Quiet Day

Thursdays are generally pretty quiet here.

Wednesdays I'm on the Iowa all day, so Thursdays are used to catch up on other things, and just kick back.

I've got the EGR passages in the Supra's intake manifold all cleaned out, along with the EGR valve and Vacuum Modulator for it.

I used a Hoppes 20 gauge "Boresnake" to get the passages all scrubbed out from fore to aft, and pipe cleaners and compressed air to get the valve and modulator cleaned out.

The red line shows the path of the EGR passage from the valve 'atthe rear, to where the throttle body bolts to the Upper Air Chamber" portion of the intake manifold. In the center is a core hole plug (aka "freeze plug") that you gently remove to gain access to the passage.

Photo credit goes to my buddy "Driftingmy85" over on the celica supra forum.

The entire HOWTO thread is located here in case you're curious about how to do it.

Tomorrow I'll put the whole shebang back together and take the car out for a run, AFTER I do the "apply full vacuum to valve to see if the engine stalls" test, which will tell me if the exhaust gas is indeed getting into the manifold.

I'll probably wait until Monday to go back to the smog test place and see if it passes.

If it doesn't pass, I'll get a replacement catalytic converter. I took back the Magnaflow converter I bought as it had an extra fitting for supplemental air injection which this car doesn't have, and it's the ONLY converter Magnaflow has in production that's supposedly for this car.

Two emails and a call to Tech Support at Magnaflow yielded exactly *nothing* other than "We'll get back to you".

Walker Products makes a California legal converter without the air fitting, so if if cleaning out the EGR doesn't produce a passing result, that's what I'll get.