Not Insane; Just Misunderstood

My 1993 Toyota MR2 has been through a LOT. It started life as a naturally aspirated 5-speed 93 Blue Metallic MR2. This thing was fully specced out, sans the turbo motor. Power windows, power locks, power steering, premium sound, BLUE INTERIOR, t-tops, and 130hp. Hey, more power than my RAV4 has. I have pieced together some of the history of this car, though it is incomplete at best.

Dramatic recreation

Original Owner:
From what I understand the original purchaser of this car was an older lady, who just drove the car as-is as a runaround vehicle. Good for her. That is likely what attracted the malaise Blue Metallic color, along with the blue leather interior. By the sound of it, she owned the car until MR2s were next to worthless.

Owner X:
Owner X may be multiple people. It may have changed hands several times before landing in Owner X’s lap. He had some… interesting plans with the car. He painted the whole car rattle can black (though I’m not sure if that’s worse than the stock blue), and sorta riced it out. A total boy racer car. Shoddy fixes, the list goes on. Until he had the bright idea to try to turbo swap the car. So he got a 2nd gen 3sgte from a 91 mr2, along with that engine’s wire harness, and tried to shoehorn that into this poor 93. Now, sounds simple enough, but the pre-93 and 93+ MR2s are very electrically different. It would take a lot of work to make a 91 engine+harness function in a 93. Mechanically it is straightforward, since dimensionally everything is the same. It’s unclear to me whether he stuck with the NA’s S54 transmission or upgraded to the Turbo’s E153. Well, he never finished that swap and ended up selling it as-is.

The car as Ross bought it, mid-swap

Ross:
Ross was the previous owner before I, and ultimately was the savior for this car. He and his dad fixed everything that Owner X botched in their attempted swap. Ross had a 2nd gen 3sgte built with upgraded internals to install in the car (wiseco pistons, tte headgasket, arp studs, the list goes on), an actual 93+ wire harness, and installed a GT2860RS as the cherry to top it off (well, an ATS CT27 but same thing). He had a 91 E153 rebuilt using all new parts to install in the car. Ross had it painted at least twice, each time the original factory color. All of the goodies that would have come with a turbo car, he installed, and put a nice set of 5zigen FN01R-c wheels.

The car as I bought it from Ross

Me:
I bought the car as-is from Ross, with some rougher paint but in otherwise healthy condition. Motor likely made 250-260whp, which was respectable but it definitely was strong enough for more. That was my daily, I drove that car through high school and didn’t really touch it, other than general maintenance, and painting it Voodoo Blue, which it remains today. It was very reliable and only stopped working on me once or twice. Well, until at some point freshman year of college it spun a rod bearing on me. This wasn’t from pushing too much power, but in all actuality the seals inside the turbo blew, and all of the oil left through the exhaust while I was on the freeway. That became sorta unsalvageable, so rather than trying to rebuild it again I decided to do a swap. I picked up a Gen3 3sgte from a 96 Japanese market MR2. It’s a motor that we never got in the states, so some parts are harder to find but it’s somewhat interchangeable with the Gen2 that this car already had. At this time I also went with a standalone Link G4 ECU. Tuned by UMS Tuning, I made 275whp on 18psi. Nice. That was a very fun motor, it felt so much newer than the Gen2, despite being mostly identical. Around this time I also changed my wheels, and installed a set of Volk TE37s. Well, a few years down the line I started wanting more, so I weighed my options. Upgrade the Gen3, or do another swap? Well, I’d known I’d always wanted to do this since I bought the car, the sound is like nothing else, the power is unreal, and one popped up for sale down the street for me: a 2grfe, a 3.5L V6, this one from a 2013 Sienna. It came with a wiring harness from a 2015 Sienna, which I was able to modify to make work with the MR2. Luckily, around the time I picked this up, Marc Lebranche of Frankenstein Motorworks had cracked the stock 3rd gen Sienna ECU, and started selling those, which worked with my wire harness. Well with a healthy mix of buying parts from Frankenstein Motorworks, Wilhelm Raceworks, and fabricating parts myself, I got the engine installed. A few hiccups, but it worked out and we’re here in the end. I was complacent with that setup for a while, but eventually found an E153 from an 01 Camry at a local junkyard. There were a few benefits over the 91 E153 that I had installed, For one it has much newer synchronizers, a dual/triple cone design instead of a single, a longer 3.933 final drive (over the turbo’s 4.285), and more bolt holes that actually line up with the 2gr (7 instead of 4). The only thing I had to modify was the Camry is rear shifted, as the transmission is in front of the driver, and the MR2 is front shifted, as it’s behind the driver. I have to take the transmission apart to drill a hole in the mid case, but that’s not a massive ordeal. Oh yeah, and I installed a Quaife helical LSD while it was apart. Fun stuff.

The car as it sits today

tl;dr, This car has been through a minimum of 5 engines (4 different engine platforms), 4 transmissions, 5 paint jobs, 4 owners, and a whole lot of miles.

Boy, that was a long lead-in to the topic I actually wanted to cover today.

During the last swap, I decided to do a semi-wiretuck/fuseboxtuck. This is by far not necessary for the 2gr swap but thought it was a good time and wanted to get a few things out of the engine bay. So instead of through the firewalls/engine bay, my wire harness runs in between the quarter panel and back to the trunk. Didn’t actually need to extend any wires, just make a quick bracket to mount the fusebox semi-securely.

Sure, tell me it’s a bad idea. I don’t care.

Due to no longer running the harness through the engine bay (and removing the cruise control harness- E-throttle baby), I was now left with about 4 holes in the firewall, that have been there since the start of the swap. These were just where the stock grommets went, so now they’re open. These let in a lot of noise and potentially CO gases, so it’s probably best I seal them up. I decided to take a page out of Mike Reed’s playbook. A while back, he covered the holes by getting thin sheets of carbon fiber and gluing them on with FIPG (basically OEM Toyota RTV- it’s good stuff)

Those are the offending holes. Not huge, but enough to let a chunk of noise through. Time to template and cut some holes

They aren’t pretty, but they’ll work. FIPG holds oil pans on so I’m not worried about the temperature being an issue. If I’m remembering right, this is where Mike stopped, but I had some leftover material so I took it one step further, and added another layer to match the dual-layer firewall Toyota used.

There we have it, a sealed off firewall. Ugly, but functional. Just like me.

Anyway, driving around like this for a while, holy crap that made a HUGE difference in sound. Just doing that made the car way less raspy from the inside, it’s almost smooth. Well, that worked so well I decided to reinstall my rear carpet. I’ve had it out for a few years, but I still have it and it’s in good shape. Why not give it a shot, its not that hard to install.

Wow, it feels like a car again.

Also on the list today was I took the car to the alignment shop, I installed coilovers a few years ago and never once had it aligned since. I also installed Alex Wilhelm’s geometry correction kit so it was a perfect time. My eyeball alignment was actually pretty good, front toe was bang on one side and slightly off on the other, and on the rear it was off by roughly the same amount pointing to the left. So I was crabwalking a little bit. But now that’s sorted, I need to look into getting some new tires, bad. Thinking RT660s are up next.