Bill Sherwood's AE-86, 3SGE conversion page

Early 2007

Due to a general lack of interest and other things happening, not a lot has gone on of late with the Sprinter. But it's still getting the odd bit of attention and also it may or may not be getting driven to the shops at night every now and then, even thought it's unregistered.
I guess the intent of this page is to show the car in its 'mature' years, and the finishing of the 3SGE project and anything else that happens to it.

For the moment, all that I've done is remove the rear coil-overs and put normal coil springs back in. The reason being I want to try to make the car as 'normal' as possible, and I'm still nervous about the rear dampers being in single-shear, even though the mount is all braced up.

I also wanted to soften the springs all round, to make it more comfortable for road driving. So off to Kings Springs to get some new ones. I was hoping to just get some off the shelf from them, but to get the ride height I wanted, they actually had to make up a new set that are about 30mm lower than their Superlows. And here's how the rear sits right now.
It's a tiny bit low, so what I'm going to do is add the thin rubber buffers on the bottom of the springs that the factory cars have. That'll lift it up a little and make it a tiny bit softer again. The spring rate has gone from 280 lbs/inch down to 150 lbs/inch. I've yet to swap those old rear springs into the front, to soften it up from the current 390 lbs/inch.

	The other thing I've been doing is finally getting around to making a muffler design that I thought up a few years ago. That's another story in itself, but with the help of a friend of mine who's the best welder I've ever seen, the muffler finally got built. And then fitted to the back of the Sprinter. The intent was the make a muffler that had no internal baffles and no real restriction, and mainly because of the way it worked to keep the engine quiet - And it failed miserably!
	The cunning plan behind it was to make the sharp pulses in the exhaust gas flow break up as they enter the large internal chamber, then out again through the exit pipe. It's those pulses that make all the noise, so if they're broken up the engine should sound quieter. But this unfortunately hasn't happened, and the two litre engine sounds like a raspy 1200cc at times. Part of the reason, I think, is that the muffler is too far back in the system to get really clear pulses, but also because it just doesn't work as intended. It wasn't cheap to make either, so it wouldn't have been a big seller anyway if it went commercial.

So with the requirement to keep the engine quiet with no internal baffling the muffler experiment is a failure. However, I want to keep it on the car as it cost a fair bit to make and I'd like to keep fiddling with it to try to make it work as best I can. And because it looks better than the fart-can it used to have. :)
That muffler tip that's on it is from a muffler I bought in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as I couldn't find it in Australia. I had to buy the whole muffler just to get the tip - and do it twice because the same tip is used on the Fraser side-exhaust now. At the moment I'm playing with a perforated tube in the centre, stuffed with steel wool to soak up those pulses and that seems to help. At some revs the exhaust note is pretty quiet, so there's hope yet. I am likely to have to add a resonator-type muffler up the front of the exhaust system to make it as quiet as I want the car to be though. As you can see, it has a large cap on the side to make it very easy to get to the internals to make changes, unlike a regular muffler.

The big rear discs still aren't on the car yet, but the kit to fit them is nearly done.
To try to save weight on the rear axle, we will be doing a sneaky trick with the alloy hat that mounts the disc and locates & spaces the wheel. Photos of that when it comes.
On the left though, is a phone-camera photo of the old disc and note the size of it compared to the new big disc. All going well the car will stop very nicely with that mod. It was mentioned to me that I could nearly use the current discs as mounting hats for the new discs. :)

- Fit the 4.1:1 diff ratio that the Altezza's have as standard so that the speedo works accurately.
- Make the speedo work.
- Trace electrical leak that flattens the battery every second day.
- Fit the bigger brakes to the rear, to balance the large front brakes.
- Finish off the interior panelling around the shifter.
- New carpet & and paint, and lots of other fiddly little things.