Frozen in Time

My RAV4 has been done for several months now. It has been great, it’s been reliable, it’s quick, it’s great on the highway and around town. Ever since it was done I’ve used it as my daily. There was no progressive trust level, it was just “well, this works” and I drove it since. Nearly 500 miles a week. I’ve barely even driven my MR2 since finishing this. I’ve said this before but a 1st gen RAV4, especially a 2 door manual 4wd, is the most car of all time. Peak automobile. I cannot stress this enough, it is the perfect balance of comfortability, usability, and ruggedness. Doubling the horsepower was exactly what this car needed.
However, there have been a few pretty minor issues with my swap since it’s been done.

The first of these issues arose pretty quickly. I noticed an increased exhaust volume, and a bit of rattling from the engine bay area. Sounded like an exhaust leak, and I just assumed that one of the V bands came loose. When I actually get the chance to look around, here is what I find:

I was out of practice, cut me some slack

Many people are due to give me (well-deserved, mind you) an “I told you so”. I thought that there would be enough flex in this small bracket to allow for thermal expansion. Turns out I was incorrect. I was NOT in the mood to rebuild this front-mid-pipe-thing, so I go about repairing it. Pretty simple, cut out the affected area, cut out a replacement piece from the same diameter material, and weld it back in as a patch. I still needed some kind of brace here, because that would still be a lot of leverage placed on that front v band. A few users on Discord pointed me to Summit Racing high-temp polyurethane exhaust bushings. Easy, drill an adequately sized hole, weld the bracket to your exhaust, and bolt it down. This ended up providing a good balance of support and flex. Should be enough to keep the mid pipe from cracking from both leverage and thermal expansion.

I had to put some loctite on that bolt since it wasnt actually tightening down on a rigid structure. Not my favorite way to do things but it works fine here. If I did this from scratch I would add a small steel sleeve insert that would provide some preload on the bushing but would allow the bolt to tighten down against that. Or just use a shoulder bolt. This is as perfect as it needs to be. Moving on.

One thing that plagued my swap from the start is that my speedometer did not work. It worked before the swap. Nothing else didn’t work, so I just kinda learned to drive the car without it. Solely based on RPM and gear I could get by just fine. I knew it had to be a simple solution, either something wasn’t plugged in or I had an open circuit somewhere. I finally decide to dig into it and solve this once and for all. I do a little digging at the chassis integration connectors, comparing to the RAV4 EWDs, and pretty quickly find the answer.

Huh, I literally just had that red and yellow wire switched. The red wire is power to the vehicle speed sensor. Well that explains why it hasn’t worked thusfar. I can’t believe I missed this, I specifically remember not touching any of the speedo wires, I left those in from the original harness and built a 2ar harness around that. I drive it around for a bit, around 20 miles, no issues arise, I call it good and move forward.

The following day I need to drive across the city. I, of course, take my RAV4, my go-anywhere buggy. I make it about halfway to my destination, then a couple things go weird. I was listening to music, and any time there was a bassy or loud part of a song, the screen on my headunit would shut off. Weird, I must have some wiring issue there. I try a different song, the radio just goes kaput. That’s strange. I make it a couple more miles down the road, then my car starts misfiring like crazy. I can’t even rev past ~3500rpm. It starts dying faster, so I need to pull over. I’m in the left lane of a 6 lane highway. Yay infrastructure. I’m only going about 50mph at this point, I know I won’t make it to the right side of the freeway. Luckily I make it to a section of road where the shoulder opens up. Here I am, left shoulder of the busiest freeway in Arizona, middle of the day, 110F, with a dead car.

Currently, I have no idea what could be causing this. I have what appears to be zero volts in the electrical system. I really doubt it’s a wiring short, it just doesn’t feel like that. I can slowly feel the electrical system dying, I of course have my hazards on, and those begin to blink slower and slower. The residual dash lights dim. All that’s left is a faint airbag light.

I don’t want to stand in front of this car in the engine bay in the middle of the freeway. Too big of a risk. If this is a dead alternator, I’m not driving the car for a few months. Not because it’ll take me months to replace, but it will be months until I have the motivation to go through the effort of replacing it. The alternator is totally buried on this swap, there is SO much in the way. It basically has to come out straight forward, which means the AC lines, condenser, and radiator have to come out. I don’t want to do any of those things.
As I’m waiting for the tow truck, my brain goes through all of the possibilites. Maybe it was the fusible link? Alt-S wire? I did pot my alternator for clearance, maybe my solder joints failed? Maybe my crimps failed. Maybe the charge cable came loose. I joke with some of my Discord buddies that the car was working fine before I fixed the speedometer, so clearly the speedometer is the problem. I just need to cut it off and I’ll be OK.

Once I get home, something finally clicked. Remember that yellow wire that I moved?

I have no idea what that yellow wire does (credit: SuperFastMatt Discord server)

Hey dumbass, that yellow wire is Alt-IG. If that wire does not get power, the alternator won’t charge. I do a quick continuity check and that confirms my suspicions. The mystery yellow wire goes to pin 2 on the alternator connector. IG. This didn't happen before my Speedo was working so clearly that's the problem and I'll just disconnect my Speedo. Dude, you were so right. Your speedo fix was indirectly the cause of your voltage loss. You were just powering your alternator from your VSS pullup, then removed it. You just drove around with the alternator powered off for over 40 miles. I am so pissed but this was HILARIOUS. I’m still pissed. Anyway, I want to figure out why I initially switched those two pins. Digging through the RAV4 EWDs, I realize that IG1 pin 2 is the correct pin for the VSS. But at the same time IG1 pin 2 is also correct for the Alt-IG pin. What gives?

Junction connector… hmmm…
Dammit those two wires were crimped together on the original harness
Well, simple fix really. At least I know the answer. I just have to attach those two wires together, then both the speedo and alternator will work. Apparently one of those is more important than the other. This also goes to the reverse switch, and apparently this is why my reverse lights didn’t work either. Go figure.

The next thing I wanted to polish up, My intake was always supposed to be temporary. Of course that means it’s still there. This is not really an issue but I am seeing 140F+ IATs while driving around. It’s pulling air from the engine bay, including the radiator and exhaust existing in the same vicinity. I always intended to build a sheet aluminum intake including a snorkel, but that is outside of the scope of what I can do at the moment. I need my cars moving, so I’ll address that later. I have a bunch of embossed stainless heat shield, I decided to cut a bit of that up to make a duct, at least block off the header and some of the radiator.

A couple cardboard template pieces later I get this, it’s far from perfect but it’s a proof of concept. I only cut off 2 fingers doing this. I’m not actually sure if this helped, I saw mostly ~120F range of IATs, but I did see peaks up to 140 still. I need to do more scientific testing with and without this duct. I have a few stranger ideas for air intakes if this doesn’t end up working how I want it to. End goal I’ll have a fully enclosed airbox that pulls from behind the front bumper and a snorkel, with the front bumper intake able to be closed for offroading. Water crossings and whatnot.
Speaking of water crossings, this next bit has nothing to do with them. My tires are pretty toast at this point. Maybe 1/32” of tread depth. I drove it around way too long without an alignment, on top of my tires being old and dry rotted. That made for a really fast-wearing combination. The tires that came on this car are 215/70/16. I’d like to go a little wider and a little taller. There are two easy answers here, either 225/75/16 or 235/70/16. After way too much time analyzing the two, I decide to get 225s. This is the most common tire size RAV4 owners upgrade to. It only requires hammering a small part of the chassis, and cutting a tiny piece of the wheel well.

A proper thing to do would be to add a new piece of plastic to replace that which I cut out, but I’ll save that for a future blog post. There is only one other issue I noticed, that I haven’t heard from anyone else on this, but that could be indicative of a problem with my car. More on that in a bit. The issue I ran into was that my spare tire now hits the trunk, and squeaks constantly. Any amount of shaking, bumps, etc, would result in some squeaking. Not a huge deal but a little annoying. Luckily, I have just the solution. A 10mm wheel spacer.

A hub-centric wheel spacer is 100% overkill for the task at hand. But I had it left over from a recent project. See [blog post not yet available] for more details on that. This is just enough to make clearance. But this makes me wonder, if nobody else has reported this issue, it could mean one of two things. One, I’m pickier on noises than most people. This is not likely. Two, there is something wrong with my car, it is possible that someone backed into or backed the car into something else, putting enough force on the spare tire to tweak the carrier or the trunk. I didn’t see anything obvious on the trunk or carrier, but that kind of stuff isn’t always visible. A few degrees makes for several milimeters over the distances I’m working with here.

Overall, over these past few months, this car has been really solid, with only a few minor (“minor”) issues to polish out. It’s becoming more of a car every day. Projects can never be finished, but my original scope has been fulfilled. So that’s pretty cool. I’ve put around 5k on the swap at this point, a pretty good shakedown for everything. The engine I built has not ejected a rod, spun a bearing, or given any indication that I did it wrong. Nice.

Smell the new rain.