Bitten off more than can chew!

Pat,

Thanks for the advice and the offer of taking a look at yours.  I'll see if I can gather up a few of us.  Right now looking at grabbing an Autopower roll cage since that seems to be the one out there that is the standard for using on the MR2s.  I figure once we get the cage, the clutch replaced and do a few other odds and ends like rip out the interior, install the seat and harness plus gut out all but the essential electronics we should be good to go.  I'll drop you a line as soon as I get some feedback from the team, y'all can regale us with tales of the Lemon since the TARP team are veterans of more than a few events.

Curtis

I'm in Dallas as well and we're going to have Joe (forddragracer) do our cage.  He's up north of town, a little past Denton.  You can search for his handle on these forums and send him an email if you're interested.

We're still getting some things together before we get our cage installed, so I don't have any first hand testimonials, but he's done a lot of Lemons cages and came highly recommended from several other teams.  And his price was very good compared to some of the other shops I had talked to.

We can't make MSR in Sept unfortunately, but we'll be at the New Orleans race in November.

Good luck.

Curtis:

Ditto what Paul said about the cage. Make sure to get the main hoop all the way up against the roof. There's a way to do this that is non-intuitive but that the WRC cage guys all do that makes it so much easier to do a cage in the tiny confines of the MR2 chassis. I wish that I'd known about it before we did our cage, but live and learn, right?

Then you have to decide if you're doing a halo design for the roof parts or bars that go from the floor by the front of the door sills all the way up to the roof and back to the main hoop. Either way, the bar that follows the top of the door inside the roofline needs to be as far toward the door opening as possible. With the way that the center fuel bulkhead is slanted, it's really a challenge to get good room for your helmet inside the cage without having your helmet on that bar to the left of the driver at all times.

Like I said, I'd be glad to show you all the what-not-to-do's that I learned from doing this car and what I'd do differently the next time. One thing is to keep it street legal, which means leaving the lights, turn signals, horn, and e-brake. It's a lot easier (and cheaper) to test your changes to the car if you don't make it illegal to run on the street

Couple of other quick notes:
-the 87-89 MR2's use a different rear suspension setup. Don't try to swap rear parts with those cars. The engine wire harness is different on those cars too as they went to a different impedence fuel injector setup.
-when you rip out the carpet and take out the seats you'll find that there's an iron bar that is spot welded to the floor under the seats. Nobody's sure why Toyota put it there but that's an easy 8-10 lbs that you can drop out of the car.
-Plan to run 15w50 or 20w50 oil if you want your bearings to last the whole race.
-Drain and flush your cooling system very well, then make sure to burp the system very well when you refill with pure distilled water. Otherwise the head tends to make steam and zap the head gasket.

Anyway, get in touch with me if/when you want to see how not to do it.

I don't have any personal experience with the Autopower cages but one thing that I would warn you about just from looking at them online is that you'll probably want to alter your driver's side door bar design. The dual door bar requirement is a little tough in cars with such a small vertical opening as ours for ingress and egress, and especially so with straight door bars (plus that makes fitting the seat harder too). If you can put in some Nascar-style door bars that bend out into the cavity that's formed when you skin your doors, it's a lot easier to get in and out of the car, especially in an emergency.

If you need to find someone to do a custom cage (it might be cheaper than the Autopower, especially with getting rid of the shipping cost), here are a couple guys who have poked around the forum:

http://forums.24hoursoflemons.com/viewtopic.php?id=2840

Also, this guy was doing cage repairs at the ECR race a couple months back:

Matt Lemons
lemco motorsports
972-293-6100
659 Grigsby Way Ste C
Cedar Hill, TX 75104
matt@lemcomotorsports.com
lemcomotorsports.com

I don't have any personal experience with either of these guys, so YMMV, but at least it's a start if you find yourself in a pinch needing to get the cage done and in the car. Cheers.

Well thanks to Pat and him being generous for us to look over his teams car I feel a bit better now.  The cage is still haunting me but the rest of the work does not seem so bad.  I'm gonna try the Precision Racecraft guys tomorrow and see if we can get them to do a cage.  Barring that we will just get and Autopower and make some mods to it as needed.

Do yourself a huge favor and call Joe M ( forddragracer on this forum) cell  214-566-Eight Zero Eight Nine.  I haven't talked to him in a few weeks but last I knew, he was giving quotes for full custom cages that rival what you would pay for buying and modifying an Autopower cage, and was able to get one done fairly quickly.  But time is ticking for before Houston so at least give him a call tomorrow.  He is based out of Sanger.

Don't you need a bar across the passenger side door, and two on the driver's side?

Looks good! I really like how high you guys got the main hoop, that's usually the toughest thing about the cage in this car.

If you ever have a weird problem where the starter won't even turn over, make sure to check the AM2 fuse. For some reason, it seems to go pretty easy; I think it's only a 7.5A fuse but if it's not working, nothing works. Go figure.

Gimme a shout if you need any help with the clutch job.

Well we found out something interesting today - Toyota changed the crankshaft mid-year on the 1985 MR2s.  From January to June they had one type of clutch assembly and flywheel and July and on it had another clutch assembly and flywheel.  Found this out after buying the whole thing and looked at it when we went to put the transmission back on.  Needless to say there was quite a bit of swearing on mine and the team's part over that bit.  Went ahead and ordered the correct part this time and plan on spending some quality time after work this week to take a shot at it.

It kills me every time to know that all companies like to do stuff like that.  Nothing like changing a major part of the car mid year to really annoy people working on them.