Long Nights — Apex Attack

I stress out easily. My former job as Project Manager for a small construction company was one of the most stressful jobs I've had. I had to make a change, and am currently pursuing an Apprenticeship as a Union Pipefitter. It's a great job, I get to build with my hands and still requires a mental challenge. Also, the stress level has dropped considerably.

But with this motor swap and overall car build, I noticed my stress levels going up again. I have put myself on a time crunch to get the car up and running, I really didn't want to miss the great summer driving weather we have here in the PNW. But building a car like this with a new job (and overtime), regular summertime hobbies, and planning a wedding in August, my time to work on the car feels shortened every night. I needed to step back a bit and realize I'm building this car as a stress relief, and not the other way around. I will be taking my time a bit more with the car, and updates may not be as regular. But rest assured, I'm really enjoying documenting the build with this blog, and will continue to do so with the same drive and mediocre writing!

Now, re-building axles. It's something a lot of shadetree mechanics like myself dread. It sounds messy. It is messy. CV joints are also known as being very difficult to get together correctly. I wasn't too excited to tackle the project, but like other projects like this, once you get into it... it's not that bad.

Check out the slightly used ATS chromoly cages and bearings. They are noticeably beefier, but of course I neglected to snap a side-by-side comparison with the OEM equipment.

Let's see if we can get all this turned into one decent axle set. Four axles, two new boot sets, and new cages/bearings.

Crank the axles down in a vice, then crank it down even harder. Using your strongest impact, get those 8mm allen bolts off. Make sure you clean them out before, they fill with gunk and make it easy to strip out the allen heads if you're not paying attention (I stripped a few, good thing I have extras).

Once you dig through the grease, you'll find and pull the snap-ring on the top of the CV, and pull the boot, outer race, and bearings. Then you'll probably have to smack the crap out of this guy with your trusty rubber mallet. Don't have one? Go get one, I use mine a lot. Cmon, it's like $5 at Harbor Freight. Pro tip, cut your boot in half and make sure you save some of the grease if it's in good shape. Toyota doesn't supply enough with their boot kit, no idea why, and you will need to re-use some. I scraped the ribs of the boot with my fingers and put it in a little plastic container to re-use.

Alright, it came off! By the way, buy a box of cheap latex gloves for this, and two trees worth of paper towels. It's messy.

Next i pulled the boot off the outer CV. I didn't rebuild these as they worked fine and rarely fail (except the one I broke in the crash). Here it is with the boot off. Slide the new boot on and fill it with grease...

Voila! Outer boot replaced and "mostly" new grease! It wasn't that hard Mike, you got this.

Next, the inner CV. I slid the boot on, applied lots of grease, tightened the clamps, and then took this picture. You have to jumble the inner race, bearings, outer race, and outer parts all together in perfect harmony and install them without dropping. It's not easy, but patience prevails. I got all the solid parts installed and then slowly added each of the 6 ball bearings one at a time. There's lot of misleading youtube videos showing how easy it can be, but it won't be that easy for you. In all honesty, it took about 15 minutes to get it all put together correctly. Then I dropped it and ball bearings flew all over the garage, and I got to do it all over again! Note, a majority of the grease goes on the boot side of the CV, if you pack a ton of grease on the shown side it just squishes out when you re-install the inner hub spline dealyo. Also, don't forget your cork gasket here, not sure how well it works, but I got it in there.

Wow! All done! This was taken AFTER cleaning up a majority of the mess too. I only took pictures of the first axle, but the second rebuild went smoother, and quicker. If you follow the BGB, it leads you the right direction.

After a wire wheel and a lick of paint, things are looking pretty good!

Axles installed! Look at that articulation... maybe I should lift it and enter this rig back into the Baja 1000 races of it's past.

Next up, the rear subframe. It needed an ethnic cleansing though. Before.

... and after.

But while it's out, let's upgrade, shall we? The car came with poly bushings installed in the front suspension components, let's finish it with the rears. Tom, the previous owner, even gave me the rest of the bushing kit. I also had to replace one of the trailing arms, rust had taken over the threaded portion where it attaches to the lower control arms, a used one was found quickly and cheaply.

Rear control arms prepped for paint. I used an old ladder to hang them from some mechanics wire, worked well!

The, standard for this blog, pre-assembly shot.

Assembled. Pretty easy to install as well. Use the supplied grease liberally (where are those prostate exam gloves again?), or you'll get the dreaded bushing squeak. The bench vise helps to get those in as well, some are a tight fit. Mike, you forgot the rear toe links! Don't worry, those will be receiving an upgrade very soon down the road. Get it, "down the road"?! Let's install this subframe and get on with it!

Next up, my exhaust. This is where a lot of aftermarket parts will start showing up in this build. A vast majority of them are form my last car. I liked a lot of my parts and want to continue using them.

Meet the Phoenix Power 80mm single exit exhaust. Not too many of them around. I've only seen one other ever in fact. It's pretty loud, and can get droney, but it's also very light, and works very well with my diffuser setup. Got your interest there, eh? It'll go back in at a later date, down the road. I did it again, I know, I'm just a barrel of monkeys.

Yeah, the exhaust is also pretty beat up, and the stainless finish is almost gone completely. Replacing the muffler would be fairly easy, and was just put on my long term project list. The more I do, the longer my list grows.

Alright, let's get this thing back down on 4 wheels!

This concluded a long, but productive week of nights after work getting the majority of the underside of the car back together. I think this photo was taken around 1 am. Even though I was beat physically, I felt a shot of motivation as the car was inching closer to firing up. I spent the next day entirely in the garage. I had a lot of little projects on the topside to take care of.

Fresh off all the coffee, I was back in the garage. Now I needed to route and finish my wire tuck. This was how things currently sat.

This will work. I want to keep the ignitor in the engine bay, I've heard the magnetic field it puts out can fry an ECU if too close. I'm not going for the full honda style "how does this even run" wire tuck, I want the function-creating-form look, while obviously being as tidy and clean as possible.

After re-wrapping the harness with OEM flex, things look better! Time to turn attention to the trunk.

Yeah, what a mess.

After building a small bracket for the fuse box, it's looking much better. Nothing was pulled or stretched too hard either, I can live with this. I will come back and modify the carpet later.

What to do with all that fuse box space? Let's fill it with my new coolant overflow can. I plan to upgrade my coolant fill neck later as well, and get rid of the huge hose running across the bay.

Next was to figure out my aftermarket catch can. With a small modification to the mount bracket, it fits pretty well there on the rear firewall. I'm not in love with the breather filter, but my only other option is a vacuum line all the way up to the intake. We'll see if I change it later.

On the timing side of the motor, I hid the MAP sensor and diagnostic port in the old cruise control location. Lots of little projects like this took up a lot of my day, but I could feel progress.

Speaking of cruise control. I was really confident my original throttle cable would be long enough to reach the throttle body... but it wasn't. I needed to install my N/A non CC model throttle cable which is quite a bit longer. Up went the car onto jackstands again... Wrestling out the old throttle cable is more of a chore than you'd expect. You have to pull it entirely from the cabin where it attaches to the pedal. I also made a great discovery about my pedal when I pulled it...

Tom's pedal on the right, my "too many beers searching eBay" Sparco pedal on the left. Yes, that's baling wire. Yikes. I know mine is a bit over the top carbon fiber, but it's better than the one on the left! I swapped pedals with the throttle cable.

With the motor mechanicals almost ready, I switched focus to everyone's least favorite, wiring! Running my motor is no big deal in an MR2, but it does require modifying the 22 pin body harness connector. After a bit of research I found out only a few pins really needed to move locations into the gen3 ecu.

Existing body harness circuits and their functions, according to the internetz.

What needs to change locations, according to my logic and the internetz. All the empty circuits aren't needed for engine function, so I left them unplugged.

I originally bought a whole new connector. My plan was to chop off the old, strip all the wires, crimp on new pins, and install in the new connector. A co-worker told me I'm an idiot and it's very easy to de-pin the OEM connector and move the 4 wires I needed to. So I got home and youtubed it. Sure enough... he was right!

Open the tabs on the sides of the connector, and the locking clips just flip out. Now you can use a very small screwdriver to release the pins and easily pull from the connector.

Now just push it into the desired location, and clip everything back into place. Wow, that was easy! Now I'm getting all excited to attempt a start up!

WOOOO HOOOOO!!!! First try, what a relief! Probably one of the most rewarding moments in a build is the first start. This is my 3rd engine swap in an MR2, and things seem to be getting somewhat easier, I think that's how it's supposed to work. Now let's get this thing full of fluids and get out for a test drive!

Filling with coolant, I got a no spill funnel from amazon, and it works as advertised. Usually I spill coolant everywhere, this time I only spilled on the tranny when I wasn't paying attention. While running the car I found a few leaks, some bad, some drips. The bad one had me in a panic... it was fuel!

Those dumb crush washers go on either side of the banjo fitting to the fuel filter, not both on one side. Doh. Easy fix, no more leaks while the coolant bubbled and burped. After 20 minutes or so the temp was rising and hot air coming out the heater vents, we were good!

Using my patent pending funnel duct taped to a hose, I filled the tranny with everyones favorite, MT-90. Forgot to snap a pic of the process, but it's very straight forward. Onto clutch bleeding. I highly recommend one of these. It's pretty much an impossible task alone otherwise. After a quick bleed the pedal felt good, let's throw the IC piping on and make sure everything is ready for a test drive!

Engine bay together in a rush to attempt a drive. My intercooler piping sucks, and I plan to build my own eventually (see: long term projects). The engine side panels will hide a few more things and hopefully clean up the looks more. Overall, the bay is all business though, clean and put together without any accessory vacuum lines, coolant lines, wire harnesses, rats nests, blinker fluid reservoirs, etc, etc. I can live with it for now! (nevermind the screw clamp coupler clamp... broke the old one, new one is on order)

Time for the test drive! I didn't film or take any pics (it was dark by then), but it didn't go too well. I have a low oil light (dummy light, oil is actually fine), couldn't get out of first gear (clutch not bled fully), and I'm pretty sure the power steering wasn't working. But it drove a full 100 yards down the road, turned around, and 100 yards back to the garage! I'll call it a victory! I have a list of things to tinker around with and fine tune, which will keep me busy this next week before I hope to take it on a little weekend trip. Stay tuned!