Thought it would be good to finally join this forum after so many years of MR2's and reading advice here, time to give a little back if I can, and share the story of the two MR2's I have owned.First one was a rev 2 turbo in a pretty dire state, but it was cheap and I was desperate to get in one.
First jobs were a change of suspension, curiosity
(mostly budget) meant I went for D2 coilovers. 
Around that time I also fitted a new half shaft bearing and carrier, manual boost controller, fuel cut limit riser
(homemade), decated it with a berk tech and fitted my first set of proper tyres, Toyo T1R's. There was also some home-brew gauge mounting going on in the centre console.
Shortly after I thought it would be a great idea to powder coat many many parts black.
So I did just that, removed as many pieces as I thought would be noticeable and had it all powder coated. 
It seems very obvious now, but at the time I saw shiny parts and couldn't wait to assemble it all so didn't even run my finger on the inside of the intake manifold.
And so begins what happens when you literally run sand through your engine...First you drop the engine out on its side because you forgot in the rush to remove the firewall mount
(coincidently at this angle the cams will clear the subframe by about 2mm, and the engine mount is strong enough to act as a hinge to entire the thing).
On to the stand and off with everything.
And when I say everything I mean absolutely everything, all valves out, reground, head skimmed, new rings, I just sanded off the wear/scoring to the top of the piston as this wasn't too bad.
It is worth noting thought that after one assemble of the short block I wasn't happy with the condition of the bores even after honing, so I got a second hand block (yes with matching caps) to reassemble with. 
SO there you have a rev 2 3SGTE fully rebuilt with many many new
(genuine standard) parts, clutch, all main and thrust bearings, oil pump, cam belt, water pump, I can't even remember now how many new parts went into this! But the end result was this...
I was pretty happy with this, a lot of hours on the engine and bodywork both external and internal had paid off.
However, after about 1000 miles it was reduced to this...
I will doubtless explain reasons for this in a later post.
That concludes MR2 number 1 which was mostly all engine work. My second post will be about the MR2 I bought to replace this one and the project takes a different route entirely.
