My first car in highschool was an 87 SR5 coupe, bone stock, family owned since new, autotragic trans and all.
Unfortunately after wrecking it and patching it together to be drivable again I sent it on its way.
After owning 2 MR2's, 2 MK3 Supras and a host of other random Toyotas I went back on the hunt for another AE86.
I came across an 85 SR5 coupe, came with a GTS lip, GTS front buckets and pizza cutters all around. Unfortunately it was a salvage title car so I wasn't able to put plates on it without getting a reconstructed title. Still overall not too bad of a car and I was finally on track to having another 86.
After buying a parts car and getting ready to put it under the knife this pops up on craigslist. The ad was short, had no pictures, said he was going to scrap it if he couldn't have it out of there within the next 2 days but the kicker was it was in Virginia Beach, almost 7 hours each way. I had a friend of mine call about it while I was in class and quickly called him back myself and told him I'd be down the next day with a truck and trailer.
Given this and a few other terrible pictures I figured I'd take my chances and jump on it. After leaving class at 1 and getting home at 4 in the morning I finally had a real GTS! All I knew is that the kid before me bought it 2 or 3 years prior but had no car knowledge, apparently very little on the AE86 at that, and that he had a friend look it over deeming it to have no compression.
After going through the whole car and the few boxes of spare parts thrown inside it things look better everywhere I turn. It's been repainted, has about 192,000 on it, but luckily for an east coast car looks to have very little rust! There's a few flaws in the interior and after taking a look into it someone had the engine apart before, all in all not bad at all! Besides a repaint, an old CD player and a chrome tip thrown on a stock looking muffler it was unmolested!
With a little more digging around it looks to be a factory LSD car as well, score again! The icing on the cake came when I was digging around underneath it I found the factory key zip tied to the back end with a house key! Sure beats just having the ilco copy that was sitting in the ignition.
I checked compression myself and yielded 0-30-0-0, depressing, but confusing. The engine spun over extremely easily and the head looked cleaned along with having new gaskets uptop. Digging a little deeper I realized the exhaust cam was upside down! So after putting the cam in correctly, triple checking the timing I gave it another try. Still no fire, but cylinder 1 already had a reading of 175, faith has been restored.
I was anticipating having to pull the motor, but luckily I still had some faith in the 4AG and I can't be happier. Unfortunately I've hit my first roadblock, but all things considered not a bad one.
The issue I'm sitting with now is while everything looks good upfront for now I'm not getting any power to the fuel pump, the fuel gauge on the dash has power but not the pump. I've already tried running a wire with straight power from the battery to the fuel pump, but still it doesn't kick on. I wouldn't put it past it for the wiring to be bad along with the pump, but it's making me wonder. Any thoughts or input are greatly appreciated! I'm planning on double checking the AFM wiring along with the relay behind the glovebox tonight, hopefully yielding some good news. Looking forward to be behind the wheel of another 4AG soon!
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