weekend service

Last weekend saw the long awaited fitment of my new Yokohama rubber, and the new Rays valves on my trusty (and shamefully dirty) TE37's. 

185/55/14 on front

The tracking on my Trueno was pretty bad, 30 minutes toe-out on either side, which led to a fairly smooth inner shoulder on the front Toyo CF1s on the after roughly 25k kilometres/1 year. I do a lot of motorway driving too so this accelerates any tire wear from alignment problems! We had been keeping an eye on this and was on the list of things to do so it was great to finally tick another item off.  

can't see through zenki splitters!!

needs so much more low.. :(

Skilfully using an oldschool set of gauges, and his internal eye-o-meter, Kev set my toe to a pretty much spot on at almost zero toe-in per side, perfect for a road going FR car.

Unfortunately the two outer track rods had been overtightened in the cars previous life, so adjustment was proving difficult. One of them was freed up enough to provide the extra thread or two needed to toe in the wheel, but the drivers side one could not be loosened despite all attempts with various grips and hammers and chisels. 

survived ultimate wallying

Luckily there was a pretty fresh spare rod (with the correct length inner end for a manual rack) sitting in the Garage Hachi treasury, and this was quickly swapped out to get us going again. Here Kev is staking the new securing washer back onto on the new inner track rod end.

leaky coolant/curry/tea FTL

The Yokohama S.Drive in 55 profile with newly corrected toe-in felt really really nice and first testing shows that they are a very nice grippy grippy tyre with a stiff sidewall, but they are quickly showing the limits of my cheapo-lowering-springs + crappy-Monroe-damper set up (also from the cars previous life). Turn in is faster now, but when pushed hard there is a tendency to slightly understeer first and then grip as the weight transfers onto the tyre. I expect the tyres to be even better when the 6kg springs & MCN shortstrokes are up front. Braking performance is awesome too and they are matched well with the brake upgrades, once the pads are warmed up of course. I also got to test them in high speed rain on the motorway home and they really do carve through the water like its not there, there was no aquaplaning through quite heavy standing water to they really give good confidence for Irish roads & weather. I have tried both these and The Toyo T1-R (though on a different car) and I think the Yoko S's are superior! When the coilovers eventually go in I will update again how they perform on my 1st trackday.

185/60/14 on the rear

The C.drive on the rear proved to be a very good choice too, as they are very grippy in both dry and the wet especially, and need to be fairly well provoked to step out in the wet, so I am enjoying the new grip style of my car at the moment! Hopefully they will be durable too. Both tyres were sourced through eiretyre.com.

While the car was on the ramp the LSD oil was also topped up as that halfshaft seal leak gets worse, so expect an axle refresher + Cusco MZ install blog in the future!

Also investigated a leak from a cracked heater feed hose, so a new hose is on the way from Toyota and that will be installed asap, to hopefully end that horrible tea running down my engine block for now..

Dave