6G Celicas Forums

He is pretty heroic. Just make sure you treat him nice...or something like that.

Dan, what are the chances of pulling the redtop ECU and trying it on your greytop or vice versa to confirm it's the ECU fouling up? Good luck.

True story. As of tonight, the BEAMS is on all four cylinders. And I've known what the problem was all along, I just forgot about it until tonight.



I saw that little wire hanging out when I got the motor and completely forgot about it until I saw it again tonight. It's one of the signal wires for the coil on cylinder 3. I ran a new wire tonight and all four cylinders are running perfectly. I have to say, the BEAMS is a lot more fun than I imagined it would be. It screams up to the redline and keeps asking for more. I'm so used to the 5S running out of steam by this point but the BEAMS feels like it's not ready to shift yet when you start bouncing off the rev limiter. Tomorrow, I will be finishing up the swap and sending the car home and then I'll be starting my partout. It'll be a quick partout with only easy to sell/ship items being sold.



Here's what was laying under the red car... Yeah, I don't think that tranny is useful at all.



More pictures will be posted tomorrow, as well as all the swap details/wiring pictures.

*generous round of clapping*

Well done, my good man! Glad to hear it's all buttoned up and running on all 4 cylinders. When you take those pictures be sure to get some video of the car screaming to redline...or just tooling about. You did a fantastic job on this project Dan and I can't wait to see the progress on your car.

PS: I have to agree on the transmission...

about time bro !

Always something simple and easy, usually just a dumb mistake or something overlooked.

Glad to see hear it's running, it's fun after 4-5k rpms !

good job on the swap!

yeah thats a piece of a diff. my friends honda did that after he redlined it and dropped it in gear

i could just come and slap u. Good to hear another beams is alive and kicking. Too bad u wont enjoy it, lol....

I suspect that's what happened to the red car. As for the BEAMS swap, it's still bogging down you floor it in a high gear. I'm sending the car home today though. I can fix the bogging issue later. This has been the longest lasting BEAMS swap ever and I'm just glad it's done. I'm less excited to drive it than I am to have it finished and know I did it. I owe Chris, turnip, and Dustin. They've all been a huge help to me. I'm probably going to do another BEAMS swap on my blue car later but for now, it's getting a 5S and daily driving duties.

Noberto, I could slap myself. I saw that wire when I got the motor but I didn't have any time to trace it that day so I figured I would get it later. Then I completely forgot about it until I saw it again, despite being asked several times if I knew of any cut wires.

This post has been edited by richee3: Aug 3, 2011 - 11:32 AM

congrats! now put up videos! hahahaah

I am/have been living vicariously through this thread... nicely done sir!

Chee La, I think the videos are best saved for text messages... I may be violating some site rules if I post them up. Lol.

Ricochet, how far are you from Chicago? We're having another Midwest Meet soon. You should come by if you can and check it out in person.

I'm currently around 5 hours from Chicago, depending of course on the meet up place. That would change come the end of august, then I'll be around 7 hours out.... either way not too bad, a long way out, but not terrible. How many usually are there in attendance? jw
Thanks
Trace

It's a pretty long drive for you then, and the meet looks like it will be in late August or September. The place is about an hour Southwest of Chicago. There are usually about 10-20 people there. They aren't huge meets but they are very more personal.

i would make the drive.. if my v6 was done.. damnit now i wanna go work on it...

You should. It was about 4 hours for us to get to Daniel's house just to put the motor into the car. So, anyone can drive 4-5 hours for a meet with some good burgers and hiking. Plus a BEAMS

Dan, do you have my number?

If not, I'll PM it to you....I want to see vids.

I do not. I'll get the PM and send it to you in just a minute.

As promised, here is a quick how-to for swapping a BEAMS. There is a lot of information spread out all over the place, so I'd like to compile as much as possible in one single thread.

Info: '97 3S-GE BEAMS motor, non-LSD S54 transmission (OEM ST185 flywheel, OEM BEAMS clutch disc (Toyota part #31250-20331), ST185 pressure plate, 5S/S54 throw out bearing, BEAMS 2.25" exhaust reduced down to fit stock GT 2" exhaust.

Wiring: -EA1 plug, pin 17 goes to pin 4. Pin 17 is the bottom left wire, red with a black stripe. Pin 4 is the thick black wire at the top center of the EA1. Pin 17 needs power when pin 4 has it. This gives the BEAMS spark.
-EA1 plug, pins 2 and 12 need to be bridged. Those are ground wires. They need to be spliced together. There should be two wires, parallel to each other. Just bridge them together.
-Clutch start wire- there are 3 vertical plugs next to the ECU. On the body side of the plugs, you have a white (19 pin) plug, light gray (13 pin) plug, and dark gray (17 pin) plug. The clutch start wire is pin 18 on the white plug. Move it to pin 17 on the dark gray plug.

That's all you need to get the BEAMS to start and drive. To get your airbag light to function properly, you run a wire from the EA1 plug to the light gray interior plug (either pin 4 or pin 5, I have read separate posts saying both and I chose not to do this step so I cannot confirm which pin it is.)

-Cruise control- Some say you need to do some work to make the cruise work. You don't. The cruise control is a standalone system. There's an ECU behind your glove box, an actuator under the hood pulls a throttle cable which is connected to your accelerator pedal, which pulls the throttle cable hooked up to the throttle body. No wiring on the engine is associated with cruise control at all. Trust me, my cruise still works perfectly and I never touched it.

EA1 plug, pins 4 and 17 bridged, as well as 2 and 12.




Clutch start wire: I don't have a picture of the other side of the connection, but I basically ran a wire and bypassed the plugs but I used spade connectors to make sure I could still disconnect when I need to:


The BEAMS uses a 5 volt signal for the tachometer signal, whereas the 5S-FE uses a 12 volt signal. The stock tachometer will not work at all with the BEAMS. You either have to get a BEAMS tach and swap it over into your cluster or use a tach adapter. I didn't want mismatched gauges (BEAMS uses a white face) so I chose to use a Dakota Digital SGI-8D tach adapter ( http://www.dakotadigital.com/index.cfm/pag...prod/prd127.htm ). To get this to work, you take pin 27 from one of the plugs on the ECU (silver wire) and cut it. The ECU side of the wire goes to the Input on the tach adapter, and the body side of the wire goes in the High output. You'll have to get power and ground from wherever you choose. This is the wire:


As I said, I chose not to run the wire for the airbag light. Here are the threads that helped me the most when I was searching for information:
njccmd2002- "I Swapped 3s-ge Redtop Into '97 Limited Edition Vert."
turnip- "Swap: 3sge Beams into 94 GT"
hurley97/Batman722- "New Addition to Our Family"
erahman85- "One acronym... BEAMS"

Any questions about swapping a BEAMS, feel free to ask. I'll be glad to answer any questions I can or take as many pictures as I need to. I'm no expert on swapping the BEAMS but experience is the best teacher and I have a month and a half of experience now

Extra pictures, courtesy of Turnip.

EA1:



Clutch start wire:


This post has been edited by richee3: Apr 13, 2012 - 2:14 PM

yeahhh but its kinda like 16 hours for me

This makes me want to do a swap so much more now. I think I'd like an auto BEAMS Redtop swap in the Celica...would make a wonderful little toy.

I totally agree with ^ - the 1800 for the motor and ecu, harness, tranny, clutch that I can get from Canada on ebay is looking MIGHTY enticing with this tid bit. How did all of the engine mounts work out?