HI
I bought this car 2 years ago, it had 47,641 original miles on it. the body was mint and the 20R engine pured like a kitten and had plenty of pep. I drove it stock for about six months until my ego got the best of me and I got schooled by a neon with a turbo charger and nos. So I went to work, I pulled old bullett apart and slowly(budget permitting, cause anyone who has tricked out one of these older toyotas knows that the parts are neither easy to find nor cheap!)I started to build my jurrasic rice rocket!. I started off with the engine, I tore it down(with still 131lbs of compression per cylinder)and took it to a couple of local shops in edmonton for some ideas, which were few and far between. Everyone who would even considder the job found very few available performance parts, and the parts they did find were big $$$, so I got on the internet and found a few celica websites (14,386) who knew that these little rockets were that popular?.
Anyway I ended ordering a muffler and headder from TRD (toyota racing development) and got some realy cool ideas for the engine and drive-train.
I shaved the head, and the deck to increase compression, had the head custom rebuilt with custom valves and rockers$$,cylinder walls were punched ou 20thou, dish top racing pistons with light weight conecting arms were kinda manufactured, stiffined up the crank with custom milled light weight main caps and extreeme duty barrings, added a high capasity oil pump, had the factory intake custom honed and polished(Nobody could find an aftermarket intake for the 79 20R engine, which pisses me off because I know the make one, so if anybody knows where I could get one I would greatly appreciate it, even after I spent almost $400 on getting the factory one done), ran 2" mandrel bent pipe to the rear and got the stock 2 barrel webber carb beefed up some($600 later). The tranny and drive-shafts were another story all together, after consulting with several "tranny specialists" no-one would touch it, they all said that the tranny was to specialised and uncommon for their techs to do what I wanted done. so I foung a shop in calgary that had the TRD logo right in their ad!, and as you can guess they had no problems installing a racing clutch, a custom short throw shifter and racing gears.
well that's all for now, there are tons of build pics coming as soon as I get a new scanner, so keep an eye out.
pic of the seats I went with in this color.
pic of my rims Lexani Iris 17" with Nitto rubber
