The Failure to Consider

Where we left off on the RAV4 I had finished assembling the 1AR-FE, and fabricated the motor mount. Now that the motor was in its final position (or so I thought, more on that later) it was time to start more fabrication. The first step here was to test fit the radiator. Because the motor sat so far forward, the AC compressor actually hit the stock radiator. Not on the fins, but on the outlet. So I’d have to cut the outlet to even attempt to fit it.

This posed a problem because the RAV4 radiator has plastic endtanks, and to my searching there was no aluminum radiator available. Well, off to more searching. I dug and dug and dug through eBay listings to hope and find something made out of aluminum and roughly the right size. Couldn’t find anything from Toyota, found a couple leads from Honda cars, but then I found the perfect match. A SR20 S13 Silvia. It’s almost exactly the right dimensions and available in aluminum. This was actually a discovery/suggestion by Alex in the SuperFastMatt Discord server, thanks Alex. Test fit everything, it’s almost perfect! just needed to cut off a few tabs, I’ll have to make the mounts and move the outlet. That was expected, but one slight surprise is that I’ll have to move the radiator cap, it hits the hood latch in its current position. Just more cutting and welding, gives me more experience on aluminum.

With that out of the way of course everything will go this swimmingly. I bought a new old stock Megan Racing header meant for a 2nd gen tC (thanks Marc). The tC has a fair amount of room in front of the engine thanks to crash structures, but this old car designed for a tilted back engine has a lot less. So I figured it would be tight. Took a fair bit of finagling to get it in there, but hey, I got it. Surprisingly it actually cleared everything, even the radiator. This part looks WAY too nice to be on a 90s RAV4. It sure is mediocre quality underneath, but it should get the job done. I did have a slightly unexpected clearance issue, but that’s another solvable one. Again, more on that later.

There is a REALLY small amount of room for the exhaust next to the subframe/crossmember thing. I could neck it down to 2” pipe or something, but I’ll try to squeeze as much performance out of this thing as I can. I’m in this deep, why not. What fallacy is that? Gambler’s? Sunken cost? I’d like to invent the Hot Rodder’s fallacy. The epitome of “While I’m in there…” the Hot Rodder’s fallacy tricks you into spending more time and money on something when there is a simpler solution available. Anyway, I’ll embrace that and move on. My goal here is to not allow the exhaust to be lower at any point than that subframe. I’ll keep those bolt holes if possible because those are the threads for the underbody plastics, which I’d also like to keep. Those do wonders for keeping the engine bay clean, they actually work really well at that in my experience. I ended up deciding that that flange was just too large. That was designed to fit a stock tC application, so it had to work with all of those other stock parts accordingly. I do not. I decided that regardless, I was going to weld on a v-band flange. I cut the last piece off before the final bend, and used a 2.5” v-band flange in its place. This gives me a little easier freedom to position the exhaust once that time comes.

I’ve seen worse from better welders. Now, as for making more room. I have very little room to run the exhaust in between the oil pan and the subframe. I don’t want to cut into my subframe. Well I guess that means I’m cutting into my oil pan. Well, what’s behind there? The oil pan is not just an empty void of space, there are two notable things in there. The pickup, and the balance shafts. Pickup sits on the far front side, not a big deal. Balance shafts span most of that space.

If you go back to my previous post you can actually see that I am not going to be running balance shafts. This is due to shipping damage from Toyota, but regardless I am not running them. I need to delete the oil supply to that part of the motor anyway, so I needed to take them out and apart. Unfortunately I can’t simply remove the balance shaft case entirely, it acts as a block stiffener, and the oil pickup and windage tray actually bolt atop it. But, there’s room to cut. I hammered a 10mm dowel pin into the oil pan where the shafts get oil supply, then I disassembled the balance shafts, removed the top case, and cut one side completely off. Here is a before and after comparison, red line being approximately where I cut the lower case. I also drilled a bunch of holes to help with oil draining. I could have likely cut a LOT more out of this, but that takes more effort and this gets the job done. Hey, maybe I’m coming out of the Hot Rodder fallacy.

I have yet to cut the oil pan, because that will be done once the exhaust is fabricated. That should give me about 2” more clearance, so plenty to fit my MASSIVE 2.5” exhaust. I plan to slice the oil pan where I have clearance issues, then just weld in a new plate around that. Just stamped steel, shouldn’t be too bad.

Next step on my list was a little extra chassis preparation. This included stripping and painting nearly everything that came off. Subframe, brackets, control arms, you name it. To breeze by all of that, the only important thing to consider here is the motor mount. Because I had to move the isolator forward on the frame, I had to weld a new nut in the frame to bolt to. I marked the hole before taking the motor back out, so easy enough to drill it out and install some threads. Once that was done, I noticed something that I couldn’t have with the engine installed, there was interference between the motor mount and the frame. Some grinding and hammering and more welding later…

Now there’s finally clearance for the motor mount to sag and flex some. Don’t want any NVH now, do we?

The next part of the scope creep was electronic power steering (EPS). The 2arfe was only sold with hydraulic power steering in a single model year on a single car, and I really don’t want to deal with making and dealing with hydraulic lines. So EPS was the obvious answer. A whole load of Toyota vehicles came with it, and the signals are all mostly compatible. That means that my stock 2AR ECU should be capable of controlling the EPS module, and properly adjusting assist based on vehicle speed. As long as I can get a vehicle speed input to the ECU. If the assist is too strong then I can intercept and spoof the CAN signals. Anyway, get to mounting this thing.

Yeah there’s nowhere to mount this thing. The motor hanging off the side is so large that I physically cant put this under the dash in any orientation and axial position. I entertained putting this in the engine bay, mounted directly on the steering rack. That would take some weatherproofing but its definitely possible.

That’s a dirty bay.

Dammit there’s no room there either. Would have to notch the firewall to even have a hope at fitting. Oh well, this will have to be a later project then. Easier once the car is on the ground. I’ll at least be depowering the rack now, don’t want hydraulic lines open and everywhere. That was mostly a matter of taking the rack apart, and welding 6 ports shut. Two on the steel tube body, and 4 on the pinion housing. I likely could have just plugged those ones, but I had the welder out anyway.

That was painful. Both metaphorically and physically. 200k miles on this thing with hydraulic fluid running through cast aluminum this whole time. There was so much crap in those ports, I ended up exploding the aluminum puddle on at least two occasions. YES I burned my leg. YES it hurt. YES I kept going regardless and did it a second time. I’m going to try driving the car with a depowered rack, and see how bad it is. If it’s tolerable I might just skip the EPS altogether. I doubt that will be the case though. Need to do some more planning, and the motor may end up being remote mount, or if I can find a smaller motor that uses the same inputs I’ll switch to that.

Anyway, with the steering rack done and now taking up way less room in my garage, its time for it to take up less room in my engine bay. But to check, the engine has to go back in. Wait, missing a step. I gotta check the transmission, so I can order any parts if necessary.

My E250F is original to the car and to my knowledge has never been opened, other than when I swapped the 5th gear. It whines a bit decelerating and crunches a a little, mostly downshifting into 2nd gear. Gotta take it all apart to inspect it. This isn’t my first foray into E series, I’ve taken apart three so far. But, this was my first narrow case, and this was my first 4WD box. That first part is basically no difference. that second part makes things a royal pain.

The way that the Toyota AWD/4WD system works is that there’s a big shaft sticking off the side of the differential, which drives a bevel gear to the rear output shaft. So even once you take off the transfer case, there’s a 5” shaft sticking out past the bellhousing. so you can’t just lay it face down on a table. I ended up using a wheel from the rav, just had the output shaft sticking into the barrel. Anyway, with that hurdle jumped I finally got to taking it apart. Pretty run of the mill here, could do this with my eyes closed. Inspection time!

Here the teeth are, in order from 1-4. I ignored looking at gear 5 because it is practically brand new with only a few thousand miles on it. Anyway, they all looked pretty good except for 2nd gear, as expected. The 2nd gear synchro teeth are pretty worn out, they should make a pretty sharp point, whereas these are crested over and smoothing out. It’s really interesting to note the direction they’re worn in. In the image below the gears rotate from left to right, so when downshifting the synchro needs to accelerate the gear, so the force from downshifting is from the left. It’s clear that its easier for the synchro hub to then “skip” teeth when you’re pushing in gear downshifting. NEAT!

Is that Zbigniew Krycsiwiki?

That portion is actually one piece with the 2nd gear, it’s not a separate part. So I definitely need to order a new second gear, and the synchro itself is looking a little tired, so I ordered that too. Along with a gasket kit and new input and output shaft bearings, every single one of the 7 items I ordered is backordered for at least a month. Oh well. I have to keep moving on this, and I don’t want to reassemble the E250F just to disassemble it again, so it’s time for some real hodge-podge.

A few weeks ago I took apart an E53 from a 92 Camry, to ship the 3.625 final drive bits off to my friend (Hi Aidan!) in the UK, to install in his E153 in a 2GR MR2. That doesn’t mean anything (yet) for this swap, but what it does mean is that I have an extra “transmission” I can install the engine back into the car with. The E53 is a “wide case” E series, while the E250F is a “narrow case”. The left and front mounts are shared between both case styles. The E250F has a “wide diff” however, as do all AWD E series, which means that the rear mount is also shared. So I completely gutted the E53 no input/output shafts or differential, install the transfer case box, and throw it back into the car. At least this way I can start on like wiring and other fabrication that I might need. Oil pan? Exhaust? more?

Turns out I was still a little short on clearance. While the transmission only weighs 50lb instead of 200, might as well fix that. Some more grinding on the transfer case, and a little bit more on the oil pan/block, and DAMN that thing is a compact drivetrain. Ended up having to grind down the t-case actuator bolt holes, as well as cut the nub off the transfer case actuator rod, both for intake manifold clearance. I can’t even use the actuators in their stock form anyway.

One more thing for intake manifold clearance. This was not a strictly necessary item, but it was a peace of mind and quality of life thing. I mentioned this in one of the videos but it didnt come up on the blog yet. The 4WD sensor. All I can say is that in times like these I’m glad that I’m a bit of a hoarder. About a year ago, actually in October of 2021, the clutch on my RAV4 bit the dust. When I was taking the transmission off I managed to break the 4WD sensor connector body, I think it was a “it swung and hit the body” thing. Well, as it turns out, it is the same exact part as an E series reverse sensor too. At the time, I was building a Camry E153 to replace the worn out 91 box that somehow ended up in my 93 MR2. So I just stole the sensor off of that, and put this broken one in its place. When I put that transmission in my MR2, I used the sensor from the 91 box and then put the broken one on the 91, stuck that gearbox on a shelf. Well it has come full circle and that sensor is useful to me again. You can see it intact in the images above, but here it is the day that I broke it vs the position it’s in now.

I intentionally broke it further. I ground the ring off the top, I will be soldering some wires to the terminals directly and then coating the whole sensor in epoxy. Then I will make a tiny scallop in the intake manifold if I must.

Anyway I guess its as reasonably of a time as ever to install it back in the car.

Damn, that was a pain. I hope that’s not foreshadowing something.

The motor was really hard to get in place for some reason. I just couldn’t get the motor mount lined up easily. Also, the mount is binding and hitting the chassis, on the far side of what I made clearance for. Wonderful. The whole thing just isn’t aligned anymore. It’s not right. I might just be able to slot the holes and make it OK again. sigh. Looking back, what I think happened was when I welded the thread into the RAV4’s frame, I ended up way further forward than originally intended, and that then changed the angle of the engine isolator relative to the engine. It’s just wrong now. Back to the drawing board.