That is pretty cool. A few interesting things...1. You didn't get the results you wanted. Did you a spreadsheet calculator like the one frankster uses? 2. That the tolerances between the housing and the ring gear were already so close. 3. That the teeth are at a different angle than stock. Did you pick that angle or did the machine shop pick it? I know it is arbitrary to some extent, but it seems the 45* angle distributes forces equally to both gears.

But, looks really good. Glad it worked.

 

1. Yes, used a calculator. But this is just a final drive change -- it multiplies all the gears the same. So under optimal conditions (what he calculators model), the upshifts still drop you at the same RPM, and not much changes. It tends to make more of a difference under real-world conditions where there's that corner where an upshift doesn't make sense (you'd have to downshift straight away), or there's no time for a downshift (you'd have to upshift mid-corner immediately) and you let the RPMs deviate from what's "optimal".

2. Oh, in a stock gearbox, there's plenty of room. Don't have a better picture, but you can see a solid 3-4mm here. Link.

3. Machine shop. I wouldn't pretend to know enough about gear meshing to have an informed opinion there. I know a lot of thought went into making the gear on the shaft side stronger.

 

So you can swap from a 5sfe to a 3sge. But are your rules such that a 2AR swap, using all of Marc's goodies, is not allowed?
4.85 is really short.

 

Let's assume swapping in another engine is not an option. The series is based on power to weight ratios and swapping in something else that might make a "whole lotta" power won't help -- I need to hit exactly 170 whp (plus minus a couple for compliance dyno variance). Usually the name of the game in series like this is making the power band as wide and flat as possible (area under the curve and all), which is why we play many games with VVTi to get us to the curves we have, as well as games with gearing to keep inside the flat region. Our competition is usually BMWs with 6-cyl M54 engines, which have to do a lot less work to get a very wide power band.

Plus, at this point I have probably 300 of on-track test hours with the 3sge, which is more than a few "serious track cars" lifetime's worth. Getting the same confidence and reliability from a 2ar/2gr/etc will take more years and many more broken goodies. Nothing super unique about the 3sge -- I bet with enough development time we can get a 2AR or a K24 to hit an exact power target -- it's just a mater of "already put in the development time in the 3sge".

 

No idea about noise -- don't think I've noticed anything more than the usual racecar sounds.

 

Where did you get the diff?? This is a cool project! Would love it if you could post up where you found parts, and what manuals/resources you used for the rebuild. Lots of us have old S54's that we want to be less old

Awesome stuff!

 

Where did you get the diff?? This is a cool project! Would love it if you could post up where you found parts, and what manuals/resources you used for the rebuild. Lots of us have old S54's that we want to be less old

Awesome stuff!

The diff I got from Nengun. The part number for the "Type RS" 1.5-way in this application is LSD 124 C15. Other Cusco dealers should be able to get it too.

Synchros and seals, from Gt4-play in the UK. I'm forgetting why not from a toytoa parts dealer here in the US -- probably didn't have it, or I was ordering beams parts from gt4-play already anyway.

Diff preload shims, snap rings, and the other small parts -- I got lucky. Had a big order from a dealer with all the parts in all the sizes because it was all "in stock". When they actually checked their inventory, they only had 3 out of the 50 or so parts in the order, but that happened to have the shim I needed for the diff. For the next box, I'd probably just find generic parts -- there's really not much to these little things. Worst case, will measure carefully and ask a friendly local machine shop.

Shifter linkage parts -- square sugar cube bushing, bellcrank bushing, boot -- just from a toyota dealer.

For resources, the BGB mostly. Especially some of the synchro retainers I had weren't quite the same as what's described in there, but everything else is pretty good. I love Toyota manuals! This video series from DrivelineMaster was pretty good too, not to follow as the law (it's for a C-series box, so not quite the same), but just to get an idea of what the steps looked like.

Other than that, just took lots and lots of pictures when I was disassembling the old box of how everything fit together and was oriented. If you want to look at lots of pictures of gears, I gotchu.

Having a press was very useful for this, along with a bunch of different pullers, and random tube attachements of different sizes to press things in and out. Oh, and snap rings should die in a fire -- I hate dealing with these things. Luckily, not that many in the s54.

 

Having just rebuilt my S54 last month, all bearings, seals, and 1-4 synchros can still be bought from US dealers. Was not able to find a source for 5th, luckily mine measured within spec.

 

I think that is true for the later transmissions. Can the earlier 2 cone synchros be updated/upgraded to the later 3 cone style?

 

Tested these more at Sonoma, things with the gears are looking much more like I expected -- car got significantly faster, in the right ways. Mostly, avoiding some 2nd gear shifts, and getting out of the "gutless" region of the engine much faster.