The 7m issue was a factory defect where the heads weren't torqued down correctly. Once they get torqued right there is no issues with them
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.
Last edited by 0036; 31st December 2015 at 09:34 AM.
The 7m issue was a factory defect where the heads weren't torqued down correctly. Once they get torqued right there is no issues with them
So will the torque specification for the head bolts in the toyota service manual be correct, or is it wrong?
yes they are correct.
the issue was not the torque specification exactly
it was that toyota changed head gasket suppliers a few months before the engine went into full production
they then didn't do ant r and d on the new head gasket with the old settings
the after market head gaskets are really good. much better then the original toyota ones.
i would recomend putting new head studs in also. i do this on every head i do anyway as the head studs do stretch. arp make good ones at a reasonable price. if you decide to turbo the motor later on it will handle it no worries then to.
Jake