[da_horse]

Initially bought back in 2001 as my first car and since then it's gotten out of hand and in hindsight I probably should have and could have bought something better, but too late now. All the work bar aircon, exhaust and painting were done by myself including the conversion which was completed in 2007 but i've just taken my sweet time to get a ride thread up.

1989 Camry SV21 CS
Some blue pearl paint my mate and I mixed up
BEAMS 3S-GE from a Caldina ST215 (greytop)
S54 LSD Gearbox from a BEAMS ST202
Whiteline rear sway bar
Front Strut brace
Recaro SR3 (from evo 4, rebolstered) (previously ST185 seats)
Juran SR rails for SV21
ST202 celica steering wheel
ST202 Shifter
Enkei RP-01 16x7 +35 (previously watanabe rs-8 16x6.5)
TRD Chaser JZX100 muffler
Greytop headers decatted

Dyno before exhaust and decat pulled 104.9 fwkW

 

[da_horse]

The conversion happened as the 3sfe was dying with the valve stem seals no longer doing their job. I could fix that but why bother. I decided to go retarded and get the beams engine. I bought a halfcut and with Jetspeedcamry's help we took it all apart and junked the rest.

The conversion is easy fitting wise as it's just another 3s block motor. The only issue is that with gen3+ 3s engines, the oil filter has been moved to the sump and this will foul on the DS front sway bar mounting plate. To fix this i notched the plate a little and used a 90 degree oil filter relocation adaptor.

Cooling wise the radiator was upgraded to a dual core unit out of a st185 using the camry end tanks. The stock thermos are too thick and shit and were replaced with some spal units. The other thing is the ST215 has the thermo sensor mounted in the radiator. To fix this issue i had a bung welded into the thermostat housing and sensor now sits there fine.

Engine out

Beams in

Have to be careful dropping it in as the intake runners are quite thin and dent easily

Then came the job of wiring. This was a pain and i kept putting it off for around 6 months, just spending time to separate looms, remove shit i didnt need and label all the various wires.

One night after I finished exams and went fuck it and did an all nighter to wire it up

 

[da_horse]

By the morning the car had been wired up for the first test crank with wires still running all over

It wouldn't crank no matter how many times i tried. Called a mate and he said check if the coils are getting 12V which surprise surprise, they weren't, the wire was hidden coiled up under the ECU

Wired that in and it was all sweet. Drove it to the local exhaust place where they joined the b-pipe up to the standard camry exhaust system. Yep, the standard 2inch system. It worked great as it was silent and only cost me $50 to have it joined. For a student that's value.

Forward a few years and i decided it's time to get an exhaust. First thing to tackle was the headers. Greytop headers have dual cats, redtop don't and for that reason make more power. I actually sourced a set of redtop headers but they need different mounts for the bottom where it attaches to the block. Considering how heavy they were, I wanted to them to be mounted properly. Thing is the mounts would cost a few hundred. So i just got the exhaust place to remove the cats and make some new pipes and merge. It's a bit rough but does the job for now.

Greytop v Redtop

modded greytop

Beauty of this is that all my mounts and heat shields still fit.

Next was to put a full 2.5" system through with a hi flow cat and resonator

I forgot to tell the guy i wanted it mandrel bent but for the price I paid, i'm not fussed. Initially he put on a redback muffler but that thing droned a ridiculous amount. Luckily I knew someone who had a munted TRD muffler off a jzx100 and so we just cut the pipes off the muffler and had it welded on with a 3" tip.

Sound wise it's pretty quiet but has a nice note and definitely flows a lot better.

 

[atobe]

very nice

 

['88 All-Trac]

Noice! I likey.

 

[nogard]

Nice work, the wiring looked challenging. How's the power gain?

 

[atobe]

It's got to be decent the BEAMS is rated at 197hp while the 3sfe is 115hp.

 

[da_horse]

is indeed decent. My 3sfe dyno'd at 69.4kW (104.9HP) and this one dyno'd at 104.9kW (140.6HP) so that's a change of 47.6hp but the biggest aspect is how much torque there is. I'll try to find my dyno chart later at home. The other thing that makes me smile is the 7200 rpm redline

 

[auto_robotics]

Just wanted to say thanks for the pics of your project. Very impressive! I understand what you mean about projects getting out off hand. Happens to me all the time...

That wiring looks seriously daunting (and I'm an EE)! I'm curious about your general process ...

So you start with a wiring loom from the donor car, right? Since most of the sensors and actuators the wiring needs to control are probably ON the engine and 3SGE computer, wouldn't most of it stay pretty much the same?

What were the major mods you needed to do to get the wiring to interface with your car? Fuse box, instrument panel, ... ? Is there a good resource you used you could point me to?

Thanks,
- Craig

 

[white90dx]

If you are an EE, the wiring won't be too difficult at all. Automotive diagrams take a little bit to figure out (compared to schematics, etc. that I was used to, at least) - but it all makes sense.

You essentially lay the two harnesses on top of each other - Take out everything 3s-fe specific from your original harness and take out everything chassis specific on the old harness and then put them together. All the fuses (at least in the case of my swap and the swap that Horse did) match in both name and value, so its easy to figure things out. There are a few different grounds to wire correctly, but those are also easy to figure out (keep the colors matched). Where things interface between the engine and chassis, you just make the choice as to what to keep (back up lights, check engine light, fuel pump power system, fan control, tach, speedo, etc.).

Any writeup meant for the Celica guys (they do motor swaps much more often) are still valid for the Camry. Make sure you have good diagrams for both your car and the motor you will be putting in. Oh, and get a whole clip if you do a full motor swap like this. There is nothing worse than missing a sensor or something from a rare japanese engine/car...

-Charlie

 

[da_horse]

Charlie pretty much sums it up above.

The differences between the ST205 (Gen 3 3sgte) and the gen 4 (3s ge/gte) wiring that jump to mind are that gen4 is COP, and mine has vvt-i. For me it was great that i had a half cut and was provided a very in depth wiring diagram. First i labelled every plug from the both engines, and then took each one out one at a time. I just sat down and stripped off all loom covering, etc and then started to trace from the ecu through each wire and where it went. Determined the common grounds, junction boxes, what relays i'd need (eg i used the newer Circuit Opening Relay). Then i repeated the process for the camry loom.

There are some differences between the two as my donor car was from 1999, and in 10 years Toyota does make quite a few changes. Once all was done i just grabbed cable cutters and went cutting, and hoping i didn't mess up! For the fuse box based wiring i just un pinned the connectors and rewired the new cables in. I wanted to retain the ability to detach the whole loom from the body loom so I just repinned the old 3sfe body loom plugs into the newer loom. That way i could essentially just reshell into another camry.

One thing to note, which i can't recall if Charlie had to do this, is that you will need a tacho booster for the tacho signal. Or you can figure out the resistor to be changed on your dash and upgrade that. Some of the MR2 guys know about this better, i had a mate who made tacho boosters so i just got him to make me one.

 

[white90dx]

One thing to note, which i can't recall if Charlie had to do this, is that you will need a tacho booster for the tacho signal. Or you can figure out the resistor to be changed on your dash and upgrade that. Some of the MR2 guys know about this better, i had a mate who made tacho boosters so i just got him to make me one.

I never ran into that problem as I have a 3rd gen (distributor) motor. Still uses an igniter, and that outputs the same voltage/type of signal as the 3s-fe igniter. The other fun 4th gen+ issue (Caldina motors, at least) is that they no longer use a speedo gear in the trans - the speedo is fed from the ABS wheel sensors... Since you kept an S-series trans, you didn't have that problem. :thumbsup:

Don't you love being able to almost to the top of the tach? :lol:

-Charlie

 

[da_horse]

Ah yes that is correct! Also of note is that the later S series boxes use an electric speedo but the old mechanical speedo slots in just fine. The only issue is my speedo is now 10km/h slow, so to do 80km/h I should be seeing 90km/h on the dial.

Plans are to see if I can actually take the speedo and tacho out of the beams cluster and put that into the camry one with a bit of rewiring there and there.


Re the tacho, yeah it's quite hilarious to go way well into the red, I didn't tell the dyno operator at first so they just backed off at 6400? :lol:

 

[Bradley Felschow]

dude, this is sick.
do you remember what wires to keep during the dissection of the wiring harnesses?
also, isn't the st205 motor the all wheel drive one? or does the fe box work okay with the ge? i'm keen on doing the swap i just wanna make sure i have all the fact's t'd off before attempting.(should probably look for a cheap daily prior to commencement though haha).
but yeah any really really important info that you can share and/or quote would be amazing! wouldn't mind the gte BUUUUUT don't know which box i'd need, surely the fe box is too weak for the POOWWWAAAAAH of the gte hahaha.

 

[white90dx]

dude, this is sick.
do you remember what wires to keep during the dissection of the wiring harnesses?
also, isn't the st205 motor the all wheel drive one? or does the fe box work okay with the ge? i'm keen on doing the swap i just wanna make sure i have all the fact's t'd off before attempting.(should probably look for a cheap daily prior to commencement though haha).
but yeah any really really important info that you can share and/or quote would be amazing! wouldn't mind the gte BUUUUUT don't know which box i'd need, surely the fe box is too weak for the POOWWWAAAAAH of the gte hahaha.

You'll need to find diagrams and figure out the wires for yourself, probably. Actually Huy and I both have decent diagrams at this point (though, not with details of what wires will end up where). Like I said earlier in the thread, you just take out all the stuff that goes to the stock motor, put in the stuff that goes to the new motor and you are off and running. You are going RHD to RHD, so you don't have to fight the harness as much as I did on my BEAMS into USDM Camry Alltrac swap.

Huy (da_horse) used a BEAMS motor - it comes from a FWD Celica. Either way though, there are multiple engine and transmission choices that are all compatible (3s-fe, 2vz-fe, 3vz-fe, 1mz-fe, 3mz-fe, 3s-ge, 3s-gte all mate up with S or E series manual transmissions and A1xx and A5xx auto transmissions). Whether they handle the power is a mixture of the driver and how modified the engine is, how good the tires are, etc.

-Charlie

 

[IGoomba57]

What CV shafts did you use for this one?

 

[Rdrcr]

^^^^
Good question. I’d like to know too.

Mike

 

[white90dx]

What CV shafts did you use for this one?

Probably stock Camry 4-cylinder manual axles. The S54 trans is very similar to the S51 (?) stock trans.

-Charlie