PureRage

items used: x-mas mini led lights! (less than 1 euro... lol) old 12v transformer (set to 3v that the lights use) piece of plexiglass white spraypaint i copied the form of the dash dials on the plexiglass. sprayed the back white drilled holes around the edge (just outside of the visible ring on the dial) soldered the 12v - 3v transformer to the back of the dash on the + and - of a dash light fitting scanned the orignal dials onto my pc. edited them to my liking and printed them on transparant overhead viewer paper. cut them out and placed them on top of the white dial cut outs. i removed the stock coolant temp gauge and placed my wideband sensor behind the plexiglass. it's ideal to see the wideband readout right next to the rev meter! and i used a blue marker to make the needles blue (quick/cheap/easy) and for a bit of laughter: total costs of this was about 6 euro's 1 euro for the lights 2 euro's for the voltage transformer 2 euro's for a small piece of plexiglass (used about 10% of it lol) 1 euro for the transparant overhead paper end result!

yeps, have been on the tgtt forum for a couple of years as Rage (name was taken here) thought i might post the story here aswell

thx lads, working on a major update but that will take some time before i can start my work on that. used a few scrap pieves of plexiglass for the dials and used overheadprojector sheets to print the dials on. just scanned the original dials, photoshopped them to my liking, printed, cut them to size. did you check out the link of the dash pics for some more detail on how i made them? feel free to ask anything you want to know about it

thx for the comments lads! thought it might make an amusing read through the ups and downs of owning her coulden't have done it without my workshop. makes working on longer projects much much easier

thx guys

thx james it's an ongoing story and far from done

a while later... i decided to take my hood off for a good spring cleaning all cleaned: and coulden't resist taking a spraycan to it and disaster struck yet again! was only a matter of time... found the limit of a glanza rod was flooring her, 1.1 bar boost, 7200rpm. snap went the rod, tore a hole in the block and sump. it was a violent death with lots of unhealthy noises, smoke and flying carparts. the only way a engine should go out if you ask me so, here we are again, in the workshop, prepping for surgery to find out what can be salvaged a familliar sight: bottom of the rod facing up... well that doesn;t require a lot of detective work to find out what caused the engine to die new ventilation holes in the back of the engine as a friend of me quoted: Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, But rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, beer in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!" and that is exactly what she did post mortum continued: damage assesment was quite good all things concidered. only things damaged and in need of replacing were: sump, bottom end, rod, piston. the engine was running quite well looking at the colors of the pistons, spark plugs etc. removed the sump and recovered some engine bits started digging through my piles of parts, still had the bottom end from the last engine failure, was good enough to use. still had a few glanza rods and pistons. found a good match, balanced it to match the others. checked the crank if it hadn't warped. and had just 0.015mm of play so was within the limits and could be reused. derusted and prepped the spare bottom end just waiting on some parts (sump, new headgasket) let the assembly commence! (again...) my workshop... filled with carparts and all back together again and running like a dream from the moment it blew to running again took me 6 days. not bad if i do say so myself *a few months later* started to smoke a little when letting go of the throttle, braking on the engine and giving it some gas again. after some detective work i found this to be the problem exhast valve seals leaking a wee bit. yay, another thing to repair bought a few much needed goodies! lsd gearbox and coilovers problem was, we didn;t know for sure there was an lsd in the box. so time to take it apart and check the box. also checking the synchro's etc to make sure the box was in good shape box was filthy and oily as hell! so gave it a good scrub stripping it down and yes we have LSD! everything in the box was in great shape so put it all back together and fitted it to the car. the coilovers were bought with the knowlage that the adjusting parts had seized up. figuring i could get things moving again i started to work on them.. boy had i miscalculated the work it took! quick "tool" that i made so that i could take an air wrench to the bottom of the shock to hammer it loose. it worked... eventually... took a whole lot longer that i had figured but got all of them moving again. and finally a few shots of my new hobby dragracing! my wife making her runs (she still has a faster time than me! no fair! by just 0.05 seconds) waiting to start the race go baby go! best run sofar with my ct9a 1 bar setup on street tires is a 14.4 @ 158km/h now we wait to see what will fail next

started to notice the lack of engine information in the car so decided to make a custom center console with gauges in it boost, smallband air/fuel, exhaust temp water temp, oil temp, oil press. how to make a console little winter project on my dash. those are xmas led lights i love to use things for what they weren't intended for cost me a grand total of 5 euro's to build, talk about major investments xmas dashbord pics and then disaster struck. due to a driver error (going around the roundabout a few times and flooring it straight after) the engine suffored oil starvation and made some seriously unhealthy noises didn't take me long to realise what had occured and i decided to check the damage and refurbish the engine confirmed my suspicions.... lot's and lots of stripping and preparing for rebuild pics 1 piston showed a slight crack, bent 1 rod, bearings were gone, turbo had seized... yikes.. decided to take her off the road for a while and completely redo the engine and other repairs to do list: rebuild engine respray engine bay respray interior wire tuck battery relocating rollcage redo the engine loom bought another spare bottom end bought a set of rods and pistons from a glanza gasket kit for the engine replaced some sensors etc. etc. as the whole thing was inside out anyways we decided to flow the head flowing the head stripping out the interior, placing the rollcage, replaced the seats and seatbelts resulting in: a few more pics and rebuilt the engine: stripped down bare and repainted... everything... assembled: back in the car: lot's of pics of the assembly a few glamour shots my tailgate was starting the rust quite badly and i was lucky a friend of mine found a clean rustfree tailgate for me repairing the TTE midspoiler. made of gummy like material and is very easely dammaged aaaand disaster struck again! long story "short" in the winter my oil catch can lines were frozen solid, pressure built up in the engine, blew out the turbo seals, filled the turbo intake and exhaust side with oil. resulting in smoke... looooots of smoke something about pics and 1000 words: took off the air filter, splut, 0.2 liters of oil came out of the turbo took the turbo off exhaust side, soaked with oil intake side, soaked aswell time to dismantle the turbo and figure out the damage hurray... more oil.. cold side fan dismanteling cold side turns out the seals were still intact. was just the pressure inside the block that pushed oil passed the seal. no shaft play, no damage whatsoever. gave it all a good ultrasonic clean checked everything for play rebuilt time to look at the exhaust oh dear... iew... removing oil ^^ the eco way found out i had a crack in the manifold and wastegate, rewelded them giving the exhaust a decent buff and we power on till something else fails

Where to begin... A long long time ago (februari 2005) i bought a little old starlet ep81 NA. with just 150.000km on the clockPurpose of the car was a pure and simple commuter from home to work. and this is what she looked like (booooring) in case you find a certain part of my project car interesting there are links that will take you to my photo albums on picasa. more pics from when i bought the old gal slowly i found out that there were little things i could mod on the car. changed the grill, rims, spoilers, dash etc. etc. more pics of the first mods then i wanted to redo the interior. i had never attempted something like this so i had no knowlage whatsoever of sowing and crap like that. the result was that it took me ages to complete but the result was quite good and yes, made by 2 blokes who discoverd the power of a sowing machine for the first time more pics of the interior the old bouncy suspention rly needed to be updated and so the modding began to improve handling brakes and shocks a few more things were added: swaybars front and rear, struts front and rear, adj. panhard, cusco camberplates etc. it was around that time i found out about the ep82 GT Turbo models! they were never sold as left hand drive so i had never come across one yet. so i decided i had to start getting all the parts to build myself a left hand drive GTT Found and bought a GTT bodykit in the UK GTT body webalbum it was around that time that the old 2e-e powerplant started to make unhealthy noises and as i still had a spare engine from a car i stripped i decided to swap the engine few more pics tinkered a bit with a psp as car audio with a 5.1 logitech speaker set. took it out quite soon after though more pics of the audio setup got hold of a knackered set of rims, refurbished them in white rims pics in the meantime we had moved to a new house with a decent garden with the possibility of building a garage. this is the result: more pics of the workshop finally got hold of a 4efte engine wich were quite rare in the netherlands (i believe i was the 4th starlet in the netherlands to house a 4efte engine at the time) more pics of the stock 4efte engine having the turbo in was a great step forwards for my project! had heaps of fun driving it after being used to just 75bhp. Also tried to get the engine swap legal and after some fretting i managed to get the paperwork done the first approved turbo starlet in the netherlands felt good to have it all done right. no worries from the police or insurance not long after the modding began again. moved the air filter to the front bumper, WEPR manifold and downpipe, HKS actuator, FCD, SAFCII and a few other minor things made it possible to drive at 1 bar boost wich netted me 177bhp back in 2010 klik a pull on ct9a @ 1 bar boostklik dyno run JAF 2010, 177bhp had some fun doing a short time attack circuit at the dutch toyo challenge. lots of mr2's, supra's, celica's etc. and a little old starlet that took home the 2nd prize few pics of the toyo challenge couple of vids: klik 2nd place Toyo Challenge 2010 klik my wife running her time attack for the very first time ever drove in the auto-X event on the japanese auto festival in the netherlands.the car did great! came home with the 1st price of the modified class klik 1st place Auto-X JAF 2010 my wife's run klik my wife's best time on auto-X JAF 2010 finally bought a full toms replica kit more TOM's kit pics as the car had a lower stance it was difficult to fit a jack under the car. to save time during repairs etc. i made a few ramps pics van de bokken with the added power of the turbo came a few small problems. the brakes needed to be updated and the top mount intercooler got too hot. so decided to swap it out and go FMIC more pics of the update

Hi all, i'm martin, 31 years young and i'm an addict will be posting the whole story soon but thought it best to introduce myself first have had a starlet for 9 years now and she started out as a simple NA car. this is the little machine as she stands now: any questions plz don't hesitate to ask