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!