GS400 2JZGTE Build in the Mitten State by solaradude

4 minute(s) of a 197 minute read

3-21-2014

I've made a decent amount of progress on the car this week. I don't typically have this much time to spend in the garage, but everything has been falling into place and I've been sacrificing some sleep in order to wrench on the car.

I finished removing the complete interior from the car. Last night I pulled the emergency brake assembly from the driver's footwell area since I will instead need to install a clutch pedal there. I'm not sure how I will address the e-brake just yet, but I'll have to come up with something custom to allow it to still work.

My black door panels arrived yesterday and are in great shape. I was planning to install those last night, but the wood grain trim is bothering me. I'm going to drop the trim off at the body shop to have it sprayed gloss black.

Here's the interior as it sits currently. I'm still waiting on a number of items to arrive next week, as well as some SEM black interior paint that my friend Toby hooked me up with. It will probably be a little while before I can put it all back together since I want to have the dash out of the way for the clutch pedal/master cylinder install.

The car is equipped with some sort of aftermarket security system that doesn't appear to be installed all that well. I didn't get a key fob or anything with the car, so my plan is to remove all of it. It looks like a bunch of aftermarket audio stuff was wired in at some point too, but some of it was already hacked into when I got the car. I'm planning to eliminate that stuff as well. Audio stuff is always pretty low on my radar. While I enjoy having music to listen to in the car, I'll worry about that later.

Here you can see the area where the emergency brake has been removed and where the clutch pedal will reside, as well as the rat’s nest of security wiring that needs to be taken out and disposed of:

Assembly removed from the car:

After doing some interior work last night, I removed the automatic transmission from the engine. I still need to pull the torque converter, but this is my first time messing with an auto transmission. I'm not exactly sure what I am doing, but I'll figure it out:

I also had a chance to remove the old pressure plate and bellhousing from the R154 transmission. This thing will need a good amount of TLC before it is ready to be installed, in addition to a shifter extensions to line up with the hole in the car's interior:

I ordered a number of items for assembling and installing the drivetrain from Drift Motion, so those should be here by the middle of next week. That includes the Supra clutch pedal, master, slave, and clutch line. My hope is to work on finding a way to get that stuff into the car shortly after it arrives.