My C32 Laurel Medalist V-Turbo hardtop

[broke]

I've been really busy of late, but I still managed to get some stuff done. While the front wheels were in the air I swapped over to my good strut tops with the new bearings and fitted my Cobra springs - no more cut springs. It was at 85mm at the front before, it's just a little higher now. I haven't measured it, but should be at 100mm or more. Also fitted the new ball joint to replace the one that was completely knackered to the point that it had about 10mm of play!


Got all the timing belt etc off, was pretty stoked that TDC on #1 cylinder was literally only about an 1/8th of a rotation away from where the engine was when I stopped it, so I didn't have to spend all day cranking away at it before pulling it apart.

Figured I'd do this job one head at a time, it's a real pain because the power steering pump is bolted to one head and the AC compressor is bolted to the other one. Here's the side I've got off

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Plenty of caramel milkshake there, but it wasn't bringing all the boys to the yard so I soldiered on by myself. Took the rocker shafts off, labelled them so I couldn't (hopefully) make a mistake reassembling it. Then took off the weird plate thing that house the lifters and then was finally able to access the head bolts. ALL 13 OF THEM!! I also learnt that there's a tiny bolt at the back of the block that holds the head on if you don't remove it, fortunately spotted it before I destroyed the head trying to pull it off! Got the head off and the rear 2 cylinders were full of coolant I'm not really sure what the correct way to deal with that is, so I just mopped it up with paper towels and ended up with this:

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Quite surprised at the lack of carbon buildup, and couldn't see any evidence of obvious gasket damage on this side (the gasket came off in one piece attached to the head) so maybe the other side is to blame. I'm not really sure the correct procedure for avoiding crap/corrosion getting into the bores, so I just wiped the cylinder walls liberally with WD40 then filled them with WD40-soaked paper towels until I get the head back on. This is what the bench at home looks like now

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Taking the rocker cover and the lifter plate to work tomorrow to clean in the parts washer, and I'll take the head into Flemings unless someone recommends a different place?

[85_Z31]

Totally forgot to tell you about that 10mm M6 bolt while i was on the phone. Whoops.The valve relief cuts on your pistons look odd.

Flemings did mine, I also recommend getting the exhaust ports faced ( i had mine done , he might even remember ) , they have a tendency to be uneven from bad sealing due to broken studs and what not from VG's.

[broke]

In continuation of this saga, the head I removed was cracked. Like, REALLY cracked, I haven't got any pics but it has one long crack going almost all the way front to back through the cam journals - in fact the cam can't be refitted to it now, as the whole thing shifted so one side of the crack is all raised up!

Dug out the parts car VG20 for its head

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This was a bit of a prick, I just could NOT remove the intake manifold due to how unbelievably corroded the studs in the head had become. Seriously, I ended up smashing the manifold with a hammer as hard as I could to break it before it would come off. Once that was "beheaded" I took it to Flemings. It tested ok, so it was surfaced. This still left me to deal with the studs - they had no threads left on them and were pretty bent and generally quite $##%ed. They don't come out easily either, I had to drill the bottoms of them out quite a bit and double-nut the tops before they would budge. Of course the exhaust studs were broken too, but they were easy to remove this time (must have been done before).

Since 85mm M8x1.25 studs don't seem to be available anywhere I had to use the ones out of my cracked head. These didn't come out easily either.... I'm glad I didn't need to do this to the good head:

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[broke]

Here's the neat VG-specific tool James made for compressing VG valve springs - it bolts down on the rocker shaft holes for stability. I fitted new valve-guide seals before putting this stuff back in. It was nice of the guy from Flemings to remove, clean and number all the valves as well.

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I got sick of waiting for it to rain today so I just decided to go for it and stop when the rain came.
Fitted new cam seals to both heads, removed rocker shafts from the other head so I could rotate the engine to get the #1 piston down the bore a bit. Cleaned the block surface, chased all the threads in the block with a tap and the head bolts got a thorough cleaning and chasing with a die nut. Borrowed a compressor to blow everything down and make sure those head bolt threads were squeaky clean and made sure there was no crap in the bores. I also invented (I hope I'm the first person to do it) a sweet way to stop carbon etc. getting in between the piston and the bore - Blu Tack! Just make a little "worm" out of it, stick it around the edge of the piston and hey presto, a removable crud barrier!

Big thanks to James for the Z31 service manual with the torque specs and sequences in it, with that I was able to get this far. It still wasn't raining either.

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[85_Z31]

Solid progress, looks good !

[broke]

Well the headaches just never stop. In my desperation to get this ready for Akaroa I now have everything bolted together, tipped some radiator de-oiler Brocky got for me into the radiator, filled it up with water, fitted a new oil filter and oil in preparation for a solid afternoon of running everything up and flushing it and..... no spark .

I'm thinking it's the crappy old alarm that's causing the issue.... you see, I've actually completely lost the keys for this thing! Brock donated a worn out old key that happened to fit in the ignition switch. It seems likely that without the alarm fob I can't make the car start. I haven't had the alarm siren fitted for ages, but when I refitted it and hooked it up to power it started going off. I could crank the engine over with it going, but it wouldn't fire - not even a cough. At this point I'm not sure whether to try to get a new fob for it or whether to try completely removing the alarm. Any tips, people?

Here's the mess of wiring I'm dealing with... truly a professional install. Not.

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I also tried out this thing I made to test the heater core to see if it was leaking. What you do is fit this to the heater, pump it up and watch the gauge to see if it drops. It did drop, indicating a leak, so I bypassed it.

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Pretty much at a loss at this point unless someone can help.

[DJZ]

Crimebuster! You should have a look around the steering column area and try and find the wires for the immobiliser, it should be pretty easy to bypass it.

Now that I look at the pictures you've already done that, are there any wires around there the same colour that are cut in half and go to the alarm box?

[broke]

Hmm, well those brown wires went into the footwell area where each of them had a glass inline fuse holder. I didn't trace them back to where they ended up, I'll have a look and see if I can find where they go after work tomorrow.

[broke]

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Long time no update. This had been sitting unused for about 4 months until this week when my daily driver (Nissan Wingroad, I sold the Corolla) snapped its clutch cable. Of course, it did this at 5:20pm on Fitzgerald Ave in the middle lane of 3 in the freezing cold

Once I charged the battery it fired right back up into life and I drove it to work and back 4 days this week and pretty much fell back in love with how smooth and quiet and sort of fast it is. Got Chris at Mag and Turbo to sort me some new Toyo T1-R's for the rear to replace the shredded mismatched tyres I had, and I've rolled the guards. It's still "mexi-flush" in appearance, but I don't get guard rub around corners.

Anyhoo, even after replacing my faulty newish NGK leads with better Top Gun ones it still has a lumpiness and a miss throughout the rev range... reading the Z31 forums online a lot of guys have fixed this issue and a whole heap more by fitting a "JRW-2" transistor module, and it looks like a 5 minute job to change it as well.

I was going to pick a part today anyway to get a clutch cable so I resolved to get one of these JRW2 thingies. Found one on a NZ new J30 Maxima - the ones with the retarded keyless entry keyboard thing on the doorhandle. Sweet I thought, I'm off home to fit this bad boy!

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It couldn't be that easy though - seems like Z31's, J30's, S12's, D21's (i.e. pretty much every car with a VG except mine) have a 3 wire PTU as standard

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The forum is being a complete dick, or maybe it's my PC but it keeps logging me out and messing up the order of the pics...

[broke]

My standard PTU has a different plug - actually instead of one 3-pin plug, it has 2x 2 pin plugs for some reason. Also the wiring colours apart from the blue one are different just to add to the confusion - here's my coil/PTU with the extra set of terminals on the side of it

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