saltywetman's overnight parts from japan NA build

[saltywetman]

Been too lazy to start up a build thread but with the lockdowns and stuff I figured I'd do some purging of old photos and stuff and start one up.

Took delivery of an 2020 Ablaze 86 GT 6M at the end of last April. Goal is to make an NA build with as many overnight parts from Japan.

Engine/Drivetrain:
-TRD USA Performance Air Intake
-TRD Quick shift lever
-APEXi Super Catalyzer with Exhaust Manifold (EL header, op, fp)
-Fujitsubo Authorize RM+C Catback
-OFT Stage 2 tune (custom from steve99)
-Blitz ZS racing radiator
-Blitz radiator hoses
-Cusco separator type oil catch can
-Cusco oil cooler
-TRD oil filler cap

Exterior:
-TRD Front spoiler
-TRD Side skirt
-TRD Rear bumper spoiler
-TRD Aero stabilizing cover
-TRD Rear trunk spoiler
-TRD Rear side spoiler
-TRD Colored fender fins
-Revolution wide door mirror lens
-TRD door stabilizers
-GReddy hood lifters

Interior:
-TRD leather shift knob
-TOMS carbon steering wheel
-Street Guardian SG9663DCPRO Dual Channel Wi-Fi Dash Camera
-TOMS accelerator pedal

Suspension/Brakes:
-TRD USA sway bars
-Carbing aluminum strut tower bar
-RS*R Sports-i coilovers
-Endless M4/S2 BBK with Super Street M-Sports Plus (everyday), CC-Rg (track)

Wheels/Tires:
-TRD USA FRS 2.0 RS 17" forged wheels PTR2018160BK on Michelin X-Ice Snow 225/45R17 (winter)
-TWS T66-F 18x8.5 5x100 in Gloss Pearl Gold with black/chrome center-caps and black duralumin lugnuts on Michelin Pilot Sport 4 215/40r18 (summer)

[saltywetman]

Year 1:

April 2020:
Here she was fresh off the boat







From the dealership, it came with the TRD USA air intake, sway bars, and I ordered a set of FRS RS 2.0 17" TRD wheels to be used as winter wheels (Due to it being one of the few 17" that clear BBK)

First thing I did straight from the dealership was dropping it off at the detailers to get full front Xpel PPF applied. I knew I wanted to get the full TRD aero kit on so had to wait until the delivery of the front bumper, side skirts, and trunk spoiler to come in before getting the car ceramic coated

However, during this time, I found out the OEM GT spoiler on Kouki 86s had holes that would not be covered with the new spoiler. Ended up having to get a new trunk lid and get it painted (should've bought base trim!)





Overall quite happy with the color matching and paint job!





May 2020:
First order arrived!



Trunk spoiler + rear side spoilers installed



Side skirts installed



Fender fins installed. Totally butchered one of the OEM ones using a fishing line to slice the adhesive but ended up being too careless and sliced through some of the black plastic underneath. Killed any chance of reselling those!



Quickshifter installed. This one was a pain in the ass because I thought the stupid dust boot was much more fragile than it really was (I didn't have to replace with the new one, just reused the existing one). As long as you don't catch the boot on the sharp pullout pin end and slice it up, you will be fine using your fingers and stretching it right over everything.

Took me longer than it should because i didn't realize the washer by the pin fell off and was on my driveway after I pulled back into the garage (after putting all panels and stuff back) so had to rip everything off just to install the washer (including that bloody dust boot)



Celebrated finally finishing the quickshifter at the end of the night by slapping a little bit of interior rice







The next day, time to install the front bumper aero! You ill definitely want an extra set of hands (or 2) as popping the aero onto the bumper takes a good amount of manipulating. Also have a tube of superglue on hand as the plastic washer comes with some weak adhesive that would likely fall off during your attempt to pop the aero on. I didn't have any on hand so ended up taping the washer right on and putting in the screws right through the tape.

Took the car in to get ceramic coated after this. Around a month later, the A'PEXi header/op/fp combo came in.

June 2020:



After ceramic coating







And installed. However, on my first drive I got this nasty rubbing/rattling noise every time I mad a hard-ish left turn. Next day went under again and loosened some bolts and positioned the overpipe as far away from the crossmember as I could. Problem solved. Went out and did some logging runs on a stage 2 OFT tune for steve99 to make some additional adjustments.

July 2020:





TRD aero stabilizing cover and TOM's CF steering wheel installed



Fujitsubo Authorize RM+C Quad tip installed



And finally, TRD rear bumper aero installed to finish the season! Installation involved cutting the exhaust area to enlarge the space to accommodate the quad tips. I would highly advise renting/borrowing/buying a low vibration air saw to make nice clean straight/curved cuts vs a rotary tool which I started out with but ended up with a lot of jagged edges i had to file/sand down after. Even going as steady as possible, the way a rotary tool cuts cannot compare to how a thin straight blade can cut. It was a night and day difference. Another tip: the templates for the cutting should be stuck onto the inner side of the bumper. Although it doesn't really matter for the cutting portion since it's much easier to cut from the outside. However there is one side that requires a small hole to be drilled in order to insert a wire harness clip that you will end up drilling on the wrong side if your templates are stuck on the outside! But use common sense! (Which i totally lacked cuz i drilled an unnecessary hole lol) The hole you need to drill will be on the same side as where your wire harness runs (drive side)

End of season photos on a real camera after a good wash:

















Went for a scenic drive in Alberta and took some pics but it was a gloomy day and I only brought my wide lens which distorted the car quite a bit. Didn't bother processing or uploading the pics last year but found them on camera today and figured I'd over-process these to make them look more like drawings. Still a lot of distortion but surprisingly was able to pull out a lot of details from the original shots to bring out some blue skies and clouds

[rawgarage]

Qualitayyyy

[Drifter X]

Sick car!!!! Was the oem rear bumper modified to accommodate the quad tips? Or did you replace the whole rear bumper?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[saltywetman]

Originally Posted by Drifter X

Sick car!!!! Was the oem rear bumper modified to accommodate the quad tips? Or did you replace the whole rear bumper?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The rear bumper spoiler required cutting an area beside on the outer edge of each factory exhaust cutout in order to enlarge the holes to accomodate the quad tips. The front bumper spoiler could technically be reversed albeit you will see 2 small drilled holes in the solid plastic area in the mesh cutout. The rear bumper spoiler, however is irreversible due to the cutting and there are rivets involved for the install

[Elliotw]

Love the name of this build! The car too haha

[Thefalls]

That is one nice build.

Love the direction you are taking.

After the TRD kit install I think it needs a drop to close the wheel gap.

If possible can you share some exhaust clips

Keep it up!

[KMA KiCKz]

Lovin this build!

[weederr33]

Wow that is amazing!

[WC-BRZ]

Any updates on this beauty with the TWS wheels mounted?

[saltywetman]

Originally Posted by WC-BRZ

Any updates on this beauty with the TWS wheels mounted?

Planned to do another full detail of the car this upcoming friday since it's start of my week off and get some pictures done. however, this is today lol Alberta weather is just so damn unpredictable!



2 days ago it was +23 degrees celsius!

[saltywetman]

Year 2:

Looks like snow season has gone *knock on wood* time to resume the project. On the agenda for this year is a set of better looking wheels to replace the ugly 2 tone Toyota 18" that came stock with the 2020 GT 6M's and 2019 TRD SE.



While swapping out my winter tires, I noticed all 4 wheels had the dreaded flaking issue that plagued the FRS release 2.0 forged TRD wheels. I expected to eventually run into this, but expected a few years of driving and more km's put on them before they started flaking. these had less than 350kms on them and already flaked.

Toyota Canada claimed they do not have reports of this "issue" in their database which means this is an abnormal defect even though I told them how PVD finish was known to flake easily and other companies with the same finish had the same flaking issues. Was hoping they would be able to pull strings and bring over a set of the cheaper gunmetal variant but no luck. They stated those wheels have not been tested for Canada therefore they cannot bring it over

After a lot of haggling with Toyota Canada. They agreed to replace with the same wheels under warranty and cover the mounting of my winters onto the replacement wheels. However, because it was a warranty replacement, the replacement wheels would only have 3 months warranty. I asked Toyota Canada what if these replacement wheels flake again in under a year. They stated if it happens again, to let them know so they will put the issue on file but did not guarantee that they would replace again.

April 2020:

Original plan was to get the forged TRD SF3, I was a fan of the similarities in design with the Griffin as well as the color. However I found out they were only 18x8.0 and I wanted 8.5's.

Started browsing around for alternatives. My selection criteria was that it had to be 18x8.5, forged, and a gold color similar to the TRD SF3's. Because of the forged criteria, my options narrowed down between the Volk catalogue and TWS. I browsed around various TE37 variants as well as looked at the TWS selection. What caught my eye was that TWS began offering the T66-F in a limited edition color gloss pearl gold and from the photos, it looked like a more subtle gold like the SF3's while the gold te37 was a very saturated and more distracting color. I messaged the blackhawkjapan rep to see if he can get those and turns out March 2021 was the final month TWS was offering the colorway. Sold!



The eagle has landed! Also picked up the centercaps as well as the black lugnuts from TWS.







@ shop getting OEM tires transferred over. Michelin website lists the 215/40r18 Pilot Sport 4's allowed a max wheel width of 8.5. It looks a smidge stretched and I'll definitely need to be extra careful parallel parking and avoiding the many local potholes on the road.

Surprise expense was the shop found a nail on the sidewall of my driver side tire. Only had 6k kms on the OEM rubber so I opted to just replace a single tire rather than buy a set of 235's this year.

Overall I was very happy with the color. The photos that were available online did not give me a good idea how rich the gold was. I didn't want something that is too distracting on the overall car. The light subtle gold color works well with the red paint. I just hope these wheels are not PVD finish! lol







Was late so decided to install some of the smaller things that arrived with the wheels. Installed the TRD door stabilizers, Cusco oil catch can (separator type), and TOM's accelerator pedal.





Next day, it was time to install the Blitz ZS radiator. Kinda f'd up and did not use common sense when reading google-translated instructions that said to use the short bolts for the "capacitor". It is supposed to translate to short bolts for the condenser bracket! I ended up using the longer OEM bolts and luckily didn't damage the core.

However on the bottom right side, the OEM bolt head snapped off as I tried tightening it and a reverse drill bit with a bolt extractor tip were unsuccessful in removing the stuck bolt. This resulted in my AC condenser being held to the radiator with just 3 bolts instead of 4. It feels secure enough that I trust it won't break off, however i really hope over time, there won't be a lot of vibration from the condenser to the radiator core causing unnecessary noise. Forgot to take pic of both radiators side by side so just included pix that showed the thickness. Took a quick snapshot after the blitz was already installed. The Blitz radiator is roughly just under 3x thicker than the OEM. The width of the foam strip is roughly the width of the OEM radiator.





Next was to install the Cusco oil cooler (chose water cool as the car is occasionally driven in winter) and the Blitz radiator hoses. The install took a bit longer since the measurements of how much to cut in the instructions were meant for the OEM radiator which is much thinner. Ended up having to do a lot more fitting and trimming to the tubes to finish.



The radiator install revealed to me how much of a greasy mess Rustcheck made everything (more to come). I decided to use a multipurpose cleaner and clean up the bay with a pressure washer and dressed some parts with Carpro Perl. Also installed some engine bay rice (TRD oil filler cap). Unfortunately the TRD battery tie down did not fit our large north american OEM batteries.





Carbing front strut tower bar. These came late from Fedex. Wished I waited to install the oil catch can since i had to remove the brackets in order to remove the front braces for the install. Also installed the GReddy carbon hood dampers. I know the Grimmspeed one has a better design but gotta adhere to my goal to keep almost all of the parts added to the car JDM.





Now I wanted a set of RS-R Sport-i Moto Spec coilovers, but did not expect to pick them up this year. My original plan was to do brakes before coilovers. The strong dollar and fear of the impending inflation once this pandemic settles made my mouse finger a little more trigger happy than it should.

Install took MUCH MUCH longer than it should because of the greasy rust proofing I had applied last fall. Made everything covered with this greasy tarry goop. Ended up having to clean every bolt tread I removed since everything got so messy. Gloves, hand tools, bolts, etc.

After everything was on, I decided to only lower both ends of the car by 20mm/0.8" since I plan to periodically winter drive the car and do not want to scrape the crap out of my front lip and side skirts. It did narrow the wheel gap a smidge but I will still fail the Mightycarmods' shoe test .

I've added onto my to do list this summer to dry ice blast the undercarriage and remove all the greasy stuff and get honeywax sealant applied which should be non-greasy and harder after curing.

Seeing how my funds are and if my crypto investments do better, I may just opt to finish off this project later in the summer and get a BBK since that will be last major upgrade I have left planned for this car.

Got a chance to take car out for buddy to take some photos (forgot my camera bag so I'll get my own photos sometime later on:

[weederr33]

Nice to see you went with the Cusco oil cooler/ regulator. I thought I was the only one nuts enough to spend the money on it. Also did the same routing with my Cusco AOS.

Did... did you copy my build?!

[Thefalls]

Nice upgrades. The wallet suffers a lot.

With the TRD kit it seems that the 18 inches wheels provide a better ground clearance and fill the wheel wells adequately.