calus001

Bought this 2zz powered aw11 off of a user on MR2OC, the swap was originally done by Cardomain user Blown59. Here's a link to the build:

http://www.cardomain.com/ride/2255550/1986-toyota-mr2

I bought it off the next person to own it in Roanoke, VA. It had mostly just been sitting since it was purchased as the guy had a kid right after he bought it and didn't have time for it.



Here's how it looked then.:








I've had it since January and have put a lot of time and effort into make it my own. Luckily I had a head start, because before this one I had a 1989 AW11 N/A with a few grand dumped into the suspension and interior and such.



For starters I swapped over my Recaros sourced from a DC2 Integra type R. The cheapest real Recaros Ebay has to offer. Also added an OEM Toyota leather bra to cover all the dings and rock chips on the nose. Sparco champion wheel matched the red and black theme I had going on in the interior well, with the red stitching on my seats and ebay red stitched shift boot. The Spazchicken arm rest cover finished off the inside nicely I thought. A real lucky find since the group buy on them was a couple years past.










After that I swapped over my Ground Control coilovers with Koni Yellows. These are the kind you have to weld onto your strut towers, and were honestly a huge pain in the ass to install, but it was worth it in the end. Also brought over the ST sway bars with High and Tight links for the front. Coupled with MR2 spyder wheels and Bridgestone Potenza RE-11s in 205/50/15, this thing was now riding on rails.












For a while I didn't do anything with it, pretty satisfied with no visible damage. I knew that paint and bodywork would be coming up soon, probably in the summer, but had no solid plans for it. And then my female room mate hit it with her 2011 mustang as she pulled out of the driveway because "I wasn't in my normal spot"
Not on purpose, she just wasn't used to pulling out with me there.



Well, it wasn't all bad! Her insurance company gave me $1200 bucks for that little dent and slightly bent bumper. And I happen to know a very very good body guy back home in New Hampshire, who happens to be my older sister's dad. I called him up and planned to redo the car with him in August. I still had a few months to wait, so in the meantime I went and fixed a few things in the gauge cluster.

For some reason the previous owners never tracked down the electrical gremlins in the Tach. It would only work when there was a load on the electrical system, and only up til 5k rpm. So if I needed the tach I'd have to push the cigarette lighter in lol. Well, I cracked 'er open and found the culprit to be a resistor that needed to be bypassed in the tach assembly. It's the one with the wire figure 8ed around it. I was using the wire to test my theory before I replaced it with a piece of solid wire.




While I was in there, I decided to do something about the old faded look of the cluster. On my previous aw11 I bought some LED plugs for the gauges but the didn't work. This time I made my own with some 4 volt jumbo LEDs and some 330ohm resistors.





Also, the orange paint on the needles may have looked cool new, but they were super faded by the time 2012 came around. I scraped the orange paint off with a knife and painted them white instead.






The lighting is more visible and even in person.

Before my trip to NH, I experimented around on Forza to see how might like to paint it. Here's what I decided on.





Obviously it's based off of a panda AE86. The gadient pattern on the hood was a stock decal available in 1985 and 86. And so I sat and planned for the remaining months until August rolled around.

Then shit got real.