Since my last tercel's lower control arm mount was pulled right off the unibody I've been searching for a new one. In february I found it, brought it home and began work. My first tercel was a silver 85' SR5 6 speed rust monster that took me almost anywhere I asked it to. The new one is a silver 85' DX auto and after driving back with the automatic I was reassured that the 6 speed must go in. I put a 4a-c from a friends 83 corolla in at the same time as the transmission along with a brand new clutch. Swapped the seats gauge cluster and tilt steering from the SR5 as well.
The lift is identical in the rear and very similar in the front to Barto's. It has pathfinder springs and t-bird struts in the rear, the front is a 1985 camry front strut with the top section of the tercel hat swapped on. Not exactly sure how much higher it is i'd guess 2inches maybe 3 in the back. The aluminum bumpers are from an early to mid 80's volvo sedan (sorry not very specific my dad pulled them off a friends car years ago).
middle of the engine/transmission swap
The next thing that the car needs is bigger tires, possibly 195/70 r14 or 185/75 r14 along with some rims that have less backspacing.
There is still alot of body work to be done and I plan to do the SR5 painted window frames. The clutch needs some adjusting but for the most part it went pretty smoothly. As you can see I didn't swap the intake manifold from the 3a-c. I would prefer to keep everything under the hood but for now this will work.
wowee, i can't believe you swapped an standard into an auto! very cool. in the second photo, though, the back wheels look like they're about 2" forward of the center of the wheelwell: am i on to something, or is that just the camera angle?
i love the old rims. i've got two sets of rims already but there are some like yours at a wrecker that i contemplated buying and painting black as well. i also have the same liquid wrench i see in the bottom photo, unfortunately i've found it to be totally useless so far. "quick acting" my ass.
same here ,have two sets of Toyota rims, I painted mixture bronze/brown with 4 silver notch to match my silver car , there are/were lots of mag wheels in B.C. but seem that US version are different ( steel rim and painted white on theirs SR5 brand )guess that why the want to change their rims
I took a closer look at the rear wheel and it appears the wheel is about an inch forward of center and the camera angle made it more noticeable. I'm not sure why it would do that, possibly with the taller springs in place the link bars angle changed and pulled the axle forward a bit?
I like the way these stock wheels look black but i think i'm going to put on some 14' steelies because of how common they are.
Just finished putting about an inch of cutting boards on top of the front struts and it now sits very close to level(will upload pics soon). And happy to say i am now daily driving it but many small problems still remain. Like a vibration under load during acceleration as well as some less than smooth lower speed cornering. I checked the driveshaft bolts first to rule that out as the vibration and one other thing i forget to put on when installing the 4a-c was the little stabilizer shock that runs from the mount to the sub frame i believe? I'll put that shock back on tonight but am still at a loss for the turning. possibly need to lower the sub frame with spacers?
Vibration under load might be the front axles? You've changed the angle they run at?
Could be your front alignment is "off". If you check out the different settings for alignment...you'll find that there is much more detail than just toe-in....cars are setup to have certain geometry under cornering...drastic changes in ride height put this all out of whack.
Give a boy a gun-give a biatch a cell phone-and pretty soon you almost got yourself a police state.
Orwell said: War is peace! Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength...
what takza is saying is right, i think an alignment is most likely in order, but enough other guys have done this mod without having any serious issues so i don't imagine you'll have to worry about dropping crossmembers or anything like that.
more pics! what other problems are you having, if any?
I haven't dropped the crossmember yet. I think that takza is probably correct it shakes worse when cornering one way vs the other. I think it does this because one axle is shorter and thus at a worse angle. Hopefully I'll get to drop the croosmember this weekend.
I didn't swap the manifolds because i hope once the crossmember has been dropped it will fit under the hood. (I don't really like having it stick out the hood but it'll do for now)
The car rides better now than it did stock. I'll have a better idea of what it can do once I'm not afraid of the cv's being ripped apart.
Did you loosen the two front control arm bushing bolts and all eight of the rear axle control arms and shake down the suspension with it on a level surface & then tighten all of those bolts after? That procedure is required to prevent the rubber bushings in those locations from being twisted when at rest since the car now sits a bunch higher than stock.
my bad, i just looked at bart's thread again and i'm wrong, you do need to drop the crossmember if you lift the front as much as you have. i think he mentioned to me that i wouldn't need to drop it if i didn't do the cutting board-thing so i got confused--sorry for the confusion!
chico, what do you mean by shake down? i haven't done that on ron's back end since bart and i lifted it but i'll give it a shot.
your terc looks rad, gretchen. i notice the pin strips are missing on the passenger side. did you take them off or are the doors not the originals? i say paint that bad boy before that rust gets out of control. keep him alive!
davidlucasbarnes wrote:
chico, what do you mean by shake down? i haven't done that on ron's back end since bart and i lifted it but i'll give it a shot.
In the FSM see pages RA-49 & RA-50 for the section entitled Installation of upper & lower control arm. I add one refinement to the procedure: I level the car out on 4 piles of blocks, then shake it down, stabilize suspension in FSM speak, & lastly dive under and tighten all the needed bolts w/o disturbing the shake down vertical settling point by jacking as per the FSM.
The basic concept also applies to the lateral control arm bushings in the rear & the front control arm bushings in the front .
Not getting this right is hard even on new bushings. On old bushings it can mess them up pretty quickly.
I haven't done the bushing shake down but it makes sense, i'll probably do that this weekend. Petros, i have another hood that is originally off this car. The hood i cut the hole in is the rusty one off my old car. I bought some 9/16 aluminium and longer bolts to drop the front crossmember.
As for the rust it will be fiberglassed before it gets too cold.
The doors are off my old car. they were less rusty than the ones that came off the car.
