Ronal ACT SC Wheels

Found a set of Ronal ACT SC 15×7″ +38 wheels from northern Spain, Basque country. Bought them and got em here.

Condition was fantastic! Had to test fit them immediately.

act1

act1

And just seconds after this photo wanted to have wider rear wheels 🙂

Took the wheels apart. This was really hard. Previous owner had pretty much used sealant everywhere and I managed to get only the lip side off. Had to resort to friends and acquitances to actually split the parts.

act3

What the hell?! Titanium hardware!

bolt_head_ro_titan

…and this is how they look now:

aw11 mr2 act ronal sc

Powdercoated in gold with huge layer of protective lacquer.

Compared to the SSR’s: (Dont worry, the floor is very clean and smooth)

act4

Still waiting for the wider rear lips, they ended up being custom made in germany. That is what you get when you have +20-year old wheels that are freakishly rare. 🙂

Original lips are 0.5″ wide, but the rears will get a 1.5″ wide. Nothing spectacular but I’m not after stance, just wanting to get a nice drivers car 🙂

The wider lip for the rear is going to widen the wheel up to 15×8″ and +26 offset and will end up with 15″ x 7″ +38 fronts and 15″ x 8″ +26 rears. To slightly correct the offset and wideness fronts will get a 10mm spacer, maybe a H&R Trak+. For tires, front will be Toyo T1R 195/50 and rear 215/45. I can also use Toyo R1R in 195/50 and 225/45 if needed.

Toda coilovers broken

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.

toda_broken3 toda_broken2

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

toda_broken4

toda_broken5

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

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.

barn_001

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

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

20140925_155918

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

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:

mr_bride

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 \;)

mr_bride_planning

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)

mr_bride_hex

Did I do something funny here? Cant remember anymore 🙂

mr_bride_rails

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