Rebirth of an Iconic Yaris

[CTScott]

This is somewhat apropos for my 10,000th post here. Some, who have been around since the old days of YarisWorld will recognize this as ChinoCharles' Yaris. I recently drove out to Ohio from Connecticut to add her to my Yaris fleet. I have a buddy who really needs an inexpensive, reliable and economical second car, so the plan was to put it back together for him.

I had seen pictures of it, prior to heading West, but was still a bit shocked to see it in person. Charles had gutted the engine bay to prep for installation of a built engine, removed the fender and bumpers to test fit a wide body kit, and gutted the interior. When I picked her everything was in boxes or piles, so we stuffed the Yaris with what would fit inside and stuffed the rest in the back of my Tacoma.

Here's what she looked like when I picked her up:





Shortly after I arrived home and started unloading the pieces and parts I realized that the prior owner was a smoker, so I decided to completely clean the interior, including the A/C system to purge the smell. In the meantime I needed to pick up and engine and tranny for her, and decided that since my buddy's wife and daughter will also be driving the car, that I should convert it from 5 speed manual to automatic. I tracked down a low mileage (under 35K miles) engine and transmission and began amassing the parts necessary to do the MT to AT conversion.

While waiting for those to arrive I got back to working on the interior and while I had the dash apart I rewired the existing power window kit, added power locks, remote start with keyless entry, cruise control, and fog lights. The thorough cleaning of the interior went well, as I can not detect even a trace of smoke smell.

As I installed the new engine and tranny I decided to check the A-Arm bolts and ended up spending an entire Sunday fighting with one that was so rusted that it snapped. The MT to AT install proved interesting as besides changing the tranny, flywheel, shifter, shifter cable, and ECM, I had to add 19 additional pins to the ECM and wire them to the AT connectors.

This evening I finished the last item, which was purging and filling the A/C, so she is now ready for the road. My buddy is very excited as inside and out she looks like a new car: