Hey all. This is Heidi. I thought I'd share what we've been up to this past month. Back in December, we picked up a 90 turbo targa supra with only 93k miles from one of our neighbors. He had bought it back in '99 for a pricely sum of $10k, and then proceded to let it sit in his lawn for 5 years after blowing a headgasket. After sitting uncovered for that long, the paint had turned a terrible pink color. Although it had been hit in two different spots (1 pretty bad), we knew the car had potential. I had never done an entire rebuild before, so I wanted this to mainly be my project (with supervision from Jake of course).
Here's some pics of the car as it came after we yanked the engine out and I cleaned the engine bay.
As you can see, it was pretty rough.
I had fun painting the valve covers and the block after it was hot tanked.
I then got to assemble my 1st short block.
We also hand lapped the valves, replaced the stem seals, and agonized over what seemed like thousands of shims to get the right valve lash.
I polished the cams with 2000 grit and prepped the buckets for all those damn shims. After cleaning misc. parts, the long block was assembled. We went with a stock rebuild with stock headbolts torqued to 72 ft-lbs. It's starting to look like an engine!
The tranny was in serious need of a cleaning and then was bolted to the long block along with the turbo, manifold, 3" downpipe. etc... Shiny tranny, huh?
Finally, in she goes! Now, the body needed some attention. Notice the contrast between what has and hasn't been buffed and the nice dent on the fender with the black scuff mark.
More to come in the next post, as only 20 pics are allowed per post!
~Heidi
Here's some pics of the car as it came after we yanked the engine out and I cleaned the engine bay.
As you can see, it was pretty rough.
I had fun painting the valve covers and the block after it was hot tanked.
I then got to assemble my 1st short block.
We also hand lapped the valves, replaced the stem seals, and agonized over what seemed like thousands of shims to get the right valve lash.
I polished the cams with 2000 grit and prepped the buckets for all those damn shims. After cleaning misc. parts, the long block was assembled. We went with a stock rebuild with stock headbolts torqued to 72 ft-lbs. It's starting to look like an engine!
The tranny was in serious need of a cleaning and then was bolted to the long block along with the turbo, manifold, 3" downpipe. etc... Shiny tranny, huh?
Finally, in she goes! Now, the body needed some attention. Notice the contrast between what has and hasn't been buffed and the nice dent on the fender with the black scuff mark.
More to come in the next post, as only 20 pics are allowed per post!
~Heidi
