Motors My Celica GT-Four Build Thread! - And Then There Were 4 (Update 25/08/20)

I will certainly be starting with the standard box to begin with. My comments regarding the problems once you get over a certain amount of horsepower were concerns only. I am told the standard box will handle everything up to and including 600 from the flywheel as long as you aren't constantly popping the clutch doing standing starts or racing it every weekend. They wear out very fast if you treat it that way, and it's usually the syncros that go, making it very noisy and hard to shift, until eventually you start losing gears. You're right, for street and occasional track day use, the stock box in good maintained condition with some uprated parts will be fine. One of the guys who told me that eventually I would need to change the box for a built performance transmission runs a drag setup GT4 and has been through two standard Toyota boxes in the past, before biting the bullet and buying the dog box with seq. shifter.

Assume for now that I will eventually be running a max of 600 @ the fly. This is the "impressive sweet spot" for ST205 3S-GTE's apparently. You can push them farther and harder, but you sacrifice reliability and every day driveability and don't gain that much of an advantage, only adding a bit more top speed rather than a lot more torque.

Removable door bars on the cage sounds like a winner to me, I honestly never knew such a thing existed. I'll definitely be putting one with ties to the front struts in. As you said, that's easily done when it's only a shell and being welded up.

The Elegante rims and the RS5's are practically the same, yes. The Elegante ones were more attractive because of the available size. I want to put 18x8's on (whatever that is in new money - about 200 wide?) and the RS5's seem to be hard to find in that size. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, but the only place I found them in that exact size was a Greek website. These are the rims that I want on it though. They compliment the car perfectly and look exactly right in my mental picture of the finished car.

Nope, still haven't found an engine to start on yet I'm starting to get impatient now... The necessity to go further afield (mainland breakers, or beyond) is looming. There's just nothing over here it seems. There aren't even any good 3S-GTE's on eBay at the moment.

On a positive note, I got a nice look around a swapped ST202 the other day. The owner works in the building beside the college where Dad teaches, and let me have a look around it after I asked nicely and told him I was going to be building a GT4! He did an awesome job on the swap. You'd really think it was an ST205 under the bonnet. He even has a 205 bonnet on it. Runs about 270hp, "nothing fancy yet" were his exact words. It was a big improvement over his worn out 3S-GE apparently.

 

To be honest, even if the normal cage you pick doesn't come with removable bars it'd be easy enough to have them chopped out and bolt-in ones made. It's relatively easy fab work for anyone who can do cages.

Gotcha on the gearbox - didn't catch your drift all the way through, 600atf is quite a lot of power! I didn't think you were going that high.

 

5 spoke wheels generally toughen up the look of a car imo, and the slight curves on those rims suits the curves of the Celica
Something like this would also look nice imo:


But maybe get the car before you get the rims!
What's the cost of getting a ~standard GT four, either local or import?

 

That's true. A few cuts here, some threaded bosses welded in there, some finish work and a coat of paint - Robert's your Mother's brother!

Yes I would certainly like to go up to 600atf, it'll take a lot of time and effort to get there, but as I've said before this is a dream project for me. There will be a large tick in a large 'life goals' box when I eventually get done with this one

 

On the subject of alloys, I'm not a fan of the artsy fartsy type wheels - better to grab some that featured on the WRC car imo. Nice set of Comp TH's/MO's would look luurrvely.

 

Yep, that's my opinion as well. The 5 spokes give it a really nice stance without looking out of place or making it look too 'mean'.

The cost of buying one in-country is £5000 if you want a decent one. Importing one, you can have it in-country for about £12K but those are usually much fresher and most come with much more power out of the container. They've basically already been tuned.

I'm really not a fan of overly fancy rims either. I like the racing look much more than the 'bling', especially on a serious car like this. I'll keep the 16x8 TH's in mind - track rims perhaps?

 

TH's are gravel rally spec wheels, more suited to road rather than track. For a track slag you want the MO's.

 

*whimper*

Some of those MO's are gorgeous! We have a winner!

 

Indeed, they look the nuts in Gold/White/Anthracite, body-colour dependant. You can get magnesium versions for maximum lightness, but they're not good for long term use as they're nowhere near as strong as the normal alloy versions. Apparently WRC teams use theirs for 2 events tops then sell the complete set!

 

That exact wheel that you posted is so sexy! I definitely have a soft spot for 5 spokes

She's most likely going to be black If not that, then a very dark metallic blue.

 

Tricky! I'd probably say white 17's to start with, then you can have them powdered if you fancy a colour change.

I think I'll have to avoid looking at the finished product, I'll be insanely jealous.

 

Nice. They are a bit less aggressive/baddass and more of a cute/tough look imo, due to the shorter and fatter spokes.
Multi spoked wheels are generally more elegant/artsy fartsy, and designs such as the one I posted float my boat

Any of the wheels in this thread so far would look great imo... except for all black, I hate all black wheels, especially matt black! (they all look matt black with a bit of brake dust) They look like dirty stockies with missing plastic wheel covers imo. On a black car, white, gold or chrome, polished or just silver/grey wheels suit, on a blue car, I'd probably go for white, polished/dull chrome look or silver/grey.

But hey, why not grab a £5000 GT four, and get to work on stripping and welding up the car and cage, whilst you save for everything else? Perhaps you could get something a little more worse for wear, as in faded paint, poor interior, etc, for a cheaper price?

You must have at least a few thousand pounds to spare if you're thinking of buying and rebuilding a 3S-GTE...

 

If you fancy a new motor Krikkit check out the for sale section...

 

Pff, fat chance I have £8.5k for anything right now! Besides, if I wanted a scoob I'd be buying a Mica Bugeye, as lovely as yours is.

 

Mmmm yes, white 17's would be nice indeed, if I don't go the whole hog and get the chrome lipped RS5's from the get go

You'll have to wait a while to get jealous I'm afraid I won't be starting for a good few more months yet. I want to make sure that it's all going to go according to plan once I get out of the gates. None of this "buy a car, drive it for a few months, start to work on it, never finish working on it, let it sit around gathering dust for years" stuff!

Even if I did have the cash to buy a whole car spare at the moment (and I don't) the lack of spare time and a safe place to put it means that I have to bide my time and wait until at least Feb of next year. Plenty of time in there for me to pay off some more of my current car and hopefully by that stage I'll be ready to buy something and make a start. You're right about the worse for wear part. If anything I'm leaning more towards doing that as opposed to buying a minter - I'm going to be tearing it apart anyway, right? Obviously I'd want the undercarriage etc to be in good condition but I wouldn't really care about the interior or the paintwork to begin with. It'll be nothing but a shell about a month after I get the keys!

I also hate matt black wheels. Black wheels can look nice on some cars, but not on this, no way.

 

Definitely buy the scruffiest but least rusty one you can get your hands on - no point paying for a minty one only for it to be stripped, caged and resprayed anyway. Had a quick glance at PH classifieds and they're about £2k at cheapest in good running condition but not minty, which is a good place to start.

 

Nice, that's a lot lower than I expected to pay, but you're quite right. I expect to be working on it as a shell for quite a while, and have the engine on a stand for an extended period of time too. I'm pretty determined that it's going to be a start to finish build once I actually make a start (i.e. not driving it around, adding bits here and there, driving it around some more).

You have no idea how much I want to get started on this project, it will give me more satisfaction to be working on something like this than I can even imagine!

I have bought a couple of small bits for it already. That's all I'm saying

 

I've been talking engine internals on 6gc today; Clicky.

Kind of at a loss as to what internals to actually use now. You'll have to read the linked thread to know what I'm talking about, but I still don't like the idea of using a 5SFE crank in there which might already have 100K miles on it. I can see where the guys are coming from, but I want to build a zero mile engine. Meh, I'll just have to mull it over a bit more

I also updated the OP with an intro

 

Sure bigger bore is better, the only downside being increased piston weight, but there's bugger all difference between 87 and 86 mm - it's only about 50 more cc's = bugger all performance difference.

IIRC, those 5SFE cranks are forged, and I bet most of them haven't seen over 3000 rpm in the shopping cars they came out of. Grab another one for spare!

 

If you do get a 5SFE crank the best thing would be to send that and your rods away to a proper engine builder to cast an eye on, balance, and grind down for the 3SGTE rod journals. I'm sure there are decent engine builders around in NI - I'll have a look on our club, some mental Irish builds coming out.

That stroker kit from briancrower looks like a good setup - fully forged/billet internals all wrapped up together to make it nice and easy.

Out of interest, how expensive is shipping between NI and Eire?