Jailbait - The Story Of A Returned Ke55...

[Tally]

Hey man sweet car...

 

Any chance of some bigger pics of your SU setup... I wanna chuck mine on but need custom linkages.

 

Hows it go with the twin SUs anyway? Smoother? power? etc?

I just got a stock 4K with 3K head that runs relatively well but the stock carb is on its way out so it runs a bit rough.

[KE ping it real]

Hey man sweet car...

 

Just so you are aware she is not a man, she is a she :)

[SLO-030]

Just so you are aware she is not a man, she is a she :)

 

.....and she was a he and he said, Hey man....take a walk on the wild side.

 

 

Back on topic, Nice car. Hope you get all the bugs ironed out :jamie:

[corolla_nut]

Good news!

Got the Booster rebuilt for $190. First off they started testing it and couldn't fault it. We told them that it was an intermittent problem and asked if they could have another go. They still couldn't fault it. They called up Robert and got the go ahead to rebuild it anyway. Turns out there was a huge crack in one of the internal bits (never seen inside one, can't remember what it's called)

Works like a dream now. We richened the mixture on Saturday and it is running close to perfect, it still takes a couple of seconds to return to idle, so Robert thinks the carbies are slightly out of sync.

I can't believe how long we spent chasing our tails looking for the vacuum leak in the carbies and manifold etc.

At least we know that there's nothing wrong with them. Lol

I polished the car on Saturday, it's a bit dirty now after the khanacross on Sunday, but I'm going to give it another wash today and I'll take some pics of it and the brake booster (all nice and new looking :) ) and the SU's for you Tally...

[KE70-from-mt-panorama]

How did you go in the khanacross? What do you think of the venue?

[corolla_nut]

I had alot of fun!

The venue was cool, tried getting there for the working bee the day before though and got lost as I didn't see "College Rd" I just saw the quarry and couldn't find it. Figured it out the next day though when we had another look at the form.

 

The track was nice and smooth at the start of the day and turned into a goat track by the end of the day. I only had one moment of almost meeting a tree!

Got used to getting into it alot by the end and then we had to pack up and go home :wink:

 

John Windsor goes alright in the el stocko ke55. He came 10th outright and I was 16th so that's what I'm aiming for 10th or better.

 

Were you there?

Edited March 30, 2009 by corolla_nut

[godlovesugly]

very nice car mate. and good work fixing up that rear end, if you want to practice fixing up a front end i have a KE25 in need of some attention lol

[corolla_nut]

^^^ lol, I don't think I like the idea of working on someone else's car, I'm not that good yet and I wouldn't wanna stuff it up!

 

I've been a bit slack on this page lately. I haven't posted up those pics of the carbs yet cause they're huge and I was having issues with them, I'll try again now for you Tally.

 

Anyway, since my last post, the rollie's been in another khanacross and has developed a howl in the diff (whoops :bash: ), I have put some racing stickers on the car which has resulted in me not liking driving my car down the CBD due to dickheads thinking I want to race them.

We've also acquired some Tramp bars, which we're yet to put on as I've taken the bonnet off the car to get resprayed.

 

I had to put a triangle above the battery on the bonnet for the khanacross (it's just electrical tape) and the tape kinda took whatever was left of the paint in that spot off and it looked shocking!

I'm hoping to do a better job than the last one (I didn't degrease/clean part of the rear quarter properly where I blended the paint and the new paint has come off slightly, also I think that I had the gun too far away on parts and the paint dried in the air and now I have this sort of powdery residue in places and it won't shine, I haven't attacked it thoroughly with the buffer yet, alot of people told me that a good buff will shine it up. I think it's just my shit beginner paint job.)

 

Anyway, the bonnet is now back to bare metal.

 

I also bought a set of 5 Corona Rims off ebay a little while ago for the purpose of putting rally tyres on for Khanacrosses.

After pricing around for a while I thought I'd never be able to put rally tyres on, as I couldn't find anyone who would sell me second hand ones and a set of new ones would cost around $1200, which I thought was a little too big of a starting price for someone just entering this type of driving.

 

Thanks to Redwarf who pointed me in the direction of a bloke who sold me six second hand ones for $130!!

 

Anyway, a tonne of pics are attached...

 

Rally tyres

You can see where the tape took the paint off

 

 

Sorry, the pic's still too big, I have to go now, so I'll resize it later.

Edited June 2, 2009 by corolla_nut

[altezzaclub]

ooohh... I see a yellow one hiding in the background!

 

There is a overrated yellow one living one house away from me in North orange, I'm not sure if you've seen it around town.

[corolla_nut]

I've seen a couple of nice rollas getting around orange lately! There was a forest green ke35 that drove past when I was at work, there's also a nice yellow ke30 and a white ke55.

The yellow ke30 is unfortunately no good. The chassis is completely rusted, and we parted most of it out. It's only got a stuffed gearbox, bits of interior, rear doors, bootlid and shell left. Was going to take it to the scrappy's but have decided to hold onto it a) so I can practice painting and panel beating on the panels, b) so I can do a lifesaving rear end transplant to the 55 when we have the skills, time and money! lol

Edited June 2, 2009 by corolla_nut

[KE70-from-mt-panorama]

Good Work on the car so far. I know that yellow car, used to be owned by HRV00S from lithgow. It is very rusty from what i remember.

 

And nah i wasnt at the khanacross. Whens the next one your going to? ill make an effort to get there. And john windsor does really good for what the car is. The track condition by the end of the day is what turns me off running in them most of the time, that or work.

 

Cheers

Jake.

[corolla_nut]

Yeah, work's always the down side.

There's a motorkhana on this month, and the next (possibly the last for the year) khanacross is on next month.

And you're right about the yellow 30 too :bash:

 

Anyway, not alot with the 55 has happened in the last couple of days.

It's now completely back to bare metal (the grilles in it are really annoying to get all of the paint out of) it has been degreased, rust converted twice and degreased again.

I'm going to do a very tiny bit of bogging tomorrow - the bonnet is relatively straight - and then re-rust convert it as part of it seems to have liked the rust converter so much it decided to keep it.

 

Then I have to move a whole tonne of crap out of the shed, clean it and drop sheet it. Fun fun.

 

 

Does anyone have a really good shed set-up? We've got a double garage, it has one car door, a bathroom in one corner (already there or we wouldn't have bothered) louvre windows and bare frame inside.

I've been wanting to replace the shitty old entry door, it seems very rickety and wouldn't take much to boot it in, I also want to put in normal windows (the wind still seems to get in and a couple of the louvres are broken), a nice sized exhaust fan with filter, a 2nd hand reverse cycle AC and I also want to put gyprock on the walls and ceiling to stop so much dust collecting.

But that's just plans for now, don't have alot of time nor money to throw at it at the moment, but that's how I'd like to have it before I paint the ke20.

[corolla_nut]

I don't seem to be very good at keeping this page updated, but I'm going to try!

Anyway, the bonnet has been resprayed - better than last time, but i still need practice - I have figured out that I need a heatgun to heat the panel, not a heater to heat the room as the ambient temperature has been way too high and causes the paint to dry before it reaches the panel. So, in effect, the paint was all grainy and it felt like sandpaper when you ran your hand over the bonnet.

I took it for a wash the other day and attacked the bonnet with some very fine sandpaper - it's now very smooth - I just need to finish polishing it.

 

Robert has also attempted to fix the diff for me in the meantime - he put 3.1 gears in it out of a diff we had at home and replaced the pinion seal and shims, although its still noisy and he's trying to figure it out.

 

Also fitted the rally tyres to the Corona rims a month or so ago, we got a local tyre place to fit them about a week beforehand and carted them home. Another interesting exercise was trying to find the wheel nuts we wanted - Rob had a scrounge around out the back and appropriated 6 off the ke30 and said we wanted these ones. So I went to Jax and said I want 10 of them, they said they had nothing like it and that they suited a TE/TF Magna with alloy wheels - Great! So I went up to the local Mitsubishi dealer and asked them "We need a VIN no" - classic! :y:

 

So I did the rounds of a couple more tyre places and they were all the same as Jax, so I went up to the wreckers (they normally only have shit so It's not normally the first port of call) and they were actually quite helpful for once - they went and found 3 for me and gave me the rego sticker of the one they got it off so I could give the VIN to the dealer - and they let me have the nuts!

 

So after going back up to the dealer and ordering them, Rob's like nah that's too expensive and decides to ring up a local parts place - sends me on the run around again!!! But anyway - we got the wheelnuts significantly cheaper than from Mitsubishi too!

 

After all this, we finally got around to swapping the rims on a saturday at Rob's work - naturally one of the tyres was dead flat. It was going to cost us $100 to get the bead fixed but we had no other choice being 2pm on a saturday - so just as rob is about to leave work to take the tyre up to get fixed, some people from Sydney turn up asking if he knows any tyre place thats open - hes like yeah but this one's shut and it's charging a large call out fee, but they didn't care they wanted 2 new tyres so they could get back to sydney. We ended up getting ours fixed for nothing seeing as though we just swung them over $300 worth of work.

:)

with the rally treads and newly painted bonnet...

So- the khanacross was awesome with the rally tyres - they made a huge difference.

We also purchased a set of tramp rods - unfortunately we have figured out that there's not going to be enough clearance for dirt events if we fit them so we talked to a bloke about resetting them and adding a spring to the top of the pack which curves in the opposite direction to prevent the rest of the leaf pack from flexing. $500 including new bushes - we're just waiting on the funds.

 

Also went in the Esses descent a little while back and have discovered that I need stickier tyres and adjustable strut tops so we can give it some negative camber. More things to buy! :lolcry:

 

but anyhow, here's some pics of the bonnet process

Edited August 20, 2009 by corolla_nut

[corolla_nut]

Rob was chasing some swaybar bushes for me today, and we finally figured out that my rear swaybar is aftermarket...

So Rob took it out tonight (managed to break a link) so I can take it up to the aligners to show them the bushes that I need and now to get a new link!

Also, sourcing adjustable strut tops for my car is almost impossible we've tried every parts place in town (we're sure they didn't even look to see if they could get some, they're quite expensive from what we've seen on the net and autobarn can't get them so I didn't even try supercheap. Robert says he'll ring a place tomorrow who definitely has them... we'll see how that goes

[corolla_nut]

So...been a while...again!

Lots has happened since last time I posted.

The rear swaybar is now back where it should be and my bodyroll is almost completely non-existent.

Some cock also stole one 8 off each side of my car during race week - I'm assuming they were going for car 8 or something?

So I've had to paint a white square and black 88's on each rear door, not the best job in the world I managed to tear a little bit of the white square off with "safe" tape when i was doing the 88s and the stencil I used was home made so it wasn't completely rounded.

All in all an inexpensive and successful exercise as I only paid $4.50 for the paint cans and didn't get charged for the paint, a couple of bucks for sandpaper, about $8 on masking tape free photonews newspaper (about the only thing it's good for) and nothing for some grease and wax remover that I had still lying around the shed. So around $13 and I have race numbers again!

Alot better than $80 for the set of stickers ;)

 

We've also had the friction plate die in my clutch in the past month so there's a brand new clutch. Took the opportunity to lighten the flywheel at the same time as we had been thinking about it for some time and the opportunity presented itself. Robinson Toolmakers in Bathurst took 2.5kg off the flywheel and it makes a huge amount of difference - one of the best things we've ever done for the car under $300. The bloke took the lip off one side and than skimmed some more and then turned it over and scalloped the other side - I think Rob took pics before he installed it - I'll have to find them...

 

 

Robert (rob83ke70) and Keith (altezzaclub) also had a play around with the suspension for me last week before the khanacross. You'll see the pics of it on the "Leaf springs in race cars" (?) thread - can't remember exactly what it's called.

Anyhow, they took one of leaves out of each pack chopped it in half and laid it arse about on the top front of each pack - seems to do the trick quite nicely and has lowered the car by around 20mm at the back so they took a very small amount from the coils at the front to lower it by 10mm.

Still debating as to whether to lower the front a little more to match the rear end.

So it got a wheel alignment to give it a bit less positive camber and also swapped the rims the front tyres were on as the whole outside corner of the treads were gone.

 

It also turns out I have a bent strut that is affecting the amount of positive camber i have. Looking to get that fixed and also get the left hand shock absorber replaced as it's spat all it's oil. Still checking out adjustable strut tops which I'm aiming to have installed before the 5th/6th December as the BLCC is having a Speed Weekend and I would like to wind some negative camber into it to give it a bit more contact area around the corners.

 

I'll hopefully have some pics up soon ;)

Cheers

Kylie

P.S. my car was on the local win news last night :jamie: Unfortunately it had me hitting a witches hat :wink:

Edited October 28, 2009 by corolla_nut