Ghost XI

I think this AW11 belongs to pralexpr. I borrowed this pic from his albums.

Here are my options with the front lip:

The basic front lip, usable but not pretty. Also, I don’t have one.

Here is a crude drawing of the buddy club lip:

Option #1

I could attach some motors to the lip so I could pull it up a little. Drawbacks with this are the shape of the front valance and the overall shape of the lip. There wouldn’t be much movement upwards.

Option #2

Cutting the lip along the front valance/bumper line would give much more space, but this would need a complete new custom front lip. Has some structural problems.

Hopefully I’m not making this overly complicated for me… this should be relatively easy to build.

I was going through my pile of stuff and I found my patch harness again. Widric and I compared some spark plugs and one of the card board boxes had my AEM EMS stuff in it. I think I’ll try to install this soon.

Widric found his set of HKS spark plugs (Denso orignally) for B16A engine. Probably overpriced stuff but still cool.

I collected the spark plugs for a group photo and funnily enough, the plugs between 4A-GZE, B16A and B18C are almost identical. 4A-GZE plugs are about 1mm longer but thats all.

Still wondering what to do with the front lip. I’ve had some visions (gin-tonic involved) about a prototype front lip made using balsawood and carbon fiber, but I don’t have even a drawing yet.

…and some progress with Mr. Kylies CarryAll. We got everything together, but couldn’t start the engine. For two days we tried everything we could think of, but nothing. There was plenty of gas, we got spark and timing was spot on… and we finally found out that the capacitor next to distributor was broken.

I measured the distance from the wheel to suspension and with this setup, I could have 9″ wide rear wheels. I think I would go 8.5″ to be on the safe side.

Clean and pretty! 😀

I finally went and bought the 5PK960 belt for the bigger supercharger wheel. Belt costed a whopping 8 euros.

The belt could be a bit longer, but 960mm will do just fine. Now the biggest problem is the timing needle. One webpage claimed that the timing needle could be bent upwards slightly when using a 165mm wheel and it would fit nicely, but I’m not so sure about that anymore.

I found out that my sisters cat isn’t that fond of Apple laptops having a certain bird logo.

Our team participated to a time attack event. I wanted to join the fun with my car, but I decided not to try the track with my car.

I still have the weird sound. I have a slightly bent CVJ cover on passenger side and I believe that could be the cause for the sound. The stub and the CVJ together could be just slightly out of balance to make a huge rattling/grinding sound.

I also spent about one hour lying in front of my car looking and thinking the moving front lip. A friend of mine had some broken linear actuators which were bulky and expensive, just as I thought. 🙂

The actuators have one disadvantage over RC servos: speed. They’re royally slow. 1 cm in one second? 200mm would take 20 seconds and that’s a eternity.

Ok, still no idea how I’m going to make a moving front lip. One thing is sure, I’m not going to cut the Buddy Club wing at all so I have to build my own lip. 🙂

I’ve been thinking linear actuators, RC servos and pneumatics to move it.

Actually I scrapped the pneumatics already, because I don’t have a compressor in the car 🙂

Linear actuators would be cool. They’re powerful, reasonably fast and easy to control, but also bulky and expensive.

Seems that I’ll be using RC servos. Inexpensive and pretty easy to control and if one isn’t powerful enough, just add a second one 🙂

I recently found out that I can’t enter the biggest mall in the city with my AW11. Front lip hits the floor while driving to the lower level of the garage and everyone behind me gets pissed.

Even before this incident, I’ve been thinking of building a moving front lip. I should be able to raise or lower it from the car to have enough clearance for tight spots and it should work reasonably fast and not disintegrate while driving highway speeds.

I had some doubts what the law would say about this, so I called my local MOT office. The engineer told me that there are no laws concerning the front lip, only front bumper is mentioned. The things I have to keep in mind are pointy parts and the width of the lip (not wider than the widest point of the car). He even told me that this is a good solution.

I’ve had some discussions about this with Maladar. Maladar has insisted that certain JZA80 Supras have some kind of moving spoiler, but I couldn’t find anything about that. Maladar then surprised me with a link to a youtube video about the front lip.

It is called “Toyota Supra Active Front Spoiler”

I found out that SARD has built a carbon fibre version of the lip as well. Sounds like it might be rare 🙂

I was trying to find more info about engine oil cooling and related things, while I found thisarticle about cool looking white *E72. The guy behind this gorgeus thing had used the oil pump plug for the pressure sensor where I’d have installed a temp sensor.

I got the picture from his article and added a green arrow where he had installed the sensor.

While reading his article, I suddenly realized that 4A-GZE with A/C is bit too tight to fit anything around the oil pump plug. My spare engine doesn’t have exhaust manifold or anything bolted on that side of the engine, so I was bit blinded with the space in the general area.

Otherwise, the sensor installation at that location seems doable. 🙂

My MBP’s keyboard is busted or something, I’d never do a mistake like in the previous posts title… Sobwoofer 😀

Ms. Waterlily did the carpeting for my sobwoofer! I was about to leave the town, but had some time to help her with the computers and email.

It fits!

Small roads, open roof and good music

(Most of the gauges are still without sensors) 😀

I took the box off the car and epoxied all the small holes. Then added some silicone to seal the wire hole, inspected the element seal and put everything together before getting the outside done.

I adjusted the amp as well, the crossover was set too high and the woofer gave kind of rumbling noise. End result was clean bass which is easy to listen. 🙂

The Suzuki got some parts as well. We tightened the cam shaft wheel and Mr. Kylie installed the oil pump. Suzuki looks really good at the moment.

Last week I spoke with Mr. Sensei about my woofer box situation and he thought he’d have some spare time to work with it.

As I had nothing to do and the car still has the unknown weird noise, I drove over to his place see how things were turning out. Didn’t find the cause for the annoying sound, but that was a minor annoying detail for this day.

Such a nice, warm afternoon 🙂 (and some test fitting with Mr. Sensei)

A better view:

…and one more

Then some amp adjustment at the garage

…and boom says the bass 🙂

I still need to do the wiring inside the box, build some kind of mount for it and get some black fabric and someone to wrap it in. 🙂

Huge thanks to Mr. Sensei, awesome job. (The woofer works nicely, though it doesn’t deliver similar kick as my shittiest 10″ woofer in a 25L box)