Category: Builds

So yeah, I called this post Winter Warfare ’cause it sounds badass. It is sort of an accurate description of this year’s winter season at Cyrious Garageworks though!! Let’s take a couple quick looks at some of the projects being worked on in the cold winter months!

1975 International Scout

This 1975 International Scout came to us with the lemon meringue paint scheme: yellow on the bottom and white on the top with a white interior. A nice colour if we’re talking about desserts, but not so great when you’re talking about a truck that might be doing some offroading duty.

After being disassembled, this vehicle was sent out for a thorough sand blasting and brought back here for bodywork. This project definitely required lots of smoothing out, especially so since (as I’m sure you can tell) the roof was removed, never to be reinstalled. This vehicle isn’t likely to see any kind of winter service, so the roof was really just added weight at that point. This made it so that there were some ridges along the edge of the bed and the windshield frame that needed to be shaved down and smoothed out.

After some heavy bodywork, the Scout made its way over to the paint shop for a coat of something a little meaner than the lemon meringue yellow. This forest/army green will definitely give off a bit more attitude than the previous colour. Now that the bodywork is pretty much all done, the next step is reassembly and the small matter of doing an engine swap and lift kit!

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We’ve had several cars in for roll cages recently of all different shapes and sizes, and they’re showing no sign of letting up! From Targa Newfoundland to drifting and beyond, our roll cages can meet any specification you require!

BMW E46 – Targa Newfoundland

This BMW E46 was slated to run in Targa Newfoundland this year, so a roll cage was indeed required! The customer wanted to leave the option open for potential future rally endeavours, so he opted for a beefier cage than what was required from the Targa Newfoundland rulebook.

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As the years go by, AE86s are slowly becoming more and more extinct. Whether it’s enthusiasts buying them all up and locking them in their garages to tinker on for years, or whether they’re all being made into drift cars and subsequently thrashed or crashed, one way or another it has become nearly impossible to buy a “nice” AE86 without it being crashed, stripped, or a rust bucket.

Fortunately for those of us with a soft spot for the AE86 there are still some really clean examples out there, and this one is no exception. This car came to us in a somewhat rough shape. Although not visibly in that bad of a shape on the outside, the car was hardly running as it rolled through our door with a long to-do list attached to it. 

As you can see the car was definitely a good looking AE86 right out of the gate. This one had minimal rust, apart from some of the more common problem areas. Still, although at first glance one would think that there’s nothing wrong with the exterior of this car, there was some hidden stuff that needed addressing before she received a fresh coat of paint. Obviously, any kind of imperfections or small dents in the fenders/body must be smoothed out…

…and the door which had been opened way too far at some point would also need to be fixed. There was more bodywork to be done, but we’ll get to that a little bit later. If you were looking closely, you probably would’ve noticed that this AE86 came to us already swapped to a 20 valve Blacktop 4AGE. You may at first think that this is a good thing, but actually it really wasn’t. The problem was that it came to us looking like this:

Many cables were left completely unplugged and hanging, a few vacuum hoses were blocked off, and there was an MSD ignition coil somehow wired into the headlights, among other oddities that I won’t bother listing here. Needless to say, the car could hardly even move under its own power.

Another big problem with 20v 4AGE installs is that there are several different methods on how to actually get the ignition system to work in the AE86 chassis, as this motor was originally developed for FWD cars. One method involves using a kit which you can order from New Zealand (or Australia, I don’t remember which). The kit entails cutting a big hole in the timing cover and attaching an adapter onto the cams so that you can run the distributor on the front of the motor instead of in the back like stock. Though it seems like a good idea at first, what they fail to mention is that this kit causes excessive wear on the cam gears; making it somewhat less than desirable.

Another method is to change the ignition system to ‘coil-on-plug’ which involves getting ignition coils from a newer car and mating them to the 20v 4age. This is probably the least painful way of doing things, as it is for the most part a plug-and-play option.

The last option is to actually keep the distributor right where it’s supposed to be from the factory, and add some clearance to the firewall to make everything fit.

This one, however, found yet another way to do it:

No, I’m not kidding. We did indeed find the firewall with a massive hole that looks to have been cut using a corkscrew, or safety scissors. In place where the firewall used to be was now a piece of somewhat flammable insulation, with carpet behind that. Needless to say, this was something that we needed to fix before going any further. We considered switching to an alternative method of ignition, but decided to keep it as it was since the firewall had already been modified.

There! Much better! At the very least, now there’s significantly less risk of a fire entering the cabin in the event of such an emergency.

It’s always amazing to see how much bodywork goes into a “near perfect” car to get it that much closer to “perfect”. There’re a couple extra bits going on here, however: the antenna holder has been removed from the front fender to make things a bit cleaner up front; the beginnings of a body-kit are forming on the car, including the fender arches having been chopped to accept wide wheels and fender flares; and the quintessential AE86 TRD rear spoiler has been added for the classic sports car look.

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Motor swaps are another of the more popular improvements that a lot of people make to their cars, and it can be done for a number of reasons. Sometimes a motor swap can simply be done to replace a blown motor with a not-blown motor. In other cases, motor swaps are done to swap in either a newer, or more powerful (or both) engine for increased performance and reliability.

Motor swaps can be completed with varying degrees of difficulty. Sometimes the desired motor was actually an option for the prospective car from the factory, so depending on parts availability the swap could actually not involve very much imagination/fabrication as far as fitting the engine, and the main part of the job is just getting everything to work (which isn’t always as easy as it sounds). That however, is not the case with the swap we did to this totally rad AE86 Coupe. This customer opted to swap out the old 4AGE with something quite a bit more modern, but at the same time keeping a Toyota heart in his machine.

And here is the motor in question: a BEAMS (Breakthrough Engine with Advanced Mechanism System) 3SGE Blacktop, taken from a 2001 Toyota Altezza RS200. Being a newer motor, it’s pretty clear that this was never a factory option for the ’86 Corolla Trueno. As an added degree of difficulty, however, this particular motor was never a factory option for any car sold here in North America. This meant that any parts that needed to be sourced for the motor itself would require a little bit of researching to find out what kind of alternatives from North American models would be appropriate, if at all possible.

As with just about any motor swap that wasn’t a factory option, a big part of the installation is getting everything to fit and clear properly. If the motor is mounted too high, the hood would potentially need to be modified (ugly) and there’s a good chance that the transmission won’t fit. On the other hand, if the motor is mounted too low, then the oil pan will be lower than the subframe, making it the lowest part of the car with risk of getting smashed when going over speedbumps or small obstructions in the road. A lot of care has to be taken in order to ensure that the motor is mounted in just the right spot to make everything clear properly, so we decided to modify the subframe to make our own motor mounts for this car.

Perfect fitment was achieved using a combination of solid billet aluminum subframe spacers, as well as our custom fabricated motor mounts and reinforcement on the factory subframe. This made it so that we didn’t have to modify the hood (which wouldn’t have been pretty with it being a fibreglass hood), and so that some minor massaging was needed on the trans tunnel to fit the transmission.

Even with the motor mounted exactly where we wanted it, some modification was still needed to get the oil pan to not fall below the subframe. We modified the oil pan to be a couple centimetres shorter, and that gave us all the clearance we needed!

Once the motor was fitted to the car, we designed and fabricated this custom transmission mount to help hold everything in!

With the motor being swapped, the old exhaust no longer worked so a new one was needed. Besides, what’s a Cyrious build without a custom stainless steel exhaust? Gotta make sure they hear ya comin’!

This car will be seeing plenty of track time in its near future, so we decided to go with a time-attack inspired turn down exhaust. It’s definitely a unique finishing touch for this car, and hints a little bit at the beastly nature of this ultimate gripping machine!

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One of our more in depth projects of the past year was this 1988 Mazda RX-7 which came in for a full build.

Visibly lots of stuff to do on this bad boy. As one may guess from looking at the pictures, this car is very similar to the one used by Ryosuke Takahashi in the Initial D comic, and this build would pull a lot of visual inspiration from that car.

Lots of bodywork would be necessary from top to bottom to make this car look as good as when it came out of the factory.

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