I bought this MX73 a few months ago with the intention of starting it as a project when i finished my AE86 project. I picked it up for $ with apart of the deal being that i could keep it at the owners property till i had space to start another project (the space where my AE86 still sits). So a few months passed and i still hadn't finished the AE86 and was no where near close to finishing it, when i got a message from the seller asking if i come pick it up as soon as possible, which was fair enough as i wasn't paying him to keep it there. So i arranged a tow with maxhag's Get My Ride towing service (Great service and highly recommend it) and got it to my place, where it sat in my drive way a few weeks while i decided what to do with it.
So its a 1985 MX73 Cressida GLXi with a 2.8L 5ME motor and a A43DL trans. Motor has a blown head gasket, suspected worse. Im not sure on the condition of the trans or diff, but i believe it was a daily driver before head gasket went. The car has 360,000 on it, and for its age the shell is very strait, no dents but a few scratches here and there. Paint is in pretty good condition for age and so its the interior.
Now being such a good shell i immediately decided 1J/2J with a manual conversion....but i have fuck all money to spend trying to build my main project that there was no chance anything cool was going to happen to this, sorry to disappoint. So i have decided to build this car for a maximum of $1000 excluding rego costs.
Now i could have tried to repair the blown head gasket and the million other leaks of the 5M, but considering the high km's and that the car and been driven with a blown head gasket more that it should have (previous owner) i decided to just replace the motor. So while i was trying to find a replacement i pulled the old 5me out.
What a shit job that was, with all the emissions shit on it, pulling it out took a full day, with two people. You can see how shit the oil was in the photos, the internals where even starting to rust.
So for my replacement i didnt have much choice for the price i was willing to spend, so i ended up with a 7MGE out of a MX83 with 170,xxx km's on it, i paid $ and got the box (think its the a340?), loom, ecu and radiator. Now, yes, i know these are known for blowing head gaskets but there wasnt much else on the market. Swap should be pretty strait forward, not too sure what box ill use, but i know the motor goes in pretty easy, just a fair bit of wiring involved.
Will do a few things while its out of the car, which also gives me time to research more about the conversion.