NOW WITH A 0-70 Launch! Well i did a thing.. my 97 lx build. distributorless/turbo/h151f (5 Viewers)

[audi2nr]

So after being a lurker for 7 years or so and spending oh I'd say 2 years searching on and off for an 80, I'm happy to announce I officially get to join the pink panty club! No stranger to lexus this is my 5th. I've had a 3 SC300's (still own one) and a 2008 GX470 which my family dearly misses it was a cherry.. any who here is the newest member to my fleet. It's a 97 LX450 in champagne pearl with 220 on the odometer, originally a CA rig. The interior and exterior are immaculate looks like there's only 50k of wear, same with the drivetrain, i highly suspect this thing was just a mall crawler. I paid 9k for it. I passed on soooooo many rigs from the east and mid west and south. After committing to a real search for a rig of this vintage I told my self I would not settle for anything with any sort of rust it's just something I don't want to deal with. Found it in Hayden idaho, He bought it in cali from the orignal owner but he quickly decided it was too small for his family, he has 4 kids, so he bought an excursion, yuck.. LOL! I plan to use this thread to chronicle my build and my trips out and about.

a few quick details of the good and bad.

good: came with a brand new arb front bumper, brand new seat gears (just installed the passenger side set going to to do the drivers today) alpine double din screen with apple carplay/android auto back up camera, bluetooth etc.. a pair of new seat heater switches, interior lights swapped to led's and brand new weather tech mats all around. no O.E. roof rack

bad: oil leak from oil pump cover, (wits end hooked it up with a seal kit! weekend project!!!!) freeway vibration/ pulling needs an alignment/wheel balance and probably some bushings but i won't address that till a lift and new wheels/tires are on the way, if anything i will just get the wheels balanced. needs a front O2 sensor, (new part on the way) needs a washer pump, (part on the way) and i need to repaint the mirror caps, (aerosol touch up cans on the way) oh, its also not locked but arb can fix that no problem..

ok photo dump!

 

[audi2nr]

 

[Heckraiser]

Wow, those seats HAVE TO be re-covered. Free child labor, if only I were so lucky. It's mostly me fixing my daugther's car, not the other way around

 

[audi2nr]

Wow, those seats HAVE TO be re-covered. Free child labor, if only I were so lucky. It's mostly me fixing my daugther's car, not the other way around

LOL ya my kids can't help but ask to pick up a tool they love it and so do i! After enlisting my minions to help me replace the seat gears on drivers side today, I can tell the covers have been replaced but they look very very oem and all accounts by the P.O. it seems the original owner was very particular about this rig so they may have been recovered in factory leather. Oh I also forgot to mention I picked up the rig in idaho so i immediately got a nice 300 mile roadtrip back home to the Seattle area. Nothing like buying a sight unseen car and driving it home! But of course this is an 80 so it was a fairly uneventful drive. Just a nice cruise back home getting to know the rig.

 

[Bowling4$]

Nice buy. I live in Hayden and wish I saw this one before you.

 

[audi2nr]

So the past few days i've been accumulating parts for the little issues here and there i have come across, hoping to get it up to a stable maintenance schedule then just drive it before major major surgery takes place more on that later.. so my next few weekends will be booked, here are the plans.. Perform front axle service including all seals and bearings (full kit from marlin crawler with upgraded axle seals), brakes all around are toast so rotors and pads all around as well (thanks to rockauto..). During my drive home after i purchased the truck i could tell it had a slight exhaust leak as well as a check engine light, apparently some jack knob may have replaced the exhaust or perhaps just the cat's at one point and left one of the doughnut gaskets on the front manifold because when i got all the hard ware off lo and behold 2 stacked on each other.. not to mention they stripped one of the studs by installing the incorrect nut on it, so today i unbolted the cat pipe from the manifolds and had just enough room to replace the gaskets replace the nuts and 1 stud. the check engine light was on with a bank 1 sensor 1 slow response, not sure if that coincided with the exhaust leak but i ended up replacing the front O2 with a replacement denso (pic shows incorrect sensor i got last weekend, that is for the rear) i received the front from rock auto when i got my package of brakes. Crank pulley tool arrived from OTRAMM, got some speakers for an audio upgrade (stock ones are blown) going 6.5's in all 4 doors and a small 10' sub, probably going to use the right rear corner to fit the sub. now i just need a nice 5 ch amp to hook up to the alpine and we'll be good to go. Last weekend i got all the belts replaced and front of engine pre-washed off before i tackle the oil pump reseal and a few days later i notice a trail of oil from further up, looks like the distributor o-rings so i need to order that.. my mirror cap tops were faded through so i got a complete spray kit for plastic parts the other day, we'll see how it works, base and clear and a bunch of accessories to prep the caps. EGR got bypassed the other day, have not deleted the piping yet but at least the heat is not blasting the wiring harness anymore, made a little 4.7k ohm jumper using the connector and pins off the old temp sensor soldered the resistor to the pins and then reinserted pins and silicon
ed it all up to make sure its water tight. That's all for now, cheers! stay tuned for a lift and wheels' tires and eventually some boost

 

[audi2nr]

 

[audi2nr]

Well since I recieved a bunch of parts I started tearing in to maintenance items I wanted take care of so I could get a good baseline.. so I started doing a birf inspect/repack at the same time replacing all the bearing and doing a front diff flush. Big thanks to marlin crawler for their kit, it has all japanese koyo bearings and their awesome eco axle seals.

 

[audi2nr]

Holy hell I've gotten so much maintenance done on the LX pretty happy so far. The last few days I completed the front/rear diff / t-case fluid services. This morning I tore into the front crank seal, oil pump gasket, distributor o-ring, coolant flush and oil change. Big big props to OTRAMM for their awesome crank holding tool, its worth its weight in gold. Successful got all the stupid Phillips head screws out without stripping any of em, and got them swapped over to Allen heads with the wits end repair kit. When I first got it I knew it had a bad oil leak and on my way home I was keeping an eye on the oil pressure gauge as it was at the lower end of the range and now I know why... that oil pump seal was so Fffffed it was losing what appeared to be a decent amount of pressure, now I'm hitting 3/4 of the pressure gauge with higher rpms before it struggled to reach halfway. Anywho some pics!

 

[audi2nr]

Forgot to add when I did the knuckle rebuild I also did all new pads and rotors on all corners as well as a brake fluid flush. Only thing I have left as far as fluids is the trans fluid and powersteering, the PO replaced the pump but put some generic napa p/s fluid and not dextron.. so I'll be flushing it.

 

[xd9sc1]

Congrats on the purchase! You've tackled quite a bit in the very short time you've owned it. And, here I thought I was blazing forward at a decent clip with stuff like seat gears, radio/sub/speakers and door panel repairs....and while I have pics of most of the work, I haven't had the time to post up yet. Hope to do that soon. Good luck with yours!

 

[2fpower]

Welcome to the maddness... . I love looking back at my kids helping me on my cruisers... my oldest is off to college this year so those pictures just strike a cord of what seems like only a couple years ago.....

 

[Chrisw023]

Congrats looks like you found a good one. PNW has a fairly good group of owners.

 

[Tinkertoy]

Looks nice. I’m in Maple Valley and I picked up a 450 recently as well. Same color. I mean you may have seen it in CL. I snatched it up pretty. quickly.

I did the same with the crank seal and the oil pump seal. My Dizzy was already done. We just drove ours around the Olympic Penn and my oil pressure guage is still kinda all over e place.

I am interested in rebuilding the knuckles and flushing coolant and the PS as well.

I have been looking at lifts but I can’t stop thinking of doing a swap. I am still trying to decide if I can tackle it.

 

[Tinkertoy]

Also I had the check engine light similar to yours. The issue on ours was on the intake. Just past the MAS the hose had developed a large hole that wasn’t visible. I replaced it and CEL turned off. Or burned out. All the same right? Lol

 

[audi2nr]

So the PO sprung for a nice alpine double din head unit but all the speakers were trash so I went ahead and fixed the stereo this morning. So the head unit is an alpine ilx-w650 has android auto and apple car play bluetooth, multiple camera inputs and a few other neat features, the unit only does 15w per channel though so I went ahead and bought the amp that matches the head unit it's the alpine kta-450, does 50W X 4 rms with alpine dpp, the combo is awesome and is super slim only like 5" deep there is plenty of space behind the assembly to stuff wiring etc.. as for speakers I chose to do 6.5" infinity coaxial speakers in all 4 doors. Install was easy peasy the rear doors I used the template and cut pie shapes in the door metal and just folded over the tabs that were created so I could fit the speaker in the rear. I have a JL 10 that I will eventually be stuffing in the right rear trunk panel so I can keep as much space as possible. Pics!!

 

[audi2nr]

Welcome to the maddness... . I love looking back at my kids helping me on my cruisers... my oldest is off to college this year so those pictures just strike a cord of what seems like only a couple years ago.....

Thanks lol! I'm glad my kids love doing car stuff with me, before I tore down my race car it was always daddy let's go for a ride daddy let's change the oil daddy I want to hear the turbos and fireballs. I feel it's safe to say my kids have gas in their veins now too. My son is 6 and my daughter is 4 they absolutely love the LX now that we have it. We are going to take it up to birch bay in Washington to go on its inaugural camping trip tomorrow!!
Here's the race car.. 1994 lexus SC300 3.0 liter 1jz 670 wheel hp. it's down for an engine build currently..

 

[Tinkertoy]

So the PO sprung for a nice alpine double din head unit but all the speakers were trash so I went ahead and fixed the stereo this morning. So the head unit is an alpine ilx-w650 has android auto and apple car play bluetooth, multiple camera inputs and a few other neat features, the unit only does 15w per channel though so I went ahead and bought the amp that matches the head unit it's the alpine kta-450, does 50W X 4 rms with alpine dpp, the combo is awesome and is super slim only like 5" deep there is plenty of space behind the assembly to stuff wiring etc.. as for speakers I chose to do 6.5" infinity coaxial speakers in all 4 doors. Install was easy peasy the rear doors I used the template and cut pie shapes in the door metal and just folded over the tabs that were created so I could fit the speaker in the rear. I have a JL 10 that I will eventually be stuffing in the right rear trunk panel so I can keep as much space as possible. Pics!!
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Nice. How does it sound? I’m literally tearing all of the old trash speakers out of mine. Will most likely go with the Pioneer 8400nex since you get both DVD and GPS with it. Haven’t decided on speakers yet.

 

[audi2nr]

@Tinkertoy It is VASTLY superior to the stock system actually it is light years ahead of the stock system and it has almost enough bass I am considering not even doing a subwoofer... I do love some bass but I do also think usable space is a priority for setting this truck up for camping for 4 people.. that being said if I were to do a sub it would have to go in the rear panel area I do not want to sacrifice any space in the trunk area. I highly recommend 6 1/2 speakers all around fitting them in the rear doors is cake just need some tin snips, draw out the opening needed and cut pie shapes and fold the metal back over into the door. The alpine headunit and amp combo is fantastic, apple car play and android auto is very nice since it just uses your phone via usb for your nav and audio and phone calls/texts. The infinity speakers I got were just discontinued but there is a new model I paid like 60$ a pair on Amazon due to their discontinuation. They are advertised as shallow mount I did the door panel mount setup and the drivers rear door needs a teeny bit of foam or dynamat to insulate a vibration I can hear. These are the speakers I got. Infinity Reference REF-6522EX 6-1/2" 2-way car speakers at Crutchfield

 

[audi2nr]

Took the rig glamping this weekend.. lol wish it were more remote and muddy but it was a good chance to just verify all the work I performed as of recent. It was also a nice practice run to see how much stuff I could fit in the rig. I am 100 thousand million percent working on a roof rack setup as that will free up so much space in the back. But all in all it's been great, also I wouldn't trust these tires in an offroad situation at this point.. date code is from 2014 and they are s***ty Michelin LTX tires. Next up roof rack, wheels, tires and a lift as soon as my fellow mudder puts his new slinky suspension on.