She's the lady who's voice you hear on the welcome message if you call us and the person most likely to make you tea if you visit! She drives a TRD VM180 which looks like this:
A few weeks ago, Lyn noticed a knocking noise coming from the engine.
Upon inspection this turned out to be a total bottom end failure caused by oval bores. This is a fairly typical 1ZZ-FE failure point, but is usually associated with pre-cat failure. Since this car was equipped with a TRD exhaust manifold from the factory it's never even seen a pre-cat!The decision was made to swap in a replacement engine, but this was the ideal time to upgrade.
The 2ZZ-GE from the Celica T-Sport / Lotus Elise was an obvious choice and along with the six speed gearbox something we're very familiar with. Why Toyota chose to put their sportiest engine into everything but their sports car remains one of life's great mysteries!Lyn wanted something a little more special for the VM180 though and opted for the 1MZ-FE 3.0 litre V6 engine from the
'96+ Toyota Camry. We've successfully installed both the 3SGTE and 3SGE BEAMS into a mk3 chassis in the past and felt that there would be a good amount of commonality between the two projects. Indeed, the 1M family of engines is more contemporary than the 3S series so some elements of chassis integrations should be easier.We managed to source not one but two donor Camrys, one of which had just 44,000 miles on the clock with 2 owners from new and a full Toyota service history! The 1MZ-FE was removed from the Camry and installed in the VM180 with suprising speed.
Mechanicals were dummied up and the engine was running within a week. Once everyone was happy with the install everything was measured and removed. In order to keep chassis modifications to a minimum we designed our own laser-cut mounts to mate engine and chassis. Lyn had specified a "factory" looking install so rather than painting the engine it was bead-blasted back to it's original condition.
Here's a video of the engine running:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=I4aPmei-ao8
...and before anyone asks the car had just been driven and so was nice and warm! The exhaust system is integrated at the catalytic converter and the VM180 has been through an MOT with the V6 engine installed. From there it's into the factory fit TRD back box which sound almost silent at idle / low load but really lets rip when you mash the loud pedal! Here's some footage of the car being driven on the road (with appropriate respect for speed limits, road conditions, etc.):http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yS4q6cYWqtM
Both the 1MZ-FE and ZZW30 support OBD-II which we were able to take advantage of to monitor the engine's condition with an OBD-II scanner.
The mk3's dashboard however is expecting information from the more sophisticated CANbus, which is a method of serial communication not supported by the older 1MZ-FE ECU. To get around this (and supply some meaningful information to the dashboard) we've piggy-backed the original 1ZZ-FE ECU.Lyn's already planning more modifications for the car
- starting with some new wheels - and plans to have a Link G3 LEM ECU installed in a couple of weeks. We've seen some good gains with aftermarket engine managment on the older 3VZ-FE engines and are optimistic about the 1MZ-FE.Patrick
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