AE92 Corolla SR5 - GTS goodies swap-in mini-build-thread

Well just got some good news, the freight forwarder found the parts and they should be leaving the US on Thursday, so things can get going again around mid-August.

Here's an update from the weekend. T3 camber plates modded to fit D2 coilovers:

I hope there's enough room for the shaft to pivot around. If not, we could try jacking up the nut with some washers that don't add to the diameter of the shaft too much. We can't remove any material from the lower part of the camber plate. That lower part can be installed 180deg from this position to give more negative camber range but the plan is to use the lower bolt slots to get as much of it as possible and then use the camber plates for any more that's needed. Ideally we'd like to run these in the centered position.

02 sensor flange clearly needs another trip to the machine shop:

I did some more appearance work on the valve covers. Xylene took more paint off than the acetone but it made the aluminum oxidize:

They looked much whiter than in this pic. So next I buffed and oiled and called it done for now. Maybe I'll try to get that nice mirror finish later but 6 hours of work is enough until the car is running. I think paint & sand was possibly the worst technique to use here (even worse than mask with tape & paint), but at least it looks a lot better than unpainted.

Well the next event is less than 2 weeks away now so we have to decide whether to take the chance of waiting for the parts or to put stuff together temporarily and then take it apart again to install the remainder of the parts...and since we have no idea when it'll get here, we have to go with the temporary stuff. This should ensure that the parts arrive just early enough that we could have used them if we hadn't already gone down this path.

Parts to be substituted:

• Cheapo short-ram intake from donor car in place of Spectre & AEM CAI
• Sheet metal scoop on the end of the downpipe to direct exhaust downwards and to the side in place of All The Exhaust Parts.
• D2 progressive rear springs with preload removed in place of Eibach linear rear springs w/ helpers
• We'll be running one adjustable and one non-adjustable cam wheel. Should get some interesting looks.
• Unbalanced tire rotation, string alignment, maybe a corner balance with the bathroom scales & levers method.

OK so the event was postponed to late September due to track construction...lucky for me, since I'm still waiting for parts to arrive. I found that the oil catch can, where it was mounted, would get in the way of the intake no matter what, so I moved it to the firewall. Here's a mockup of the intake layout:

I'll just be using the elbow and sensor ring from the Spectre kit. You may have noticed that my giant cartoon air filter is right in the path of one of the radiator fans...I wanted to partition off the air filter but I think it's too big for that, but I'll at least make a heat shield to deflect the air coming from the radiator and separate it from the cool air coming from the battery area (bottom right of the pic).

Check out my my pics from my engine bay, I made a heat sheild using thin aluminum sheet and I cut a hole for the intake tube.

It looks like you did a battery relocation as well, am I right? I've been thinking of doing that (battery sits where that bucket of bolts is in the pic)...in any case I'll have heat shielding for the filter for sure.

Yeah, I dumped the battery in the trunk. I made a small tray for it and a bracket to bolt it down. It has held through two track days and has yet to get loose

You will definitely need to protect that air intake. The hot air under the hood will cause a noticeable power loss. I fabricated my own for the FX16. The black tube off the throttle body is from an AE92 GT-S. The rest is cobbled together stuff from Spectre. The box is cut from an 8 gallon Rubbermaid tote with rubber pipe insulation to seal it to the hood. It pulls air from around the headlight like the factory setup. Works well and has a great sound as rpm's rise!

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Battery mount in the FX16. It was in the rear when I bought the car. It was a side post battery held in place with three metal shelf brackets and only held down with the cables. Scary!

Today it is a top post battery, in a battery box, which is bolted to the chassis, and the battery itself is bolted to the chassis. I had a tech inspector press me on adding terminal post covers too!

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Here is the pillow block in the front. The red cable near the middle of the picture under the blue air box is the battery cable. It is routed through the firewall at the speedometer cable opening. Then routed under the door sill plate out to the battery box.

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Thanks for the pics trucke, both your intake and battery relocation are very similar to what I had in mind. Good idea to use the tubing to make a seal. I had the idea to cover the bay-facing side of the intake partition with aluminum tape for better insulation, hint hint

EDIT: Just had an even better idea. Chop up an aluminum-coated-foam or aluminum-coated-bubblewrap windshield sunshade to make insulation.

I've been going back and forth in my head over battery relocation vs. lighter battery, but I think I've just decided on battery relocation. It's heavier and more complicated but it makes far more room for the intake, gives better balance and doesn't require the use of any expensive or difficult to obtain batteries. Besides my spare tire well already rusts faster than my battery tray

the foam tube is a good idea to really seal the area. As far as the battery goes my current battery is on its last legs and I will be replacing with one from a Civic which is alot smaller

Here is how NOT to mount a battery in the trunk. This was the fX16 when I purchased it.

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Hmm exposed terminals...just a couple of shelf supports limiting its movement...looks legit

Decided where the battery's going, where the gas can is in this pic:

I could get it lower by putting it in the spare well, but that wouldn't be as good for corner balance, would increase rear overhanging weight, and would require more mods to the trunk upholstery and eat into more cargo space (which I need for transporting gear to the track). It's already a few inches lower than stock here. This position only requires a little modding to the carpet and will be "fenced off" by a future strut brace anyway, mocked up in yellow here (and I didn't get the perspective wrong, it's tilted forward to give better torsional bracing between the towers).

Aw man just got super bad news. The stuff in the second half of the shipment was lost. The freight forwarder's going to reimburse us for the lost items, but the problem is you can't buy time with money. This also creates a bit of a cash flow problem.

We can't find out what parts of the shipment were lost until we go through the process of having them declared lost and clearing the remaining items from the port...at least if the helper springs were among the lost items I can save money by reusing the ones that were on the donor car this time. So who wants to bet they're the only items that made it?

The AC compressor from trucke wasn't part of that shipment, but for me personally this freight forwarder now has a 50/50 success rate at being able to get a large crate of items to its intended destination, so I hope they don't mess that up too

Looks like the battery relocation's off as well, the location I wanted isn't really doable from a wiring & attachment standpoint, on top of being a maintenance PITA (but I already knew that). The only workable locations would be in the outer corners of the trunk (big space loss because of the cubbies at the outer edges) and the spare well (big space loss + interior mods because the battery is much taller than the well is deep). Putting it against the back seat at all is a no-go.

So I basically have to choose between losing big chunks of the cargo space that I need to make this a self-cargo-hauling track car and adding the cable weight in order to turn front overhanging weight into rear overhanging weight and free up room for the intake, or just settle for having to make a bigger CAI partition around the filter and convenient front-mounted battery. That's not a hard choice.

That blows about the shipping.

@Gameboy, is this a daily driver? If not remove some of the seats. I sometimes drive my car to the track and haul all the gear in it, but then again I do not have it as a dd so it has been gutted no interiors

It's a backup DD, I try to drive other things as much as possible but I think over the last year I drove this more.

Will you have the battery in a box?

Had to abandon the battery relocation (detailed a few posts back), it won't be in a box in the front.

I was thinking that if you had a metal box, you might be able to incorporate it structurally into the strut brace you're building anyway.

Like this.

Whoa, that's clever! I'll talk with the mechanic about that.

The mechanic said that would take care of the mounting problems but not the wiring problems. The wiring would have to either pass under the seat (with near-zero clearance) or right where the passengers' feet would lie, either of which would wear on the cables. And that going under the whole car is the worst routing option. So there's no good way to do a battery relocation on an AE92 unless you strip out the rear seat area

Not much going on, still waiting for the freight forwarder to declare the items lost to customs.

It looked like the AC compressor from trucke might be lost for a while but the freight forwarder found it after it sat in their Miami warehouse for over a month, seems like they didn't even know it was there until we pointed it out to them.

I don't know what will have to be re-ordered but these things will be changed if they were lost:

Rear helper spring setup: Replaced with cleaned-up parts from the donor car which I didn't know existed at the time. This will save a lot of money so I kinda hope they're lost.

Exhaust: Same basic setup, but instead using Magnaflow mufflers with a steel mesh wrap around the perforated tube to reduce the chance of packing blowout. They make a really long muffler that would be a good resonator too.

I'm not sure what the fuss is about wiring a battery to the rear. One positive wire to the back. One (short) negative wire to the chassis. Run the positive wire under the door sill plate. The FX16 has a cable track there. The AE92 should too. Mine is run on the drivers side, then up under the dash, the firewall at the speedometer cable hole. No rubbing issues at all! Your original design (behind seat next to wheel well of passenger side) is doable.

I hate to hear the about the shipping issues. We know that is frustrating.