This is going to be a long post to catch up on everything that has happened up till now with the build...
It was awesome to make it back to the challenge this year and I feel like I’ve been re-bit by the GRM bug. Despite the fact that I was piloting a literal Yacht of the Land I got the competitive itch and after the concours I was feeling downright inspired. Thus when we got back to Texas it was time to sit down and flesh out some pipe dream plans I had been working on before. I want to keep things relatively simple and “cheap” so the goal is a car that comes in under 2000lbs with over 200hp. Also I want RWD mainly just for personal preference and better hoonage. With this goal in mind my buddy and I started foraging the internets for a powerplant for the new car. Also we needed a car… I had been eyeing one before I even moved down here this summer but life happened and I realized there was no way I’d have it ready for $2018 (this will become important later).
In my typical fashion of finding theoretically sound but practically unproven solutions to my problems I became fixated on the idea of a J-Series Honda engine in front of a T-5 for our powertrain. Conservative estimate based on internet and aftermarket sellers is this should be making 250hp/250ft-lb and it weighs under 400lbs fully dressed and filled with oil. Again based on my research it appears the best complete engine (that can be readily found in junkyards) is the J35A3 out of the 01-02 Acura MDX. Lucky for us there just so happened to be two of them near my friend’s house in San Antonio, in the absolute cheapest junkyard I have ever seen.
$150 + $85 core charge for any engine regardless of cylinders or aspiration method. Once we got there we found out why this place was so cheap - it is a desolate car wasteland of Mad Maxian proportions. We were lucky the engine we were pulling was at the end of a row because if it were in the middle there would be no way to get an A-frame over the piles of body panels, engines and other debris that littered every aisle. Take a moment to soak in the glory (or maybe horror) of this mess -
Thankfully the engine was really easy to pull, partly thanks to Honda actually designing for serviceability but also thanks to the lack of snow (and thus salt) in southern Texas. As a northerner, I’ve never had a better time in a junkyard than I do down here where everything isn’t rusted together or just gone thanks to rust.
You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned a car yet, and that is because, much to the confusion of the junkyard employees who asked us where the engine was going in, we had an engine but no car yet. I was still trying to make space for another car in the garage, and decide what to actually buy. So in the meantime we got the engine partially stripped down and somewhat less greasy then, in a feat of maximum practicality, fit an entire engine, engine stand, MIG welder and tank, myself and a dog into my Fiesta for the drive back to Waco.
Suffice to say I was running ~hella flush bro~ in the rear. Back in Waco I got the engine mostly decrustified and started pulling off the harness for rearranging later.
Now comes the part where that car I mentioned earlier becomes important - I had talked to a guy about his 1979 Toyota Corolla before I even moved to TX but like I said before, the realities of time and budget forced me to take a simpler road to the 2018 Challenge with the wagon. However, these cars must be really unloved or people were just scared away by the project that would be involved in rebuilding it, so six months later it’s still up for sale. I talked to the guy again and once I had the cash in hand from selling other random crap out of the garage I went over there and picked it up.
Not the prettiest sight from the get go but all the parts (glass, interior, body panels, literally everything) is in the car and for 250 bucks you kinda have to expect some (lots of) assembly required.
Now with the car safely in the garage I spent this past weekend sorting through all the junk that was inside the car, tossing trash (there were lots of broken trim pieces, seals not worth saving, moldy seats) and sorting out the good stuff for future use or just to get core refunds down the road. I also gave it a good cleanout and probably vacuumed out several pounds of dirt, hornets nests, rocks, and bird skeletons.
On the subject of weight, since one of my (self imposed) constraints is weight, it would be nice to know what I am starting with. One of the reasons I liked the Corolla other than price was that in stock form they weighed 1900lbs wet. I figured without the engine, trans and interior we should be down around 1400-1500 lbs, but I don’t own racing scales or know anyone in the area with some.
But if you give some engineers a few beers, they come up with the darndest ideas… it turns out that while racing scales can run you upwards of 1000 bucks, a high capacity bathroom scale is only $40 on Amazon. And it turns out that 4 issues of GRM stack up to the same height as said big boy scale. Thus I give you the poor man’s racing scale - all you need is a 550lbs capacity platform scale and 12 copies of GRM or any other combination of things that are the same height as your scale. Simply set three wheels up like so:
Then set the last wheel on the scale:
Rinse and repeat for all four corners, add your weights together, and voila! A pretty decent picture of how much your car weighs, in my case 1384lbs. That includes all the glass except the rear side panels, as well as the dashboard and all the headlights/tailights. Not too shabby as far as I’m concerned. Next thing I need to do is weigh the engine so I’m not just basing my total weight off of internet numbers.
In the meantime I’m working out if a T5 is the transmission I should use as well as how I'm going to make an adapter - in my mind making the J35 a RWD engine is going to be the hardest part for a dude with a basic garage and no fab shop at his disposal. I'm also trying to figure out what rear diff to use as well as just how I should run the rear suspension. Current setup is a leaf-sprung live axle - this car was literally built like a truck. The balancing act is going to be building something that won’t rip apart in the drag that at the same time is as light as possible to meet the weight goal. Also hopefully my car is not now haunted by the bird whose grave I desecrated yesterday, but that has yet to be seen.
