Team AA

Saturday, I’d gotten the 4AGZE starter motor to replace and relocate the balky starter.  Relocating the starter requires changing out the bellhousing splash plate. Somehow I was able to install the transmission myself.

Here you see the old plate, the hole for the starter on the front/exhaust side of the engine. The new plate you see the hole on the other side. It’s a little hard to see, but the starter is now buried in there to the left, under the intake side.

Sunday, the Angry Asian pit crew came over to help me get the tubular headers in. They didn’t quite line up. Some Angry Chinese power and we finally got them bolted up. I scavenged the starter main and solenoid wires from the other harness as the originals in this FX were quite ugly and very questionable. I had previous problems with the solenoid connection. Anyway, that wasn’t to difficult, just a little bit of a bummer undoing the countless hours I had spent putting my custom 20 valve wiring harness together to get these two wires. While I was doing that. Scat noticed the 20v had a nice aluminum radiator. Gave us the bright idea of swaping it. That was done pretty quickly. With the hard part done, the crew took off to take care of their own duties and left me to finish up. It seemed all good. Until I noticed the clutch cylinder. Something didn’t look right, it was way too loose. Pulled the boot off the fork. All kinds of curse words were floating around in my brain as I saw that the fork had come off the throwout bearing. I seriously was near tears. I sent a sad message out to all the crew. I entertained thoughts of reengaging the fork with some super surgery manipulation, but I knew I was going to have to drop the tranny again. That was it, I was majorly frustrated. 

Dropped the tranny, looked at the damn fork. Sheesh. This time made sure everything was connected good and worked on reinstalling. I’d done it before by myself, I could do it again, right? Guess I wasn’t lickin’ it right this time. I struggled for hours with no success. I gave up, distress signal sent.

Monday evening head straight home from work. Got a little delayed, but the plan was to hit the Koko Head jumps for a bit, then go into the garage and get the blasted trannt back in. Despite the previous rains that rained out weekend ride plans, the jumps were dry and in perfect condition. Had some fun, then to the task ahead of us. Having more angry Asians made everything better. It still took a lot of convincing, but this time Angry Jap power got it in. We got everything pretty much back together, enough to start the FX and make sure the clutch engage & disengaged. Whew! Done! Took it for a test drive, and it felt really good. Just in time for the next SCCA Solo II race!

The headers and aluminum radiator, ready for action!