Horse's BEAMS 3SGE Camry SV21

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

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.

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

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.

Bradley Felschow said:

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.

Click to expand...

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