes. We knocked the stock bushings out (which were still in great condition) with no problem, greased it up a little bit and put the Ronnie K polyurethane bushings in. Here's a picture of it sitting with the new yellows in.


Tomorrow I'll be going back at it. The plan for now is to take the lower control arm and spindle off of that other rear end and clean them up a bit and put them on this subframe, and take the rest of the parts from the rear end on the JZA70, including the torsen differential. I'm going to keep the clutch-type LSD and axles that came with the extra rear end just incase, because torsen is a pretty bad choice for any type of drag or drifting, but torsen is great for circuit, which is most of what I'll be doing with this car.
Anyways, I'll be taking pictures over the next two days of hopefully getting everything done and swapped over. That's all I have for now!

Update

Well it's been about a month and a half since I last updated this, but I have a good reason! I managed to twist my foot around and tear a good number of ligaments in my ankle nearly in half, so I've been off my foot for a few weeks now, and haven't really had an opportunity to get up to the car and work on it, since as soon as I was able to walk again I had to do as much school and work as possible.
I'm currently up with the car right now though, and will be working all through today and tomorrow to get as much done as I can and hopefully have it done by mid-next week.

As of right now, I'm just getting everything ready to go into the car. I've received all my parts in my time off, which is definitely good news. I ended up ordering my polyurethane subframe bushings directly from Ronnie K. in New Zealand so I've had them sitting around for a while and they look great (I don't have much of a good way of taking pictures right now so I can't upload a picture of them, I will try to tomorrow though). Today I just got to work making sure the intercooler is going to fit on properly and figuring out what the problems with the car are.
The first obvious problem was the hydrofan fluid leak, and it looks like it's coming from the soft part of the return line from the hydrofan, there are some really small cuts in it that flow a fair amount of fluid out of them, so I'll have to replace that hose with something to get that stopped. I'm also getting the engine running pretty rough, it doesn't want to hold a constant RPM, so I'm going to be checking for vacuum leaks tomorrow, as well as doing a compression test just out of interest (I haven't done one yet!). Here's a picture of it running in my garage for a little while just to warm it up and figure out where the leaks are. Don't mind the odd white pipe you see down there in the place of the intercooler. That was another doing of the previous owner due to a boost leak from the intercooler...who knows.


Gas also jumped WAY up in price, it's now $1.41 per liter for 87 octane, which is crazy expensive, and the 94 that I put in the Supra is much worse, so that may have a bit of effect on when I get the car onto the road too!

Tomorrow I'll be going at the rear end I picked up with some wire brushes to scrape all that rust off, and painting it up nicely. My uncle and I will be attempting to pry out the 20 year old stock bushings and put in the new poly's as well, and that way everything will be ready to get swapped over. I'll probably be back on Monday or Tuesday (or both!) to actually swap the part over, and if everything goes to plan I'll be able to take it for it's first real drive around the block on Tuesday! I'm beyond excited for that, it'll be nice to drive the car farther than 5 feet!
Here's a picture of it sitting around with the Accord to end this off, hopefully I'll have a bit more frequent updates now, but I'm just coming up on final exams so there won't be too much until after that!

Parts

Well I've finally managed to get all the parts I need to get the JZA70 back together and rolling legally at least. That includes the rear end, intercooler, coolant reservoir, new foglights (DRL's on this car) and a new battery. They aren't all in my hands yet, but they're on the way at least.
On Saturday Nanci and I went by Pur Auto to pick up the rear end from a 89+ turbo Supra they had there which I found to be much easier than just getting parts and reassembling everything around the subframe I picked up a month ago. We used an engine hoist to drop it in the back of a Honda CR-V and drove it an hour and a half up to where the Supra is sitting right now and engine hoisted it back out of the CR-V, so it's tucked away in the corner of the garage now. Here's a picture of it before we dropped it down onto a creeper and pushed it to the side. Clearly it's got a fair deal of surface rust but it'll all be cleaned up before it goes in.

All I'm waiting for now to get that in is my Ronnie K poly subframe bushings, which I'm kind of stuck on right now for where I'm going to get them from because there are two options, but I should have them by this coming weekend with either option.
The other thing I need for it to actually drive is the replacement intercooler, and I'm going to go with the driftmotion hard pipe kit with the big front mount, but for now I just want something to make it move, so I bought just a stock JZA70 intercooler to stick on there for the time being. So once all that stuff is done it will be good to go, besides changing fluid for the differential, doing an oil change, refilling the coolant (noticed I'm somehow missing my coolant reservoir!), and refilling the fan fluid. The fan fluid was a bit of a surprise to me because I'd never heard of that before, but apparently these cars came stock with a hydrofan. The reservoir is empty so I'm assuming it is leaking, which would explain the thick fluid dripping while the car is running. It's a big relief to me that it's ATF from the fan rather than oil from the engine!

On Sunday the 20th we got a bit of work done, I began removing the bumper (which turned out to be not so easy on these cars, there's roughly 4 million bolts holding it in in the hardest-to-get-to places they could find). We did get the fender off though, so I'm going to get back to hunting down another one to put on there so I don't have to drive around with it missing. Getting the fender off was a challenge of it's own as it requires you to push your arm all the way through the fender up to the front by the header panel. Nanci's small arms definitely helped out with finding the bolts because there was no way my arm was getting in there that far!
We got the back jacked way up to swap the rear end in, but I've decided to do the actual swap somewhere else just down the road, so for now to avoid another tow truck, we're going to weld the control arm to the hub and just drag it 5 minutes down the road and swap it there. It's ghetto, I know, but it will get the job done better, especially since the floor of the garage where it is now isn't the most even surface.
Here's a picture where you can see the big crack running down the middle. It's not actually in the way, but it would make it a little more difficult to maneuver the rear end around on the floor jack.


All in all most of it went pretty well. I managed to snap the head off of one bolt holding the front bumper on under the foglight, so that's going to be stuck in there I believe, but since there's four bolts there in total it's not going to make a huge difference anyway. I also just pulled the bolts out of the bumper support to make it a little easier to get the bumper off, and they manged to get a bit mangled too, here's a picture of the left side showing how a bracket should be, and the right side showing off how to be mangled.


So overall it's coming along quite well, and hopefully within the next two weeks it will be good to go, and by May I plan to have it registered and legally driving around on the road! That's all for now, I leave you with a picture of my missing fender (which actually allows my driver door to open!), and you can see the fan fluid reservoir poking out of the engine bay there too.

Home Again

Last night we finally got the JZA70 out of storage and up to it's winter home where I'll be working on it. It went incredibly smoothly and way easier than moving it before, surprisingly. I was originally planning to somehow reverse it onto the flatbed so that I could drive it forward into the garage, but I wasn't able to get a hold of the guy I used last time with the smooth backed flatbed, so I decided to just go forward on a regular flatbed and figure it out when we got there. Luckily, when the tow truck showed it up turned out to have a smooth back anyway, and it had a somewhat bendable end on it which was much better than the previous flatbed.
So we loaded it up, and left the car pretty far back on the flatbed (shown in the picture below, you can also see the connection where the bendable part is) so that it wouldn't have to roll as far coming down. Somehow my passenger side window has stopped working, which is something I dealt with with my previous Supra, but it isn't a huge deal since the car is inside anyway. We did get a little bit of rain on the way up, but because of those window visors the car has, nothing really went in the window.

Getting it off the flatbed was pretty easy. We used the same way as before of getting the rear wheels off then driving the truck out from under the car. We didn't end up using the dollies this time (mostly because I've managed to bend them up pretty badly), the car just rolled down with the wheel sideways and rubbed against the inside of the fender. Normally I wouldn't let it do that, but it only had about 3 feet to go so it wasn't a huge problem. The front lip took a bit of a beating coming down the bed, but the whole bumper could use some work, so what's a bit of paint on the front bumper?

After getting it off the flatbed, I got to drive it into the garage where I'm keeping it, which was nice to actually get to drive my car a bit. I moved it a few feet forward the last time I used a flatbed, but this time I actually got to drive it a little bit farther, which was kind of cool. I can't wait to have everything working and actually have the option of going backwards too! As for now though, it's just sitting in a garage as I wait for more parts. I managed to find an entire rear end from a friend of mine at Pur Auto, so I'm going to be swapping that over instead of just the subframe, so I'm waiting to pick that up next week, and then all I need is the Ronnie K subframe bushing kit and I'll be good to go for that. Tomorrow I hope to get the bumper and fender off to make it easier for when I get the DM intercooler kit, and to get started on removing the rear end.
Here's two pictures of it sitting in it's new home, along with a fake palm tree to make it and myself feel warm when I'm up there working on it!

Headaches

Today I picked up my subframe, which is a relief to finally have it home and ready to go on the car. Yesterday was quite a headache though. I decided to turn the JZA70 around in it's storage shed so that the front end was facing out, so it would be easier to load onto the trailer when it's time to move it. I figured it would be best to do it when there was some snow on the ground so the car could be dragged without damaging the already damaged wheel, but we ended up getting a lot more snow than I'd expected. It took Uttam and I about 5 hours total, so I'll go over it briefly.

We started by pulling it out, we just roped it up to the back of the CR-V and pulled until the wheel folded, then jacked it up again to straighten it until we had the wheel on the snow, then we just dragged the car out much as we did when I picked it up originally. Then we had to turn it around. I tried to drive it around under it's own power, but with the packed down snow the tires would just spin and that would make the bad wheel fold over, so that didn't end up working. So we had to tow it around a corner with the CR-V, and then drag it back towards the shed. Once it was near the shed we had to align it by attaching the rope to the front towhook (something which only came on the JZA70 Supras, never on the left hand drive ones, which is VERY convenient!), and pulling it across sideways. I know this probably isn't the best thing for the car, but we'll be going over it front to back after we move it to make sure everything is okay. Here's a picture of us trying to figure out why the 1JZ was steaming on startup (which has since been figured out) and just admiring it in general, and one of Uttam tying some sort of crazy slipknot to the CR-V's tow hook. You can see where the yellow rope attaches to the JDM tow hook on the front of the Supra. These pictures are just screen caps taken from my GoPro which I stuck inside the container for all of this, so there's a pretty funny video of this all taking place when you speed it up!

Getting it back into the shed was going to be the biggest task. We couldn't reverse it because of the wheel folding, and we couldn't tow it because there was no way of getting the CR-V inside. So we decided to head over to Canadian Tire and get a 2 ton hand pulley thing, which ended up working perfectly. We found hooks inside the shed to attach one end to, and then attached the rope to the other end and cranked the car in. I decided to take the wheels off the dollies I got before and threw them under the wheels to act as little sleds. It ended up working great so that the bad wheel could slide along the ground, and the good wheel could slide as well since the LSD wouldn't allow for only one to be turning. We threw some snow down on the floor so that the bad wheel could slide along and not have to roll, and now the car is nicely sitting facing out. Here's a picture of it on it's way in with the pulley attached, and one with it as it sits now.

As for today, Nanci and I drove down to Port Huron, just on the other side of the border to Michigan to pick up my subframe, which looks to be in great condition. No serious rust on it, just stuff that could be easily sanded down. Next up is a set of Ronnie K bushings for it, then my intercooler kit. Next week is midterms all week, so I won't be touching the car until after that, then it will be the 20th and the car will be getting moved for work to get started! Here's a picture of my subframe sitting at home on my stack of tires, and a picture off the bridge entering Michigan (because we thought it looked cool with all the ice!).

Gutted

We got a some work done today on the donor Supra, and found out some pretty good news about the JZA70. My friend Uttam and I went at the interior today and basically brought the parts Supra to the point the other one is at, which is down to the metal in the back. I've sold off a lot of the interior, and decided to make sure the back half was going to fit into the other car, and it does! That came as quite a relief to me, although it does look really weird. I now have a gray front half of the interior, and a blue rear half. Nothing is bolted in yet so it's not official, but I may have found my Recaro rear seats that I've been looking for, so I won't be putting in the blue seats until I'm sure about that. Here's how the parts car is sitting now.

As for the rest of the interior, I pulled off a few more pieces that I need, as well as found some questionable stuff from the previous owner in there...lets just call it some interesting leaves. I'll be going back tomorrow to take out some more parts, and hopefully bolt in the back half of the interior on the JZA70 to make sure everything actually fits properly, and cleaning up some of the stuff so that it looks presentable.

Another bit of great news I received today is that my horn actually works! I didn't think it did because of the aftermarket wheel and it wouldn't honk when I tried before, but apparently that was just because the battery was dead. I hit the center of my wheel today and heard a faint noise, so I pushed it again and it honks perfectly fine! This is a great relief for me because I don't have to get a new wheel or do any sort of wiring for that for certification. That's all for today, here's a picture of the interior parts sitting in the JZA70, none of them are perfectly in place or screwed in, but this is just to show that they fit for the most part. The only part that doesn't is you can see the speaker cover part on the top sits up high because it doesn't fit over top of the damper adjusting knob on the Tein coilovers, and the carpet is a bit wavy because I don't have the wooden board down there to hold it flat. You'll also notice there is a lid on the center console, which is in terrible condition but I'm pretty pleased to have it there now!