well... turns out I was late for the challenge, but this project was not forgotten!
Finally linked up with John from garage zero and my buddy Chase to get this done. With three incomplete heads, couple intakes, and a lot of random things that had gone missing and luckily could pull out of both of their parts piles and the spare junk motor this car came with we got it all together and fired up for the first time in many years!
got it towed to chases garage and we got cracking. Pulled the head that had been sitting and thankfully keeping water out of the fresh built bottom end. To our suprise everything looked almost brand new in there. The head was actually also in pretty decent shape, but missing too many parts to use. I brought my CRC benchtop and gave it a scrub down anyway to hold onto.
The head that John was supposed to bring for this ended up being locked away, so we had to dive into Chases stash. He had a GZE head that he pulled off sitting in a box and we got to getting that cleaned up as well as I could, only to find that it had one totally burned out exhaust valve. Swapped one from my incomplete head, and went to getting everything put back on. Somehow had too many washers and not enough bolts for the ARP studs that was in the car, but chase came to the rescue again.
Our cheap torque wrench and not checking that the studs had been torqued properly made this a bit sketchy, but we got it all buttoned up and ready to add oil! Except the oil filter plug had gone missing, another thing I had to borrow from Chase's stash. Forgot to stuff the distributor I also had to borrow in and poured oil straight on the ground, oops. Once it had oil we figured out the stupidly all same color battery leads and tried to turn her over. After john did some magic with the fuse pannel she was spinning freely, sounded like great compression and we called it a day.
The next morning John went ahead and did most of the intake and getting some things plugged in, I worked on getting the rest of the cooling stuff routed, and grabbed some more spare parts I had laying around like lightly used plugs and leads I had for an old Honda. I tried to make the aftermarket seat at least have a bolt in it, bled some of the clutch and we worked on getting it timed and ready to go. After a couple attempts and the fun of dealing with distributors on MR2's and my annoying want to get it first starting up on video and bam she lit off! Still needs a good bit of work to get it actually happy and idle, but with at least some confidence I got to drive it around the neighborhood.
Now trying to track all of this on the budget, that will be tricky. I know I spent $40 on the oil and filter. I gave John the crusty spare motor for the fresh head, but that will end up going to Chase for all his parts we used. We stole the alternator off it and probably more I am forgetting. Once I get a new exhaust, track down a couple other missing bits, a battery, and whatever else I am sure that will come out to around 500 bucks. I spent 400 on some used but still seemed brand new tires. That leaves about 60 bucks left in the budget. If I can get this to a somewhat usable car with 60 left, that would be sweet... but this car is just asking for another parts bin special turbo kit. Maybe I can find one on ebay for that cheap :)
