Richee3's Progress thread., Wilwood BBK installed. Options

[richee3]

You might be asking yourself, "Self, how does a person who just sold their Celica make a progress thread for a Celica?" The answer is easy: you go buy another Celica. So I picked up a '96 GT hatchback with a blown engine.

The story: My brother's friend got the car brand new in '97. It's a '96 model though... gotta wait until the end of the year so you can get a good deal on a car! So back in 1997, a slate gray Celica pulls into my driveway. I've never seen one before. My brother is always telling me about how fast the car is. Flash forward a few years and I find myself with a '96 ST sitting in my garage and I find out that my brother lied to me and that these cars aren't fast at all. So here I am, 3 Celicas and a Lexus IS 300 later, and I miss my Celica. I had my hopes up for a swap and a GT4 front end conversion. So what did I do? I called Marc tonight and asked him about his old Celica. I knew he never changed the oil and never even checked it. I knew he blew the engine up. Tranny is still good, body is still good. New brakes and tires. Even has good blades on the windshield wipers. So tonight I call him and ask if he still has the car and he said he'd let it go for $250. I was there in 30 minutes with a check in hand. The car I grew up watching, the Celica that made me love Celicas, is now mine. Forgive the bad pictures, since it was night before I got there to buy the car. Better pictures coming later.









Like I said, the motor is blown. Not a big deal since I am doing a swap anyway. It was lady driven at first, and ladies suck at driving (no offense, ladies.) So she cracked the skirts and had a body shop remove them. No big deal since I am putting TRD skirts on. The car needs paint. No big deal since I was painting it anyway. Needs a new head unit... You get the idea. That's literally the extent of things that are wrong with the car. Everything else is in good shape.

Plans for the car... I'm still undecided. It's definitely getting a 3S, whether it's a BEAMS or a 3rd gen -GTE.

So... here I am, 6gc. It was a long month without a Celica, but I'm back and I'm here to stay.

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Update: 5S-FE to BEAMS 3S-GE wiring explained with pictures:

• EA1 Plug: Pins 17 and 4 need to be bridged. Pin 17 needs power when pin 4 has it. Pin 17 is in the lower left corner, black w/red trace. Pin 4 is the big black wire at the top, center of the plug. Doing this gives the BEAMS spark. Pin 17 coming off of the EA1 plug can be snipped and covered up, left alone. (See picture 1.)
• EA1 Plug: Pins 2 and 12 need to be bridged. They are both ground wires, white w/black trace. (See picture 1.)
• Clutch start wire: Black w/yellow trace. This one is a bit tricky to explain. There are 3 vertical plugs next to the ECU. On the body side of the plugs, you have a white (19 pin) plug, light gray (13 pin) plug, and dark gray (17 pin) plug. The clutch start wire is pin 18 on the white plug. Move it to pin 17 on the dark gray plug. (Refer to picture 2.)
• If using your OEM tach and a tach adapter, you'll need to intercept the tach signal going from the ECU to the gauges. This comes from plug C, wire 27 on the ECU plugs. It's a gray wire. (Refer to picture 3.)
• Cruise control wiring: I have a 1998 USDM Celica. In my case, no wiring changes were necessary and my cruise control works perfectly. I believe that this is standard across the board of USDM Celicas, although some pre-98 models may still require changes. Further research from others is necessary.
• Airbag light: To get your airbag light to function properly, you run a wire from the EA1 plug to the light gray interior plug (either pin 4 or pin 5, I have read separate posts saying both and I chose not to do this step so I cannot confirm which pin it is.)

Picture 1. EA1 plug: At the top, pins 2 and 12 are bridged together. These are grounds. In the middle with the yellow butt connector, you can see pins 17 and 4 bridged together, red w/black trace and plain black wire. At the bottom of the picture, you can see the unused and covered wire that used to be pin 17.


Picture 2. Body plugs next to the ECU. Here you can see the clutch start wire in the bottom left corner, black w/yellow trace.


Picture 3. Plug C, wire 27. This is the tach signal wire that needs to be intercepted for a tach signal adapter.


This post has been edited by richee3: Aug 26, 2014 - 10:01 PM

[richee3]

Posting for no reason other than just keeping a record of when I did some maintenance. I set the car back on the ground tonight for the first time in about a month. I meant to just take it off the road for a weekend to do some simple maintenance but nothing ever seems to go well with projects that only take a weekend. The idea was to replace both front knuckles and bearings, driver side axle, rebuild all four calipers and replace the 19 year old brake lines with stainless braided lines, new parking brake shoes, and completely flush the brake fluid. Some of the project went smoothly but I ran into an issue with the shop that made my brake lines, followed by parking brake shoes that refused to cooperate. Turned out to be parking brake cables that were just starting to seize up, so that put the project behind another few days. When the cables arrived, they still didn't cooperate with me. While I was waiting for parts, I decided it was time to get rid of at least two of the junk Falken tires I had. Ideally I'd like to get all four but the CFO/wife would only give me enough allowance for two. She acts like we need new rear tires for the Supra as well as four new tires for the 4Runner, while we are simultaneously trying to finish up the last few projects on our house to get it listed for sale so we can move halfway across the country or something. But I digress, no two year bumps worth it without pictures.

Wow, fancy!


Pictures don't do the tires justice. They are BF Goodrich g-Force Comp-2 A/S's. I would have liked to have gotten the regular Comp-2's to start running dedicated summer and winter tires but we have too much going on in other parts of life right now to dedicate the money to two sets of tires per car so I'm sticking with all seasons for now. These are ultra high performance all season tires, a category that I wasn't even aware existed. UHP and all seasons normally don't go together, but these tires are rated pretty well. Almost anything will outperform the Falkens I just replaced.

[richee3]

Well, as much as I hate to say it, age is finally getting the best of this car. We started smelling fuel a couple of months ago but that was around the time we were packing up for a big move halfway across the country. It’s no surprise that the hint of gas eventually turned into a pretty big leak from the tank. Had to buy an aftermarket tank, straps, and filler neck from RockAuto although they are still available from Toyota. However, I replaced the pipes and rubber hoses with OEM parts.

Out with the old:




And in with the new:






The new tank came with crappy silver spray paint that wouldn’t last a week under the car, so I tried a couple of different solutions. Truck bed liner seemed to work best. While the tank was down, I decided to drop the rear sway bar, clean the rust, and give it the POR15 treatment:




Typical of these old cars and ongoing projects, simply replacing the tank always snowballs into bigger jobs. I was going to drop the rear subframe and refinish it, and buy new rear bushings, but I honestly just got tired of the car being on jackstands and costing me $200 for this and $250 for that so I decided this was enough for now. I did take care of all of the rust that I could get to, cleaned up as much of the subframe that I had access to and finished it in POR15, and had to tackle one other project while the tank was down. As much of an improvement as the bushings would be, I have to consider safety before upgrades. Back in 2012, we had one of the steel brake lines going to the rear brakes rust through. I patched a new piece in but I’ve always questioned when the next spot to rust through will be. It happened at home in 2012, but next time could be an emergency situation. No sense in risking our safety or that of others, so I went ahead and replaced both hard lines with brand new OEM lines, and not a minute too soon.





And of course, I found the weakest spot when I was wiggling the passenger side brake line to drop it from the car.




But the new ones make up for the old rusty ones!





Aaaand while installing those this morning, I decided that no amount of money on earth can ever fix the newest problem with this car.




That’s it, guys. Progress thread over. Car’s burned to the ground. It was the only solution. Had a good run but we’ll just collect the Insurance money and import a GT4 later.

[Zake]

that spider was a whole lot of "NOPE"

[richee3]

Key word: was.

[Box]

You made the right call, I'd have done the same.

[rave2n]

Quality work as always, Sir.

[SwissFerdi]

Good stuff. Love the plate. Please tell me yours says "ISASUPRA."

[richee3]

You made the right call, I'd have done the same.

I had no choice. My hands were tied.

Quality work as always, Sir.

Thanks! I’ve got my fingers crossed that you finish yours!

Good stuff. Love the plate. Please tell me yours says "ISASUPRA."

No, it’s still “RICHEE3” but that’s not a bad idea for when I switch to Colorado plates!

[cheela]

you can't trust these spiders... they may have already made their way to the supra.... you know what you have to do...

and this wouldn't be the first time you collected insurance money from the celi. lol

[njccmd2002]

awesome update

[sandusky1977]

Laughed my ass off, thanks for that!

[narly_charley]

Yes, very funny! Haha!

Brake cleaner works GREAT on bugs and spiders. They basically melt.

[Box]

Fire works great too as you can see.

[NgoFcukinWay]

Should've just given the spider the keys and walked away.

[richee3]

Brigette surprised me with a Wilwood BBK for the Celica for Christmas, and since I didn’t have much else going on I decided to get to work. These came from another member’s car here on the forum, Csober. Most of you know that he sold his Celica to get his Z31 and the guy that bought it immediately started parting it out on Facebook. Kind of irritating to see such a nice car get parted, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a few parts from it. Since we were in the middle of moving halfway across the country, I decided to be a responsible adult and keep my money. Brigette, on the other hand, didn’t.




Comparison of stock GT brakes vs the Wilwood brakes.






Finally mounted.




My biggest concern with these was clearance. Having seen them on Tao’s car, I knew they were considerably larger than the stock calipers so I was concerned that my wheels may not fit anymore and I may need to get different spacers, but I got lucky and have miles of room.




Initial impression is that they work much better than my stock calipers and Hawk HPS pads. I’ve never liked the Hawk pads, since I don’t warm them up enough to be effective in daily driving. (Still waiting for an “I told you so” from Chris.) These have much better initial bite, but haven’t successfully ripped my face off yet. I’ve done a couple of hard stops from 20 and surprisingly, they didn’t even lock the wheels up. I will bed the pads in later, after the holidays when the highway patrol isn’t out in force. Perhaps these will grab harder as they get warmer as well. I didn’t even warm them up on my quick drive.

The calipers are significantly lighter than stock. I wish I had weighed then before mounting them. I currently have no plans for the rear brakes but I’m leaning towards ST205 brakes.

[Box]

It was nice of her to buy you a present for her car. I wonder if they have a non drilled rotor available for them.

[1994Celica]

Looks nice! I'm jelly.

[BonzaiCelica]

awesome on fuel restoration.

hopefully i dont have to do this. my cars been sitting for 16 months without any fuel additives....

[NgoFcukinWay]

Those wheels are 17" Caldina wheels, right?

[richee3]

It was nice of her to buy you a present for her car. I wonder if they have a non drilled rotor available for them.

Right? Her car, her money, but it’s presented in a way like the parts are for me. There is a blank rotor option available, but I’ll keep the drilled rotors for now. I’ve heard tons of horror stories of drilled rotors cracking but it’s not like I’ll be doing any track days to heat the rotors up, so hopefully we won’t have any issues.

Looks nice! I'm jelly.

Thanks! Yours will be right there with mine in no time.

awesome on fuel restoration.

hopefully i dont have to do this. my cars been sitting for 16 months without any fuel additives....

What’s had your car down for so long?

Those wheels are 17" Caldina wheels, right?

Depends on why you’re asking. If you want a set for your car, they are definitely something else from another car and you should get different wheels. For any other reason, they are Caldina/Matrix M Theory wheels, 17x7 +45.