Project Car

I just took my wife's car out of the paper, since no one would give anything for it. When I married 21 years ago she came with an 1981 Toyota Corolla 2dr Deluxe Sedan,

3TC5speed with air with 10K miles and a payment book.

We both have a few more miles on ourselves and the car has 275, 000.

My choices are to give it to charity or put it in the garage and strip it down for a complete rebuild, and as a teaching device for our thirteen year old son ( My similar teaching device many years ago was a similar looking Ford Cortina GT, but that's another story.

First question: Any suggestions on mods, including parts upgrades from newer models (what bigger brakes, better struts, engine parts etc) fit? One thing I am most interested in, before it fails again is the alternator and separate voltage regulator. The car was built in late 1980, and is VIN'ed an 1981, but the Alternator has a plug that fits the loom but shows up as a 1980 truck part. If I ask for the 1981 I get a

2-prong plug part that won't fit the 3-prong loom plug.

Is there a later Toyota Alternator, with internal VR that can be grafted to the loom.

Next is the rear axle. The center section spun the pinion bearing and had to be replaced, and was a couple of months locating one. Does any later solid axel fit up, from a truck or something, that may have a LSD available?

My goal is a Rally Beater and weekend autocross car, my son is kind of gravitating to a "drift car" with a chain-saw sounding exhaust system with a giant-sized exhaust spout.

I have pretty considerable shop facilities and welding capability so can fabricate some stuff. Another step will be to transition to EFI from a carburetor if a system can be grafted from a later vehicle into this one. I hope to use as much salvage equipment as possible to hold cost down and so parts are always available from the Toyota dealer. This may not be possible itself, as once the cars pass 15 years old, the local dealers Here in Birmingham Alabama stop stocking parts for it and it takes an order from the warehouse in Mobile or Atlanta to get anything,

Anyway, a guy at work just completely restored his 1976 Honda Accord hatchback, and after seeing that, I knew the Corolla was at least as deserving.

Anyway, any suggestions and advice will be appreciated. I don't have a digicamera yet, but am thinking of buying one when the after Christmas sales start, and I will try to post "before" pictures.

Also, if there are particular websites or news groups catering to this kind of stuff, let me know.

And Thanks to All in advance for any help offered.

Big Al Brown Birmingham AL, (USA)

Reply to
Alfred Brown
Loading thread data ...

My opinion is that solid cars don't deserve to be scrapped lightly. If the kid helps with the restoration now, when he gets his license he'll have personal effort invested - making it far less likely that he'll do something exceedingly stupid like wrap it around a tree.

Make friends with a local wrecking yard that specializes in imports

- they have cross books that cover all this. If they'll let you sit down and study the books, you can find all sorts of interesting stuff.

The first step is getting an alternator that will bolt into the existing brackets and get the pulley with the right size groove and at the right depth to line up with the other pulleys.

After that, the electrical half is a piece of cake.

KISS. If you can get the carburetor dialed in and working right, leave it. Unless you find a simple Racing EFI kit, fuhgeddaboudit.

Changing to an OEM-style EFI system is a huge job that affects almost every system on the car - new fuel tank with a high-pressure pump, new fuel lines, major electrical changes, all the added senders on the engine, emissions plumbing that has to be there or the computer won't know how to act.

The worst part would be doing a Frankenstein job to modify a Carb car wiring harness to handle the EFI tasks, and we're probably talking

400 wires here. Probably simpler (but not a lot) to take the EFI harness and modify it to work in an older chassis. Either way, we're talking hundreds of labor hours minimum, if not thousands - and when you're done you will be the only people who can work on it.

Then you have to find a place to mount the computer. You even need a new speedometer and instrument cluster to give the computer speed monitoring pulses.

-->--

Reply to
Bruce L. Bergman

MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.