My First Corolla AE86 – Enjoying My Dream Car – Part Two

 

In part one, I described how I was able to purchase my dream car: a Toyota AE86. I was able to buy one with a bit of a shady background, a shady engine swap, some broken parts, a cracked windshield, and many parts in boxes. It took some time and effort to get there, but I managed to sort out most things. Now that the car was drivable, I started driving it on a daily basis.

Me and my girlfriend went on many weekend trips and I really enjoyed wrenching with my mates one or two evenings per month. I would do small things to improve the car or help my mates out if they had a bit bigger job to do. For me, the next thing to sort out was to make the car a bit more comfortable and improve things. Improving comfort was necessary as the suspension featured lowering springs of unknown origins, a set of yellow Koni shocks set to the maximum stiffness, and the four-links of the rear axle had their rubber bushes replaced by solid nylon ones. This may be comfortable when going sideways in a drift session, but not when driving through Dutch urban neighborhoods. The Dutch are king in lowering speed in urban areas to 30 kilometres per hour (18 mph) and placing uncomfortable speed bumps wherever they can.

Out of the blue, the previous owner, Jasper, called me to ask if he could somehow get his braided brake lines back as for driving on the streets it would be of no use anyway. As I didn’t own a set of four-links myself, I bargained that if he’d replace the four-links and brake lines back to OEM, we would be even. When he uninstalled the four-links, he found the two upper ones to be broken. That would explain the clunk on my way to a job interview a few days earlier and the strange feeling I had under heavy acceleration. Replacing the springs wasn’t an issue as my best mated just started to upgrade to a home-welded coilover setup. So I quickly took the opportunity to reuse his set of Apex springs.

 

Another thing to rectify was an issue with the pop-up headlights. During the engine swap, the car received a complete European wiring loom. In this loom, there are no provisions for the US market only popup headlights. This meant that someone jammed the electrical wire of the popup motors between the headlight’s fuse and socket within the fusebox. Effectively the headlights would now pop up whenever the low beam was selected. However, when the high beam was selected, they would pop down as the high beam headlights had their own fuse and thus power to the motor relay was cut.

Before making any statements on this, I need to explain something first. In the Netherlands we have a mandatory yearly inspection for cars called APK. I’ll spare you what the abbreviation stands for, but it roughly translates to General Periodical Inspection. This yearly inspection is the Dutch equivalent of the British MOT inspections and I’ll use the term MOT from now on.

For the previous owner, the strange wiring for the popups wasn’t an issue as he was (probably still is) an inspector for MOT. (APK) If he deemed the vehicle to be road-worthy, it was definitely road-worthy because he was the one who put the signature on the inspection report. Yeah right, that’s literally marking your own exams! This wiring setup would never pass the MOT inspection with another inspector, so this was high on the list to be rectified.

 

The only proper solution would be to Frankenstein the correct parts of the SR5 wiring loom into the European wiring loom. As Toyota didn’t label anything except with a part number, it was one giant puzzle of wires and (relay)boxes. Back in those days, there wasn’t a website like Toyodiy to look up the parts numbers written on those boxes. This meant I got stuck and decided an intermediate solution would be far simpler: add a relay in the fusebox and use a switch on the dashboard to control this relay. This worked beautifully and I hardwired the relay to the positive terminal of the battery to ensure the popup headlights would stay up even when the power was cut off by turning the ignition key. This decision turned out to be a good one that I profited from more than a year later.

I also tried to beautify the car a bit. I swapped the rear bumper for a European one. The clunky USDM 5 mph bumper weighed a ton and the flimsy polyurethane European bumper made the AE86 at least 30 pounds lighter. I also swapped the 15-inch Khamsin wheels for a set of 14-inch Celica Supra wheels with 185/60 tyres stretched on them. This suited the car much better and it improved driving comfort as the sidewalls were now 60% of 185mm instead of 40% of 195mm.

 

For the AEU86 forums, we scheduled our first meetup in September 2006. We managed to get seven Corolla AE86es, one Corolla TE71 and one Corolla EE80 liftback on a single photo. Not bad for a first meetup! Later that day two more cars joined at the BBQ. It’s strange to look at that photo and realize only three cars in that photo are still registered today! I know two of them are laid up and a third is being restored, so actually it’s not a bad score after all!

 

I loved driving my AE86, especially on my way home from work when I would enter the Zeeburgertunnel in Amsterdam and hear the engine roar. Sometimes before entering the tunnel, I would open the sunroof and, as the legal speed limit was 80 kph (50 mph), I would shift down from 5th to 4th, from 4th to 3rd and then from 3rd to 2nd. By then the revs would be near 5000rpm and I would let the 16-valve Toyota 4A-GE engine sing all the way up to 7800rpm exiting the tunnel! Usually, traffic would divert to a different lane than the one I was driving in and I could exit the tunnel with nobody in front of me. There is nothing that could beat that sound! Well, maybe a 20-valve Toyota 4A-GE engine… In hindsight, I actually should be ashamed of my behaviour 20 years ago.

A recurring issue was water leaking into the car. At first, I found the tail light gaskets to be too far gone to keep a seal. I patched up the seal with a silicone kit and ordered replacement seals. Shortly after I replaced them, I found one of the side windows to be leaking. I patched that up with, again, some silicone kit and that held up fine. And finally, I found my sunroof to start leaking at random intervals. I removed the rubber seal, filled all rust holes I could find, and revived the seal with Vaseline and that resolved the issue. Shortly before selling the car, I found more leakage in the boot and some rust-brown patches started to appear. It felt like the car was crumbling away between my hands. But I’m running ahead of myself.

 

Related to water leakage is rust. Rust was also a recurring issue: after fixing the rust at the bottom side of the window, I also failed MOT inspection on rust in the footwell the year after. Or at least what was left of the footwell. I jokingly named my car the Franken-hachi, now one of my mates changed that to Fred Fankenstone. I asked my neighbour again if he could help out again and he welded the floor as best as he could and then I tried to retest for MOT.

When it got retested, the owner of the MOT garage didn’t even bother to redo the entire test. He was unlucky when he sent in the test results and was chosen for a spot check. The inspector would probably arrive within 20 minutes or so. This meant my AE86 had to be placed on the hoist (it was outside in the rain) and the owner had to pretend he actually fully checked the car. I helped him prep the car and he asked (or rather begged me) if I knew of any possible defects. He already had a bad reputation and he could potentially lose his license to perform the MOT tests. I quickly removed the lap belts in the rear as one of them was stuck. Then I unscrewed the USDM indicator lenses as in the Netherlands daytime running lights are not allowed to be amber but indicator lights are allowed to be white. Finally, I put the popup headlights in the up position, hid the switch for the popups behind the dash and used tape to mask off the empty spot on the dash. The car passed with flying colours. The only remark made was that the daytime running lights were missing a lens, but that was totally within the law.

 

As described above, the underside of the AE86 was very rusty. In the Netherlands, during wintertime, we put salt on our roads. As the cars from the early 1980s didn’t receive any rust prevention, the salt will disintegrate any exposed steel eventually. It will start with a small blemish in the paint, but once the salt has crept in there, it will slowly eat away the paint and expose the bare steel underneath. Most of the seams at the bottom of my AE86 were unusable for lifting the car up with a jack. Using a two-post lift was still doable, but not for very long. The patched arches started to show small signs of rust appearing and I simply started to get the feeling this would never end.

 

The most memorable drive I had with my car was to the Louwman Museum in Raamdonksveer on my birthday. Back in those days, it was still located at the Dutch Toyota HQ in Raamdonksveer and presently it has moved to The Hague. Me and my girlfriend visited the museum and I found a bigger version of the two-door AE86: a first-generation Soarer! I secretly hoped Mr. Louwman would pop out of some false door on the side in the decor and propose to swap it for my AE86. Unfortunately, Mr. Louwman had better things to do that day.

 

In the meantime, me and my best mate had opened up a webshop under the AEU86 umbrella. We were focusing on selling AE86 parts in Europe and imported three shipments of various parts and bushings from T3. I remember vividly our living room was completely filled up with boxes full of Prothane bushings because we bought 25 sets at the same time. This to the horror of my girlfriend, but as quickly as those boxes appeared, just as quickly all these boxes were then individually shipped to our customers all over Europe. We also started to expand our business by selling Koni shocks, Apex springs and Mintex brake pads. Me and my mate were both planning to use our cars as testbeds and showcases for the parts we imported. We were convinced we were going to become big…

 

And in the story, this is about where my girlfriend told me she was overdue and when we tested, we were overjoyed! When I told my mate the news he told me coincidentally his wife was also expecting a baby. I tried my best to convince my girlfriend that the AE86 was a suitable family car. However, whatever I did, the AE86 wouldn’t baby. The baby seat simply wouldn’t fit in the rear of the car. My wife declined to sit in the rear of the AE86 all the time and I wouldn’t blame her. If you are over 1.5 meters tall, the rear of an AE86 is cramped and getting in and out is really difficult. So I had to source a different family car and I found it in the form of a four-door Toyota Carina DX TA60 sedan. I bought that car on the 7th of July 2007 and sold it 17 years later. But more on that car in the Carina installments of my COAL.

 

Unfortunately, this meant the end of the road for the AE86. I toyed with the thought of laying it up for later, but I quickly realized it was too rusty. If I would revive the AE86 in, let’s say 10 years, it would probably be beyond saving. So I bit the bullet and put it up for sale after owning the AE86 for two years. An Irishman called Ian wanted to buy the car and I agreed to pick him up from the airport. What happened next to the AE86 can best be saved for the third and final post on my AE86!

 

Related CC reading:

Curbside Classic: 1985 Toyota Corolla GT-S – The Legendary AE86

CC Analysis: An Objective View Of The Corolla AE86

Vintage R&T Review: 1985 Toyota Corolla GT-S (AE86) – The Exciting Twincam 16 – An Honest High Performance Weapon