Another day, another Subaru. This time, with no turbo and two more cylinders.
Month: January 2015
After selling my M3 its been a long slog deciding what I want to replace it with. Long nights trawling trademe, lots of questions to various sellers about their cars yet nothing has really made me go “WOW, I MUST OWN THIS!”.
Today I decided to go try a few cars on the watchlist and see if I liked any of them. The lucky victims today were a VW Golf R32 MK5, a Toyota Blade Master G and a Nissan 350Z.
First was a trip to Turners, who had the Golf R32 and Blade. They also had a manual Golf GTI that I wanted to nosy at.
Registered to test drive, like usual (not my first Rodeo) and walked into the warehouse. R32 and GTI on the left, a pair of Blades on the right. First was to actually view the cars before driving them. I already knew what Golfs were like inside, so off I went to look at the Blades. First one I come to, stick my head near the open window. Ugh, stale smoke. Nope Nope Nope. Hope the other one is better.
Toyota Blade Master G
The first thing I should mention about the Blade Master G is that Toyota took their highest spec Corolla Auris (usually fitted with a 4 cylinder up to 2.4L) and shoehorned the 206kw 2GR-FE 3.5L V6 from a Camry into the front. They only came out in Automatic.
I jump in, no smokey smell here, yay. Its a 2007 Toyota Blade Master G in White. First impressions of this one is that it’s pretty low spec, no leather, no dual climate, no cruise and some awful fake woodgrain on the dash. Like a lot of imports these days it has a colour screen in dash radio, but of course being an import everything is in Japanese and it has no band expander meaning it’s restricted to lower frequencies. As mentioned this one had only single zone climate control, but one thing I did notice was how unintuitive the vent controls were. one button to cycle though and the display being on the passenger’s side of the console not the drivers. odd.
Along with the lovely woodgrain theres a helping of Alcantara in various places, like the usual seat bolsters and door cards but also strangely, on the lid of the passengers top glovebox.
Speaking of seats, comfortable but not very aggressive bolstering. Not heated in this model.
One quick note is just how awesome the name is. Blade Master G. Seriously, its like its a hiphop samurai or something.
The S62B50 engine as used in the E39 BMW M5 is designed for some pretty heavy use. One of the features the crazy guys over at the ///M Division put into this engine to make sure it can last longer during a good thrashing is a pair of oil scavenge pumps and a pair of control solenoids.
The main function for these is to keep oil going to the right places under heavy cornering. Most engines unless they have a baffled sump will tend to have the engine oil slosh to one side under heavy cornering. Some cars (including the BMW V8s) also suffer from oil building up in the heads and unable to drain. This means disaster if it causes the oil pickup in the sump to draw in air instead of oil. Its a very quick way to running a bearing.
A solenoid will activate at over 0.9G of cornering force, allowing the scavenge pump for that side to draw oil from the engine head and return to quickly to the sump. This helps to keep the rear of the sump topped up with oil and keep the oil pickup submerged.
Just goes to show how far the ///M Division went in order to make this engine special and make the E39 M5 the beast that it is.
