Grassroots Motorsports

On the engine Jan 20, 2003

The engine was pulled out today. We'll be sending the head to the Cylinder Head Exchange for some legal lovin', while Stu at BSI will be handling the bottom end. 

Coming together Feb 12, 2003

The engine is slowly coming together. We're hoping that it'll be done by Friday so we can go to the practice event down in Ft. Myers. The drive down will be the freshened engine's break-in period.

The cylinder head has come back from the Cylinder Head Exchange. We reused the valves as they were all fine. New guides and seals were installed, after the head was surfaced and the valve seats re-cut.

The block has returned from the machine shop. It was hot tanked and bored 0.5mm over.

We're now waiting for the crankshaft, which is being machined to fit factory undersized bearings to clean up the scoring from the spun rod bearing.

Meanwhile, we stripped off the all of the paint on the AR24 rims that we're using for autocross tires, including all of the powder coating. This was actually easier than it sounds. After failing to remove much of anything with a bead blast cabinet or a wire brush, we went to Lowes and bought a huge "muck" bucket and 3 gallons of Methylene Choride paint stripper. Pour caustic goop into bucket, put rim face down in goop. Wait a few hours, rinse off caustic goop and the remains of any paint. repeat 3 times. A word of cautio: this stuff will eat through just about anything, including nitrile gloves.

The rims were then taken to John Purner at Complete Custom Wheel. He shot blasted them for a cool "as cast" look and they were sent out to be anodized to retain this vintage look. Anodizing is cheaper then expected, approximately 20 bucks a wheel. Cheap is good as it effectively doubles our investment in these 12 lb. wheels. 

Engine Reinsertion Mar 5, 2003

The engine is going back in today. We'll have about a week before its first event to get some miles on the new engine. 

The engine’s good, tire’s fair… Mar 18, 2003

The new engine is back in, and now has about 1k miles on it. We'll be changing the oil tonight, sticking with conventional "Dino" oil for now.

Our revitalized Celica had its first event on the new engine this weekend. While the engine was awesome, our leftover old compound Kumhos were noticeably worse than the new Kumhos that we had mounted up on the front of the car. The result was a lot of oversteer and a hard to drive car.

We've also sent a set of OE Toyota shocks to Koni for dyno comparisons with the single adjustable sports that we're currently using. It feels like the Toyota shocks are quite a bit stronger in bump damping than the Konis. The OE shocks are actually OE for the GT, not the ST, but work well on the lighter ST.

Whirlwind Weekend Mar 24, 2003

The Celica had a busy weekend. On Friday, we dyno'ed the new engine, which now has a whopping 1100 miles on it. It showed us 95.3 horsepower at the front wheels. This is up just 4 horsepower from the previous baseline (pre-engine rebuild at 91.3). Our thinking is that the engine was running well, with loose bearing clearances before the rod bearing spun, so a stock rebuild wouldn't be a major source of horsepower.

The first pull on Friday showed power at 92.4 horsepower with a stock air filter and stock exhaust system. (1.1 more than pre-rebuild). Looking over our notes, we noticed that the last pre-rebuild dyno run was with a K&N drop-in air filter and the ECU recently reset. We popped the K&N air filter in for the second run, which yielded 93.7 horsepower, with a consistent gain from 4000 rpm on up. The ECU's fuse was then pulled for approximately 30 seconds and the car was run again, this time showing 95.3 horsepower and 103.6 lb.-ft. of torque.

Interestingly, the gains shown with the new engine are all above 5000 rpm. There is a 4 horsepower gain at the peak, but approximately a 6 horsepower gain at 6250 rpm. This is where the improvements due to a fresh valve job make themselves known.

On Saturday, we went to our local muffler shop (A&W Muffler in South Daytona (386) 767-0786). We had the shop owner, Steve, bend up a cat back system out of 2.25" aluminized pipe, a resonator that we sourced from Helix MiniSports (we liked their resonator design when we were doing testing with our H Stock MINI) and a 14"-long Borla muffler. With the two stock catalytic converters, the resulting system is very quiet and unobtrusive, yet does have a nice growl.

Power appears to be stronger than stock. We did some 2nd gear 20 mph to 50 mph acceleration runs. We dropped from around 6.2 seconds to about 5.9 seconds. That's a noticeable improvement. We'll be dynoing the new system later this week and we'll also be investigating a replacement catalytic converter as our stock one is slightly plugged up.

Sunday, we autocrossed with the Buccaneer Region and were quite pleased with our win in G Stock and the overall PAX FTD. 

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