TARP Blog

It was a nerve-wracking day yesterday, but as the headline reads, the rebuilt motor is alive! After rotating the crankshaft by hand to get the no. 1 cylinder to TDC (or close), I installed the distributor (with new cap and rotor) and wired up all the spark plugs and the coil. Rolled the car out into the driveway because if you burn down the car, you can always rebuild it, unless you burn down the garage, too. Sage advice, Stevo.

On the first try, I flipped the ignition switch and the red light didn’t even light up. WTF! Turns out that I forgot to re-plug in the main power harness to the switch when I was finished working on the switchgear. Problem easily fixed.

Second try, flipped the ignition switch and the red light comes on. Success! Short lived, though. Press the starter button and nothing. Bupkis. Double WTF! Rolled the car back into the garage. Clearly something is not right with my wiring work, right?

Ha! Wrong! Turns out that one of the two main connections between the body harness and the engine had gotten knocked loose sometime during my work on the engine. That connection contains the lead that goes from the starter relay to the starter that tells the starter to go-go-go.

So, plugged that in, rolled the car back outside, sat down, flipped all the flippy switches, pressed the starter button and - whir, whir, whir. Turning over but no start.

In my head, I knew that this is normal. After all, there’s been no fuel in this fuel rail since at least November. But in my heart, I was freaking out a little bit. What if all this work is done and I can’t get the engine to start? Epic fail.

Second try, whir, whir, whir — vroom! Yippee! Even though I hadn’t set the timing on the distributor to anything than basically dead center of its range, it started and purred like a kitten. Oil pressure came right up (yea!) and hung steady at about 75 psi, which isn’t surprising given the thick break-in oil that’s in the car right now. I let the car run at somewhere just above idle for a few minutes, then noticed some wispy smoke from around the exhaust manifold. It’s probably just the new seals on everything getting hot for the first time, but I shut it down anyway. I’ll roll under the car tonight to see if we’re melting anything important

Yesterday was a big hooray day. Looks like we’ll have a car with a running engine for the race!

MR2, Race Prep Author: Pat

Sorry that updates are coming slower, but it’s not because I’m not working on the car. Precisely the opposite, actually. I finally got the oil cooler work all completed, including the wiring back to the relay and the switch in the dash. Yesterday was spent mostly getting all the electrical work in the dash area finished up (and hopefully done right), including wiring up the new electronic gauges — volts, oil temp, water temp, and oil pressure. Each of the gauges (except volts) has a warning light feature that goes off if the gauge senses that things are amiss (temps too high or pressure too low). Apparently they have a warning buzzer sound too, although who knows if you could even hear it during the race. But the light is bright and should be helpful to help us not grenade the engine. Also moved the tach to the middle of the steering column and the bright blue “SHIFT NOW!” light right within easy eyesight of the driver

The engine is almost ready to fire. I’m going to reposition the distributor tonight and finish up tying up some of the wiring that is laying around loose. I need to fill the car with water and then hopefully we start it for the first time tomorrow! Keep your fingers crossed for us. More info soon.

MR2

Got a few various and sundry things done last night. I got the airflow meter and air filter bracket finished up and hung on the car, so I was able to attach the AFM wire. Other than getting the timing going and the distributor mounted, I think we now have all the electrics hooked up on the engine. If not, we’ll know quickly.

Most notably, I welded up the new exhaust system and test-fitted it. I need to figure out a couple of hanger locations. Also need to test-fit with the tailpipe turn-down and trim that to fit as necessary, then weld that on also. I need to test fit the passenger-side half shaft to make sure that there’s not any interference there (keep fingers crossed), otherwise I’ll need to come up with a couple inches of extension from between the flange at the end of the header to the flange at the start of the b-pipe.

I also ran some new wire for the fan on the oil cooler and cleaned up the switch panel wiring and got the swichgear mostly worked out. May need to add one more switch for the radiator fan but that all depends on if it’s still automatically cycling or not. Still lots to do, hopefully I can crank out some more tonight.

Race Prep Author: Pat

So the title of the post probably isn’t a “real” word in the English language, but it pretty well describes my weekend past: not a lot got done. The in-laws were in town for the baby’s baptism, so while there was a lot of hanging out and eating good food (and a baptism), there was a decided lack of hard-core car working. I did manage to steal out into the garage for a couple of hours on Saturday and got the danged clutch activation cylinder and the bracket that holds it and the two shifter cables bolted onto the car. I’ve connected most of the engine harness to the engine, but am needing to fabricate a bracket for the air flow meter before I hook that part up. Also need to splice together the positive battery cable from the kill switch to the positive side of the engine wire harness.

Then I need to fabricate the new exhaust system, and then get the engine to TDC and get the distributor lined up right. Then I can fire the engine. Maybe — maybe — by next weekend if all goes well this week?

I need a clone.

Race Prep Author: Pat

I am beat-ass tired today. Or as my brother says that they say it in North Carolina, tar’d. Why? Dave and I got the engine mounted in the car yesterday. And while this might be an easy job if you had a lift that would maneuver the car up and down, we don’t have one of those at my house, which meant a lot of lifting the car up with the cherry picker, then rolling the engine under the car, and then lots of other up and down movements and to and fro movements, and then finally — finally! — the engine was mounted.

Unfortunately, Dave had to leave after we had the engine under the car but before it was actually in its mounts, so he didn’t get to see that part (yet). At one point when I was trying to get the driver’s side/transmission mount into its saddle on the frame, the missus came out into the garage with infant in hand and operated the cherry picker jack handle while I pushed the transmission so that it would get lined up properly.

The rest of you who think/claim that you have kick-ass wives had better get those ladies to start bringing the heat because not only did I just take two consecutive weekdays off from work to work on the car without her even blinking an eye, but she operated a cherry picker jack, having never done so before, while holding a screaming baby. Huzzah!

After that I wrangled with the passenger-side mount for a few minutes and finally got it bolted in. Put the upper timing belt cover back on, and started wiring up everything that needs to be wired up topside. Not much later the missus needed some help with dinner and the three screaming/crying children inside the house, so that pretty much wrapped things up for the day. Which was fine, because I was already beat-ass tar’d at that point. I went back out later to finish cleaning up and straightening things, but that was the end of the work for the day.

Since I finally got all the radiator hoses in front worked out the other day, the only hose left to fit is the output hose from the engine to the tube that takes it up to the radiator. I have a hose temporarily in place but it needs to be cut down and then I think we’re all set. After that I will complete the re-connection of all the stuff in the engine bay, re-mount the clutch/shift cable quadrant, and then complete the re-wire of the dash area and switch gear. If I can pull it together tonight and tomorrow night, we might even have a first attempt at starting this jalopy by the weekend. That’s probably optimistic given the baby’s baptism this weekend and the resulting hoarde of relatives, but a man can dream, can’t he?

Race Prep Author: Pat

I was getting pretty stressed out the past few days, what with the engine not being ready to go in the car and about 10,000 other odds and ends needing to get sorted out. After today, I’m feeling a lot better.

Thanks to Rachel and the wonderful freedom provided by self-employment, I was able to work on the car from about 8:30 am until almost midnight, with breaks mainly just for lunch and dinner and to help clean up the back patio a bit. There’s nothing like a long & uninterrupted work session to melt away lots of stress for me.

Dave came over for a couple hours around lunchtime and it was (again) great to have him helping out on the car. One of the big remaining tasks in getting the car ready for the engine was completing the battery move. We’ve moved the battery to the passenger floor because the new front frame brace made the old spot in the frunk impossible. Dave finished up re-fabricating the brackets that will hold the battery in place and then completed shortening the battery cables. Those BMW cables are thick, so that took awhile, but now they’re the perfect size. And I’d bet that taking just 18″ off of each of them probably removed 10 pounds from the car. Those things are thick! Huge thanks to Dave for pitching in on the car, his help really made things progress smoothly today.

While Dave was working on the battery issues, I finished getting the rear radiator pipes re-arranged for the new-used engine configuration, then finished off the radiator mounting hoses. Many hose cuts and worm clamps later, I think that the cooling system is finally ready to hold water once the engine gets into the car. I still need to figure out the best way to hang a cooling fan on the radiator but otherwise the cooling part of this project is done.

There were a bunch of other little odds and ends that I finally got taken care of too but hardly even remember, but all stuff that is critical to function of the car. Like one of the engine to ground straps had come un-ended, the charcoal canister needed replacement of its vacuum hose, etc. Lots of niggling little stuff that all adds up. Well, I got a lot of that cranked out of the way today.

Also finally got the oil cooler placement and installation completed. I decided to locate it on the passenger side rear fender in the trunk and put the engine compartment fan on it. This isolates it from the heat of the engine bay itself, has easy access to the engine compartment for the oil transport tubes through the fender and the engine cooling vent, and it’s less likely to get collided there than if it were mounted on the rear facade of the car. I want to rig up a scoop to help feed air through the cooler, but I’m happy with it for now.

Speaking of oil, I filled the new-used engine with oil for the first time and didn’t see any of it leak onto the driveway. Of course, I haven’t run the engine yet, so…

Tomorrow I hope to get the oil pressure and temp gauges installed then get the engine moved into the car. I’m not ready to start it yet — not until the gauges are all installed so I can tell what’s going on inside the engine — but that day’s coming soon. Not soon enough

Race Prep Author: Pat

No work on the car last night, as I was tasked with assembly of the new LP grill that I bought for the missus. We like to grill and the one we bought when we moved into the house 7 summers ago is no longer working very well. So now we have a new grill to cook upon. That will not, unfortunately, help us turn laps at the race.

I’m taking a mental health day from work today to do a solid 12 hours on the car today. I’m hoping that Dave can come over for part of that. Full update tomorrow.

Race Prep Author: Pat

Days tend to run together in memory. I look at the blog and it’s been several days since my last post — things have been crazy busy both at work and at home. And yet, the car still needs work and the clock keeps ticking.

Thanks to Dave Anderson, the engine is (finally) mounted to the transmission and ready to be mounted in the car. I had the rest of the engine finished and wired up and everything, but although it’s not really all that heavy, it was just heavy and bulky enough that I couldn’t get it mounted alone. So Dave came over to the house around lunchtime on Sunday and helped me squirm that transmission into place. With 2 people, it actually wasn’t very difficult. The downside was that to get the transmission in place, we had to remove the side gear on the passenger side, which drained all the (pricey) transmission oil onto the floor. Oh well. And then the bracket/brace that connects the bottom of the transmission to the bottom of the block on the silvertop engine, well there’s a section that has to be cut out, otherwise that same side gear doesn’t have room to turn.

A little work with the grinder later and the bracket was clearanced and we had the transmission bolted up to spec, the brace mounted, and the side gear back on the transmission. I need to run out and get some more transmission oil at lunchtime today, as refilling the transmission took more than what little extra I had on the shelf. Nothing like seeing red transmission oil flowing out of the transmission onto the floor to get one scrambling for the oil dry and being very, very glad to have an extra full bag over in the corner of the garage.

Dave and I scrounged around for awhile in the bins of castoff parts to find the transmission mounting plate for the driver’s side engine mount. Of course, it wasn’t anywhere near where I thought it would be, but we found it and got that bolted on, as well as the other mounting brackets. Other than finishing the transmission oil refill, I’m pretty sure that it’s ready to go in the car.

There are a couple odds and ends that I need to clean up in order to get the car ready to receive its new engine. Late last night I figured out the mounting solution for the oil cooler and fan, so I want to get that complete and drill the holes through the trunk firewall for the oil line passthrough. Also, a couple of fuel and vacuum lines need to be extended, and I want to try to finish off the return radiator hose line issue so that’s ready to bolt up. Getting down to that bottom return line will be a total PITA once the engine is in the car. I hope to finish off those couple of items, as well as completing the hookup of the front radiator lines so that once the engine is in the car, I can get water in it and get it started up. Yes, at just under 6 weeks until the race I want to get this engine running

Race Prep Author: Pat

The Top 51 Lemons of the Detroit Irony 24 Hours of Lemons feature on Jalopnik this weekend opens with this scintillating photo of TARP North’s Topless Asset MR2 leading the pack around a turn:

I’m no expert on the firesuit/helmet combos of the drivers up there, but I’m speculating that’s PK. I know that Stevo and Doug both have red suits, and I remember that PK’s has some white on it. I think that Big Pete’s suit is all black, but I could be wrong about that. Pretty cool to have the lead photo on the Jalopnik, though. Here’s another action photo of the Topless Asset in action, I think this is PK too:

That car really does just get better looking every time I see it. I especially like the non-matching wheels, that’s just strong, Lemon-y goodness right there.

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were Author: Pat

Sometimes progress takes a back seat to trying to get it done right. I got the engine off the engine stand and on the cherry picker and was getting everything ready so that I could mount the transmission. I finished hooking up the wire harness and went to put on the rear plate (which separates the block from the flywheel/clutch assembly and basically contains the clutch dust inside the transmission bellhousing) and remembered that I had not been able to get all the bolts torqued down on the rear main seal while the engine was on the engine stand. There just wasn’t enough room between the engine stand and the block to get a wrench in there.

So I went to torque down the rear main seal bolts. The rear main seal, of course, prevents the pressurized oil in the crankcase from seeping out the back of the engine and all over things. As cruel experience has taught, the failure to keep things oiled in an internal combustion engine leads to, among other things, catastrophic engine failure, overnight drives to find a replacement engine, et cetera. On the other hand, we know that the puny M6×1mm bolts that Toyota uses for things like the oil pan and the rear main seal are not very manly and cannot withstand prodigious torquing.

I used my most sensitive beam-balance torque wrench, since the BGB says that the rear main seal bolts should only be torqued to 9.5 newton-meters. For those of you not familiar with newton-meters as a form of measurement, that’s about the amount of torque that a bumblebee produces when it alights on a tulip. The licking of a cat’s tongue probably produces more than 9.5 N-m. Regardless, I tried my best, but I snapped off two of the 7 bolts that hold in the rear main seal. As a first effort at repair, I thus uttered forth some choice swear words (no doubt procured from a drunken sailor on shore leave, or Nancy Pelosi), but those were insufficient to remove the snapped studs from their ironclad threaded caves.

I next tried to use what is commonly called an easy-out or Grabit bit to turn the studs backward out of their holes. This has proved successful in the past when I’ve broken off an M6×1mm bolt in a block, but not this time. There was no avoiding it any longer, the rear main seal had to come off so that I could repair this work. Unfortunately, to remove the rear main seal, you also have to remove the oil pan, and that was held on by about a metric ton of RTV gasket sealer. All of which will need to be removed and re-installed, a tedious and time-consuming process. Durn.

Rear main seal removed, and one of the bolts actually had enough thread sticking out of the block that I was able to turn it out with a vise-grip. But no such doing with the other one. Several minutes of drilling and tapping later and voila, a Heli-Coil was in place and all was right with the world. The rear main seal went back on (after throwing away all the stretched out bolts that were holding it in before), but the re-gasketing of the oil pan will have to wait for another night. I just wasn’t up to the task last night. So I gapped and installed the new spark plugs, smeared the threads with anti-seal grease and the insulators with dielectric grease, and installed all to their torque spec.

Hopefully tonight I will get to re-attach the oil pan and be done with buttoning up the engine.

Race Prep Author: Pat