Project Stormbringer

[Dracov]

Wow, I'm curious how it handled without a rear swaybar?

Oh I can sum that up easily: More body roll than the Costa Concordia :evil:

But now that's all over with, finally. And I finally replaced the liftback struts...which, the apparently only aftermarket replacement out there is too long for the hatch to close. So I had to flip the brackets to move the bodyside pivot upwards and she now closes, and more importantly stays open. I also gave her a full round of all four liftback bumpers, so hopefully there's no hatch rattle from this

 

[UtahSleeper]

Yeah, I've heard some other horror stories to that effect. These were bought and paid for many moons ago so it's not like I can return them. I'll just run them until they die and worry about replacements then.

As for improved handling... Some PO before me removed the stock rear bar and left it like that, so this isn't even an improvement over stock; it's outright repairing previous fuckery

And I can safely say that fuckery was not me!!! I was too afraid to work on the car then lol.

 

[Dracov]

I feel like a doofus now. Figured out why I lost half the car, electrically speaking. That damnable 1-wire connector to the main fuse block decided to **** off and go on holiday. Crammed it back into its hole and suddenly I have back my fogs, defroster, tail lights, brake lights, and door locks. All that crap depends on a single white wire. :twisted: Turns out it doesn't click into place, so I have the fun of figuring out a not-shadetree fix to that. But in the meantime it's tangled amongst its brethren in a way that should keep it in position for now.

Though for some reason when ever I shut the car down I lose the gauge cluster illumination right away. It doesn't stay on in accessory position. Hoping it's just a loose ground or such but I admit I'm a little lost when it comes to that part of the electricals.

That said, I am really just a trans hose kit away from having her fully assembled and ready to actually move under her own power

 

[Dracov]

The fun never ******* ends. While hunting down gremlins with the coolant system my power steering rack decided all it wanted in the world was to be incontinent, and so pissed away my overpriced steering fluid and generally made a mess. Myself, not willing to try my hand at rebuilding a rack just yet, and so went on the hunt for a good steering rack. And I lucked out and came into a Toyota OEM remanned rack, one of the last in the country for the 165:

Looks pretty nice and came with inner tie rods. I even sprung for some new rack bushings, and found a poly set that looks like they'll fit nicely:

But this job is not only incomplete, but was met with hell along the way in the form of Toyota deciding that the studs for the brackets needed to be three times longer than would be convenient for pulling the rack out. The nuts were on so tight they acted like thread chasers even though the rack had presumably never been removed. Which got compounded on the driver side bracket by the fact that there's no damned clearance between it at the transaxle without dropping the stack, which I am loathe to do. Fitment was so bad I had to buy a second 17mm deep and saw it down by about 5mm and use that to turn it out enough for the shallow to take over. I still had to force the stack to pivot forward for clearance, doing both of these operations at once was...less than convenient.

Though now I have the problem of pulling the rack out. Its tubes are hitting against the shift cables so it won't simply slip out the passenger side per the BGB. Going out the driver side is out because of all the brake lines and fuel filter in the way there. If there's any tricks to this I am obviously overlooking I would be grateful, the BGB in all its endless wisdom merely says this about how to actually pull it after disassembly:

Thanks. :|

 

[Dracov]

OKay, so!

Got the damned thing out, and took a bath in power steering fluid for my troubles. And essentially none of the very scant steps the BGB had on this process were actually needed, and many other things NOT documented were necessary without dropping the stack. Namely:

1. Have someone tilt the stack to gain vertical clearance for the rack
   Pull the charcoal cannister
   Disconnect the shifter cables from the gearbox, including their retainer clips
   Twist the rack along its axis as it comes out, otherwise that idiotically long stud will catch on the input shaft housing
   Fight the shifter cables until they stretch over the input shaft as the rack slowly slides out
   Twist and contort the rack yet again to get enough clearance for the input shaft to exit the body as the hole for the tie rod is technically too small in diameter for the job in the first place

But, it's done and the new rack is just waiting for me to recover and calm down from that excruciating extravaganza. Maybe tomorrow.

 

[underscore]

Make sure to compare the racks on the ground first, just in case the new one is incorrect for some reason.

 

[Rick89GTS]

Yes, the BGB has a tendency to oversimplify, lol

 

[Dracov]

Well this was a fun week. In my struggle to get the new steering rack in I ripped open the knock sensor plug. So I dug into my spare harness bits and produced a healthy KNK pigtail and just crimped it on. Eventually I'll do it right and run a full-length shielded wire from it to the ECU but for now this will work. It took me a few tries to get the steering column centered onto the pinion shaft but it's there now, and toe is largely eyeballed into a drivable state.

She is back on the ground on all fours. She starts, she idles, and isn't pissing anything. I think - aside from cracking the clutch free of the flywheel anyway - I have her running at long freaking last.

...which means she needs tires now

 

[Rick89GTS]

Good job man!

 

[UtahSleeper]

HELL YEAH!!!! Good job. Now time to rip her around!!

 

[Dracov]

Welp, it's been just a little while since my last update.

The beast still needs tires. But, a few changes happened in the last two years! Just a few...

So for starters, I was not happy with how the engine turned out. As such it came out and I shipped it off to a local 3S expert for a rebuild. That, naturally, gave me time to reflect, scheme, get bored and finally get around to fixing stuff that's been bugging me since forever ago.

First up with my newly-vacated engine bay: Fix the power steering. For whatever reason one of the power steering lines was manhandled, mounted in the wrong bolt hole and as a result kinked all to hell. I'm impressed it still held fluid at all but this was simply unacceptable. So, I looted new lines and hoses off an 87 GT. They look pretty nice methinks

While I was at it I decided to annoy Damper Doctor and have my crank pulley rebuilt. Came back absolutely beautiful and perfectly phased

One thing that always bugged me was the trashed suspension. When I bought this beast she came with some ancient KYB Rally front struts, long since dead rears, old bushings, and tired springs everywhere.

So, I did the natural thing and started by buying the entire poly catalog and every single bolt, nut, cam, screw, and plate Toyota still offered because by the gods am I tired of fighting rusted out bolts. Plus they look like ass paired next to shiny new parts.

I also opted for a set of Ceika coilovers and set them to OEM ride height. They look freaking beautiful, and I didn't even need to use the old school front strut bolt spacer on them!

Another thing that has been a problem for me: Aircon. She never had any. The system never held vacuum much less pressure. And I never learned how to fix it. No time like a pandemic!

So I stockpiled the usual suspects: Remanned compressor, receiver drier, evaporator, TXV, another set of tubes and hoses from a junkyard donor I'd had hidden away for a while. All that good stuff.

After some of my carefullest monkeywork I pulled vacuum on the system, let it sit, and proceeded to develop clinical anxiety waiting for it to inevitably equalize with the Mile High atmo...

After having the pump off for a full hour she was still holding about 23 inches of vacuum! Damn that feels good. I retrofitted my Supra the year before to R134a and got similar results. My aircon shop practically laughed at me insisting it will never hold refrigerant. When I came back to pick her up she was cold enough to make me shiver in summer and still holds just fine. We'll see what they think of a repeat retrofit customer this summer. :>

Moving on to other systems, I wrestled a set of greasable poly swaybar bushings for up front. Needed to bend one of the ears to fit the chassis contours, but it managed to settle into place eventually. Good thing too as my original rubber ones were practically nonexistent

By this point I about lost my damn mind and decided to fix every little issue I could possibly think of...and boy, there was no lack of 'em.

Including: The interior. Not only did I have the usual T16 dash vinyl shrinkage/cracking issues, but with a red interior the whole thing faded to an unpleasant tan poop shade.

By happenstance I came into a beautifully intact black dashboard. No shrinkage at all, no fading. The only cracking is at the windshield defroster holes, which I can have fixed later. For now it looks amazingly better, isn't busted all to hell and that's all that mattered to me:

Eventually it made its way into the chassis. I opted to swap in all my red HVAC vents into the dash, to it's not this random swatch of darkness amid an otherwise crimson sea interior. Honestly...I damn like it. It lends interest, and if I feel froggy later I might even dye some of the rest of the interior to give it a more black & red theme inside. Who knows. For now I just wanted to get the interior fixed.

The rest of the interior back together up front:

Center console with a Pioneer DEH-X8800BHS, and a working period correct HKS Type 3 turbo timer! I commissioned Autoextrude to make me a single DIN turbo timer slot for this model, since they didn't have one designed already. I think it came out beautifully:

Speaking of said turbo timer. The connector was butchered, so gave it the Queen of Hearts treatment and crimped on fresh terminals. Also took a look at the guts because, why wouldn't I?

Keeping with the interior work, I noticed there were remnants of what used to be rockwool glued to the interior panels for the rear seats and cargo area. Who the hell would just rip that stuff off, and why? It's there for a reason that someone other than me spent way more money R&D'ing out why it needed to be there. So, I went about recreating that, only with the benefit of 30 years of materials science advancement and less budgetary red tape.

First up, the rear center panel since it's easy: One single sheet of 3/8" thick self adhesive foam with an aluminum backing to reflect a bit of heat out in the summer. Plus a couple of unbacked foam strips for preemptive rattle abatement:

 

[Dracov]

Rear seat panels came out to 9 panels of foam a pop (only 8 are seen here; added the 9th later after finding old glue residue there):

The awkward cargo panels took a lot more work, and by this point I was half delirious from heat exhaustion using a heat gun to activate the glue, as well as hours of swimming in some heinous glue fumes. But at the end of the day, these panels fit up right where they belonged. I was careful not to put foam anyplace that wouldn't have space to fit it without compressing any:

And here it is with all the panels back in. I haven't seen this sight in a few years:

So with the interior sorted, we rewind a little bit and back to another functional disaster: The glass.

Now, this 165 had been in a front end accident long before I bought her. As best I can tell, it happened in the 90s so it's been a LONG time. But...whoever did the repair work was criminally incompetent, which I will probably rant about later in this post. For now, the glass part...

The windshield. It leaked. Badly. In winter I could actually see frost develop, in real time, on the INSIDE of the windshield. That was just outright dangerous. So after pulling the cowl, I saw why. This is work that an insurance collision shop did. Not some rando mom & pop shop, but a McCollision Repair corporation:

The eagle eyes in the audience may notice that the windshield is not sitting on its bottom rests. After peeling away the barely-sticking rubber, my glass monger and I found it was jammed up against the top of the frame, more than a 12mm gap between the bottom edge of the glass and where it was supposed to be sitting. Plus, the glass was manufactured for SafeLite, under a brand that hasn't existed since the 1990s. It was primo ****™, lemme tells ya.

But wait, there's more! After cleaning up the old adhesive I discovered that the job was so poorly done, that the upper part of my windshield frame was rotting away. Just a small bit of wire wheel work revealed these holes:

My heart sank, but I was not very surprised. Thankfully my glass monger had my back and educated me on the wonders that is 3M panel bond. This stuff is amazing. Two-part epoxy meant for, well, bonding body panels together. Permanently. This stuff takes a week to cure but it's hard as diamond and sticks like nothing I had ever before seen. I love it so much that the overpriced tool for it was worth the price of entry:

I ended up even using this stuff to fix a number of cracks and breaks in my interior panels as well as my poor haggard bumper skin. Which I spent a while trying to fix up nice, since the insurance shop did the lowest effort work I could possibly imagine trying to repair it short of just not doing anything at all. I'm going on an adventure!

Pretty sorry shape, all told. Half the skin is broken, there are tears here and there. It is missing literally all of its braces and bracketry, and the right fog light mount is, if I may be polite, completely fuckered:

The right fog light mount not only had a weld broken off from the force of its impact, but it got bent backwards, to one side, stretched, and was horribly rusted.

Right fog light mount, 92mm tall:

Left fog light mount...over 100mm tall:

 

[Dracov]

That was a day's project in and of itself. That's to say nothing of the skin was split open and rewelded...improperly. But I'm not equipped to completely fix it right and take out the minor twist in it, so I shored up the tack welds that were there with something that will actually hold up to the impact of a gnat's fart for a change.

And to make matters better: The collision shop actually removed the license plate mounting nuts for the front bumper. They were solid gone, man. Luckily you can still get them new, so I did just that before stuffing the energy absorber and refreshed crash bar back into the skin:

The skin itself was a challenge. Fixing all the cracks and breaks took me 55 hot staples and a generous application of panel bond over them to reinforce the repairs:

With the bumper sorted, I moved on to a special project: The 165's fog lights. Mine are pretty bad off; many of the mounting ears were just plain broken, rust everywhere, etc. With a rare treasure for me, I lucked into a nicer set of fogs. All the plastic is good, but they were pretty rusted up. So, time to refresh some parts again!

First off, rust remediation on the brackets. Behold, the magic of science!

While I waited a week for the rust to convert off the buckets and mounts, I noticed the lights are height aimable, complete with headlight adjuster screws and everything. Only, they were rusted up solid. To complicate matters, a regular Toyota headlamp screw won't work because the slot it captures is much bigger; a regular screw would pop right out.

Top screw is the original ST165 fog light screw which has a large captive washer on it, middle is a standard Toyota style headlamp screw. Bottom is my solution: M5 screw, two washers captured by a nut that's both pinched and bearing compounded in place. All 316 stainless steel:

All the parts all cleaned up:

And all assumbled:

So, this is me we're dealing with. As a result, I was not fully satisfied and I wanted something that I never quite figured out how to do before. So...I did what any reasonable crackpot would do and try to figure it out live.

Yellow. Fog lights.

It took a lot more fiddling than it did designing, but the fog lamps themselves have a yellow lens in them so I can use whatever bulbs I want and keep the same color. These aren't JDM market fogs, but work just like them I think.

Head unit wiring was about as bad as one can expect:

I did the reasonable thing and went overboard with metri-pack connectors. Amazingly they all do fit back there with everything in place:

Amid all the fixes I was doing, I got the wild hair to try and do an upgrade too. My Alltrac does not have automatic aircon. Seems it was a rarer option in CADM versus USDM. Is it amazing tech? No. Do I want it anyway? Duh. So, let us get the funk out!

First thing's first: Parts. Automatic aircon relies on three electrical components. The solar sensor, which is the same unit the MA70 uses. An ambient outside temperature thermistor...again identical to the MA70 unit, so neither are hard to find. The third component is T16 specific however; the in-cabin air temp thermistor. It clips into the aircon controller itself but has its own electrical plug. Both the ambient and interior sensors are in-line on the same circuit, so you can't get away with just using one. Luckily, I scored all the sensors plus the hose for the interior sensor for a song:

Now that's all nice and simple...but why is there a farking hose on an electrical sensor? Lo and behold...I am missing parts still. On the heater core box there is supposed to be an aspirator valve that the hose hooks up to. It's basically a venturi, using the HVAC's own airflow to pull air across the in-cabin thermistor so it gets live data. The T16 one is long since NLA, and my fleabay-fu was not strong enough to score an original. So I took a chance and bought one still in production, with the intention of modifying it to mount my air box.

First problem: I need to punch the hole out of the heater box for the aspirator. You can see it over on the left:

A little careful work with knifery and pliers took care of that. Next up was the aspirator. Luckily its hose barb perfectly fit the hose for the sensor. Yay! Next up was seeing how hard it would be to make it fit the oh-so-obviously differently dimensioned hole vis a vis the aspirator made for a much newer model car I've forgotten what it's off of:

Uh. I'll be damned. It just, literally, clipped right into place like it belonged. Perfectly. But will the hose still hook up with everything else in there? That's a big affirmative:

So now that the sensors are sorted, we need to enable the automatic fan speed selection mode. This was a little more tricky. My Auto button has one light and controls vent selection only. On the automatic unit, it has a second LED and two switch plungers behind it, the second one enabling automatic fan speed along with automatic vent selection. Luckily, my control panel has the LED and switch right there! Meaning it's just the button not activating the switch behind it.

There's a couple kinds of plungers on the unit. The green ones are one way toggles; they're for the vent selection, so pressing another green plunger deactivates the previously activated one. The black one that is the vent auto mode just cancels all the green plungers at once. Red ones are on/off toggles that can cancel themselves, so that's the compressor and recirculation switches down below. Lastly, the white plungers for the fan speeds are on/off toggles that cancel one another like the green ones. Why did I just blather all that?

Because the fan auto switch is a white plunger; you press it, it stays clicked down just like the other fan speeds. Hitting Off cancels it, but you can't press Auto twice to cancel itself, whereas the black plunger under Auto doesn't do this; it springs back on its own since it's momentary. This tells me that the Auto button probably wasn't meant to stay plunged down in Auto mode, but I never had one in person to confirm this so chances are I'll be corrected later.

Long story short, the Auto switch body is just missing a strip of plastic to actuate the black plunger. So I simply glued in exactly that:

Mechanical testing confirmed it actuates and cancels in a reasonable fashion. Electrically...well, I need to get the aircon charged to find out if I was ultimately successful reverse engineering this feature.

Moving on, I have some problems with having this 3" exhaust. The first problem; it rubs against the boot of my right rear axle shaft. Like burned it off and melted out all the grease before. So first order of business: A new boot kit

It even rubbed the steel paper thin. After pounding in some strategic dents I had to go back and fill these holes with weld metal. After installation there's a nice amount of air gap between them, so I'm happy:

The other problem is the lateral crossmemmber up front. There's rub marks on the midpipe from it. So rather than relying on stacks of washers that just want to be unruly when trying to install, I cut and welded up a big ol' spacer plate instead:

 

[Dracov]

Another thing that bugged me for a long while was the T16's speakers. It's well known the fronts are not the 4" the likes of Crutchfield and Sonic Electronix insist they are. They're actually 3½" speakers. That's simple enough, I tossed a set of Pioneer TS-A879 speakers at them and called it a day. The rears however are bothersome. Some sites claim they're 4".

They are not.

Some try and claim 5¼" will fit...they don't.

What fits and fits proper? The out of production Polk db501:

These are, in fact, 4T format speakers, which is to say 4½" which nobody freaking makes anymore. The db501s are the last model I could find in that actual size, and they fit perfect. They seal the hole completely, the screw holes all line up exactly right. I tossed in some thin foam tape just to help keep the box sealed. That and some modern speaker batting inside and I am satisfied with my audio. Apart from maybe an under-seat sub someday.

Somehow in the time I have been doing this, my Hella Supertone horns just...up and died. Feed with angry pixies, no happy tooting. So, I decided to go a different route and snapped up a pair of stock UCF20 horns. I just needed to slightly modify my custom horn bracket, extend one horn cable and it all, just, worked!

Moving on, another problem I had was the E154F's oil cooler. The stock one just...does not fit. The hard lines are too long, the soft hoses are too short, and my cooler was bent up anyway and probably will just leak. A long while ago I got a cheap tube and fin cooler I thought would possibly work...

Uh. No.

Now, there is the Wilhelm Raceworks kit. But it's for the E153 and the bracket wouldn't work on an E154F. So I did the reasonable thing and toddled off and bought the same size radiator elsewhere and got the funk out again and fabbed a full bracket for mounting it directly to the gearbox using some pre-existing holes in the case. I even routed the hoses such that the fill port is fully accessible still! Though the actual hose routing between that and my intercooler pump is a bit...tortured:

Obligatory bracket shot!

Speaking of intercooler hoses... That was a fun adventure of couplers, elbows, shipping mishaps from the UK (multiple!), and discovering the joy of heat shrink hose clamps, which made this complicated mess much easier to install:

I also built a bracket for my ST205 pump to tuck it up higher against the frame rail and kick it inboard a little bit. This allows my engine bay tray to fit over it without anything rubbing. I found if I use a tray from an automatic T16 it fits just about perfect and doesn't interfere with the trans cooler

But that, of course, is not all there is to the intercooler adventure. I'm using the stock 205 intercooler and stock 205 pump and hard pipes. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to fit the 205 intercooler radiator, so it had to go. For a while I rocked a generic unit I managed to barely cram into place, but I didn't like the results, and it gave me no room for the aircon evaporator. So after going over lots of options and crafting several intercooler radiator fitment test jig thingies, I landed upon using a 12x12x2 coolant radiator and modifying it to suit.

First order of business: Off with it's head! I didn't need the radiator cap filler, and it causes clearance issues. Lop that off, TIG up a plate over the hole, bam! Next: Its drain port faced forward. Which unfortunately makes it unusable since it would run into the bumper. So I got a down facing bung welded in and plugged the original. Got me a nice all metal petcock with a hose barb on it for slightly-less-messy coolant changes too.

Oh and more brackets. I actually reused the original radiator's upper bracket and just tapped some holes into a strip of spare steel to make an intermediary sub-bracket. The boys in Shropshire ought to be proud:

A lower bracket was fashioned as well of course. For those keeping track at home, this puts us at four brackets fabricated on our misadventure.

There was actually a fifth bracket.

This ST165, like so many T16s and contemporary Toyotas of the time, suffers nowadays from an incontinent starter circuit. Instead of ripping apart my harnesses to run fresh copper and all that mess, I opted for the tried and true 12V Starter Mod™. I mean, I had it before but it was a janky mess. This time I went for a nice weatherproof automotive relay, weatherproof fuse holder, and proper connectors where I could to try and natively integrate the whole thing like it belonged.

This included, of course, a bracket for the relay and fuse holder. I shaped it so that it bolted up directly to the fuse box itself. That way if the fuse box needed to be moved, you simply unbolt it from the battery tie-down bracket like normal and the starter mod moves with it.

Moving on to other things that make my teeth itch: The liftback struts. Mine were dead in 2007 and have, obviously, not gotten any better. Toyota stealership ones are hilariously NLA, and everyone online for some unfathomable reason insists that the T18 liftback struts fit. ...Nein. Nyet. No. Negatory. Iie. WRONG.

First off, the T18 struts are a whopping 30 inches long. The ones for the T16 are a svelte 24 by comparison. And yes, I modifed a set of T18 struts to bolt up...they are physically too long for the liftback to even close. So no, they do not, can not, and will never ever work.

Naturally I did the reasonable thing and hunted around. A lot. Until I happened upon my MA70's old liftback struts. Funny, they're 24 inches long. But the feet are the wrong size; bolts are too close together to fit the T16. This is where I happened upon a brand where their MA70 struts have replaceable feet. Their "T16" ones do not, but the feet are the right size; they just have a permanently pressed in dowel instead of the removable one on the MA70.

My solution? Grind off and punch out the permanent dowel. Bam! The T18 Celica strut foot can now accept the serviceable dowel kit from the MA70 Supra's. Merge the two together, slap in a few washers to shim it out and I have some perfectly working liftback struts, which so long as the brand keeps making cartridges for, I can service whenever I need

MA70 strut foot in back, T16/T18 foot up front and installed. No rattles when closed even.

Some other stuff happened along the way, like swapping out a few space-shuttle-Challenger era bulbs to LEDs, swapping my blown tail light failure box for one that seems to work better, swapping the mirrors out for heated ones, slapping in some braided stainless brake hoses, getting the CT20b rebuilt with a 50-trim wheel on it, getting the rear torsen professionally rebuilt, and replacing my sunroof wholecloth because one of the cable retainers on the original just shattered. On top of I needed a new panel anyhow. But I haven't gotten to test to see if my sunroof track rebuild is successful yet as I need more shims for the panel.

She starts, purrs at idle, excellent oil pressure, all that good stuff. Now she's ready to begin engine break-in (But still needs new tires, hah!)

 

[AlltracAvenger]

As someone who has been a tangential part of this project, I'm absolutely stoked to see Stormbringer running. Absolutely excellent job!

 

[RedCelly94]

It's so cool to see this. Makes me feel good. The love people have for their rides lol.

 

[underscore]

That's an impressive amount of clean up work that I'm assuming involved an equally impressive amount of head scratching and gnashing of teeth.

You've already got it sorted for now but an fyi for the future, there are people/companies who can apparently rebuild those rear hatch gas strut things if you can't source new ones. I don't know for sure if they can do Celica ones but it might be worth looking into the next time you need replacements.

 

[Gert]

Very nice, keep up the good work.

 

[UtahSleeper]

Glad to see her coming back. And holy hell that was one hell of a progress dump!!

 

[Dracov]

It turns out I have been needing to hunt down an unsettling amount of coolant fumes coming out the exhaust. Like, my engine has literally half a kilometer on it, how could it possibly have a BHG already‽ It was, to say the least, disheartening to watch as that plume just kept going without any signs of slowing down any time she was running, cold or hot.

So I started checking my engine builder's work; ARP studs were torqued somewhere north of the requisite 60ft/lbs, so they didn't loosen up somehow. He did say that the turbo CHRA could have cracked...personally I never heard of that happening on a CT turbo, but dude's forgotten more than I'll ever know about the 3S so I braced myself for the hell of finding a rebuildable CT20b and getting that sorted out. In the mean time I did an exhaust gas test on my radiator...which the results were inconclusive. Not. Helpful. So the next order of business was to tug at Blackstone's sleeve and shipped off a sample of my fresh oil just to make sure if coolant is mixing with it at all. Survey says... In the clear! Not even the slightest hint of water or coolant in there. So, ****. Possibly turbo still.

But while dinking around with the intercooler I noticed that the water level kept dropping no matter how much I put in. There's no external leaks, but while the engine runs the coolant level just kept dropping and dropping. Sure enough, that damnable thing had an internal leak. Thus, off to The Great Internet Garage Sale known as fleaBay. I snapped up a unit that looked overall nicer for more money than I wanted to spend. This one went straight to my radiator shop, which does free pressure/leakdown testing. After educating them on a WTA intercooler design they were able to test both the liquid side and air side and confirmed no detectable leaks. Yay! So on went a sheet of Thermo-Tec heat wrap like I did my now old one, slapped it in and watched as not even condensation was appearing in the muffler even after 25 minutes of idling. Leaving me with just replacing that noisy Walbro fuel pump with a fresh Denso unit and then finding good 15" tires as the last steps to getting her 100% roadworthy.

I love the beast