Be Cool, Winston — Apex Attack

It's been a fantastic winter. A lot of snow has fallen... A LOT. I know, you probably don't care about snow from wherever you're reading this, but I do. 63 days so far this season skiing, and hopefully many more this spring.

Excuse the woo-girl yelling, I was fired up! Anyways, with all my ski days, garage time has been at a bit of a premium.

Right, this a car site, that's why you're here. Let's get busy.

So, I had a big list of projects for the winter. Some small, some pretty intensive. The whiteboard was full. Slowly I've been chipping away.

About a year and a half ago, I spent a third world country's GDP at the RacerX Thanksgiving sale. One of those parts was their lightweight alternator bracket. If you've ever pulled the OEM bracket off a 3sgte, you'll know that Toyota carved it out of a WWII battleship anchor.

The one on the right is seriously the OEM piece. Lots of differences. Design. Size. Material (Cast versus aluminum). And ultimately, weight. Nine pounds to be exact.

It's a well built piece, and does exactly what it describes, holds the alternator in place.

Here she is, installed.

I needed a slightly shorter belt for the alternator. A quick run to the store, and picked this up. 30" long, 3 ribs to match my st205 crank pulley (your engine may differ).

Alternator back in, and belt tensioned. Tensioning the belt takes quite a bit of patience, but you'll get there (or you won't, and you'll set the garage on fire). Proper mechanic lubrication and shorty wrenches make all the difference in the world. Or just install this mod while your motor is out, like a sane person.

You may have noticed, I was able to install this bracket somewhat easily due to my intake manifold being missing. What the frig, Mike?! Well, that leads us to the next big project that's been sitting in my shed over a year.

RacerX straight runner intake manifold! Holy jeez, what a cool hunk of alloy. (you see the fuel rail too... don't know what to do with that yet) All aluminum, gorgeous welds, and just great engineering.

Some track dedicated MR2s switch over to a air-to-water intercooler. Not my thing. It's heavy and complicated. You need to fit a heat exchanger up front, run water lines the length of the car, add a pump, and wire it all up (and also install the intercooler and piping). I would rather go the simpler way, with a trunk mount intercooler.

"but Mike, you're only running a measily gen3 with bolt ons!"

I know, I'm "building" this motor entirely backwards. The engine is still stock internals. The turbo is a breathed-on ct20b. The ECU and fuel system... is pretty much stock.

But, I do have another gen3 motor in my shed with a spun bearing, maybe next winter that can be rebuilt, toss on a bigger turbo and injectors, add an ECU and have some fun at 450hp. All it takes is time and money. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In the mean time, the intercooler setup and intake manifold will hopefully give me a couple more horsepowers, better response, and no heat soak on track days. Doesn't sound like there's too many downsides. (if you know of any downsides (besides no mo' trunk(holy shit, parentheses INSIDE parentheses, INSIDE parentheses!)... please put me on blast)) Let's get wrenchin'.

Here's a terrible picture after I removed the intercooler and intake manifold already. It's all straight forward, I had all this out within an hour or two. I was in the zone, good tunes bumpin', rippin' and tearin' the engine bay apart. Why is taking it apart so much easier than putting it together?

Look at all that room for activities!

Ok, let's plan out where we're gonna cut up this hog. After a lot of hmmm-ing, hah-ing, while grabbing my chin in a thoughtful manner, I basically made up this size to cut. If it didn't fit, you can always cut more.

The point of no return. Lolz, we passed that well over a year ago. I used a hole saw to radius the upper corners. Time for the angle grinder and a steady hand. Lay off the coffee before cutting.

Now we have room for ALL the activities.

See?! Actually made the hole too big, it could have been shorter.

Note the throttle body. The MR2 one did not fit very well at all in that space, it has too many spacers and brackets and crap attached to it. I thought of solutions, looked at ordering a throttle body outlet from ATS or RacerX, and then a light bulb went off, and I started rummaging through all my parts boxes. Luckily, I still had my ST205 throttle body from the swap (remember, my engine is actually a Celica GT4). It fit perfectly. Booyah!

Ebay intercooler, meet Ebay intercooler. The new core is 25"x12"x3", or twice the volume of the old greddy knockoff. I could have gone bigger, but this fit the way I wanted to mount it best.

Upright!

Test fit time. So far, it's coming along the way I imagined it. A little too easy you might say.

Turns out there's a TON of details yet to be figured out. Things like throttle cable routing, wiring, vacuum lines, ECU mounting, yada yada yada.

Here's the box of Ebay intercooler piping I bought. Just a generic 2.5" kit. I also picked up a SPAL fan. The whole intercooler setup cost me under $300. The quality isn't next level weld-porn, but these are basic, non-moving parts, as long as they don't leak, they should function well. Let's piece it together to make a functioning setup.

So, there's no real science to building a trunk mount intercooler setup. It's been done many times, there is a lot of ways to skin a cat (I love cats, NEVER EVER skin one). It's one of those "figure it out yourself" kind of mods. If it looks like it's going to work, then it probably will. If this seems overwhelming to you, you should probably start with smaller mods.

So I took some tinker-time, and started figuring out routing the IC piping. From there, I roughly determined where to punch my hot pipe hole through the rear firewall.

Hole saw is your friend!

It fits! I'm a pipefitter for a living, so that'd be embarrassing if I missed.

I cut up one of the 180 degree bends to make the hot pipe end up. The rubber band was used to help determine where I wanted the bend to terminate. I added a small straight piece to the end so the coupler fits well to the intercooler.

The cold side... was easy. Basically I cut a 90 degree bend short, then a 90 coupler, and a 2.5 to 3 inch reducer into the throttle body. It is one more coupler connection than I wanted, but I can live with it.

I then took all the pipes to my friend Brandy (B*Nasty for short), who welded up all the aluminum bits for me real quick. She also added beads on all the ends for the couplers and clamps to grab onto and seal well (instead of a bead roller). Getting the hot pipe in and out is tight. Tighter than...

...whatever crude joke you just came up with in your head. You sick-o. Anyways, it's a squeeze, I might have to enlarge the hole in the rear firewall a bit (ya ya that's what she said, you sick-o).

With the piping all figured out, let's fire this baby up!

Hold your horses cowboy. We got lots of other connections to figure out. Let's start with the throttle cable.

Looks like it fits great here! WRONG! With the OEM throttle body plate and the cable adjusted out maxed, the throttle was still cracked open a bit. Since I'd like my idle to be 800rpm and not 2500, we gotta fix that.

Did I tell you guys I got a welder?!?!?!!? A cute little Lincoln mig machine perfect for jobs like this. No joke, I'm pretty much actively looking for crap to weld on the car now. It's opening lots of doors. Let's cut, shorten, and weld up the throttle cable bracket so we have more adjustment in the cable.

Not stacking dimes with this machine yet... but it's flux core, gimme a break.

Cleaned up and test mounted. It works! I painted it black and the weld is hardly noticeable.

Speaking of throttle cables. We need to route it correctly. When I modified the bracket, I had the cable running through the engine bay, and it looked like crap, and was potentially in a bad spot to get into a fist fight to death with the alternator belt. I'm using a NA, non cruise, throttle cable. It's literally 2 inches short to run through many areas in the car. Then, I pulled the flare and sideskirt and got determined.

From under the car, it runs to a small hole in the chassis, up through a dead cavity, and into the side vent area, then up through the quarter panel cavity. This is also where the intercooler will get cold air to the trunk. The big rubber gasket is out, and I plan to build a block off plate to the engine bay.

Well, that worked out well. I know you noticed the black throttle cable bracket. Looks not that terrible, eh?

Next we need to fab up some sort of bottom mount for the intercooler. Tacked into place, these work. The intercooler has some cylindrical posts on the bottom just like you see on the top of it. It fits right into these brackets. Currently, they're primed so they don't rust.

Looking half-ass finished!

Next we had to extend some of the engine harness. Three sensors, throttle position, intake air temp, and idle air control.

I was a little scared to cut up my perfectly good engine harness, but since I've hacked everything else up on this car, why not a couple of wires!

It was a good excuse to re-learn how to solder wires. I know I'm not Wyatt Earp with a solder gun, but I get the job done.

The three connectors all extended. I should've bought a bunch of different color wire for this project. But, then I didn't.

You can see one of the sensor extentions on top of the intake runner, sheathed up. I didn't know what to do with the main harness. I couldn't get it to comfortably fit underneath the manifold runners without extensive modification. So I KISS, kept it simple stupid. Out came the welder and I built a simple bracket.

And painted it. Then I wrapped the harness with some electrical tape to clean it all up.

Looks decent all wrapped up eh? Bet you didn't even notice it with the valve cover off.

Oh yeah, why's the valve cover off? Well, the wrinkle black needed a refresh. (The head looks clean, it should with only 25-30k on it!)

It's been a few years. Lots of wrenches and bolts have fallen on it, oil and coolant spilled on it. The PO painted it with some of the worst quality red paint I've ever seen. It chips off if you fart around it. A fresh coat of wrinkle black will help shazam! this thing back to life.

Also, what are we gonna do about that hole? It's where the throttle body support bracket used to bolt in. I was going to build a steel patch for it when I remembered I have scraps of carbon fiber around.

Using the gasket as a template...

KaCHOW! Neat little cover plate.

Now, we know the intercooler is going to receive cold air from the chassis cavity into the trunk... but how about exhausting all the hot air? Borrowing some ideas from badass old ferraris, I decided to try something I hadn't seen before in the MR2 world. Out through the trunk!

Marking up where I thought would be best to cut. You have to leave the trunk lock cylinder in if you still want the cabin release to work. Out comes the grinder, again.

Ta Da! After some paint of course. But, we don't want to leave it all exposed like this.

So I thought I'd try some more of that cool hex vent mesh material. It doesn't look like total chicken wire when installed.

Hey, not terrible! Just the perfect amount of rice. I then primed and painted the vent panel black.

Now let's put it all together one more time and see if it fires up! For real this time.

It rumbled to life first try! Idle was high, but settled down once the ECU relearned some things (battery was disconnected).

I also worked with my ECU mount setup to make it a bit less... shitty? It worked great before, but wasn't very tidy. I re-made a mount for the fuse box, lowered the ECU mount to make room for the hot pipe, and cleaned things up as best I could without major harness modifications. It's not show car clean, but it was never meant to be.

Also, we need to add in a SPAL fan to make sure we're pulling air through the intercooler as efficiently as possible. More on that in the next post because I still gotta build it.

Close up of the intake manifold. You can see all the connections in the plenum. Intake air temp, vacuum and boost lines, and a few I blocked off for now.

Valve cover lookin fresh! Brand new wires from Prime I've had for 6 months were installed to make sure that strange misfire never happens again. The little carbon block off looks nice too. Let's go for a rip!

Yup, still snow around these parts. And rain, for the next two months. The rear end looks pretty purpose built with the mesh.

Anyways, it drove pretty good! Boost seems to roll on and build up in a much mellower fashion. Kind of hard to describe. With the old setup, boost hit pretty early, and 17psi hit hard. It was awesome and pretty impressive, but not the best way for the powerband to come on when driving at the track. Now it rolls on and builds up smoother, without any added lag. It's going to make it much easier to drive at full tilt, more of a V6 style powerband.

Oh yeah, the spoiler is gone! More on that next post! Speaking of the next post, here's a big teaser on what's coming up.

Track day in a month! Crap!