On Maintaining Healthy Long Distance (Automotive) Relationships - CTeo's Lexus SC400 Build

Hi all, I figure now is about as good a time as ever to start a build thread on my 1992 Lexus SC400; I hope to keep this updated, but knowing me I will purchase another car and lose focus on this thread

A little about me, I'm Casey, a current senior at Georgia Tech and have been on Wreck Racing the past four years, as one of those hooligans who has worked on both the LS swapped e28 as well as the J swapped S10 for the challenge. I want to start some documentation of my SC project before I forget some of the stories and/or lose some pictures. Bear with me here, I want to keep the thread in chronological order, although I bought the car two years ago in January 2020. This thread spans an interesting 2 year period as I shuffle back and forth between my hometown in Akron, OH school in Atlanta, GA and work in either Detroit, MI or Fort Wayne, IN.  I currently own this SC400, a lifted LS400, a beautiful '93 G20 Shorty conversion van, and am always shuffling through other dailies/projects as they come.

The journey to this car started off as a weird one, I being a dumb college student desired a fun project that checked all of my boxes: Powerful, RWD, Manual, Reliable and Cheap. After checking out an awesome Fiero with enough hidden rot to salvage the car, and a suspiciously cheap '00 "Trans Am" with ~cloth~ seats and the t56 missing 3rd (later learned it was a factory v6 with a sketchy LS swap), I decided maybe an old GM car wasn't going to check all of my boxes.  Sitting around doing my usual fb marketplace searches with other Wreck Racers papamilad and his $300 challenge LS400 as well as BigDaddyDeek and his known Lexus affinity, I was being pressured to buy an LS400.  Now that doesn't satisfy my manual transmission requirement, but maybe that's okay, since papamilad and I discussed manual swapping our cars together.  The only hangup I had to this was my opinion on LS400's, that they're hideous and look like what a second grader would sketch as a generic "car".  (Spoiler alert, I bought an LS400 9 months later and love it to this day).  That's when I stumbled upon an ad for an SC400, a car I had almost forgotten existed but had always loved. (If y'all want to feel old, I was born the final year of production for the Z30).

The ad was for a 200k mi 1992 Lexus SC400 just outside Atlanta for $3600.  I messaged the man, stopped by the bank, and was at his door the next day.  Just before I left, the seller called me and said he would be unable to show the car to me, since someone came to look at the car the day before and tried to jump the dead battery, but crossed the jumper cables and now the car was unresponsive. Some quick Google searches showed a main fuse could have popped and I said I was still interested in checking the car out despite the electrical issues.  Turns out, upon arrival that the car was fine and just needed a battery swapped in.  Thanks to papamilad and his 300zx that never runs for donating a good battery to the cause. The seller was immediately amazed at these wizards who were able to start this old car with such ease, and who brought a battery and tools to purchase a used car.  I noticed also that the 200k miles that were on the car, were in fact 200k km (124k miles), and this was a Canadian spec SC400 eh. The seller told us the car was his fathers, who had just recently passed away in a nursing home in FL, and his father got the car from his best friend (the original owner) in the early 2000's.  These two elderly gentlemen imported the car into the US from Canada in the mid 1990's and moved to FL with it.  The seller then informed us he wanted it to be his sons first car but the son was more interested in an Acura crossover from within the last five years, and wanted no part of an almost 30 year old boat. (Lucky me).  The test drive showed the car was in phenomenal working order, the interior was reupholstered, the exterior was recently touched up with a factory respray. The speedometer was the only thing that did not work, (my friend informed me after the fact that I may have been cruising 70 in a 45 but that just goes to show how smooth this car was).  I was sold.  I started to negotiate a little bit and saw a tear start to well up in the sellers eyes as he removed his late fathers umbrella from the trunk, and the retirement villages front license plate.  I couldn't low ball him, not for how nice this car was.  We settled at a fair $3000 and I was on my way.  I slowly worked my way out of his suburban neighborhood, and respectfully waited to lay a pair of elevens until I was on the main road to celebrate my new purchase.

The trouble with Atlanta is that parking can be an issue, especially for a project car.  Luckily some other Wreck Racer's knew of a deck I could park in with them to keep the SC in Atlanta, free of tickets.

Here we have mgfoster doing what was a hilariously fun parking garage clutch job:

And papamilad and I with our 1uz siblings:

First up for me was some basic maintenance, a wash, and new LED bulbs all the way around.

The eBay headlights definitely looked out of place with the stock high beams, so I began searching for a matching pair of eBay high beams to finish the look. I also made note of common maintenance that papamilad's LS400 needed and took preventative measures. One thing was replacing the original PCV valve, new ones are only about $3 and a 3 minute fix.  Until the valve disintegrates and the gaskets crumble into your valve cover... 

Here we have a 3 minute job, turn into a 3am job as I wandered aimlessly searching for RTV to seal my valve cover.

Just before I drove home that night, I realized my headlights needed some major adjustment, and the eBay housings I had were fundamentally flawed with poor fitment and poor adjustability.  Here's the housings maxed out with adjustment.  I eventually shimmed them with a bunch of washers to make them semi-legal to drive around with.  Regardless, these cheap housings suck.

CTeo said:

lifted LS400, a beautiful '93 G20 Shorty vaN

Any details on those as well?

I will try and give some updates about those two, but likely won't have a dedicated build thread to either, unless I suck it up and end up LS swapping the van. Those plans will have to wait about a year until I'm settled in a more permanent location and have some more constant funds though. For now, this thread will be aimed at my long distance relationship of building the SC. 

Got it. Liking the build so far. 

I always thought these were neat cars. Excited to follow along. 

I had an SC300 for a few years. The SCs are super cool cars, looking forward to where this one goes

As all college kids desire, the multitude of luxurious, silent, and extremely heavy mufflers had to go.

If I'm going to own a v8 I want to hear my v8, so that involved me removing all of the factory mufflers and resonators and replacing them with one single Borla XR1 Sportsman (I believe that is the model).  The muffler is a 3" straight through style I picked up at an Amazon Returns Warehouse auction for $12 and I have to say it made me a huge fan of Borlas.  So anyway, me being a dumb college student, I raided the spare pull-a-part exhaust piles and patched a bunch of junkyard miscellaneous sized pipe over every factory muffler, then hammered my 3" opening into a roughly 2.5" square to fit.

This project took two days to complete, and I (again being a dumb college kid) drove around campus with a header dump for a bit. Heading up my parking garage one day had some construction workers ask for a quick rev, which resulted in way too many car alarms going off.  They probably regretted that when they had to continue working with now annoying car alarms going off.

But anyway, the exhuast, in all of its sketchy glory is still the same set up to this day.  One day I'll pull the trigger on some Australian Hurricane Headers, and do a real V-Band, Stainless, tigged full exhaust.  But for now, this works.

It's time to learn how to start driving this car.  Still a 30 year old luxury automatic, but now it sounds aggressive, and I have no self control to not do a burnout on every ("private") road.  Wreck Racing is hosting an autocross though and I want to autocross the crap out of this barge.  Now, I decided I also wanted coilovers on this car, since I wanted to ruin the cloud-like ride these Lexus's are so good at providing.  I bought a new set of Tein Flex Z coilovers off of Facebook marketplace for $500 and wanted to see how they would affect the driving characteristics of the car.  I was then conflicted, I had only driven the car probably 30 miles total at this point, so I had no idea if coilovers would make the car better or worse since I have no good feel for the car yet.  This is where one more of my hairbrained ideas comes into play.  What if I installed the coilovers DURING the autocross day? I could use a morning session on the stock suspension, then an afternoon on coilovers and see how the car handled and how my times changed.

Car Before:

Car After:

I have to admit I have zero mathematical data on if the coilovers shaved any time off, but it sure made the car feel a lot more planted and sportier.  The issue, was in the morning session I spun out on some loose gravel my first run, then took an easy run, then went for a hard run.  I started the coilover swap and all went flawlessly, was super easy to hit all four corners.  But, while I was throwing the coilovers on, another Wreck Racer hit the same gravel I did, and oversteered into the timing gates.  So for my afternoon session, I had zero idea what my times were, and the course also had changed slightly to avoid some other gravel areas.

If anyone has any ideas for clearing an entire abandoned runway of gravel, I'd love to hear it.  The current plan has been lots and lots of push brooms.  Also at that autocross day, between a 6 speed cammed Trans Am, a C5 Corvette, Civic SI, papamilad's welded diff LS400, and plenty of other cars. A bone stock 4.3 NV3500 Sierra piloted by the same driver who shot the e28 onto the podium laid one of the fastest times of the day.

When in Rome:

One just has to take a bunch of pictures of their new Lexus, along the two other Lexus's in the club. (Spoiler, more Lexus's have been purchased at Wreck Racing, it's becoming a problem these days)

So then uhh, the police cruisers may have been posted up near by as the local PD uses the runway for their training as well.  So ~naturally~ I have to take a picture with the cop cars in the background....

I forgot to mention, of the cars seen, one has a welded diff, the other has an LSD, and the third oh that is my SC... Sometimes I can actually get both tires to spin pretty effortlessly. This was not one of those times. But lucky for me, this is early March 2020, and I have a whole semester to fiddle with this car and search for wheels and tires, because nothing could possibly happen that would be life altering in that month......

CTeo said:

...but knowing me I will purchase another car and lose focus on this thread

So I indeed bought another project.  I will try and continue this thread, while also likely starting a thread for the '86 528e I recently purchased off mgfoster.

As somebody who also has a long distance relationship with my car in Atlanta, I'm all for this thread. 

CTeo said:

I have a whole semester to fiddle with this car and search for wheels and tires, because nothing could possibly happen that would be life altering in that month......

Sounds ominous...............??

So, now the plan for the car is to complete a manual swap as quickly as possible. It can't be too hard to bang out a swap onto an engine that has never received a manual transmission right?

First up, was the clutch pedal. I ordered an OEM Toyota MKIV Supra clutch pedal and pieced it together. Along with buying a new SC300 Master.

Next up was a transmission.  Most people who manual swap a 1uz opt to use a glass W58 trans, or a hard to find R154 (some opt for the AR5), but the gold standard seems to be the Nissan CD009. (Others swear by T56 swaps but I can't afford that on my meager college budget). Next for choices is the KA transmission, but those swaps tend to only happen because someone ends up UZ swapping their s-chassis. But then folks also tend to Z32 trans swap their S-Chassis to beef up their drive train, so if all adds up, I figured a Z32 transmission into an SC400 would make total sense.  This is where PapaMilads challenge deal came to play out. He luckily found two mystery condition Z32 transmissions and a KA trans with a cracked bellhousing for a stupid cheap price, I want to say the combo only cost $350 for all three transmissions. I bought one of the mystery Z trans for $200 and we planned to start our swaps.

bonylad said:

CTeo said:

I have a whole semester to fiddle with this car and search for wheels and tires, because nothing could possibly happen that would be life altering in that month......

Sounds ominous...............??

Annnnnd now we remember March 2020(GT's Spring Break), when this little thing called a pandemic started (which at the time I was convinced would blow over within the week...) This leisurely semester quickly become the Tiger King era when nothing was certain.  Here I am, with a car on bald tires, horrible eBay headlights, and the threat of state borders shutting down (I'm from NE Ohio). All while still trying to manual swap my car (luckily I hadn't started) and still finish the semester with reasonably good grades.

Well, at first I wasn't too worried, I was still on spring break. I had some local resources available, and ordered a matching set of eBay High Beams to match all the lights on the SC.  A little fun fact about these 90's Lexuses: They're a little overbuilt. To install the high beams, the bumper has to come off.  That shouldn't be too much of a hassle... right?  Wrong... There is quite a few fasteners holding these bumpers on.  I'm pretty sure every single project I have done on this car has ended with a wide array of extra hardware once I am done.

Here's one of my favorite pics, Spring Break late night Lexus work session:

Once the new eBay high beams were installed I thought I was good to go... nope again! I accidentally bought (used) chrome internal housings not black! So then came time to disassemble these eBay housings to rattle bomb the internals black to match my other eBay lights.  I just keep ignoring all of these signs to just not use any eBay lights but alas.

So anyway, what should have been a simple headlight swap became once again an extremely long drawn out project on this car.  I am pretty sure to this day, I have spent more time messing with the lights on this SC than any other mechanical project.  Here is my eBay-ness in all of its cheapy glory.

I also spent this time deciding to turn every single bulb into an LED, and found a really cool relay with a potentiometer to adjust the turn signal speed without adding a ton of resistors (since each tail light is 3 bulbs per, plus the assortment of bulb in the headlight and I didn't want 12 toasters running on my car 24/7) But imagine that, the relay is a 3 prong, and my turn signal relay was a 5 pin so only a few bulbs worked.  Back to the stock relay, which instead of hyper-flashing, just doesn't blink at all.  So basically all of my LED's caused the relay to not fire, and now I have manual turn signals.

I read online that you can grind away at the relay to change the internal resistance and get them to function again, but after grinding a handful of palmed junkyard relays, I have resigned myself to manual turn signals.

(Two years later and I still have manual turn signals, I have not gone about fixing this yet. I just have to say its entertaining to just fiddle the stick a little and do whatever speed I desire, be it slow, as fast as humanly possible, or solid. Whenever a friend follows me they tend to always get a kick out of my blinking patterns and procedures.  I also have yet to get harassed by anyone and can maintain a pretty standard blink if needed)

One more thing to add to the broken list became the passenger door handle.  I actually recently found a junkyard handle so I can take this one off of my to-do list soon, when I get to be around the car again. (Long distance relationships are tough when you're 700 miles from the car).

Anyway, the clips that hold the door latch rod into the handle is made of some very old, very original, very brittle plastic. And when one tries to force the door open while it is being unlocked, the plastic can break and dislodge the rod.  This isn't too big of a deal and requires popping the door card off and putting a new plastic clip into place.  Now what I didn't realize was that my passenger door was just forced and broken, and this is a common thing on SC's, but the number one thing not to do is roll the window down.  This is where I screwed up, I decided if my door handle is broken externally, but the interior one still works, that I will roll the window down so others can still get in and out of my car.

I got the rod tangled in the window and bent all sorts of out of shape. Lucky for me also, it's behind a bunch of door bracing so I can't even rebend it into shape, I can only barely touch it with my fingertips. It's so close, but the angle I made note of is supposed to be slightly different to still operate the handle, while avoiding the window, and not popping out of the socket every time its pulled.

It should be a simple fix, but for the past bit I have been a bit slow about it since the latch rods are part of the latch itself and those are around $200.  Luckily I pulled a nice condition one off at a junkyard and got it as part of the All-You-Can-Carry day.

In the meantime, the lady friend actually seems to enjoy having doors opened for her, so it hasn't been a priority.

Wheels and Tires post coming soon...