1989 Toyota Corolla

[2flags]

Great work on this. They were great at being 'a car'. Seen loads of late 90's Toyotas around lately. Don't know whether they are ULEZ refugees or people can no longer afford the HFM new shiny on the drive and have begged or borrowed Grandad's old car. 

[mark165]

Starlet manual choke Carbs were a popular "upgrade" on these.

Well, this came back to haunt me. And then some.

It turns out that for the European market for this engine, Toyota produced a carb that was a *bit* overcomplicated and crap. Vacuum hoses everywhere and parts unobtainable. Hence why the starlet conversion was mostly likely so popular!

After taking it apart a couple of times and reattaching all I achieved was the carb dumping a load of petrol into my super expensive Mannol oil, ruining it.

The rebuild kit from the phillipines was no good as the later carb didn't share much with the previous and plus someone had been at mine before. Compounding the frustration was that the manifold had a different carb flange to every other corolla the world over.

Options were to buy a weber, convert to bike carbs, buy a whole engine from some guy up north or try something different. With those other options all coming up at 500 odd quid, I looked further afield to European versions of gumtree.

Anyhow, after sending 90 quid to some random Dutch guy on a website called Maarktplatz and then waiting six weeks because of 'busy', my starlet carb turned up and was duly fitted this week with a few mods to the solenoid wiring.

Started up today after putting some oil down the spark plug holes. It's a bit grumpy as something seemed stuck but that's gone away. Some dickhead painted the exhaust heatshield so I'm questioning life choices on that one and left the door wide open to disperse fumes.

Next job is to figure out distributor advance as it's a bit slow to rev? Dunno. https://cloud.tapatalk.com/s/66746b0d49fd0/VID-20240620-WA0003.mp4

[mark165]

I feel I should be posting on the 'mistakes I've made" thread, but I'll keep it here

Couldn't get it to run right, sounded and ran like a bag of crap, so whipped off the timing belt cover only to find it was a tooth out, turns out I didn't account for the slack when putting the belt on.. dick. After refitting with extra paranoia all was good. I think I got lucky in that nothing was affected.

Next silly mistake was that I completely forgot to redo the valve clearances since the winter time. They were rather tight and went someway in explaining why it was hard work to start. 10 minutes with some feeler gauges sorted that one.

Finally, the only reason it wouldn't run withiut distributor advance was because it didn't have enough fuel. After many checks of everything else a last desperate few turns of the idle screw solved this straight away. My lesson here was to not get sucked in by the Internet. Now running with all the refinement of a 35 year old engine you'd expect.

The new carb has a different air filter mounting to the old one, so I've ordered some crap off Aliexpress to graft in until I can find the real deal. I then hope it can be driven for it's first time in seven years!

[mark165]

Been a while on this one - received my 'totally legit' GENUINE air filter from Aliexpress and bolted it on. Didn't fancy testing it out without something in place although it definitely looks out of place.

With that done I tentatively got it out the garage 18 months after it first went in and had a drive for it's first time in seven years, albeit only up to second gear.

Surprisingly no knocks or rattles, clutch is nice and light. Adjusting to no power steering was tricky though.

Then I treated it to a wash. I've since replumbed the fuel line to cope with a return feed, bolted fiddly bits down, connected washer jets etc. Looking like just some new wipers and a change of brake fluid then I'm going for an MOT.

Insurance £100 per year!

[jim89]

Nice looking thing 👍🏻 (the car 😂)

[mark165]

Well, this took a little longer than I thought to get here.

First thing upsetting progress was that the clutch on my daily trusty old accord started slipping to the point where reasonable acceleration was becoming a bit tricky. Fortuitously a friend of mine had bought another old Toyota on a whim, which seemed the ideal replacement.... enter another corolla.

I bloody love this thing and I look for opportunities to drive it all the time. No abs, windy windows, 171k on the clock, lacquer peel like sunburn and a few other endearing faults. It's so easy to park and drive. My kids hate it, obviously. I ditched the steels and later put them on the other corolla, which I think was the right thing to do.

So far I've changed the broken headunit with an aliexpress special and swapped out the front speakers. Next is to fix the temp sender and probably change the ancient spark plugs and leads.

[stuboy]

42 minutes ago, mark165 said:

Well, this took a little longer than I thought to get here.

First thing upsetting progress was that the clutch on my daily trusty old accord started slipping to the point where reasonable acceleration was becoming a bit tricky. Fortuitously a friend of mine had bought another old Toyota on a whim, which seemed the ideal replacement.... enter another corolla.

I bloody love this thing and I look for opportunities to drive it all the time. No abs, windy windows, 171k on the clock, lacquer peel like sunburn and a few other endearing faults. It's so easy to park and drive. My kids hate it, obviously. I ditched the steels and later put them on the other corolla, which I think was the right thing to do.

So far I've changed the broken headunit with an aliexpress special and swapped out the front speakers. Next is to fix the temp sender and probably change the ancient spark plugs and leads.

back to basic motoring..love it

[mark165]

So where was I? Lost in a new corolla, which was working as a car and acting as complete distraction.

After the novelty of the newer one lost a bit of shine, I thought it was best to change the brake fluid on the older one, promptly shearing off a brake nipple and necessitating a new wheel cylinder. This was September. So after replacing it, I decided it was probably time for it to 'fly the nest' - read 'leave the garage' and go get itself an MOT.

I'd just started a new job, so a mate of mine took it to the MOT. To say I was nervous was an understatement. First time on the actual road for seven years. As the starlet carb has a manual choke, it doesn't work at all properly until warmed up. And it was using my spare petrol for the lawnmower. But it made it. Failed on rear foglight and a tyre, which was fixed with some contact cleaner on the fuse and borrowing the wheels with the newer corolla.

I've now hit 200 miles.... and even 65mph on one heroic venture. Here are some pictures of a visit to sainsburys during Storm Bert and another one in a different sainsburys the day after. Even my kids don't seem to be fussed about the school dropoff.

If anyone feels that they need a review on the finer details between the mk6 vs mk7 corolla, I feel I'm now in a position to assist.