Hope that subframe serves you well. Sorry about the crappy finish, I just couldnt get the POR 15 to cooperate. It's been blasted clean of all rust though!

Has black car; buys blue clip.

Has white car; buys black clip.



Good work though

Finally, an update worth posting. First and foremost, the front end damage is repaired now.




Along with that, I finally got a rain tray for the hood, so no more rain failing directly on my header heat shield. While I was spending a ton of money to repair the car, I decided it was time to refresh a few other things that have been bothering me. You guys are all familiar with my ongoing subframe and control arm issue. Luke (enderswift) hooked me up with a new subframe a while back, refinished in POR15. So I bought a new set of control arms from Cameron (ted95), a new set of poly bushings, and set to work on cleaning up the old paint and getting some new paint on them.








No pictures of the new stuff installed, but I got the new subframe and control arms mounted tonight. It goes in for an alignment in a few days but for now, it drives 1,000% better! I was tired of riding on noisy old suspension so I picked up new Eibach Sportlines, KYB GR2's, KYB strut mounts and dust covers. Rides much quieter and smoother now.




Before anyone asks, I didn't go with coilovers because I'm perfectly happy with struts and springs. I'd literally never adjust the height or damper settings. Sportlines ride smooth enough for me to be happy with and sit at a height I'm happy with. And the setup is significantly cheaper than the coilovers that I would put on my car.

So, with the new suspension, subframe, control arms, poly bushings, and getting $5,000 worth of damage fixed, I'd call that a decent update.



For the last year or so, my exhaust had been rattling. Quite loudly most of the time. At first I figured it was a loose heat shield, no big deal. When I crawled under the car to investigate, I discovered the worst. No heat shield was loose, but the cat had a loud internal rattle. Yep, the honeycomb was breaking down. My Magnaflow high flow cat was becoming a Magnaflow higher flow cat. I had no idea how bad it really was until I got it replaced a few weeks ago. Turns out it was a really fkin' high flow cat.....



So, new catalytic converter in place, new suspension, needless to say the car sounds much better. The fuel filter decided to spring a leak last week so I have a new OEM fuel filter that will be installed in the next couple of days. That's about all for now, and the car should be good for many more happy miles.

looks good Dan. Still wish that POR coat came out better on the subframe. I have no idea why it wouldn't flow out. Either way hope it serves you well

Wooo car looks great and I'm sure it drives just as good.

Cats are for losers. I've heard of Magnaflows going out before, which is kind of disappointing since I've never had an issue with their mufflers.

That's pretty sad that Magnaflow cat broke down so fast.

Looks great! Your car is probably my favorite one one here. It's just done really well.

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Are you kidding? It looked great to me! I had to give it a couple of love taps with a 12 lb sledgehammer to get it to line up so I need to touch the paint up now but otherwise you did a pretty good job.


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It certainly is driving much better now that I have no play in the control arms. It's been a long time coming. I've just been procrastinating. Always prioritizing other cars first for different reasons and lately I've been working on my house. You say Magnaflow cats have an issue? I need to look into that. I just had another Magnaflow put on it.



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No joke! It's only a couple of years old. I know the BEAMS naturally runs rich but shouldn't be running that rich. I'm going to look into it soon and check my AFR's just in case.


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Thanks! I've made my share of mistakes when I was younger. Now that I know better, I'm trying to do things right the first time and fix my older mistakes as I go. Little by little I've been removing crimps I've used in the past and properly soldering my connections.

yay update!!

glad you're getting all the suspension bits fixed too.

Looks good brother! Making me kinda jealous.

This 'vert has me so pissed off at it, that I've spent the last 3 days looking for GS300s....

Not sure what's worse.

Posting for no reason other than just keeping a record of when I did some maintenance. I set the car back on the ground tonight for the first time in about a month. I meant to just take it off the road for a weekend to do some simple maintenance but nothing ever seems to go well with projects that only take a weekend. The idea was to replace both front knuckles and bearings, driver side axle, rebuild all four calipers and replace the 19 year old brake lines with stainless braided lines, new parking brake shoes, and completely flush the brake fluid. Some of the project went smoothly but I ran into an issue with the shop that made my brake lines, followed by parking brake shoes that refused to cooperate. Turned out to be parking brake cables that were just starting to seize up, so that put the project behind another few days. When the cables arrived, they still didn't cooperate with me. While I was waiting for parts, I decided it was time to get rid of at least two of the junk Falken tires I had. Ideally I'd like to get all four but the CFO/wife would only give me enough allowance for two. She acts like we need new rear tires for the Supra as well as four new tires for the 4Runner, while we are simultaneously trying to finish up the last few projects on our house to get it listed for sale so we can move halfway across the country or something. But I digress, no two year bumps worth it without pictures.

Wow, fancy!


Pictures don't do the tires justice. They are BF Goodrich g-Force Comp-2 A/S's. I would have liked to have gotten the regular Comp-2's to start running dedicated summer and winter tires but we have too much going on in other parts of life right now to dedicate the money to two sets of tires per car so I'm sticking with all seasons for now. These are ultra high performance all season tires, a category that I wasn't even aware existed. UHP and all seasons normally don't go together, but these tires are rated pretty well. Almost anything will outperform the Falkens I just replaced.

Well, as much as I hate to say it, age is finally getting the best of this car. We started smelling fuel a couple of months ago but that was around the time we were packing up for a big move halfway across the country. It’s no surprise that the hint of gas eventually turned into a pretty big leak from the tank. Had to buy an aftermarket tank, straps, and filler neck from RockAuto although they are still available from Toyota. However, I replaced the pipes and rubber hoses with OEM parts.

Out with the old:




And in with the new:






The new tank came with crappy silver spray paint that wouldn’t last a week under the car, so I tried a couple of different solutions. Truck bed liner seemed to work best. While the tank was down, I decided to drop the rear sway bar, clean the rust, and give it the POR15 treatment:




Typical of these old cars and ongoing projects, simply replacing the tank always snowballs into bigger jobs. I was going to drop the rear subframe and refinish it, and buy new rear bushings, but I honestly just got tired of the car being on jackstands and costing me $200 for this and $250 for that so I decided this was enough for now. I did take care of all of the rust that I could get to, cleaned up as much of the subframe that I had access to and finished it in POR15, and had to tackle one other project while the tank was down. As much of an improvement as the bushings would be, I have to consider safety before upgrades. Back in 2012, we had one of the steel brake lines going to the rear brakes rust through. I patched a new piece in but I’ve always questioned when the next spot to rust through will be. It happened at home in 2012, but next time could be an emergency situation. No sense in risking our safety or that of others, so I went ahead and replaced both hard lines with brand new OEM lines, and not a minute too soon.





And of course, I found the weakest spot when I was wiggling the passenger side brake line to drop it from the car.




But the new ones make up for the old rusty ones!





Aaaand while installing those this morning, I decided that no amount of money on earth can ever fix the newest problem with this car.




That’s it, guys. Progress thread over. Car’s burned to the ground. It was the only solution. Had a good run but we’ll just collect the Insurance money and import a GT4 later.

that spider was a whole lot of "NOPE"

Key word: was.

You made the right call, I'd have done the same.

Quality work as always, Sir.

Good stuff. Love the plate. Please tell me yours says "ISASUPRA."

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I had no choice. My hands were tied.


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Thanks! I’ve got my fingers crossed that you finish yours!


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No, it’s still “RICHEE3” but that’s not a bad idea for when I switch to Colorado plates!

you can't trust these spiders... they may have already made their way to the supra.... you know what you have to do...

and this wouldn't be the first time you collected insurance money from the celi. lol

awesome update

Laughed my ass off, thanks for that!

Yes, very funny! Haha!

Brake cleaner works GREAT on bugs and spiders. They basically melt.

Fire works great too as you can see.

Should've just given the spider the keys and walked away.

Brigette surprised me with a Wilwood BBK for the Celica for Christmas, and since I didn’t have much else going on I decided to get to work. These came from another member’s car here on the forum, Csober. Most of you know that he sold his Celica to get his Z31 and the guy that bought it immediately started parting it out on Facebook. Kind of irritating to see such a nice car get parted, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a few parts from it. Since we were in the middle of moving halfway across the country, I decided to be a responsible adult and keep my money. Brigette, on the other hand, didn’t.




Comparison of stock GT brakes vs the Wilwood brakes.






Finally mounted.




My biggest concern with these was clearance. Having seen them on Tao’s car, I knew they were considerably larger than the stock calipers so I was concerned that my wheels may not fit anymore and I may need to get different spacers, but I got lucky and have miles of room.




Initial impression is that they work much better than my stock calipers and Hawk HPS pads. I’ve never liked the Hawk pads, since I don’t warm them up enough to be effective in daily driving. (Still waiting for an “I told you so” from Chris.) These have much better initial bite, but haven’t successfully ripped my face off yet. I’ve done a couple of hard stops from 20 and surprisingly, they didn’t even lock the wheels up. I will bed the pads in later, after the holidays when the highway patrol isn’t out in force. Perhaps these will grab harder as they get warmer as well. I didn’t even warm them up on my quick drive.

The calipers are significantly lighter than stock. I wish I had weighed then before mounting them. I currently have no plans for the rear brakes but I’m leaning towards ST205 brakes.

It was nice of her to buy you a present for her car. I wonder if they have a non drilled rotor available for them.

Looks nice! I'm jelly.

awesome on fuel restoration.

hopefully i dont have to do this. my cars been sitting for 16 months without any fuel additives....

Those wheels are 17" Caldina wheels, right?

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Right? Her car, her money, but it’s presented in a way like the parts are for me. There is a blank rotor option available, but I’ll keep the drilled rotors for now. I’ve heard tons of horror stories of drilled rotors cracking but it’s not like I’ll be doing any track days to heat the rotors up, so hopefully we won’t have any issues.


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Thanks! Yours will be right there with mine in no time.


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What’s had your car down for so long?


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Depends on why you’re asking. If you want a set for your car, they are definitely something else from another car and you should get different wheels. For any other reason, they are Caldina/Matrix M Theory wheels, 17x7 +45.