I needed another boost buggy - my '93 MR2 Turbo build

Yeah, but it'd be worth it! Then on the drive back home, you could get all pissed off with the car and leave it with me in Denver...

BoxheadTim wrote: Two slight flaws in that plan: - I don't want to have an engine swap in the car, at least not right now - They're on the other side of the country, so getting it there and back would almost double the cost of the swap

Only the second point has merit IMO since the Prime swap is basically a drop in setup with a factory ECU running it.

Maybe someone on your end of the country does the Gen4 swap. 250+hp in that car would be nice.

Not like you have anything else you are spending money on right?

Well, I wouldn't say that I'm spending money on the 996. More like hemorrhaging money...

There is a local-ish MR2 specialist who can be convinced to do a Gen 4 swap, but from talking to him he'd only recommend it if I don't have a healthy engine in the car and wouldn't expect a ton of headroom for future power increases on the Gen4.

Provided the engine is healthy (still have to do a baseline dyno run), I can get pretty close to Gen4 power by just optimizing the breathing of the stock engine and throwing an ATS CT27 turbo on it. That's likely to end up being cheaper than a Gen4 swap.

docwyte wrote: Yeah, but it'd be worth it! Then on the drive back home, you could get all pissed off with the car and leave it with me in Denver...

We could short circuit that by you showing up here with a suitably large amount of money and driving it home.

How's $350 sound?

Multiply by 20, add a little bit and we can talk .

BoxheadTim wrote: Well, I wouldn't say that I'm **spending** money on the 996. More like hemorrhaging money... There is a local-ish MR2 specialist who can be convinced to do a Gen 4 swap, but from talking to him he'd only recommend it if I don't have a healthy engine in the car and wouldn't expect a ton of headroom for future power increases on the Gen4. Provided the engine is healthy (still have to do a baseline dyno run), I can get pretty close to Gen4 power by just optimizing the breathing of the stock engine and throwing an ATS CT27 turbo on it. That's likely to end up being cheaper than a Gen4 swap.

I would... for about the same money, suggest doing a CT20B and a Gen3 electronics conversion. The car will run much "happier" and consistently.

The Gen2 electronics are some of the worst E36 M3 i've ever dealt with in my life.

Well, one two-day track event and a two-day Autocross, and the transmission is doing an Exxon Valdez impression. Great .

Oh, and hose on the compressor side of the turbo shows oil mist, too.

Between this and all the other vehicular problems this year, this doesn't look good for the rest of the season.

Is the td06 not the hot ticket still? It was all the craze when I was into them 10 or so years ago..yours leaking oil sounds like mine. I wished I had the time to pull the motor and replace all the seals like it needed but I sold it and someone eventually did a gen4 swap in it. If you have the time and skill to do it yourself id say lift the body off the rear subframe and go to town replacing everything rubber. My theory is with the motor in the back and not much place for heat to go, on top of boost pushing seals out they dont last..and its 20 some odd years old. And why throw out a good 3sgte if you can just make it even better. Good luck on your endevors I wish I still had mine to tinker on.

Actually the motor is mostly oil tight (at least by 3sgte standards) but the transmission looks like it's leaking from the transmission input shaft. To fix that, I'm looking at a complete strip down of the transmission just to get at that seal.

At this point in time I'm most likely looking at having the local race shop pull the transmission and send it to their manual transmission rebuilder for an assessment. Alternatively, get a transmission that's been rebuilt by one of the specialists and have that fitted, but that'll probably cost me similar money.

Swank Force One wrote:

BoxheadTim wrote: Well, I wouldn't say that I'm **spending** money on the 996. More like hemorrhaging money... There is a local-ish MR2 specialist who can be convinced to do a Gen 4 swap, but from talking to him he'd only recommend it if I don't have a healthy engine in the car and wouldn't expect a ton of headroom for future power increases on the Gen4. Provided the engine is healthy (still have to do a baseline dyno run), I can get pretty close to Gen4 power by just optimizing the breathing of the stock engine and throwing an ATS CT27 turbo on it. That's likely to end up being cheaper than a Gen4 swap.

I would... for about the same money, suggest doing a CT20B and a Gen3 electronics conversion. The car will run much "happier" and consistently. The Gen2 electronics are some of the worst E36 M3 i've ever dealt with in my life.

That '88 Celica Alltrac I had was a nightmare. Totally turned me off from Toyotas, which I didn't like that much to begin with... I want to like them soooo badly though.

Yeah that was a gen1 3sgte. All the problems the gen2 has, but with less power. Awesome.

That car would've been awesome with a 3rd gen 3S. My buddy has it now, if he never does anything with it, I'd love to snag it back up from him.

Any updates?

It's sitting outside and slowly leaking oil onto our parking area...

After eventually getting around to talking to the local race shop, it turned out that their tame transmission builder doesn't work on Toyota manual transmissions. Or at least not mine . Last time I checked with my local MR2 specialist, he didn't have any good used MR2 Turbo LSD transmissions available either. So I'm a little stuck right now as I'm not super keen on just buying an overhauled transmission - the configuration I want with a Quaife LSD installed is running at over $3k. And that's without removal and re-installation of the box itself.

I'll probably crawl underneath it again and try to verify that it's leaking out of the axle stub seals and not out of the input shaft seal as we originally suspected. Either way, it's a little reluctant to get in and out of 1st and 5th gear so this has all the makings of yet another expensive problem.

What's annoying is that I have a whole bunch of nice parts for it stacked up in the shed that don't make sense to put on until I get around to resolving the gearbox issue.

I'm after some seats for mine. Finally got my car back (still awaiting legal proceedings from the snowplow incident). I have a line on a set of freshly reupholstered clack leather ones calling my name. I love your car and hate to hear of your woes, if I lived closer we'd pull that box out and take it to the well known transmission guy here!

Well, I finally got fed up of looking at it leaking slowly. After driving it on the weekend to go look at a couple of potential backup trackable vehicles and figuring that the MR2 drove better than all of them, I called up the local Toyota dealer (who sold the car back in '93) to see if they were interested in taking a break from working on Priuses. They were.

Turns out the suspected gearbox leak may have been a red herring as they found that the main leak came from the distributor. I guess fresh Rotella T6 and fresh MT90 kinda look the same, and the distributor was leaking right onto where you'd expect oil traces to show up from a bad driveshaft seal.

When they pulled the distributor to replace the O-ring that's usually the culprit for this leak, they found that the distributor housing was cracked all the way around in the area where the O-ring sits. That'll explain the leak and probably also expect the odd wear I found in the distributor cap.

Anyway, they're trying to get their hands on the last brand-new Toyota distributor for the car available in the US. Once that's on, they'll go hunt for additional leaks but right now they're convinced this one is the main one and it's so bad that it would mask all sorts of smaller leaks.

Once I got the car back, I'll fit polyurethane front and rear engine mounts, plus replace the shift cable bushings with some CRW spherical bearings and see if that improves the shift quality before doing anything too drastic. And then it's finally time for the baseline dyno run before I start bolting on the go-faster bits.

So the bad news is that it won't be ready for the next round of my regional SCCA club trials, but with encouragement from my wife I've rented a Spec Pinata car for that round.

Whoa, an update that is potentially good news. That's a welcomed change for you I'm sure.

I had to a rebuild on my dizzy as well.
http://twosrus.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=22_31&products_id=67 Twos 'R Us stocks a kit to fix the oil leaking inside and I think it was ~$40 IIRC, wont solve your housing issue though :-/

Actually the mechanic at the dealer had hoped to get away with changing just the O-ring but as you said it wasn't going to fix the housing all by itself. I have a suspicion that I most likely don't want to know how the housing got damaged, but what's done is done and if it does end up with me not having to pull the transmission I'm happy about the smaller bill.

And here is the evidence that there are worse mechanics out there than me:

I mean, how the heck do you manage to break the distributor housing like this?

Anyway, to celebrate the occasion I bid on and won a set of use TE37s for this car. Always wanted a set of "real" ones and the first car I ever saw a set on was a TRD widebody MR2.

Now it's safe(r) to take it on trips further than walking distance from home:

A little more progress in the typical BoxheadTim "one step forward, two steps back" fashion.

I was planning to Auto-X it on Sunday but didn't get around to prepping the car until early Sunday morning. That's when I noticed that the OEM airbox was missing a clasp and the engine was drawing air through the resulting gap. I guess that explains why the AFM was rather dirty. Anyway, I decided to do something about it so instead of going Auto-Xing I ended up pulling out the whole original airbox and trial fitting some rare parts instead:

I guess I'll have to get the baseline dyno done with the ARC intake as I really, really can't be bothered to put the original airbox and resonator back in even if I could source a clasp. What a pain in the rear. I need to get a few screws and other small mounting bits to properly fit the ARC intake (perils of buying used) but that one should allow the engine to breathe properly.

Today I also got the new used wheels for it:

Despite the PO's best effort to make them look like they're fakes with a not very well adhering paint job, they are genuine TE37s with all the right forging markings. At this point I'm not sure if I'm going to have them refinished or not, but I have a hunch I'll end up having them powdercoated.

Plan for next weekend (barring a sudden trip to check out the ND Miata that should hit the dealer any day now) is to finish the intake assembly, fit the matching front TRD strut brace and then take it around the block to see how badly out of balance the wheels and tires are.

Yay!