TRD Ferguson grows an extra pair

Hello!

For those of you who have followed my posts from last year, you would have seen lots of questions about turning a GT/GT-S into an Endurance Racing monster.

Well long story short, while driving a header stud snapped off inside the block, and shortly after that the leaking exhaust fouled up all sorts of electronics (O2, MAF). To top it off, we never removed the cat as the exhaust was really rusted, but we did afterwards and it was completely clogged.

Needless to say, we were slow on the straights. Even with no weight in the car, no A/C, no PS, we could barely hit 90 and we were whisper quiet rolling down the track. Truthfully we have no idea how fast we were going because of the dumb mechanical speedo.

Anyway, with the blown header stud, it was either time to rebuild a 24 year old engine, or to upgrade.

Hello 1996 Lexus ES300 1MZ-FE V6!!

After hours of browsing through forums, and also looking around to see how easy a new 1MZ would be to find, we decided this was the best way to go.

That was back in October. Fast forward to today, the engine is mounted in the car and ready for plumbing and wiring.

Mr. TRD Ferguson just grew an extra pair of cylinders!

I am going to try and keep this updated from now on. I will also post some photos from the work we got completed last time and its current state.

 

More Photos here:

Here are a few shots of TRD Ferguson as prepped before last October's race @ Road America:



And here are some shots at the race:



And finally one award won! This one, called the Slow Motion Special Effects award, was won by us for being the slowest car out there.

 

Just a quick update.

On the 3s-GTE a few things came up:

1) cost. 3S-GTE was used in 1 model of toyota. The 1MZ was used in camrys, solaras, Lexus ES300s, Previas... all of which sold more than the All-Trac.

2) Torque, i dont want to wait for it, i want it NOW!

3) Weight, the 3S-GTE weighs more than the all aluminum 1MZ-FE

I have more photos of the exhaust and the carrier bearing mount coming possibly later today!

 

Here are some more updates:

We started the wiring harness now. Essentially we are going to be running everything from a Lexus ES300 except for the starter, fuel pump, and lights.

Of all of the other systems available, we have the entire EVAP setup as well as EGR, however, we lost the hole to gather these exhaust gasses. Now at WOT or idle EGR is closed, but anywhere in the middle it is open and exhaust gasses are allowed in. With this in mind, we decided it would be ok to cut this out. There will be only a few points where we will be in the active EGR range, and it wont be for a long enough time to really cause any issues. Those of you who have messed with EGR, do you have any tips or tricks or advice about this?

Someone asked how we handled the engine mount. What we did was take a piece of angle iron that fit across a spot on the engine where the original torsion mount sat, and drilled it to bolt directly on there. Secondly we took the old passenger motor mount from the 3S, cut the bolts off of it, and welded it to the angle iron. Lastly we put an extra plate under the angle iron to get the engine as level as possible, and bolted it right up.

The transmission we are using is an S54 from an MR2 but with the original linkage from our S53. It bolted right up to our original 3 transmission mounts and fit nearly perfectly on the 1MZ.

The carrier bearing was going to be a huge project. There are no perfect axles for this project, so the next step would be to make a hybrid axle out of a V6 Camry and MR2. Looking into all of those parts and the labor involved, we said screw it, we can fab a carrier mount. It is seen here:



Also visible is our fabbed up exhaust.

 

Regarding the timing, since this is going to be a track only race car, I think we are going to stick with the factory timing because I want to make the most reliable power I can at WOT. Under breaking we should just be pumping air until the shift point where we would return to idle timing and then right back to WOT.

Pitting might be the only time I am not at WOT or Idle, but I am basing these assumptions off of the first version of this car; a <100HP really restricted 3S-FE.

The only other time would be through a long sweeping corner that is just too much for full throttle. Again, we never came across a corner that was long and wide enough that the 3S could over power. If we do come across a corner like this, hopefully its duration will not be long enough to seriously raise cylinder temps.

On another note, your intake is really shiny, looks nice!

 

Update 7/15/13

So for all who have helped so far, thanks you!

This most recent update come complete with a video, and instead of waiting until the end, ill go ahead and put it in now:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8lpkaO4fLOaZ0pFTnhrRlR4dGc/preview" width="640" height="385"></iframe>

I would like to actually post the video in here, and i have it on Google Drive. If anybody has done this before and has ti working, some help would be appreciated. Until then, a link is all I have.

What you see there is the first time firing up the 1MZ-FE in the Celica. Honestly we expected something less-reliable sounding for the first time, however we were pleasantly surprised to hear it just rumbling along! There is a huge flat spot from when we start to open the throttle and when it starts revving up as well as a number of lights lit up across the IP, but hey, first time we barely had anything hooked up and it worked!!

So some background since I last updated it:

The motor is finally in the car, set up on just 4 mounts. This is the same setup as the 3S-XXX and seeing as though it is a lighter motor that made about the same power numbers as the GTE, I think we are fine leaving it at 4 total.

The transmission we currently have in there is an S54 from an MR2 with a swapped out shift selector from our old S53. We had issues with grinding gear shifts and falling out of gear during our last race, so we opted to go for this new transmission. We are also using our old shift cables and clutch hydraulics, which seem to operate just fine.

As far as the wiring goes, we have the entire wiring harness from the 1996 Lexus ES300 donor car which has lead to two interesting problems:

1) 1996 Lexus is not covered by any standard repair manuals and its wiring is unique to its year. 1997 and 1995 are both different. In '95 they have 6 ignition coils and a number of other differences with EGR, EVAP, etc. In 1997, they made changes again to EGR and EVAP and with the body change, added manual transmissions to V6 Camrys, changing some of the pinouts of the ECUs. We wound up paying for access to a multitude of manuals and patched together something that works.

2) It is the Lexus harness, meaning it had options for EVERYTHING. There are SO MANY WIRES in that harness! Having to discern the difference between the shift lock ECU plug and the Cellular Phone ECU is not a problem I ever want to deal with again. So for those of you looking to make the swap, grab the Camry harness.

Wiring it up has been interesting. My tip for those of you who have no experience doing this is to learn how to read a wiring diagram, and hook as many things up as possible INCLUDING ALL GROUNDING POINTS, before starting to trim back. Finally, make sure you have a ton of high quality zip-ties. I ordered about 400 of them from Monoprice.com. They have some that hold up to 150lbs which is good even for some lighter things when considering how much you don't want miles of cables coming undone in a hard corner.

The wiring isn't completely done at this point. To get it started, I needed to manually wire up the fuel pump and starter as we happen to be missing the door lock theft deterrent ECU which is causing some issues with my ignition key harness voltages. The goal is to either find or acquire this and then look for a way to just short circuit it. In 96, the immobilizer was not a thing from what I can tell on this wiring diagram, so it might just be required that we have it plugged in, whether in theft mode or not.

Also seen in that video is our plumbing solution. I have seen before a mix of copper pipe and rubber hose. We are going with rubber hose all they way with some PVC fittings. Most of this stuff is straight from home depot, which adds a layer of coolness.

Once we had it fired up we decided to take it for a spin. This resulted in failure of some part of the transmission. We drove maybe 50 feet in first, went to change to second and something happened. Either our clutch wasn't releasing or the shift cables just couldn't move correctly, but the shift to second resulted in taking the car out of first, and it ground on its way into second. When trying again, the shift cable moved and the levers moved, but it does not sound like anything is changing inside the transmission. We wound up having to push it back to the garage and now a quick tear down is in order for this setup.

So now we having a working engine, and a rotten connection to the wheels. Either the brand new clutch blew up, the differential blew up, or the internal shift selector blew up. When pushing it back we could hear some rubbing coming from the transmission casing, but could not tell where. Will know more next weekend.

So that is where we are! I guess it is progress, the wiring bit is really difficult and confusing, so having that somewhat sorted out is excellent, but blowing up another gearbox is not.

More updates to come soon, in the meantime, any expertise on the S53 or S54 gearbox / linkage would be extremely helpful!

Thanks!

 

We kind of knew going in the shift selector was not going to be perfect because of the bent cable, however, it now does not go into any gear and the selector itself feels pretty loose (significantly looser than before), like it is not even engaging the shift forks.

 

We fixed this issue this past weekend, here is what happened:

First apparently we had the wrong size clutch put in backwards (not my doing, but probably a good thing just the same). The clutch fit the E series transmissions which have a slightly larger diameter input shaft. It fit on ours and moved it, but it would wobble around when the clutch was released. Having the clutch backwards caused the metal of the disc itself to grind against the flywheel bolts. And that resulted in this:



That's the clutch! Regardless of the outcome we would have had to replace the clutch from having it bent the wrong way for so long under pressure, but i did not expect a complete separation like this.
Because the disc didn't fit really well on the input shaft, we were concerned some of the teeth had been worn off, and to top it off that transmission didn't shift very well to begin with, so to solve this whole mess, we went to the junkyard.

We found a 95 celica GT and took:
S54 Transmission
S54 Clutch
Shift cables
Shift lever assy.

and a few other odds and ends. Brought this all back to our garage on the same day and had it bolted up and ready to roll by the evening. This new transmisison has 108k miles on it and engages the different gears like a dream. I am tempted to compare it to my BMW's engagement it is so good. With this S54 we plan on using gear oil instead of ATF as well, and we solved the issue of having a giant hole where the MR2 shift lever used to attach. All in all, an excellent... um ... side-grade.