The Girl's Ke70

[altezzaclub]

Well, another trip to Adelaide over Christmas, this time I was under pressure to do the 1200km in 12hrs before the reception desk closed at 5pm.  That went well, although not the 7.0L/100 I was hoping for...

Then i got keen over quietening it down even more and bought some foam/foil insulation off Ebay. First was making a few short videos as I drove to the workshop and back each day, now I just need a video editor for dummies so I can measure some noise volume.

I started on the parcel shelf, straight over the fibre-board Toyota fitted in the factory, and I'll put a coloured cloth over it when I can convince the wife to sew it.

Next was some melamine on 3mm MDF for the firewall area, but fitted much more carefully to make sure there aren't any holes or gaps.

I didn't think of photos until 10min ago, and I'm not taking that seat back out again.. 

The base foam goes straight on the floor, which is where I'm up to. It covers the guard curves under the seat wings too.

 

So, I'll fit the seat base,  run a few videos on the way to work on Monday and see if I can measure a difference in noise.

[altezzaclub]

Well, I couldn't find a way to measure the noise reliably, but it is quieter.

Meanwhile, the no-throttle to low-throttle stumble was moving up the rev range, so last month I took the plugs out-

An odd combination I thought, what connects cyls 1 and 3...  So I looked in the dizzy, and found the cap was burnt underneath, something to do with the heatshield I was always going to fit but never did! The area was so soft it was easy to put my thumb through it.

I bought a new one with a  rotor online, its rather hard to find the old type that these are, but after spending a day or two farting around under the bonnet I decided it was time for the Haltech computer, which uses the later distributor, and other odd jobs like a lightweight flywheel, new crank seals front & rear, a look inside the sump and beat the dent out of it, new clutch master & slave cyls... and when its running again, a set of extractors! The Haltech requires a complete rewire, but this time I know a lot more about it!

Inside the sump looks clean and tidy, I didn't have the balls to take a bearing cap or two off, and no pleasant surprises like forged rods or pistons.. its all quite stock.

With it being off the road for a while the T50 is getting new synchros and forks, and a new input bearing at the local gearbox shop. The bearings are mainly still available, but a nightmare to try and get a set organised. The gearbox man said the bearing very rarely give out.

Kickn5K might be right about cheap Ebay rads, from 8years ago when I bought it. I found it weeping at the top of the cores under the cap corner, so its had a cleanup and some epoxy dribbled in there. If it remains a problem I'll toss it out and replace it.

..and if you want to see desperate machining, look at the pressure plate holes in the flywheel! They drill & tap the holes then reduce the flywheel on a lathe to take out a good 1/3 of the hole! This is to take a 215mm clutch plate instead of the stock 200mm.

At the moment it looks like this-

but if I can get the gearbox back next week it should be much better in a  couple of weeks time!

[altezzaclub]

Well, I've had it running for a couple of weeks, odd trips around town with the laptop recording data and the 40km trip to the workshop on weekdays.  The original 4AGE oxy sensor was on there, but gave readings like this-

In the top graph, the yellow trace line is the RPM, the skinny beige one the throttle. The heavy beige line on the trace below is the oxy sensor, a one-wire narrow-band. So down the bottom is lean, and it shoots up past the middle which would be 14.7, and goes to rich at the top.  On the bottom Data Navigator trace is the whole recorded run, and you can see it was spending more time being rich just before this.

So we tossed the stock manifold and fitted a set of extractors with a new two-wire narrow-band sensor.

This gave the sort of trace I'd been expecting, the yellow line in the top graph alongside the TPS and RPM, on a constant throttle cruise.

However that didn't last and it soon gave just  flat line in the middle with spikes occasionally, as shown in the lower graph.

So I hit the wreckers and grabbed a heated narrow-band, a 3-wire, and tried that. I'll just download the graph and transfer it here-

Edited August 25, 2024 by altezzaclub

[altezzaclub]

Well, the 3-wire reckons it lean under power and rich at idle, which is quite likely- The N15 Pulsar I took it out of must have been running well, the sensor was a light grey colour in the exhaust.

This is turning right at an intersection, you can see the beige throttle blip up as I pop it into 2nd then accelerate and the green RPM climbs. They both drop as I grab 3rd, accelerate and grab 4th, then cruise.  The yellow oxy sensor says lean, but rich as the throttle hits idle, then lean under acceleration. The odd one in the middle of the cruise is typical, a tiny throttle adjustment and the oxy suddenly goes from lean to just-rich, then back again as the throttle comes off slightly.

Anyway, there is so much data gathered by the Haltech its amazing! This is just three channels of a dozen, 3 ignition channels, 3 fuel, 2 each for water and air temp, volts, MAP...

I'm going to bite the bullet and buy a cheap (for wideband!) $120 wide-band gauge and sensor, and see how that reads.

 

 

[altezzaclub]

Well, the wideband made a big difference, and the Haltech will auto-tune a cell to the AFR you set. Now it cruises up to about 30% throttle slightly lean at 15-16AFR and drops to 14-14.7 as soon as you boot it. The wideband keeps the range of mixture quite tight, unless you lift off or accelerate, just as it is meant to.

This is the run home up a big rolling hill then along the flat top of it for a few Km, then up a  ridge into town, as shown in the bottom little graph. The flat bit in shaded pink is magnified in the main picture.

RPM is red, sitting between 3000-3500, throttle is blue, going up and down over little rises in the flat land, and mixture is yellow, 0 is 14.7 on the graph,  and -1 is about 15:1

Cold idle is still poor, more work needed, warm idle is dead stable, a big improvement on the stock ECU. Coming off over-run in town is still jerky, that first tiny touch of throttle makes the advance jump too much I reckon.

I'm working on getting a COPs kit next, and when I fit that I will wire in the idle-up valve so it can get extra air for cold starts.

Radiator seems fine, it must have been a hose clamp leak putting the green stain there.  Gearbox feels much more positive from the new selectors, but still quietly whiny in 5th due to no new bearings! No oil leaks at all, so the new crank seals and the silicon instead of a sump gasket are working well!

 

 

[altezzaclub]

Projects are starting to pile up..We're buried in building rally cars, but I need a full day for both of us on coilovers, brakes and wheel bearings... otherwise I can't drive home! 

and...

Then some time on changing the Haltech to sequential COPs with a distributor converted to Hall effect sensors.

Never enough time in life...

[Big G]

It looks like Santa came early to your place. Tou must have been a very good boy this year🎅

[altezzaclub]

Well, Josh is now NSW rally champion, so all that hard work went somewhere...

Finally back onto customer's cars... we make amazing safety cages, but don't expect a rush job.

He can drill a blind 38mm hole in  scuttle panel and put a 38mm tube through it that comes out in exactly the right place for welding!

Then brace it with another tube that fits perfectly...

If we can finish this shell before Christmas the customer will think Santa has been! The seam welding is done, although it needs to go back on the rotisserie for some work bracing the diff mounts to the rear cage. I've got seat mounts sorted, and we have the rear cage and side-intrusions to do.

[altezzaclub]

Well, the Evo7 went back and that cleared some space for a Volvo 144 rally car. Suspension bushes and odd tuning, and fitting an electric power steering column, the first one I'd seen. Now I'm an expert of course, although still not a fan of lying upside-down under a dashboard for a couple of days. There's another one to do already.. 

 

Meanwhile, on The Girls KE70, Steve had said I could use any of the 4AGE gear he no longer needed from the AE86, so Josh & I fitted the extractors. An interesting point I then noticed is that they had been cut and re-welded in #1 pipe, it was bent down at a sharper angle than the rest. I realised they probably came off a 20valve and you had to cut #1 to bend it out of the way of the distributor.

 

 

The giant job of fitting the new Haltech ECU was part of sorting out the old dizzy cap with the hole in. Sadly the Mk2 version dizzy from the 4AGE smallport in the AE86 bought its own problems.. The heat-shield acts as a little dam for the oil, but the inside of the engine bay is getting very dirty. I've bought a rebuild kit for the 4AGE distributors, but it just hasn't been fitted yet.

 

 

 

Finally we got some more work done on Steve's AE86 Sprinter, but having it there was handy when I was researching brakes. The Diahatsu Move 601 brakes I put on years ago were swinging caliper vented discs, and I wanted to upgrade them again. A lot of talk was on AE86 brakes for KE70s, so I had the opportunity to measure both. They turned out to be the same size and almost identical in design! 

 

 

A week of research gave me no surprises, this Excel sheet was bigger than shown here.

 

[altezzaclub]

I chased Corona XT130 struts and calipers too, but they are quite heavy and hard to find these days.   With the wife saying "This is the rainy day you've scrimped and saved for all you life, spend it before you die.." I figured I'd just pay Barry Manon for a complete kit, choosing the 13" wheel size with Wilwood Dynalite calipers. That lovely package arrived and you can see the rotor size difference. that Daihatsu Move rotor is already bigger than a KE70 stock one, from 218mm to 234mm, same as AE86, to 256mm..

 

 

Fitting them was as normal, nothing ever goes a smooth as planned. The LCA touches the rotor by a mm , which came with the instructions, so the end of the LCA gets flattened slightly. This photo doesn't show it well, and iphones turn the damm things sideways!

 

 

The kit came with very smart braided stainless lines, but of course we couldn't get one nut undone and cut it off, then made a new flare on the line.

 

 

...and the final insult was when we put the wheels back on, and the 13" stockies don't fit over the calipers! The rim fits OK, but where the wheel centre is welded in the rim, the extra 4mm of steel makes the diam too small.

 

[altezzaclub]

Of course while this was all going on we were also fitting the BCRacing coilovers. I'd driven down to Sydney to pick them up and meet Darren, he organised to replace their standard 6kg/mm front springs with 5kg/mm.

 

 

They were an absolute work of art, and it allowed me to keep the KE70 stub axles while getting a 52mm strut tube and adjustable shocks.

 

 

The coilovers are a press fit over the KE70 tube, then welded on-

 

 

Eventually we got there-

 

 

 

..and it looked like this-

 

[altezzaclub]

So, what's it like..?   The brakes are fine, less outstanding than I thought initially, but now I realise you can stand on them and they stop, especially with the tyres.  The pedal is still where it was, very high, and the booster is still in place. I thought I might need a larger master cyl, but the 4 pistons don't move as far as the swinging single piston and its fine as it is.

 

The coilovers are stiff, fine on smooth road but too harsh on the broken up stuff trucks leave and Govts refuse to fix. The dash cracks and bangs over the worst stuff, but I'm working on it. All 4 corners are set at their highest and all 4 shocks on softest, with the springs just captive at full droop.. Some of the road feel will be from the tyres, they have very stiff sidewalls for trackdays, and the rims are passed their best. We have balanced them since fitting, but 50 or 60gm of weights means the tyres are not made for road use. The rear shocks were topping out initially, so I fitted a rubber bush on the top of the shock and below the boot floor, which pushed the shock shaft down in the tube, but I didn't want to lower the car to do it. It was 10mm or so droop with 130mm compression, and I took it to 25mm droop and 115 compression.

 

Last weekend I took the rear springs out and measured them and the stock springs on scales, sure enough the BCR were 4kg/mm and the stockies 1.8kg. I fitted the stockies back and measured guard max height, but it was touch too much. A grinder took half a coil off the bottom and it is back to the 620mm it has been for years. That gave me 40mm to max droop and 100mm to max compression, about normal.

 

Now it looks like this-

 

 

With the corona LCAs I've had for years, the camber is within 10minutes of vertical, so the camber-adjusting tops aren't doing anything. The next job is to see if I can fit stock rubber tops back on and hopefully take the harshness out of the front suspension.  There is always the option of PSR coils at 4kg/mm or even 3.8, or adapting the stock spring base to the coilover and using stock front springs!

 

Last week Josh had a windscreen guy coming for a customer's car, so I took the opportunity of spending $480 on a  new windscreen!  It was quite strange to drive with for a few days!

 

Next... While I chase that and also pursue the drive-away problems of the Haltech, which starts without throttle and idles beautifully, but won't drive away when cold!, Banjo has my old distributor for fitting Hall effect sensors, and the next piece of the puzzle will be fitting that distributor with a new oilseal kit, and Barry Manon's COP kit.  So eventually the wiring will be finalised, the brakes upgraded, the suspension sorted...

 

 and then there's the diff....

 

and Josh keeps telling me it needs a Garrett on an intercooler...

[altezzaclub]

Well, it was Sept 2017 when I put up that odo photo showing 188888km, and this week-

So about a 1100km a month. In reality working with Josh takes a tank a week, so 550Km/week, but Covid knocked it back.

Meanwhile, the stock strut tops do fit back on, although with some dodgy bushes until I can get enough time to sit on the lathe at Josh's. Smoother than the camber-adjusters, and I found a pair of 3kg/mm springs from Alderspeed in China.  They may or may not be complete rubbish, but for $100 I don't mind trying them. Being longer, when I fitted them today the car kept the same ride height.

They still take up less room than a stock KE70 spring-

I'll take the car for a  drive on Sunday and see how they go. Then oil & filter, a clean and a tidy-up, and I'm taking it to Melbourne next weekend and back a few days later. That will be close to 2000km, and if I drop the grandson back a week later it will be double that!

The tuning is fine for driving now, starts without throttle hot or cold, runs when cold and runs when hot, the only downside is an extra litre/100km, 8.1 instead of 7.1.  I'll see how the Melbourne trip goes. Cruises lean, 15:1 or almost 16:1 at 100kph, but richens uphill or accelerating. Hard to get it lean around town.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 28 by altezzaclub