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Big Supes' UK-Spec - The Story So Far


Big Supes

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Wastegates are on and connected up. 

ECU, AEM Wideband and IAT sensor are wired in. It was quite satisfying undoing my shitty wiring from 10 years ago (FCD). 🙈😅

FMIC and pipework, completed. 

New radiator and temp sensor fitted. Air conditioning condenser is being left off until next year as I'm still waiting on a new Reciever. 

Jobs left to do... 

Run boost vacuum hoses for solenoid & controller, fill radiator, fit aux belt, fit seats, put dash back together, secure radiator when billet brackets arrive, cut down lower radiator hose to prevent kink, eventually change top rad hose for something that'll clear the IAT sensor. Block nipple on brake servo for TRC, delete charcoal canister, fit oil catch can, prime the turbo with oil and then cross every digit on my body. 🤞

Once I know there's no leaks, etc, tidy up wiring, give everything a once over and then move onto the brakes.... 

20mm hubcentric spacers are in the post so I hope to get the NUR wings I picked up from Delboy this week fitted. If all goes well, the wheels should clear the brakes. 

The UK rear brakes are back from being refurbished and I have new OEM discs to go with them. 

The next step after this is MOT and mapping.... 

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  • 3 weeks later...

First start up happened this weekend with the man, the myth, the legend@Mike2JZ teamviewing in on the laptop to configure the ECU. 

Had a few mechanical teething issues as expected, but they were more annoyances instead of anything serious, luckily. 

IAT Sensor was being weird - prob a wiring issue so Mike bypassed it for now. 

Two oil leaks which consisted of blanking off a second oil feed hole in the block (doh!) and the second was a loose fitting on the feed pile which needed nipping up.  

I noticed some water leaking from the heater matrix pipe coming out from the bulkhead and suspected an air lock as the jubilee was super tight. I asked Mike to keep an eye on the engine temp and sure enough it got hot pretty quickly. Luckily Mike had managed to get done what he needed to do so we called it a day and I ditched the water in the radiator as I had wrongly brimmed the system with the car level, instead of having the nose up in the air.  

Tomorrow I'll fit the rear brake shoes and calipers so I can get the rear wheels on and drop the back of the car down. Once it's down I'll refill the cooling system and that should be sorted.  

Massive thanks for Mike for the help. Much appreciated. ✌️

 

 

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8 minutes ago, Homer said:

Awesome to hear that first start, you won’t tire of that single turbo idle sound 😎 It takes me back to way back when I did mine. You’re on the last 5% of getting it finished and driving 👍

Yeah, I'll be honest... it's been my dream since owning the car. I just didn't want to rush into going single.  

Looking forward to getting the car off the axles stands and going for a gentle test drive. 😎

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Personally I prefer the oem tach to the Trd. The authentic ones aren’t very useful in a daily driver and let’s face it, few take their engine over 7.2k anyway meaning most of the tach is useless.

Are you going to recalibrate it to make it accurate? The oem ones are WAY off.

When Ryan was mapping my old car the tach was reading 7.3k rpm but it was only 6.7k from the Ecu .

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2 minutes ago, Homer said:

Personally I prefer the oem tach to the Trd. The authentic ones aren’t very useful in a daily driver and let’s face it, few take their engine over 7.2k anyway meaning most of the tach is useless.

Are you going to recalibrate it to make it accurate? The oem ones are WAY off.

Yeah, I totally agree. The 10k tach would be mostly wasted on me.

I wasn't aware that the oem tacho was way off. It would definitely be nice to get an accurate reading. Do you know how they go about calibrating it? 

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1 hour ago, Mike2JZ said:

I'll calibrate your tacho as its being controlled via the Link ECU, so will be bang on. Same with speedo. 

Awesome, cheers mate. 

I used a GPS app to calibrate the speedo after the transmission swap and opted to keep it approx 5mph out as I get impatient enough with people driving under the speed limit.  😅

 

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Gave the fully refurbished rear calipers a quick make over and fitted them along with new shoes, pads and discs.  

Knocked out and replaced for longer front hub studs. Offered up the front wheel and brakes with the 20mm spacer. Sadly it was still a bit too tight in there so I put a 5mm extra spacer in there and now it fits. I'm not quite sure this set up is going to work so I may have to revisit getting a new rim from SSR and swap over the barrel. 

 

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14 hours ago, Chingy said:

Great to hear this fire up. Awesome effort bud 

Thanks matey, I'm not going to lie.  Including the removal of the twins,  it's been a lot of hard work on top of my day-to-day. 

Hoping to have it MOT-ready by the end of next week. 🙏 

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Fitted new boot gas struts, bled the engine cooling system and refurbed the UK-Spec front brakes yesterday and today. 

Hey @Homer how did you find installing those gas struts? I bought the same ones you posted in your build thread. They work fine after a bit of fudging as what they showed on the instructions was very different to what was originally on my car to begin with. I ended up removing the oem strut mount on the car, cutting it down and sticking it back through the car so I could use stainless nuts on the bracket. 

So, regarding my front wheel and brake set up/saga, I've decided to go down the route of putting the UK-Spec brakes and stock wings back on for now. When I take the car off the road for winter, I'll sell the front wheels and buy a fresh pair of Professors with 0 offset which will allow for the K Sports with no need for spacers or any kind of faffing around. 

The NUR wings will be going back up for sale as sadly there's still too much wheel poke for them.  

My front brakes were pretty tired and definitely needed the refurb. I'll feel confident asking for stronger money when I come to sell these now. 

It's nice to see the car finally off axle stands. If the weather permits, tomorrow I'll get the lights and front bumper in and on. 

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Good progress mate, coming together nicely! Those pistons look pretty crusty, must make sure I check the mine when it comes to the restoration stage.

 

18 hours ago, Big Supes said:

Hey @Homer how did you find installing those gas struts? I bought the same ones you posted in your build thread. They work fine after a bit of fudging as what they showed on the instructions was very different to what was originally on my car to begin with. I ended up removing the oem strut mount on the car, cutting it down and sticking it back through the car so I could use stainless nuts on the bracket. 

We just removed all the old brackets and fitted the replacement units, with new washers and nuts both sides to keep it waster tight. @evinXis that right?

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5 minutes ago, Homer said:

Good progress mate, coming together nicely! Those pistons look pretty crusty, must make sure I check the mine when it comes to the restoration stage.

 

We just removed all the old brackets and fitted the replacement units, with new washers and nuts both sides to keep it waster tight. @evinXis that right?

Yup. The lower brackets we used flanged bolts and nuts that were not supplied. And the top bracksts we used some flanged bolts to match...can use the oem bolts on the top bracekts

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Ahh, yes. Thanks for confirming, chaps. I wasn't going mad lol. @Homer @evinX

So, today I swapped the oem wings back on and found myself attending to some rust on the seals while I was there. 

I'm really looking forward to having the opportunity to get under the car and attack any surface rust and underseal the car. It'll most likely happen when I drop the rear subframe to refresh it along with the diff and suspension arms. 

The rusty patches were taken back and coated with POR-15 and then hammerited for now. 

The front bumper and lights are back on too! It's a car again! 😅

Hopefully the front OE fitment discs will be here tomorrow so I can fit the UK brakes and bleed the whole system. Next to bleed will be the clutch and then it's just a case of buttoning up the undertray and inner arch liners, bung off the TRC line, hook up throttle cables, fit the front seats and then off to the MOT station. 

Once it's MOT'd it'll probably be time to take it off the road until the new year. 🤦🤣

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Edited by Big Supes (see edit history)
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  • 4 months later...

Howdy peeps,

Hope everyone is doing good. I've been slacking with my build thread so I thought I'd get it updated before I forget what's been happening the past few months. 

The car is off the road for winter now, safely tucked away in the Carcoon. Prior to that, I had been pretty busy chasing a few issues. To begin with, it was smoking quite a bit on idle (which I originally thought was my knackered twins). As it's running a brand new turbo, next on the list was the valve stems seals.

Off it all comes out again...

 

I devised a little tool to pressurise the cylinder in order to keep the valve(s) up to avoid removing the head. I used the line from my old compression tester. NB: if anyone does this, make sure you remove the little one-way valve on the line as it prevents air surging back through the line, meaning you'll think the cylinder is under pressure until you hear Mr Valve drop into the cylinder. 😅😖

The top half was in an inline gauge and bleeder valve to shut off/save the compressor having to keep pumping. 

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Sure enough, on the exhaust side of number 3 cylinder (which showed the most oil on the cylinder head port), the stem was no longer sat in position. A few other seals had perished to the point they were no longer sealing at all. 

Once it was all back up and running, sure enough, the smoke issue had gone, although it probably needs a good run to clear everything out properly.  

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After doing the valve stem seals, I felt it was pretty near to mapping, but there was one thing that was bugging me and it was something I coulda/shoulda done better which needing addressing and there was no easy way to do it...

It was the single turbo water lines (deleting the water-cooled twins). 

I thought I was being clever cutting away the T section of the OE pipework at the bulkhead to avoid blanking off the redundant return to the twins while moving the T section further forward to give more room for the turbo downpipe. I was wrong lol. I ended up just creating a system that was weak in design and was causing small water leaks. 

As a result, it was a quick decision to make - engine out - as this car has been almost faultless in the last ten years and I'm not starting the next chapter with breakdowns and overheating issues. This is the only way to access the stainless water pipe that runs around the back of the head. 

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 After removing the pipe, I got to work undoing what I had done while making it easier to access moving forward. 

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I'm happy to report the new water pipe works a treat with zero leaks. Engine is back in and running. 

After buttoning everything back up, it was time to transport it for winter storage. 

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I know some people would be reading this thinking "what an effin ballache", and I don't blame you lol... tbh, at my end though, I enjoy the process and already plan to refresh the engine more than likely at the end of this year. It's really not a difficult engine to pull out. 

People might have seen my Professors are sadly up for sale as they're simply not going to play ball with the K Sport brakes. As a result, I stumbled across a set of these Work Wheels on the cheap. 

They've grown on me. 

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The rear offset is a bit too aggressive for my liking, but they'll do for now. 

Lastly, I had a little drive around the block before putting it to bed. It's safe to say my neighbours car likes it. 😄

 

 

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I love the fact you didn’t even try to get away after setting off the neighbours car alarm. 🤣

Nice exhaust note in fairness, and I know the microphone might dull the sound a bit, but didn’t sound that loud to me? Maybe the neighbour should turn down their alarm sensitivity a bit? 😉 

Car is hybernating for a bit now at least so that should make them happy. 

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50 minutes ago, Peter P said:

I love the fact you didn’t even try to get away after setting off the neighbours car alarm. 🤣

Nice exhaust note in fairness, and I know the microphone might dull the sound a bit, but didn’t sound that loud to me? Maybe the neighbour should turn down their alarm sensitivity a bit? 😉 

Car is hybernating for a bit now at least so that should make them happy. 

The neighbour was actually filming so it was all good. 😄

Yeah, it sounds awesome, but then again, show me a single Supra that doesn't give an eargasm. 

I honestly don't think it's obscenely loud. My buddy said it's loud, but he's conditioned to driving a stock EP3 for a long time now so your average BPU Supra would probably sound loud to him.  

It'll be interesting to hear how loud it is on boost once it's been mapped. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

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