KPGC110 Rendering

By Eric

I don’t remember where I came across this but I’ve had it forever.  Pulls off the more modern vibe quite well……

Click for full size.

Kenmeri build part 5 : Finishing it all up…..

By Eric

We could definitely have had many more build posts on the 73 Ken & Mary Skyline that we have here at JDM Legends but what I have tried to do here is give you a little bit of what I feel you guys might think are some of the more interesting parts of the restoration, and also to give you a bit of insight into what goes on when we receive a car here at JDM Legends and our attention to detail.  Aside from what some may think, we don’t just pick up the cars for dirt cheap and flip them to some poor unsuspecting client only to find out they have a rusted out jalopy with a laundry list of electrical problems and no brakes.  Trust me, there is plenty of  J-tin that falls into this category which is exactly why we feel we provide a very valuable service to anyone looking to pick up a classic Japanese car.  This very business came about from buying cars that were sold as being solid cars only to find that when we received them that they were  almost undrivable.    There is a very thorough 140 point inspection process that goes on with each and every vehicle that we import, and if something with the vehicle is not up to our standards then we fix the problem.  And if we decide the problem isn’t serious enough for us to fix, the problem is noted and the customer is informed prior to purchase.

So enough of my ranting, on to the build.  We last left off in part 3 with our fenders being modified to properly accept the new flares.  I thought I would share a bit of the preparation process of the parts we received before painting them.  I’m going to start off with a picture of the poor quality over fenders that came on the car, and why we decided to redo them.  As you can see the finish is very poor, and it looks as though they were taken directly out of the box, painted with a spraycan,  and screwed to the car with whatever hardware that could be found after sweeping up the shop floor.

They’re worse in person, trust me.  Now even though the new over fenders we received were substantially better quality than the old ones, they still need a bit of preparation before painting to get the finished product we are looking for.  Mostly some minor filling of imperfections and air bubbles and a good overall scuffing to make sure the new paint adheres properly.

While we were doing the over fenders we decided to also install a chin spoiler on the front of our Kenmeri, because lets face it,  chin spoilers make almost any classic J-tin look instantly ten times better.  And to be honest when I see them without them they look kind of naked, like Kenny Rodgers without a beard.  Anyway, the chin spoilers only come in fiberglass as well and I have yet to see a long piece of  fiberglass not have a serious case of wavyness  to it,  that if not taken care of will be obvious in the right light.  You can see here the low spots that have been smoothed out in the preparation process.

And also while we’re at it, the front fascia/grill area needed some attention with all these nice, new parts going on.  The grill was not as bad as the fenders and just needed a little bit of tlc to be up to par with the rest of the parts.  I also removed the grill and had it powder coated  satin black for a durable, OEM finish.

Now with everything painted it’s time to mount the parts to the car, and in my opinion the hardware used in mounting the parts to the car has a big affect  on the overall presentation and quality of the car.   I have seen some very nicely prepped and painted over fenders that look really nice but when it comes time to mount them to the car they just screw in some self tapping screws and call it a day.  So after mocking up the fenders on the car, drilling holes, and making sure to paint some rust inhibitor/primer in them to prevent future rust I decided to use some very high quality stainless steel, button head cap screws with locknuts on the back to prevent them from loosening up in the future.  You definitely don’t want to remove your entire rear interior to tighten up your hardware if it becomes loose over time.

Muck nicer than the old half-painted sheet metal screws right?  I also decided to use the same fasteners in the front spoiler.

One more thing that always needs to be addressed when installing a twin turbo motor with at least 3 times the amount of power that the car originally came with is the brakes.  Even with 4 wheel discs all around the brakes on this car were never quite right.  All the bleeding and pedal adjustment I could throw at it did nothing to help the situation.  That’s when I realized the situation was a bit more serious than just some minor maintenance.  It turned out that over time condensation had caused the seals in the brake booster to fail over time inhibiting it’s ability to hold vacuum.  So I figured if it’s worth replacing, it’s worth upgrading so I set out to find the largest booster I could fit in the location with hopefully minimal modification.  I ended up using one out of a later model S31 Z that can easily be found here in the states.  The further I got into it appeared that this wasn’t the first time the booster had been replaced and it looked like someone had to fabricate a new adapter plate to get this one to fit.   Hmm…   not what I was hoping for but that is what the welder’s for right   Here’s a pic of the original adapter plate.

This is the new one I had to fabricate to get the new booster to mount in the car.

Not too bad,  then I mounted it and realized the actuator rod that mounts to the brake pedal was way too short.  Not a big deal if you have the resources.  Here’s the finished adapter plate and lengthened rod.   Heh heh….  I just said lengthened rod.  Sorry, to much Beavis and Butthead in my youth has apparently rotted my brain just like they said it would

And boom shaka laka we have brakes!!!    Which are a nice addition to any RB26DETT I might add.  One last thing I decided to do was make a spare tire cover for the trunk area as this car never had one and I felt it left it looking a bit unfinished.   Here is the design drawn onto the same fiberboard used in the OEM spare tire covers.

Finished product cut, upholstered, and ready to go.

So that’s about it for Mr. Ken and Mary.  Like I said there is a lot of other work done to the car not shown here on the blogs but we feel like we have fixed all the major problems with the car and it is now ready to wear the JDM Legends badge of honor and hopefully make some J-tin aficionado very happy and me very jealous   At the end of the day it all comes down to feeling like you have put heart and pride into your work and  done everything that you can do to make sure that whomever is the next owner of the car will be happy with the caliber of service they have received.    I try to treat every car I deal with here as if it were my own, and that is exactly why we do this.  Not to make a million dollars,  for the love.

Just because…

By Eric

Nice line up of Hakosukas in their natural habitat.

Longing for spring…..

By Eric

While some of you lucky schmucks get to drive your classics year round, here in SLC Utah we have to wait patiently for winter to pass before releasing our beloved classics from captivity.   And by the way, I apologize for the lack of content on the website but this car is actually still for sale, unfortunately I am a grease monkey, not a computer monkey so I have to rely on others for that   E mail eric@jdmlegends.com for more info.

P.S. I figured out how to make these clickable for your full size viewing pleasure so click away and be whisked away into wallpaper wonderland!!

RA29 Build part 4

By Eric

So now that we have taken all the old beat down and worn out stuff out of the Celica, it’s time to start putting some cool stuff back in it.  When we outlined the way we wanted to build this car we had a few goals in mind.  The idea is to update the car from it’s tired state into something a bit more modern and reliable while keeping that all important classic Toyota DNA.   We new we wanted the new motor to be fuel injected and we had a goal of 300 whp, not too much that it became unresponsive and overpowered the chassis, but definitely enough power to make it more than fun to drive.

Now you can’t expect to throw in  a new motor and call it a day, we also needed to update the braking and handling to keep up with our new motor setup.  This is going to call for front and rear disc brakes, an LSD, coilovers, and rack and pinion steering conversion.  If you have never driven an older car with a “recirculating ball” type of steering  with a good 2″ of movement in the steering wheel either way before anything actually happens you know exactly what I am talking about, far from precise.

So now what do we use?  We threw around a couple of ideas on motors, wanting to retain a 4 cylinder for balance and keep it in the Toyota family we thought about a 16v or 20v 4AGE, or 3SGTE.  Both legendary motors in their own right but we wanted something a little different so we decided to use the 3SGE Beams motor out of the JDM Toyota Altezza complete with 6 speed transmission for our starting point.

Yamaha tuned and rated at 210hp @ 7500 rpms, individual velocity stacks inside each runner in the intake manifold, and a redline of 8000rpms the Beams 3SGE to me is the pinnacle of  the normally aspirated 4 cylinder Toyota motor.  And to get to that 300 whp goal we will also be  installing a Trust  turbo kit.

Cool, that was easy.  Just drop it in and fire it up right?  Umm…..  no.  This is far from a drop in swap and will require an entire custom subframe to house the motor and rack and pinion steering.  Now lucky for us I have been working on acquiring a new daily driver that I had to build out of two cars  and just so happen to have a spare chassis with rack and pinion steering rack complete with donor subframe.  Here it is, a 1982 Toyota Starlet (KP61),  pretty sad right?  Its okay though, it had a bent frame and it’s guts will live on to see better days.

Here is a side by side comparison between the RA29 subframe and the KP61.

As you can see they are actually pretty close in dimensions and will make a great starting point.  But before we can pick up the torch and star hacking things up there are a ton of measurements that need to performed to assure that the suspension geometry will stay as close to stock as possible.

So far everything appears like it should work pretty well, but we also need to make measurements of the RA29’s suspension.  Starting with the height of the lower control arm mounting point.

It’s location in relation to the frame rails, and the length of the lower control arm and tie rod end.

There are a lot more measurements and procedures that need to be made but I won’t bore you with all of that.  With all the measurements made and recorded we can get to business!  The first step is to cut out the spot welds and remove the factory KP motor mounts.

Next, mount the subframe in the chassis in the correct location and drop the motor in so you can get an idea of where the new motor mounts are going to need to be located.  The goal is as low, and as far back as possible for the best possible weight distribution and handling characteristics.

We decided to use Toyota Supra mounts because we new they would be able to take all the abuse this little 4 cylinder could throw at them.  This is the mount starting to take shape.

I cut out the top of the subframe in order to be able to weld the inside of the mount where it sits on the lower portion of the subframe to more evenly distribute the load.

New plate welded to the top, note the slotted holes on the top of the subframe to allow me to temporarily mount it in the chassis.

Next I welded a 1/4″ thick steel plate where the subrame mounts to the chassis for more strength.

Here is a shot of the underside of the subframe.  You can see the hole that needed to be made to access the nut on the bottom of the Supra mounts.  The lower control arm pickup point on the KP61 subframe also needed to be cut and widened to accept the RA29 pieces.  I also decided to stitch weld the entire subframe in between the factory spot welds to increase strength and rigidity.

And the finished product,  just needs some paint.

Here’s the motor sitting happily in it’s new home.

Next up  is completing  the rear transmission mount, connecting all the steering linkage, and making a new hole for the shifter as it sits a bit further back than the old 5 speed.   So check back for part 5!!

Hypothetically speaking….

By Eric

If money wasn’t an option, which straight 6 would you put in your Nissan?  L series with 6 carbs?

Carbureted RB20?

Fuel injected RB30?

S20?

OS Giken TC24-B1?

Or RB26DETT?

Decisions, decisions……..

JCCA 2010

By Eric

For some of you who don’t know, the JCCA is the largest annual meeting of nostalgic cars in Japan.  It is to the Japanese what the JCCS is to us yankees.  Every year there is a featured marque and this year it was was British, so while there may have been as much JDM goodness as usual there was still plenty to see.  I waited a couple of days to see what showed up on the interwebs before I made a post so I could put up a decent collection of what was there.  Unfortunately I don’t have all day to search for all those super cool unseen pictures so this is just a little collection of pictures I have put together from some of the blogs I frequent that I thought may be of interest to the JDM Legends type.

Let’s start of with some Hakosukas,

Of course the obligatory works replica…

Nice gold one, I’m a big fan of Hakos running wide wheels up front as well as in the rear.   Is it me, or does it seem like everyone in Japan daily drives on R-compound tires?  One more reason I love the Japanese style.

Here’s a pair that I really dig, I’m not usually the biggest fan of red cars but I love seeing it on Hakos because they always seem to be white or silver.  The gold and bronze Watanabes also differentiate them from the crowd, and once again wide front wheels and R-comps …..  straight nasty!!

And if it needed to get any better, look under the hood!  That’s an L series motor with a super rare and $$$$ OS Giken TC24-B1 twin cam cylinder head.  Apparently these were designed because there is a serious lack of flow with the 2 valve per cylinder cross flow heads above 7000rpm so they decided to build an entirely new head with 4 valves per cylinder that makes power up to 9000rpm.  When I win the lottery it will be hard for me to decide between this Frankenstein or a real deal s20

One more….  see what I mean about the wide front wheels?  I guess to me it’s more of a grip style or drag style thing, and I’ve always been a bit more into grip.

And a sedan with a nice stance.

How about some kenmeri love, this one in a nice color and some Panasports.

And this one with some seriously wide wats.

And some really nice Yonmeri’s have been turning up lately, here’s a nice one on some Works.

And this is one of my favorites of the JCCA, love the color combo, stance,  everything!!

I haven’t seen too much from the Toyota camp except a few nice TE27’s.  Simple and clean….

You can’t go wrong with TRD tosco wheels on any classic Toyota.

I’ve always wanted one in moss green.

Especially with this motor, twinspark baby!  that is 2 spark plugs per cylinder.  You don’t see a whole lot of these.

Nice row of Bluebirds but I didn’t find any single ones worth posting.

Sunny’s have a huge following in Japan.

And this is probably one of the best ones I have ever seen IMO.  Super wide Techno Phantoms and nicely done flares.  Yes please.

And remember those British cars that were there?  Not really JDM Legends material but I did find one worth posting, a Lotus Europa on some MK-III’s.

And an amazing engine bay, look at the headers!

And a big reason I would love to go someday is the swap meets.  Manifolds galore….

Some random Nissan stuff.

Need some titanium exhaust parts?  One day I need to take the time to learn how to weld that stuff.

Or a legit  Nismo KPGC110 grill?  Wow!  I believe it due to the quality of the mold, and trust me I know what replicas look like

2T-G header.  I love that you can make something of this caliber and actually sell it for what it’s worth in Japan.  They really respect craftsmanship over there which is more than I can say for the knockoff ebay mania that goes on here.

That is all for me today, back to real work!!  Check out http://japanesenostalgiccar.com/blog  , noriyaro.com , and choufukai.blogspot.com for more pics.

Kenmeri build part 4

By Eric

Lets talk gauges here for a minute.  When it comes to installing aftermarket gauges in a car I think the style, make, color, and quality can make a huge difference in the overall presentation of a vehicle.  For me quality is paramount in choosing a gauge.  Not necessarily for the longevity or cool factor of having an expensive gauge, but I’ve installed many gauges over the years and what some people don’t think about when quantifying the cost is ease of installation and quality of sending units/hardware etc.  One example is hooking 3 Defi gauges that all use one central unit, greatly reducing the amount of wiring and and clutter under the dash, compared to installing 3 (name your Autozone or ebay brand here) and having a rats nest of wiring and adapters and fittings all over the place that will all need to somehow be hidden.

The Kenmeri we have here came to us with about 5 of the type of gauges that fit into that second category.  The factory dash was hacked up and the speedo and tach were removed in order to install the gauges.  Not to mention an engine bay full of wire taps, fittings, and wires strewn about here and there to make them work.  This might work for some, but we felt that the aftermarket gauges and install somewhat detracted from what we were looking for and didn’t fit the style of builds that we do here at JDM Legends.

So the plan was to order another factory instrument cluster surround and reinstall the factory gauges for a more classic, oem feel to the interior.  Here’s where it gets a little tricky,  if you have been reading some of the past kenmeri build posts you may recall this car has an RB26DETT  out of an R33 Skyline and RB25 RWD transmission.   So how do you get old gauges to work with a motor that is 20 years newer?

First off is the speedometer.  This is not too difficult if you know the right combination of parts.  The RB25 transmission has an electronic speedo sensor in the transmission and the kenmeri uses a manual cable-driven speedometer.  First off you need to know what exact transmission you have, and what final drive is in the car as this will dictate the tooth count on the manual speedo sensor which can drasticly change the speedometer readout.  A little searching around to find the right  sensor and cable to go to the back of the gauge cluster (I can’t tell you too much, we have to make $ somehow ) and you’re done.    Here’s a little comparison of the electronic speedo sensor (top) out of the RB25 transmission and a cable driven speedo sensor (bottom)

Next up is the tachometer which is a little more difficult.  Most older cars use the positive side of the ignition coil for the tach signal as opposed to newer cars using the negative side.   There are a couple of companies claiming to make units that convert the signal but I have heard many mixed reviews as to whether they would work for our application or not.   We decided to go with what we thought would the best possible way to get or tach working and that was to use the internals out of an R33 gauge cluster and install them behind the original face of the kenmeri gauges.  Easier said than done.  Modern tachometers and speedos are very delicate things and you must be VERY careful when attempting to disassemble and reassemble things as they’re not exactly cheap either if you break something.  This pic shows the the R33 tach motor being installed behind the oem face, removing the needles is a little more scary than enjoyable.

While I was cleaning thing up I also decide to remove the abundance of notoriously intermittent wire taps in the car and hard wire everything.  Please, unless they are for your L.E.D. hood squirters on your Geo storm never use wire taps as I will guarantee that they will eventually fail and cause you many headaches down the road.  If I only had a dollar for every wire tap I’ve removed in my lifetime…..

Another thing that always bothered me was the way the ecu was mounted, definitely an after thought.

So after some looming and and remounting of the ecu, I decided to make a cover as it was now hidden up under the dash out of harms way.

Much nicer don’t you think?

And the speedo and tach work like factory now.

Now when you sit in the kenmeri you would have no idea as to what lurked under the hood, just a nice clean oem interior.

The Promised land

By Eric

Looking through some of my random pics I have cluttering up my hard drive here and I stumbled across this one and I thought I would share.  I believe it’s  from the Nismo festival a few years back.  A  row of works hakosukas ready for battle at Fuji circuit.   Can you imagine what a pack of race tuned S20’s must sound like in person!?   One day……..

RA29 Build part 3

By Eric

It’s time to get dirty!!   As I had mentioned before, the “bananarama special”  paint job on the Celica looked like it could have been some one’s highschool auto body project.  And if that is the case, I hope they got a big fat F.  It has all the signs of a shotty paint job, bodylines that mysteriously disappear, orange peel for days, dents that can be seen inside the car but not on the outside, moulding and trim overspray, and my favorite…..   painted over factory stickers.

Can you see the GT?  Needless to say, if we are going to do a proper restoration on this the only thing to do is take it all the way down to the metal.   So the next question is how?   There are many ways to go about this and I considered every one of them.  First would be acid dipping the entire thing.  The benefits being that is probably the easiest way to go and most likely  the only sure fire way to get every bit of paint and goo out of every nook and cranny.  The cons of acid dipping is that even if we had someone in SLC that could do it, I’m sure it would be way out of our budget for this car.  I’ve also heard that the acid used can remain in the seams of the chassis and eventually seep out over time which, as you can imagine would probably not be the best thing for your new paint job.  There’s also horror stories of entire rusty cars coming out of  their acid baths in pieces!

The next method I considered was soda blasting.  I think this would probably be the best route to go with this car as I haven’t  really heard  much bad about this method, and we could just drop off our yellow shell and pick it up in a matter of days.  But with the cost ranging anywhere from $1000 to $1500 you have to really have a nice budget to play with.

Sand blasting is much cheaper in the $300 to $500 range, but it can be pretty brutal if the person doing the blasting isn’t careful.  And if you end up with a bunch of pitted and warped panels the money you save will go right back into repairing them.

Now the cheap route to go is aircraft stripper.  You can do an entire car with less than 2 gallons of the stuff and all you need is the desire to put in some serious work.  Not being one to shy away from some good ol’ fashioned manual labor I said to myself what the hell,  strapped on some gloves, goggles, and respirator and decided to get busy!  There’s only one way to see if it’s worth it or not, and that’s to do it.

Now you might be wondering why I look like I’m ready for chemical warfare.  Let me just tell you that this stuff is seriously nasty.  If it gets on your skin you’ll know it because it will feel like someone is burning you with a hot poker.  I can only image what it might feel like in you eyes, hopefully with the proper precautions I’ll never know.  The method is pretty straight forward,  use a paintbrush and spread a libereal amount one panel at a time and prepare for magic……

It will start to bubble up, and when it stops it’s time to get out your putty knife and get your scrape on!

It’s almost like unwrapping a Christmas present because on something like this you never really know what you might find.  I guess I was pretty crappy this year because all I found underneath was a ton of bondo, a bunch of holes from a slide hammer,  and rust

Goop, scrape, repeat.  Goop, scrape, repeat.  Results may vary as it depends on how many layers of paint (or bondo) is on your car.  This one had a couple of layers of paint and as you can see plenty of bondo.  You will need to manually sand the bondo as the stripper only really works in the paint.   A little DA sander action to finish it up and ……

As you can see I have my work cut out for me to get this thing straight, and this is the good side.  You can also see quite a bit of surface rust starting to form under the paint that we would have never caught had we not taken it all the way down to the metal.  I also did all of the fender wells, engine bay, and underneath the car.

Now that it’s been torn down, It’s time to bring it back.  In the next installment we will build a custom subframe to house the new motor and rack and pinion steering.  See you in part 4!