Last week I reached out to MVP Motorsports, and got rolling on having Chris tune it.  He provided me my initial base map on Sunday night.  I had a chance to fire it up, and it is better than what I have been able to pull off in 6 weeks.  I sent him back the log files, and will await the next calibration file to use.

Now that the weather is great again, I am ready to get the car on the road.  With having a professional tuner on board, I don’t think it is too far away.  There is a small handful of things that I need to take care of in the engine bay, but they are nice and small.

Hopefully I do enough things to keep the blog going better than I have been lately…

Here is a quick vid of the initial start up with Chris’s calibration.

Essentially 3 main area where worked on:

1 – Intake Manifold:Pretty straight forward stuff here.  A gasket and a handfull of bolts.  Easy to put on, but also easy on the eyes

2 – Exhaust Manifold: This appeared to be easy, but then turned into a pain.  Like the intake manifold, I put on the gasket and bolted on the manifold.  Seemed like things were good until Corey and I tried bolting on the turbo.  There was hardly any room.  We ended up taking the manifold off and bolting the turbo on the manifold off the car, and then sticking it all on at once.  Still was a pain to get the turbo mounted, but we got it done.

3 – Oil Pans: Basically…oil systems freak me out.  Unlike other parts of the engine, if something is messed up with the oil system, you probably ruin your engine.  None the less, we bolted everything on.  Took our time, and will see how it goes when we fire it up.  Pretty basic stuff.  The only snag we ran into was the previous owner stripped out one of the turbo oil return line bolts.  So that will need to get fixed with a heli coil (spelling?).

Other than all that, things are moving really good.  Still sorting out the wiring (it was a mess), but am hoping to get the engine dropped in this weekend!

The first weekend of the engine build has come to an end. Overall it was very successful. We ran into some snags here and there, but for the most part things went well. We kicked off the project Friday night, and had a five man squad dig in.

The night started off a little rocky with the bolts for the engine stand being too long. While someone ran to the parts store, we started with it still on the crate.

Once we had the right hardware, we got it mounted on the stand. We didn’t have too much planned for the night; the end goal of the weekend was to get a new head gasket and ARP head studs installed – both are needed to be able to crank up the boost. The ARP studs are needed so that the head and block do not separate, and the head gasket is needed to lower the compression a bit.

By far the hardest part of the night was getting off the intake cam gear, clearly it had been on for 15 years. It probably took us an hour or so, but we finally got it to break loose. After that it was smooth sailing for the most part. While taking the cams off we realized that we did not have the right tool to get the stock head studs out. End of night one.

Day 2:

After running to about three different stores to find the right tool to get off the stock head studs, we kicked off the second day. Overall the day went perfect. We got the studs out and popped off the head. Luckily, the block and pistons looked to be in really good shape. They looked consistent and didn’t appear to have anything out of the normal going on. Ryan (a fellow car lover) and I spent a good hour or so cleaning up the block, pistons and head. It turned out to be really nice looking.

We then put in the new studs and BoostLogic head gasket. Nothing special going on there, pretty simple stuff.

We continued to bolt things back together. The Toyota repair manual is a life saver (thanks Dad!). It nicely lists out the procedures and torque specs. The rest of the night went well. We paid close attention to getting everything torqued correctly, and the timing components installed right. Along the way we replaced the stock cam gears with Titan adjustable cam gears, and we replaced the stock valve covers with much nicer looking ones.

The night ended by me not having a vice to reset the timing belt tensioner. Overall it was a super productive and successful weekend! Thanks to everyone that came out to help! We will be starting it up again this Friday. If all goes perfect, we will be done with the engine build and will be getting prepped for dropping it in!

Stay tuned!

A couple weeks from when  we parked the car in it’s new home, the engine arrived.  We picked an engine out of New York with about 80,000 miles on it.  This weekend we will be getting the engine on the stand and digging in.  If all goes well, we will have a good chunk of pictures and a lot more info to share shortly.

Stay tuned.