6G Celicas Forums

Anyone know any good swaps for my Celica? It has the 7A-FE 1.8L 16V in it now. Anyone know if the LS just bolts up to my automatic transmission?

Most of us locals have moved on from Celicas, but I’m always down for a Toyota get together.

My first car was nearly identical. 91 GTI 8V in Tornado Red. I sold it and used the money to pay for my first Celica. This one is in worse shape, paint wise, but they’re becoming increasingly hard to find and afford. This one has 273,000 miles on the odo.

The plan is to keep this as a project car that my son and I can work on together once he is old enough. He’s only two weeks at this point, so we have a long way to go for that, but in the meantime I have focused on what will make the car safe to drive now - full brake overhaul, lighting, tires, etc; that way I don’t die from driving it before he has a chance to work on it.

Got this a couple months ago. Working on making it not a colossal turd. Also got the Golf R in June. Sold the S4.


Repainted the grille spoiler, replaced the wheels and tires, upgraded from 9.4” brakes to Corrado 11.1”. LED lights all around inside and out, speakers, sub, amps, head unit, all wiring, etc. Not pictured are the clear turn signals and side markers.

Just got my hands on a minty set of OEM Recaros on Sunday.

This is with Lightroom, two Chrome tabs, and GTAV running via Steam. Not necessarily as hot as it runs when I'm crunching, but an example load on the workstation.

That doesn’t take into account the 6GB of GPU.

Plex server with GPU-accelerated transcoding, photoshop, steam, games, a billion tabs of Chrome, etc.

Since my workstation is basically a server, finding RAM is a bit of a challenge. ECC Reg RAM isn't particularly cheap, and dual proc boards eat double the amount of RAM.

Scored a 64GB kit for $130, which is when I found that my Proc 1 riser only has provisions for 4 sticks of RAM, versus the 8 slots the main board has for Proc 0.

So now I have 80GB of ram. That should be enough for now.

If you’re building anything to game, you should only be looking at i7’s. I’d also look at a Corsair liquid cooler.

The SSD is a no name brand. I’d stick to a Samsung EVO or Crucial MX.

If you’ve got extra RAM laying around, or can order a couple sticks on the cheap, I’d swap them out. First thing I would check if it doesn’t boot up is pull ALL the RAM out and boot it up. It should produce an annoying beep error. If that happens then you know the system will POST (Power On Self Test). Memory can foul up just about everything, so it’s good to have a couple extra DIMMs laying around to eliminate variables such as the actual DIMM, or even a channel on the board.


SSD. Yes. Do it. Get something like the Crucial MX500 or Samsung EVO 860. SSD’s have a finite lifespan in terms of data read/write, but it’s into the hundreds of terabytes, so you’ll be fine. The speed boost alone is worth the price of admission.

Memory issues manifest in strange ways.

If you want a new rig on the cheap, you can buy an older Z620 on amazon for about $600. Dual xeon procs, 32+gb RAM, generally a single SSD with Win10Pro, and can accept most graphics cards. The power supply even has the provisions to power a pair of graphics cards.

I bought one with 64gb of RAM, slapped in three 500GB SSD’s in a RAID5 config, installed a GTX1660, and now I have a gaming rig/Workstation/Plex server for well under $1000.

1050.60.14.14.4 was the part number for mine, so 14mm injectors. Popped right into my Racer X rail.


Put up some pics of your situation.

3SGTE swap would be nice, and you could keep a small turbo on it to make sure you get on power sooner (not that it doesn't spool super early as-is)


However, a V6 is:

Cheaper (engine, anyways)
Flat torque is more predictable for a racing application
Lighter (2GR is 379lbs wet, 1MZ is 337lbs wet VS 3rd Gen 3S 409lbs wet)

And if you want to go with a 94-96 1MZ (non-VVT), I have a LinkECU Atom already tuned sitting on a shelf in my garage...

That is what I have. MR2Link v3.

ID1050X's in a Racer X rail, full -6 lines to the pump.

E85 in the Seattle area is pretty much impossible to find. There are 7 stations in the state that sell it. It isn't like the corn belt states over here, HOWEVER my tuner wants to slap a flex fuel sensor on it just so we can see what it'll do with E85, but meh.

Well I've been away for a minute...

MR2 is still a work in progress. A victim of the oft-moved goalposts, I've kept tinkering with different aspects, but never coming back to the engine work to complete it.

So, engine bay update:


I pulled out the TCS coolant overflow tank in favor of a matching Racer X piece. I also finally got my hands on some M10 stainless hardware so I was able to replace the bolts that connect the X brace to the firewall with something that doesn't rust.



I had been looking at the brakes, which got my OCD going. The rears were upgraded to the 93+ Turbo rear brakes, and are larger than the front non-turbo brakes. The car looked goofy. I had to fix it, so I upgraded the fronts to Wilwood 4 pot superlites with MKIV Supra Turbo rotors. Just barely cleared the back of the valve stems.







Recently I got to thinking that pretty much the only things that are still stock on the 3S was the valvetrain. I knew I wanted to upgrade the cams eventually, so I bit the bullet and ordered a set of GSC S1 cams (268 degree), GSC valve springs and retainers, and a pair of ATS cam gears. These are going to be going in along with the intake manifold hopefully in the coming weeks so that I can get the car back to my tuner for a final tune.




In a less "big" change, a couple weeks ago I swapped the rear tires for 255/35-R18's and got rid of the 245's. Looks much better now, but I don't have a picture of this.

I’ll put something together for you later today when I get to work.

Yeah the rust belt isn’t a good place for cars. Most 90’s cars over here aren’t rusty at all. We don’t salt roads here, though. Just sand.


For what I paid for parts alone on the 3S swap, I could’ve just bought another clean MR2 Turbo. Mine is missing two things that differentiate it from a factory Turbo car; front brakes and a speedometer. Everything else is Turbo.

Get one.

Do it.

Embrace the inner masochist.

Still need to install my RacerX intake manifold...

You’re allowed to sell pre-production cars, but you have to do a couple of things:

1: you need to document what specifically is different on it from standard production.

2: you cannot sell it as new.


VW did neither of those things to 254 people in the US, and about 6700 in Europe.

Got this a couple weeks ago. 2015 S4, with every option.



I wasn’t in the market for a new car, but VW sent me a nice letter saying that my car was a pre-production unit, and it needs to be destroyed, so they bought me out of the car after a bit of a legal spat back and forth between my lawyer and their team.

I had to run to get some SD cards for work yesterday, and on my way back to the office I noticed the temp gauge rapidly climbing. I quickly pulled into the next parking lot and shut the car off. I could hear hissing from the engine bay.



It looked like the lower coolant hose had ruptured, so I had to call AAA to come get me and take me home. Once I got the car in my garage I got to work. This is what I found:



I must’ve knicked the hose when I put the heat shield back in, and it finally popped. New hose will be here today, and I have to go drop a small fortune on coolant at the dealership.

Well I haven’t updated this in a hot minute. Intake manifold is here. We’re just waiting to put it on. We slapped a manual boost controller on in the meantime and set it to 11psi. I’ve been getting about 24 - 26 MPG with it, and I’ve been beating it like it owes me money.

The TCS coolant neck broke on like the 4th or 5th day. The overflow port broke off, which is when I learned that TCS just epoxied it in place. I replaced it with a RacerX unit.

We should be ready to slap the intake manifold on in a few weeks, and then it’s back to the tuner for the final tuning and max power pulls.

The intake mani has shipped! I should hopefully have it by Saturday.

Not many updates for now. Racer X sent the coolant neck and I installed it, and cleaned the dried Toyota Red from the top of the transmission. I drove the car once, and then the alternator started to undercharge the battery. I didn’t have time to look into it until yesterday, where I found the nut had completely backed off the power wire, so I got that tightened back up and went for a drive.



Filled the tank and calculated initial fuel economy. 224.6 miles and 9.456 gallons to fill up = 23.75mpg, or 10.09 km/l.

Still waiting on my intake manifold to ship. Hopefully this next week.