Friday activities
Today I went and helped my good friend April with her ongoing project car. She's (slowly) swapping a 2GR-FE from a wrecked Toyota Aurion into her ST185 Celica GT-Four. I've posted about it before on Cohost (RIP), but the Celica was heavily modified in its first few years of ownership, and April purchased it after many years of disuse to find that it had a nasty bottom end knock. The stock 3S-GTE engine is expensive and difficult to source, hence the ongoing attempt at fitting a nice big (and common!) V6 in there instead.
We've been stripping the donor car for quite a while now, but today was the first time Adelaide's vicious summer weather permitted us to take a whack at pulling the engine. There were a few complicating factors: the donor car in the driveway is on a slight slope, there's a ~2cm lip on the edge of the garage, and the 2GR-FE is... not a small engine, to say the least.
To remove the engine from the engine bay, we had a couple of options. We could use an angle grinder to remove the front crash bar and simply pull it forward, or we could drop the entire subframe (including the struts and hubs), get that out of the way, and then get the engine out from underneath the car. It was mildly sketchy, but we went with the second option since the first option would have been sketchier. Lots of flammable liquids and liquid residue around that engine bay, after all, and we've already dealt with enough fire on this project. (Original engine presented a number of complications upon firing it up.)
So, we lifted the car even higher... (less sketchy than you'd think, since we'd removed ~350kg of engine block, transmission, and subframe from the front end, thereby shifting the centre of gravity significantly backwards)
...and dropped the engine and subframe.
I neglected to mention that April had already undone most of the engine mounts, so the entire situation was a bit... wobbly. We spent a bit messing around with dollies and jacks, and with some judicious application of brute force (mostly by me) we got the subframe out. Wahoo!
A note: this was complicated by the fact that we need to put the subframe back on the car so it can be taken away for scrap. It needs to be able to roll onto a wrecker's flatbed, hence why we elected not to completely disassemble it.
I didn't take any photos of the next bit because it took the combined grunt of three people, but we were eventually able to extricate the engine out from underneath the front of the car. To put it lightly, I do not recommend doing this on a sloped driveway. But we got it done nonetheless! Engine emancipated from its wrecked donor, onwards to a new life.
And here's the engine, finally in the garage, next to where it's going to end up. You can just make out a very lovely GT-Four underneath all that crap in the background.
By then, it was after 6 PM, so we packed up and I decided to take the long way home through the hills. Adelaide has some seriously great back roads, and they're pretty empty at that time of day. So I was able to make my way home at my own pace, leaping between sunbeams.
I don't post about it a lot, but my daily driver is a gently modified Subaru BRZ, which is my pride and joy. It's perfectly suited for the kinds of roads I love to drive: it rewards holding momentum through corners, and you can have a lot of fun without breaking the law. Perfect.
Here's a photo of it, taken last week:
Over the past few years, I've consciously cultivated gratitude in my heart. It does the soul good to feel thankful every so often, and every time I drive this car down a winding road, I feel very thankful indeed. It's a beautifully communicative machine with few flaws, and an excellent dance partner.