New to here, but not new to the internet forums stuff. I am on a bunch of the other supra boards and some of the old school toyota boards. Here is my story...
Story starts out with this 76 RA29
I fancied dropping a 7M into it. Easier and cheaper than the 1JZ as the 7M is almost a straight drop in for the chassis. I could never find one and the previous owner( a toyota mechanic) came up with a NOS cannon intake and weber sidedraft for the 20R in the car. Anyway, one day my friend calls me up and says that he found a cheap supra on craigslist. I figure that it can't be that good of a car for the amount of money they want. I call and the guy tells me that if I can get there the next morning before he leaves for the crusher I can have the car. I make it in the nick of time and end up with this...
I got a straight MkIII supra with a 7M. The starter needed replacing as it had torqued off the engine. It also needed a new ignition cylinder as the keys had been lost. I found that stuff for around 40$. Got it all sorted out and tried to start it. Nothing happened. I started with the spark plugs and found this.
Okay, so I fix that, not that hard. 25$ in gaskets, 12$ in plugs, I at least got NGKs, but I couldn't see spending 70$ in plugs for a possibly blown engine. 6$ in 8MM plug wires off a 6M from the junkyard. After all that, we got this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZfXRbpb_8I
I have a bunch of other parts for it waiting to be put on. New passenger's door, cleaner carpets, new bumper, new hatch, new passenger's seat. Nice thing is I found some one parting a couple supras out and the new parts ran me just under 75$ I also picked up a new dash pad and a better bumper out of the junkyard yesterday. Total for both was 24$ The dash pad is perfect with no rips tears or fading.
Big question was the headgasket. Is it the stock or a new one? I believe that it has been replaced. I know that the transmission only has a couple thousand miles on it as the old one was in the back of the supra when I bought it. When I replaced the valve cover gaskets, this is what the cams looked like.
Which leads me to believe that the head has been off. Also, the mechanic that I showed it too believes that too. The car has almost 200K miles on it. The cams, if they haven't been worked on should be quite a bit more discolored than they are.
Okay, so the grand total for the car so far...
just over 350$ I only paid 200$ for the car originally. I think I did okay. Oh yeah, with out the exhaust, which it doesn't have, it pulls like a rabid ape!!!
Unfortunately, last week I did discover a coolant leak. I was just tooling around the yard with the car and a couple of minutes after I shut it off, I had a good sized pool of coolant on the driver's side floorboard. After investigating, I discovered the return line from the heater core is busted right at the firewall. So the next big job will be replacing the heater core and blower. I will at the same time replace the dash pad as well, since it will need to come out anyway.
There are also a lot of little things that need finishing. The passenger's headlight bucket is broken. I have a new one, but haven't had the time to put it on. Bumper will be fixed between the three I now have. New hatch as stated above. Passenger's seat needs some work. 'New
to me' carpet to go in. Good thing I removed the old carpet. It was bad!!! The windows had been left down for some time and the carpet had absorbed a lot of water. All that water had gotten inbetween the layers of sound insulation in the floorboards. I chipped most of that out. I did find that the floorboards are solid as are the rear wheel wells. I have new mouldings to put on around the windows and such. Eventually I will start a build thread and document most of this stuff.
Glad to finally be allowed to post and look forward to helping out if I can.
Story starts out with this 76 RA29
I fancied dropping a 7M into it. Easier and cheaper than the 1JZ as the 7M is almost a straight drop in for the chassis. I could never find one and the previous owner( a toyota mechanic) came up with a NOS cannon intake and weber sidedraft for the 20R in the car. Anyway, one day my friend calls me up and says that he found a cheap supra on craigslist. I figure that it can't be that good of a car for the amount of money they want. I call and the guy tells me that if I can get there the next morning before he leaves for the crusher I can have the car. I make it in the nick of time and end up with this...
I got a straight MkIII supra with a 7M. The starter needed replacing as it had torqued off the engine. It also needed a new ignition cylinder as the keys had been lost. I found that stuff for around 40$. Got it all sorted out and tried to start it. Nothing happened. I started with the spark plugs and found this.
Okay, so I fix that, not that hard. 25$ in gaskets, 12$ in plugs, I at least got NGKs, but I couldn't see spending 70$ in plugs for a possibly blown engine. 6$ in 8MM plug wires off a 6M from the junkyard. After all that, we got this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZfXRbpb_8I
I have a bunch of other parts for it waiting to be put on. New passenger's door, cleaner carpets, new bumper, new hatch, new passenger's seat. Nice thing is I found some one parting a couple supras out and the new parts ran me just under 75$ I also picked up a new dash pad and a better bumper out of the junkyard yesterday. Total for both was 24$ The dash pad is perfect with no rips tears or fading.
Big question was the headgasket. Is it the stock or a new one? I believe that it has been replaced. I know that the transmission only has a couple thousand miles on it as the old one was in the back of the supra when I bought it. When I replaced the valve cover gaskets, this is what the cams looked like.
Which leads me to believe that the head has been off. Also, the mechanic that I showed it too believes that too. The car has almost 200K miles on it. The cams, if they haven't been worked on should be quite a bit more discolored than they are.
Okay, so the grand total for the car so far...
just over 350$ I only paid 200$ for the car originally. I think I did okay. Oh yeah, with out the exhaust, which it doesn't have, it pulls like a rabid ape!!!
Unfortunately, last week I did discover a coolant leak. I was just tooling around the yard with the car and a couple of minutes after I shut it off, I had a good sized pool of coolant on the driver's side floorboard. After investigating, I discovered the return line from the heater core is busted right at the firewall. So the next big job will be replacing the heater core and blower. I will at the same time replace the dash pad as well, since it will need to come out anyway.
There are also a lot of little things that need finishing. The passenger's headlight bucket is broken. I have a new one, but haven't had the time to put it on. Bumper will be fixed between the three I now have. New hatch as stated above. Passenger's seat needs some work. 'New
to me' carpet to go in. Good thing I removed the old carpet. It was bad!!! The windows had been left down for some time and the carpet had absorbed a lot of water. All that water had gotten inbetween the layers of sound insulation in the floorboards. I chipped most of that out. I did find that the floorboards are solid as are the rear wheel wells. I have new mouldings to put on around the windows and such. Eventually I will start a build thread and document most of this stuff.
Glad to finally be allowed to post and look forward to helping out if I can.
