When it comes to restoring an old car, many of the problems can be solved by starting with a fresh chassis. Dealing with rust, road grime, and gunk that has built up over the decades can be a nightmare. Building from a body-in-white would be significantly easier than starting with a beat-up donor chassis. That's why we were excited when a Chinese concern announced it would be selling complete fresh reproduction chassis of Toyota's iconic AE86 Corolla. To find out if these Alibaba chassis were any good, the boys at BigTime bought one, as well as a thrashed AE86 donor chassis. Their idea was to attempt to fit all of the parts from a ragged example into the new chassis to see how good, or indeed bad, it might be. Unfortunately, it didn't go as smoothly as they had hoped. "Keep in mind this is the first one of these," ...
When it comes to restoring an old car, many of the problems can be solved by starting with a fresh chassis. Dealing with rust, road grime, and gunk that has built up over the decades can be a nightmare. Building from a body-in-white would be significantly easier than starting with a beat-up donor chassis. That’s why we were excited when a Chinese concern announced it would be selling complete fresh reproduction chassis of Toyota’s iconic AE86 Corolla.
To find out if these Alibaba chassis were any good, the boys at BigTime bought one, as well as a thrashed AE86 donor chassis. Their idea was to attempt to fit all of the parts from a ragged example into the new chassis to see how good, or indeed bad, it might be. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as smoothly as they had hoped.
“Keep in mind this is the first one of these,” says BigTime mechanic Mike Day. “So there’s gonna be some things that don’t fit great, and they’re still dialing in the tooling, but there’s a lot of really bad stuff on this thing. Everything’s crooked, this weld is not completed and cracked, if you look at it from the front this [passenger] A-pillar is an inch and a half lower than that [driver] side.”
In the build process, the BigTime crew definitely found a few things that would give a Toyota engineer some pause. Bad welds, a few shortcuts, mismatched holes, poor fitment, missing hardware, and mis-drilled components were just a few of the issues they encountered. Like Mike said, this was the first chassis, so maybe subsequent examples will be better than this, but do you really want to spend ten grand plus import duties to find out?
The fact remains, however, that this chassis has potential. With some refinement and attention to detail, it could become a great starting point for any AE86 enthusiast. But for now, it’s a mixed bag.
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