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Matt's back! With a new Celica...

Discussion in 'Your 4th Gen beauty' started by MattC, Oct 16, 2016.

  1. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

    We speak the Queens english down here hahaha
     
  2. vic dat

    vic dat Well-Known Member

    image.jpg Here in LaLa Land we're not quite as "civilized" as y'all...
    image.jpg
     

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  3. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

    Nice 800, only ever seen one of those in the flesh.

    Couple of minor updates on the car. Had the wheel alignment done and new set of tyres put on (Bridgestone RE003 for those playing along at home). Got the wheel alignment guy to set it to factory toe settings and 1.5deg neg camber all round, handles great and actually drives in a straight line now! Fun fact about the T3 rear end - the inner jam nuts on the control arms can't be tightened properly with the control arms installed in the car. So you've got to set the alignment, then drop the control arms to tighten the nuts, then re-install everything and hope the alignment hasn't changed. Good times.

    Only drove the car for about an hour before it developed a clunk in the front right corner on acceleration and deceleration. Must just be the new suspension settling and something has worked loose, thought I. So wheels off and back up on jack stands it went, and I nipped every bolt tight. Took it back out for a test drive - CLUNK. My guess is that with all new poly bushings, stiffer springs and new shocks taking all of the slop out of the suspension that had been absorbing torque in the chassis, it has instantly broken a 30-year-old engine mount.

    The fun never ends o_O
     
  4. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

    Nailed it. Broke both the front and the back mounts.

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    Bought some poly mounts made by Mad Polly here in Australia. They don't do mounts specifically for ST162's so these are the front mount for an ST184 and the rear for a ST204. My research indicated that they would fit my car. They do not. The front is about 8mm too narrow and the rear about 3mm too thick. Nothing a little fettling won't fix. I'll email the Mad Polly guy with the correct dimensions for an ST162 in case he is interested in making some specifically for our cars.

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    While I'm pulling stuff apart up front I may as well do the crossmember bushings too, right? These are advertised as both crossmember bushings and chassis to cabin mounting bushings, I bought them under the assumption that they would fit, which I based wholly on eyeballing the pics on the Nolathane website. Pretty close, they just need the hole re-drilled from 15mm to 20mm.

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    I removed the old broken engine mounts with fire then pressed in the new poly mounts. The Mad Polly ebay ad and accompanying YouTube instructional vid specifically said not to remove the inner metal ring. The rear mounts went right in, the fronts were too thick, so I had to remove the inner ring to get them in. Which is a prick of a job.

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    Should get it back together tomorrow.
     
  5. eNtraxGT88

    eNtraxGT88 Well-Known Member Donated!

    cabin vibrations! but it's gonna be super responsive!
     
  6. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

    Haha its got 8kg front springs and 4kg rears, poly bushings in the front suspension and no bushings at all in the rear, she already vibrates! Shit it corners good though :D
     
  7. vic dat

    vic dat Well-Known Member

    image.jpg Sounds like a shit ton of laughs but I'm an OG so I needs softer haha
     
  8. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

    I think I have enough grey hair to qualify as an OG as well :p The car only does about 3000km a year, ride comfort is pretty low on the list of priorities.

    Got the car back together. Had to make some shims out of 3.5mm plate to get the front mounts to fit.

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    The rears, despite being a few mm too fat, didn't end up needing any modification and went in with the aid of a rubber mallet. I do need to get some new mounting bolts though, the factory engine mounts take an M12, but the new ones really want an M14.

    I'm not very confident about the Nolathane crossmember bushings, they're a much softer poly than the engine mounts and tightening them up made them compress quite a bit. They'll do for now, but I'll keep looking for an alternative, or might have a crack at making some.
     
  9. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

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    Car passed the annual roadworthy inspection :)
     
  10. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

    Sorry Vic, I forgot to include a full body shot for you. Despite lowering it by around 65mm (or 2.5" in freedom units for our American friends) I don't think it looks too stanced or ricey, and it still has a good amount of ground clearance - I've got quite a steep driveway so making sure it didn't scrape every time I came and went from home was important. It did bottom out on a speed hump this morning though :oops:

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    Some new toys I didn't get around to installing and won't until the new year now - Magnaflow stainless cat and back box, Vibrant Performance resonator, and Summit Racing flex joint, all with 2.25" inlet/outlets. Way too big for the FE motor in the car right now, but should be perfect when the 3rd-gen GE currently hiding in my garage makes its way into the engine bay :D

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    The cat converter is the little one in the middle of the pic. The road rules only say I have to have one, there is no rule to say how big it needs to be, so I got the shortest one I could :p

    Won't be a whole lot of muffling being done by the other pair :cool:

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  11. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

    Todays (mis)adventure - replacing a tail light.

    The right side tail light on my car has a chip out of the lower left corner of the casing, which has annoyed me since forever:
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    Pulled all the boot trim out so I could remove the old light. Found bent and hammered sheet metal and sealant that definitely isn't factory. Looks like it has had an accident in that corner at some point in its life:
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    The old light was a bitch to get out, whoever had installed it had used WAY too much sealer:
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    An hour with a razor blade, a caramel wheel and some solvent and it ended up like this:
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    Whoever painted it after the repair had no idea what they were doing, they sanded it way to heavily, possibly applied the paint with a brush, and didn't clear-coat it, so it looks like shit. Also you may be able see along the lower edge of the light surround there is some filler that has started to crack. Tomorrows job now is to get some paint mixed up and fix it.

    One more little job for the day - I was doing a bit of a clean-out a few weeks ago and found a pair of headlight eyebrows in a box that are in better condition than the ones that were on the car, and they match the top section of the grille, so I threw them on. Not sure if I ever mentioned my grille hack - I like the Celica font on the pre-facelift better than the post-facelift, so I modified the top half of an older grille to fit my car. It's not too hard, I think I only had to file down a couple of mounting tabs. Anyway:
    [​IMG]
     
  12. lone wolf

    lone wolf Well-Known Member Donated!

    nice work ! Too bad you found the old damage...hope the car is still straight..
     
  13. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

    All of the damage is localised to that back right corner, and the bumper hasn't been repainted so I'm guessing it wasn't a very big hit, maybe someone reversed into it or something? I dunno. I've been under the car a million times and there is no signs of repairs to the chassis or the floor, the car tracks straight and the panel gaps are even, so I'm pretty sure its no big deal.
     
  14. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

    So I got into that "little" job today.

    Hmm, that's a lot of filler...
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    I got sick of sanding and wire-wheeling after about an hour so I started chipping the bog away in search of metal. Check out how thick it was:
    [​IMG]

    Whoever repaired this had shoved what looked like JB-Weld or something similar in the join between the rear and side panels. So I dug it out, and found the dreaded tin worm underneath.
    [​IMG]

    Also a handy hole:
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    I finally found the metal I had been looking for. It was not pretty. Old mate who "fixed" it after the accident wasn't much of a welder. I also started cutting to see how bad the rust was. Not too bad as it turned out.
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    So, as usual this is going to take a lot longer to fix than I had anticipated. But hey, I've always wanted to buy a welder, now I have an excuse :D:D. My parts car also has a date with an angle grinder to liberate the required sections of panel.
     
  15. vic dat

    vic dat Well-Known Member

    Wow...
    That's a lot of work just to remedy a little visual piece of chipped plastic.
    Mine has a similar ailment but I'm not in a big hurry to fix it now. I think my car was tagged a few times over the years also with mixed results. My left light doesn't sit flush with the side (probably about 1/8" proud).
    Vicdat
     

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  16. CelicaSteve

    CelicaSteve Well-Known Member Staff Member Super Moderator Donated!

    As Vic said, you found all this work to do, after you thought was going to be a simple change of light cluster, but it gives you the excuse to buy a welder.
     
  17. eNtraxGT88

    eNtraxGT88 Well-Known Member Donated!

    better now than later! it'll be worth it for sure
     
  18. vic dat

    vic dat Well-Known Member

    image.jpg Surprises are always fun
     
  19. eNtraxGT88

    eNtraxGT88 Well-Known Member Donated!

    lol me as well. blinker fluid
     
  20. MattC

    MattC Well-Known Member Donated!

    It sure has been a while between updates, all of my play money has been going into major retaining wall and drainage works in my back yard. Still haven't fixed that bodgy body work around the tail light. Todays job was installing new crossmember bushings. As I noted in an earlier post I wasn't happy with the Nolathane bushings that I adapted to suit, so I dropped the coin on Speed Source aluminium bushings instead, because who needs ride comfort anyway and what is this NVH you speak of? :D

    Prior to getting dirty. No instructions provided. Pull the old bushes out and line them up with these ones, you'll work out which is which pretty quick.

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    To install you'll need to remove the east-west crossmember, then loosen the front and rear engine mounts and support the motor with a jack under the sump, then remove the north-south crossmember. Pull the old bushings out and clean 30 years of crap off the crossmembers. Install new bushes like so:

    [​IMG]

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    I used the factory bolts instead of the bolts supplied with the kit because they're longer and have a nice taper to start the thread.
     

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