Carina TA60

Some people may have read it on Twitter: I bought myself a box full of yellow foglights.

My Carina: Marchal yellow foglights
When driving there (and trying to find my way through Zoetermeer) I was navigating on the map. At a certain point I noticed a white Prius in my rear view mirror, when looking at the map and back to the rear view mirror it changed into a very well known front of a car: a R33 GTR! Damn, that was a shock! GTR passed me and gave the driver a thumbs up. ;)

If you look at the box it will contain four times a yellow Marchal foglight and two times a yellow Cibie foglight. Two of the Marchals are broken (lights/wiring/casing), but the other four are perfectly fine! :)

Well, this is the one I was actually after:

My Carina: Marchal yellow foglights
And they are surely worth the drive! :)

My Carina: Marchal yellow foglights
So, for the people with difficulty of remembering my Carina: this is what the Carina looked like.

And now it looks like this:

My Carina: Marchal yellow foglights
Better?

My Carina: Marchal yellow foglights
Without the black/white Marchal covers these foglights look a bit less sporty...

I did know about the existence of turbo-ed 2T and 3T engines, but bi-turbo?

If you look well enough you can see a big intercooler behind the cutted front air dam. Also where the grille used to be an oil cooler has been placed. It is unknown which engine has been used for the swap, but it is surely a bi-turbo diesel engine.

The original car appears to be a TA60 Carina coupe and its 31 years old Finish owner takes really good care of it:

Yep, that's how easy it is to get a Carina sideways when you have loooooads of torque! I wonder how long it will take before D1GP will be flooded with diesel engines. :D :D

This is the most recent video of the car:

I wonder if there will be more updates soon! :)

Google Streetview has been updated in the Netherlands yesterday. Of course I checked some familiar spots first including my house.

For some reason the images of my house are mixed up with the images of a street right next to it. Fortunately enough there are images of my Carina on Streetview:

My Toyota Carina TA60 on Google Streetview

Unfortunately this is the only "good" picture I could capture since the other images were from the street next to mine...

I also found some of the Down on the Street entries as well, so I'll post them next Sunday.

I was browsing the Portuguese car sale portal Standvirtual and searched for interesting cars and found this very good looking Toyota Carina TA60 sedan:

Portuguese Toyota Carina sedan TA60

Basically the same as mine, but what caught my eye was the asking price for this car: only 550 euros!

Portuguese Toyota Carina sedan TA60

Minor dent above the exhaust, but it's bootlid appears to be rust free...

Portuguese Toyota Carina sedan TA60

...and from the side it also appears to be rust free, so it can't be rust!

Portuguese Toyota Carina sedan TA60

Interior looks as good as mine...

Portuguese Toyota Carina sedan TA60

...and also has the three point seatbelts on the rear seats!

Portuguese Toyota Carina sedan TA60

And the doors are also as rust free as mine... The car has 80000 kilometers on the odometer, so that's roughly the same as mine... And I don't think the price includes the dog...

So, you may ask why is this car this cheap then? It is simple: the car is an unwanted car! It is not a Celica or the sporty Corollas (TE71 or AE86) and AFAIK Portugal has no legislation for 25 year old cars like The Netherlands has. Basically it is considered an old clunker... The car has no papers! ;)
Thanks to Santos for the correction!

Now, who can chip in for a one way ticket to Lissabon?? ;)

After last weeks posting about the Toyota Carina GT-R AA63 cluster I could not leave it on the shelve anymore...So I opened it up:

Carina GT-R AA63 cluster cleanup: opened up

First thing I spotted under the tachometer was this:

Carina GT-R AA63 cluster cleanup: check engine light
The check engine light! I already thought it was missing! ( ﾟ ヮﾟ)

And when continued to unbolt plate from the backside I saw this:

Carina GT-R AA63 cluster cleanup: identification
Some sort of identification for the cluster. The 4cyl must be useful information for the tacho (pulses devided by four) and the RH must mean it is a RHD cluster. The other two numbers don't ring a bell. ┐('～`；)┌

So with everything unbolted I was able to access this:

Carina GT-R AA63 cluster cleanup: odometer internals
The odometer internals!
When pushing the black gears between the numbers to the left you can just change the odometer number on the left of it to its right position. Be careful and use something soft like a toothpick: I damaged one of the (not really important) numbers this way because I used a screwdriver! Σ(゜д゜;)

I also saw this on the backside of the backplate:

Carina GT-R AA63 cluster cleanup: speedometer calibration
It is used for calibration of the speedo- and odometer! 637 revolutions of the speedocable is equal to 1km. If the cluster has the same number of revolutions as my current cluster it will be an easy swap! Otherwise I probably need to have the speedo recalibrated to the value on my current cluster...

On the other side you could see the fruits of my work:

Carina GT-R AA63 cluster cleanup: odometer adjusted
I adjusted the odometer from 171178 to 081178, which is quite near what the current cluster is at.

Carina GT-R AA63 cluster cleanup: closed up again
So, all that was left was a good cleanup of the backplate and perspex and put everything back together. ヽ(´ー｀)ﾉ