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Toda coilovers broken

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Beldin helped me to diagnose a strange clunking noise coming from somewhere under the car. Found out that the front swaybar bushings had left for the spirit world and the swaybar itself was banging against the bottom of the car.

toda_broken

Beldin did found some real problems too 🙁 three out of four struts were not within usable tolerances. Beldin suggested later that there might be problems with bearings, but that was not the case. And all of this just after 20.000km

I later took one out and tried to find out if there was anything wrong just pushing the whole thing against floor.

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Couldnt find out anything so I went to see a local fellow who had experience with various suspension things

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Apparently there is something wrong down there. Bearings and seals need to be replaced.

I was later in contact with both Toda Europe and Toda Japan. The former, located in UK, was a total waste of time. They dont have suspension service there and the customer service I got when I sent them an email was appalling.

Toda JP on the otherhand was very helpful. I wasnt able to order the service parts and the only option seemed to send the whole bundle back to Toda to get serviced, which would have been quite expensive. After some emails back and forth, there was an agreement that I could send in just the strut cases and leave the actual shocks out of the service. (The shocks seemed to be fine).

Stock suspension

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Went to get the stock aw11 struts and suspension parts from the barn. On the way I called my brother and asked if he was doing anything special, just to make sure that I had a pair of hands with me if I couldnt do it for some reason.

Everything was untouched since last time and we picked up the parts.

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When driving back to my brothers’ apartment, I commented that one of the cars we saw had its lights pointing in weird directions. Just when we were passing it, I noticed it was a red AW11 😀

I said to my brother that I just had to see it more clearly and we turned around at the next intersection. Found the car pretty easily and it was a red, early NA. Nothing special there, but I just had to see it again 🙂

aw11-red

 

Turbo project – something to show

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Mr. Manon from Manon Racing Products, NZ made me a turbo manifold 🙂

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I havent yet bought the actual turbo, but I have a manifold at least! It is custom made to fit a BorgWarner EFR6255 or 6258 turbine into AW11.

Here are some measurements of the engine compartment I took for Mr. Manon to see if it would fit. The engine in the picture is a naturally aspirated one and the trunk side is not very accurate. Also, seems that at least my engine sits somewhat tilted towards forward for unknown reasons.

Measured distances should be accurate to 10mm.

engine-4agze

Click the picture for a bigger, clearer one.

Used Bride seat

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Using Widric as my front I managed to acquire a old Bride Brix seat. It’s one of those early ones that will change the color to dark purple when they’re left into sun. The early Brides didnt have proper UV protection.

The seat was in good condition. I like how I was able to take the seat apart for cleaning, so I washed the thing with mild soap water and squeezed the seat supports dry.

Here’s the seat installed:

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My old Sparcos are bit clunky already and I’m not that fond of the red color.

Found out that the seat rail pattern was slightly different between Sparcos and Bride and I had to somehow correct the difference. The Sparco pattern was 345 x 271mm while Bride uses 290 x 330mm for the bottom mount MO-type seats.

Not 100% sure about this, but Momo, Sparco and OMP should be using 345 x 271mm, while Recaro, Bride and Cobra use 290 x 330mm.

I bought some 50mm x 4mm aluminium bars and made some highly technical drawings inPowerPoint OpenOffice. CAD is overrated anyways \;)

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There are five adjustment holes to move the seat slightly forward or backward because I was too lazy to measure the exact position difference of the mounting holes.

Countersunk of course. The freshly drilled hole is still bit rough here.(Edit: this was one of my test drills hence the roughness)

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Did I do something funny here? Cant remember anymore 🙂

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Now I need to get a second one just to have a matching pair.

Oil pressure in various conditions

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This is something that I’ve always wanted to do. Stock oil pressure and various other numbers of the 4A-GZE. Measures from the Pivot gauges, only mod I have is relocated oil filter assembly with sensors attached, which means that the stock oil-to-water cooler is removed.

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Amb ient temperature was around 19degreesC, using high performance 5W40 oil.

Edit 4.10.2017 I’ve fucked up this post, haven’t I? Where are the numbers?