2GR Engine swap with EB60 gearbox = no cutting rear subrame build video!

[jvanzyl]

Good grief.
Soooo is this another full circle then back to importing a gearbox from another country??

[Marc]

I'd really look into the price of that avensis 3zr gearbox as mentioned in post #46. importing a bellhousing only is way easier than a whole gearbox and if the 3ZR eb60 is cheap locally this could end up also being the cheapest option.

and keep in mind that the gearbox needs to be opened up for this swap anyways so changing the bellhousing at the same time would be a trivial amount of extra work.

Honestly it's too bad there's no big displacement option in the ZR family, that would solve a bunch of problems for you guys.

[jvanzyl]

Ok so getting the bell housing from the US delivered is about £860 plus there will an import duty.
I'll totally give the local Toyota dealership a call in the morning and ask how much they can get it for..

There weren't many avensis/rav4 2L petrol engines sold over here, at the time of sales the government made it very clear that diesel was the way forward so you'd very rarely have someone opting to buy petrol over diesel. So they're basically none existent really- which makes getting the bell housing a bit of a none  starter.. ?

[Jay]

Amayama showing the 31105-33041 housing as 'permanently out of stock' ie discontinued most likely.

Seen that too many times with stuff for my EP82, usually means that no more will be made.  If you can find them in stock anywhere buy asap.  A Toyota dealer should be able to confirm if they can order.

[jvanzyl]

Yeah Steven Eagell toyota dealerships want £835+vat for the bellhousing... to source an EB60 gearbox they want £3000 odd plus vat.

on the plus side however!
Dubai is where it's at! I've got quotes of £600 to ship roughlt 2cubic metres/pallet of stuff from Dubai. So in theory if you could get someone to pallet the engine & gearbox that's not too bad.. it's £1400 for a whole car (shared with 2 others in a container). So if you got a camry with the 2AR-FE engine with eB60 gearbox that's you sorted.. don't think the 2GR version of the camry came with a manual, so you'd still need to get the gearbox if you did that.

Anyone think of an easier/cheaper shipping route than Dubai?

[Marc]

Amayama showing the 31105-33041 housing as 'permanently out of stock' ie discontinued most likely.

Seen that too many times with stuff for my EP82, usually means that no more will be made.

It's possible that the status on the part changed in the last few weeks but i just sent one to Australia brand new from the dealer so it seems unlikely.

Yeah Steven Eagell toyota dealerships want £835+vat for the bellhousing... to source an EB60 gearbox they want £3000 odd plus vat.

So that's a bit more than i was hoping for but if you can get the 3ZR EB60 for a good price that still puts you in the range of what we get the gearboxes for here in the USA.

on the plus side however!
Dubai is where it's at! I've got quotes of £600 to ship roughlt 2cubic metres/pallet of stuff from Dubai. So in theory if you could get someone to pallet the engine & gearbox that's not too bad.. it's £1400 for a whole car (shared with 2 others in a container). So if you got a camry with the 2AR-FE engine with eB60 gearbox that's you sorted.. don't think the 2GR version of the camry came with a manual, so you'd still need to get the gearbox if you did that.

That sounds like a potentially better plan than getting them from the USA. And you're right, the 2GR-FE never came with a manual, Camry or otherwise. The only stock manual 2gr-fe application is the Lotus Evora but we already discussed why that's not really viable earlier.

[Jay]

True Marc, just thinking, the parts supply is split up into different markets. ie Japan stock is separate from UK is separate from US and so on. 

If that bell housing wasn't actually used or is discontinued in the two markets that Amayama.com source from (Japan and United Emirates) then it could explain the message.  It's reassuring you have been able to source them, firsthand experience is priceless. 

For me personally the engine is the easy bit - I've a heavily dented RX350 sitting here that I used for 18 months and trust.  The gearbox and wiring are the shadowy bits that I'm unsure of.  You are shining a great deal of light on everything which is very appreciated!   

[Marc]

{...}The gearbox and wiring are the shadowy bits that I'm unsure of.  You are shining a great deal of light on everything which is very appreciated! 

Obviously we've been covering the gearbox and i agree that it is certainly going to be the tricky bit for people in certain locales including the UK. Honestly the engine isn't super easy to get for you guys either but at least there were some available in the country and some is *WAY* better than none.

But let's talk a bit to that wiring worry because I've spent a ton of time on making that easier and that information is honestly valid for any other swap as long as the engine controller is able to respond to OBDII messages over high speed CAN. 

The core of how i make it easier is the body controller that i make:


this is a circuit board that gets installed the stock ECU case and you plug the normal chassis integration plugs into it. The circuits on there do a few things:

-they talk to the new ECU over CAN to request the coolant temperature and then translate that temperature to the BEAN bus to send it to the gauges cluster.

-It takes the alternator charge light and the oil pressure switch state from two direct wire inputs and transmits them to the cluster. Note that it also allows 5W to be drawn from the alternator charge light circuit so it looks like a light bulb and will work with any alternator in about the last 60-70 years since the older ones draw power from that circuit to energize the field windings.

-it reads the A/C request and the A/C thermistor over BEAN and the A/C pressure switch that is wired into it from the normal chassis wiring along with the state of the engine and controls the A/C clutch. The nice thing is, unlike the stock ECU being piggy back'd in you don't need a LOCK input anymore so you can now use any A/C compressor instead of being forced to use the stock Spyder unit. You do lose locked rotor detection though so that means it's like 90% of other A/C systems out there. The squeeling belt whenever the A/C switch is pressed should be a good enough fault indicator there anyways.

-and finally, the more silent but most important part is it routes the wires that the engine controller needs out of the two other stock plugs on the ECU so you don't need to cut any wires on the stock wiring harness. you can now just plug the swap right into those plugs and you have access to everything you need. It also adds a 5th plug that just passes through some of the engine controller signals to make it so you can have a seperate harness going to the accelerator pedal and the OBDII diagnostic port. It's really annoying when you have an engine harness reaching all the way to the accelerator pedal, that makes removal a huge pain.

I did make a video that goes over this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhN6tB84xj8 and also if you would rather read it there's a document here that covers how to use it and what all the connections do, which ones are necessary and which ones are optional: https://frankensteinmotorworks.com/MKIII/diagrams/Toyota%20MR2%20Spyder%20Body%20Controller%20Wiring%20Guide.pdf

Then i make two sub harnesses available:


The one on the left goes from that 5th plug to the accelerator pedal and the OBDII plug so you don't need to wire those at all.
The one on the right plugs from the largest plug on the body controller to the chassis integration plug on the ECU.

Note that the above was made for the 2AR-FE swap, the 2GR-FE uses the same connector and the same wires but with a slightly different pinout. The document above mentions the 12 steps required to update that harness to the rav4 2gr-fe ECU i sell and I'll also update it for the Sienna ECU that i will use in this swap when i get there.

That means at this point you've only got the direct engine harness to chassis plugs to deal with and there's also the 4th plug on the body controller left open because things like the alternator and the oil pressure switch would be expected to go to the chassis normally but need to go to the body controller instead.

So nothing complicated at this point yet, you've just bolted stuff in and plugged connectors in and on one connector you moved some wires but no wires had to be crimped or soldered yet and you're almost done with the wiring already

So then you take that 3rd gen Sienna 2GR-FE harness and you convert it to the FM1 chassis integration connector via the kit i sell: https://frankensteinmotorworks.squarespace.com/shop/sienna-fm1-pigtail-kit and of course a step by step video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GiKIxN82_Y and of course accompanying paper documentation if you prefer that: https://frankensteinmotorworks.com/2GRFE/diagrams/FM1%20connector%20wiring.pdf (though to be honest they really work better if you view the video and look at the paper documentation)

and for the Spyder you'll have to add two wires to FM1 that you'll salvage from the stock Sienna harness for reverse lights. There's a chance that you might even be able to salvage the connector from the Sienna harness also, i need to look more into this.

And now that means you've crimped three wires together and if one crimp fails you'll just get slightly worst throttle response and a check engine light and if either of the other two fail you'll lose reverse lights but it'll still get you home no problem. The most catastrophic thing that could happen is if you the reverse light wiring shorts to the chassis somewhere because the crimp was *that* bad you'll blow the alternator ignition fuse and lose charging. This is a problem of course but it should not be that hard to avoid this.

It also means that you're now inside the cab with the wiring and you have 3 chassis plugs on the MR2 (BC1, BC2 and BC3), 1 plug on the body controller(E4) and the FM1 plug from the engine that need to be connected in a small harness that patches those together.

One of the plugs only gets one wire from the body controller and it's optional only if you have daytime running lights and want to keep that functionality.
Alternator ignition goes from E4 to BC1
Ground, oxygen sensor power, reverse light bulbs and ignition coil power goes from FM1 to BC1
Alternator battery sense, A/C clutch, MAF power, starter solenoid and fuel injector power goes from FM1 to BC2
Oil Pressure switch, alternator light, reverse light power, alternator ignition and two grounds go from E4 to FM1

And that's it, you're done. So you still do need to make a harness but it's about 12" long or so and contains 16 wires (17 if you have DRL) that are fully documented already with plugs you'll already have.

The only part of the above that isn't documented properly yet is the reverse lights, that's two wires going to a single connector and relatively easy to figure out but don't worry i'll make a pin by pin video describing exactly what needs to be done to make that harness, it'll take less than an hour for most people to convert the sienna harness to the FM1 connector and then less than an hour to make that adapter harness I discussed above with the 16/17 wires.

The 2AR-FE wiring skips the FM1 connector because the Scion tC harness already matches the same pins as the Spyder uses so there's only two wires that need crimped in that one to do the whole harness work but it's still a very similar wiring job and the video for that is here if you want to see it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKUaHLryid0


*Side note, I really wish the text entry box on this site was a bit bigger, only seeing a dozen lines at a time is somewhat of a pain when typing large replies*

[shnazzle]

I would do so much to find out how you translate coolant and alternator light over BEAN. That's literally the only reason some cars have the stock ECU piggybacked

And, you can just drag the bottom right of the text box to expand

[Marc]

And, you can just drag the bottom right of the text box to expand

You're a savior, thanks!

I would do so much to find out how you translate coolant and alternator light over BEAN. That's literally the only reason some cars have the stock ECU piggybacked

The BEAN bus is a proprietary bus but thankfully Toyota released an SAE paper about it: https://frankensteinmotorworks.com/MKIII/2ARSwap/SAE970297.pdf

That gets you 99% of the way there and the only thing left to figure out from there is the polynomial used for the checksum but it's a one byte polynomial with a few extra bytes of start state options so there's only a couple thousand possibilities so i just recorded the temperature climbing messages and then brute forced the polynomial backwards from there. Since the polynomial is only needed for transmitting messages and not for reading it's relatively easy to hack like that.

Reading the bus is just a question of bringing the voltage down to where the microcontroller can read it with a couple resistors and a zener diode. I'm just using the microcontroller's body diode instead of having it externally. Then I designed a circuit that is recessive at ground and dominant at 12V so i could write to the bus using two transistors a handful of resistors and a diode, getting the fall time to be fast enough and keeping the ground a recessive state (where another module can pull it up without additional resistance) was the tricky bit.

From there I wrote some bare metal C code on a microcontroller to emulate the peripheral. As far as i know there's no microcontroller out there that exists that has BEAN as a built-in peripheral. The tricky bit here was how to use minimal hardware so i could keep the price of the body controller down. There was some interesting interrupt programming needed and a bit of critical cycle counting to resync to the remote transmit frequency since it's only "near" 10kHz, not exactly 10kHz. A one off solution could just throw a way more powerful CPU at the problem instead and just oversample at 200kHz and then easily decode the message.

But honestly, I sell the body controller for $190 and the form factor makes wiring the car way easier. The documentation also has a minimal 14 wire configuration for A/C or 8 wire connection just for the dash stuff. You can use that wiring configuration if you just want to retrofit this body controller into an existing swap to add this stuff in there.

Perhaps i'm biased but $190 sounds like a deal. I know i would have been all over just buying that solution instead of designing my own if it was available at that price.

[shnazzle]

And, you can just drag the bottom right of the text box to expand

You're a savior, thanks!

I would do so much to find out how you translate coolant and alternator light over BEAN. That's literally the only reason some cars have the stock ECU piggybacked

The BEAN bus is a proprietary bus but thankfully Toyota released an SAE paper about it: https://frankensteinmotorworks.com/MKIII/2ARSwap/SAE970297.pdf

That gets you 99% of the way there and the only thing left to figure out from there is the polynomial used for the checksum but it's a one byte polynomial with a few extra bytes of start state options so there's only a couple thousand possibilities so i just recorded the temperature climbing messages and then brute forced the polynomial backwards from there. Since the polynomial is only needed for transmitting messages and not for reading it's relatively easy to hack like that.

Reading the bus is just a question of bringing the voltage down to where the microcontroller can read it with a couple resistors and a zener diode. I'm just using the microcontroller's body diode instead of having it externally. Then I designed a circuit that is recessive at ground and dominant at 12V so i could write to the bus using two transistors a handful of resistors and a diode, getting the fall time to be fast enough and keeping the ground a recessive state (where another module can pull it up without additional resistance) was the tricky bit.

From there I wrote some bare metal C code on a microcontroller to emulate the peripheral. As far as i know there's no microcontroller out there that exists that has BEAN as a built-in peripheral. The tricky bit here was how to use minimal hardware so i could keep the price of the body controller down. There was some interesting interrupt programming needed and a bit of critical cycle counting to resync to the remote transmit frequency since it's only "near" 10kHz, not exactly 10kHz. A one off solution could just throw a way more powerful CPU at the problem instead and just oversample at 200kHz and then easily decode the message.

But honestly, I sell the body controller for $190 and the form factor makes wiring the car way easier. The documentation also has a minimal 14 wire configuration for A/C or 8 wire connection just for the dash stuff. You can use that wiring configuration if you just want to retrofit this body controller into an existing swap to add this stuff in there.

Perhaps i'm biased but $190 sounds like a deal. I know i would have been all over just buying that solution instead of designing my own if it was available at that price.

You're one of my new favourite people. 

I did have that SAE document actually but didn't get all the way through it. Should have stuck it out. 
Quite frankly dude, 190usd is a steal for that

[jvanzyl]

Totally would pay $190 for that no probs... just wish I had the engine to go with it!

[J88TEO]

2GR-FE only in RX350? What about the GS450H or RX450H - are they the same engine?

[Marc]

I try to share as much info as i can, i haven't found there's anything to gain by making this stuff a secret. Of course there's still some bits that i won't share like my mechanical drawings and software that i've written but within reason i usually help people even if they aren't buying my parts.

2GR-FE only in RX350? What about the GS450H or RX450H - are they the same engine?

The GS450H is a 2gr-fse motor, it sounds almost the same but it's more or less a completely different engine. I'm not saying it's impossible but it's going to be a lot harder.

The RX450h uses the 2GR-FXE which as far as i know is mechanically the same shape so it would bolt in but the vvt-i system is different and the compression is higher because this motor runs in a pseudo atkinson cycle mode. If you're willing to use an aftermarket ECU there's a good chance you can make that one work. *note* i haven't done this myself, this is just speculation at this point.

[J88TEO]

Marc,
Thanks...so just the 2GE-FE then....

[Jay]

Post 57 - I'm nodding in approval, you are a genius

Post 59 - I'm baffled, you are a magician, you lost me at polynomial 

[J88TEO]

Totally would pay $190 for that no probs... just wish I had the engine to go with it!

I agree....

[Marc]

Marc,
Thanks...so just the 2GE-FE then....

Yeah, the 2gr-fxe would really only be an option if you're looking for a challenge. the extra costs would outweigh any savings on the engine cost.

Post 57 - I'm nodding in approval, you are a genius

Post 59 - I'm baffled, you are a magician, you lost me at polynomial 

I just enjoy working on cars. It also helps that i spent a bit over 10 years doing automotive electronics for a living.

On a different note, i am out there shooting part 2 right now. I hope to have it out in a day or two. I've got about 2-3hours of wrenching left and then a whole ton of editing.

[J88TEO]

Great!
Looking forward to part 2.

[Marc]

Great!
Looking forward to part 2.

Wait no more! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSlcfFxc8OI

Enjoy

[J88TEO]

Great1
Many thanks...
I was watching the 2ARFE ones......maybe that's the route to go as the 3GRFE engines are quite difficult get hold of here...

[jvanzyl]

Great1
Many thanks...
I was watching the 2ARFE ones......maybe that's the route to go as the 3GRFE engines are quite difficult get hold of here...

Erm.. think you got it the other way round.

We do have the 2GR, we don't get the same 2AR.

[J88TEO]

You are correct...thinking with the wrong brain....home country instead of host country!

[Nvy]

Great1
Many thanks...
I was watching the 2ARFE ones......maybe that's the route to go as the 3GRFE engines are quite difficult get hold of here...

Erm.. think you got it the other way round.

We do have the 2GR, we don't get the same 2AR.

How much a 2GR would set you back?

[J88TEO]

So far...searching the net I haven't come across a 2GR-FE engine for sale....
Maybe I am looking at in the wrong places! :-(