my 4age is dead. long live the 4age!

Well it has been an extremely quiet month (or two now) at Garage Hachi, mainly because not much has been happening with the cars! For me anyway I have just been daily driving the Trueno, as its nice to have a car that is on the road more than off it for once. Kev has a few things up his sleeve which I will let him blog about soon. Also the weather has driven us into the warmth and comfort of indoors and away from the hachis! But as we come into the better weather the enthusiasm (and some money!) returns and the projects resume again.

My longer term plans for my engine have jumped the queue a little with a tasty head gasket failure last weekend. The coolant in my car was never the cleanest despite many many attempts at flushing the system out, and my uprated temperature gauges revealed a water system that was not the most stable, quite often after a hard drive there would be a lovely mess in the engine bay after the expansion bottle got sick all over the chassis leg! Something that I knew needed addressing but finally has to be done. Now.

So, Kev and I drew up a few plans, keeping with the head-build that is already in progress, and added a few more items, to come up with what will be a very nice streetable but still track day capable (if I ever get there...) 16v T-Vis 4age for my Trueno. So, until the build pics start coming, all I can offer is the planning list so far:

• cleaned / skimmed big port head with port work by Kev
• HKS 256/8.3mm cams with HKS pulleys & HKS valve springs
• ARP head / main / big / flywheel bolt and stud sets
• TRD/Toda 0.8mm head gasket
• block cleaned / bored / decked, to make way for...
• Wiseco 81.5mm high comp. pistons
• new big / main / thrust / spigot bearings
• new Toyota oil pump
• all new Toyota gaskets 
• new timing belt & tensioner
• all new Samco coolant hoses (including new heater hoses soon available thanks to jdm86gtz on 86irl!)
• new standard radiator
• breathing through my full ARC intake system and Fujitsubo Super Ex 4-1
• all thoughts controlled by my AP Engineering Apexi Power FC

If funds allow I might get some bodywork repairs done while the engine is being build, and hopefully sometime soon I will have a pretty fresh hachi for 2011! So here last pic of her we'll see for a little while, turning another corner in the project life :)