H3XME

Might wanna take a jerry can or two. Make sure you top up at every petrol station. Also, there is 0 premium fuel up there so if you will up with Momentum99 or V-Power, you have no chance.

It may not be related, but I've been using Mishimoto magnetic oil drain plug on my cars for years now. It's a really strong magnet and catches whatever metallic dirt they may be in the system. Works really well and for sub £15 "mod" it's worth every penny. As for oil, i religiously use HKS 5W30 synthetic oil. I have tried Shell 5W30 oil before and it may be just placebo, but I think the car prefers the HKS oil. 

https://www.part-box.com/product/mishimoto-magnetic-oil-drain-plug-m12-x-1-25-lexus-is250-and-more/

https://www.part-box.com/product/hks-super-oil-5w30-synthetic-engine-oil-4l/

I wanna incline towards the brakes. Does the car pull to a side under heavy braking? I've been driving the car for too long to notice anything like that enough to bother me. Although I can't let go of the steering wheel and go perfectly straight either, but when i notice it I generally just blame it on lorry rails (imprints) in the tarmac so the surface is never perfectly flat. Driving the IS250 compared to a GT86 the steering is VERY light in comparison, so I just blame it on that mainly. Sorry for not being much help.

Very clean car! Looks looked after. If the plugs have already been done, I wouldn't stress about changing them. If you want oil and filter, let me know. We sell performance car parts including HKS. 5W30 HKS Oil is what I use. Magnetic oil drain plug is also a worthy upgrade. You don't want metal shavings floating around 🙂 

On 6/24/2021 at 4:31 PM, ColinBarber said:

The IS250 only has direct injection. Therefore it doesn't matter what fuel you use, none of it will wash over the intake valves to stop carbon build-up.

is it direct only? I was under the impression it was port & direct like my 86. 

6 minutes ago, Spottedlaurel said:

Or it could just be someone like me! I knocked on the door and had a chat with the owner when I saw a Mk1 LS400, leaving him my number. Seven years later I got a call and it's now mine......

Haha, I love it when that happens. I did that a few years ago.. On the way to work I kept driving past this BMW E36 that was stood on the drive for years.. actually knocked on the door and an elderly lady answered. I asked if she'd sell it, and she said I can have it for £250.. when I got home I had a look on eBay again for a project and found a V8 Soarer for £450. I wish I got the BMW as well, but I ended up getting the Soarer for an absolute steal. Guy had it parked on his drive for 7 years. It had a suspected oil leak and seized brakes. Car didn't run due to a faulty fuel pump. I took it anyway as it was cheap. Got it home and found out that thel the oil leak is coming from an old rusty oil filter. Replaced the fuel pump, rebuilt the front calipers and serviced the car and it was sweet as a nut. When it's that cheap, it's worth taking risks.

Some time later, I came across LS400 the same way. Older chap had it since new. He wanted £1500 though. I didn't end up taking that as LS400s were for sale for less than a grand at the time.

Everyone should check on the government site if their car is compatible to avoid potential issues.- https://www.gov.uk/check-vehicle-e10-petrol

More specifically, they say that IS250 made between August 2005 and September 2007 is NOT compatible with E10 petrol. Mine is '08 registered car, I'd have to find out when it was built to know for sure, but I only fill up with 99Momentum (if possible) as we have direct injection engine and carbon build up could be an issue. 97+Oct fuel, "SUPER Unleaded" will still be available, so it won't necessarily make any difference to me, but if anyone here fills up with standard 95 unleaded, you should check if you car can take it 🙂 

57 minutes ago, rich1068 said:

This is certainly one of the reasons they're in demand. At the other end of the scale I find there's a growing market for late 90s/early 00s motors, Japanese in particular.

My 83 year old father still drives my '02 IS300 and he mentioned a young lad in another IS giving him a wave and a thumbs up the other day.

This is going to get a bit tricky with the introduction of E10 petrol from September. Older cars can't run it, so I think older cars (pre-2001?) should become cheaper because of it. Though, 99Momentum, V-Power and such will still be available, but not many people fill up with that. Only really enthusiasts tbf. I only run Tesco 99momentum in my IS250 because of direct injection and potential carbon build up, so I try to prevent it as much as possible. Can't say I feel any difference in this particular car when using better fuel, it's just better for the engine. 

10 minutes ago, KeefO said:

I've had two occasions recently when people have knocked on my door asking if I want to sell my 21 year old IS200.  The second time was a guy in a company van so I don't think it was any sort of scam.  He claimed he wanted it for scrap and offered me £200.  This seems very odd to me.  Are old IS200 hundreds becoming sought after?  The car is a good runner but by no means in great cosmetic condition.

Chances are they just want them as a cheap drift/track car before they get scrapped. Not really that unusual. BMWs and MX5s aren't as cheap as they used to be, so IS200 and IS250s are the next best thing.. rwd, manual, cheap. 

3 minutes ago, Kiefels said:

The trouble with finding a direct replacement is: The way the speaker actually mounts onto the parcel shelf. I think the ACTUAL speaker is not an exact size. It's a 5.5 or 6.5" and there is no way in hell that you are going to get it to fit the original Mark Levinson Mount. 

Getting a new Woofer from Lexus is around £500, so scrappies are the only direct replacement option. Or as Mr Vlad says, replace it with something completely different and mount them differently.

 

I don't mind cutting into the car to mount it. That's not an issue. I'm just useless when it comes to anything electric. Wiring will be a challenge as it's not going to be plug n play. I saw a very nice solution to an aftermarket 8" sub in the is250. Guy just mounted it behind the rear arm rest.. I have mine down at all times anyway to use the cup holders as there's only 1 upfront (stupid). 

On 6/15/2021 at 5:13 PM, Kiefels said:

Getting the subwoofer out, was a little tricky.

It was quite some time ago but as far as I remember.

10mm bolts holding the lower part of the back seat. 2 or 3 of them, they need to be removed.

I think you have to either push the lower seat back or pull it forwards, as it has hooks the hook into brackets. Don't forget to push the lap belt through.Then it's a case of man-handling the seat out of the car. It's  not heavy, just large and you are in it's way.

Remove the rear headrests. Push in the tab and pull the headrest out

There are now, on the back part of the seat, metal brackets that are bolted to the boot partition. Remove those also.

The seat belts are clipped in at the top of the seat back. They are pretty tough to unclip, just persevere

You may need to remove the seat belt anchors, I think sometimes I did and sometimes I only required certain access.

With the rear, back seat, removed. The parcel shelf is clipped in, in several places, that I can't recall, they are quite tough to dislodge, I didn't use any tools as I didn't want to damage the material. Don't forget the ones right under the rear window.

Now you have access to your sub-woofer, it's the little raised number in the centre of the window

I have done it in the end. Got a replacement sub from a scrap yard. Funny thing is, I blew another one up a week ago.. I might have to get another sub and be more careful with the bass.

1 minute ago, Las Palmas said:

If consumption and taxing are your main issues you could be right.

About the IS250 being close to perfect you need to look at the forum for the IS and see if you still think that.

Here it is possible to buy a lot of used IS and not one diesel. Could be for a reason. So yes: it is hard to find a good used diesel when owners will not sell.

The few common issues there are with IS250s are generally little things that are cheap and easy to fix - compared to the diesel it's even more economical to fix should anything go wrong. I don't see the benefits of having IS220d to be honest. For the sake of extra £200/year on tax for manual IS250s it's a no brainer. 

On 6/16/2021 at 10:40 AM, Jaro said:

Yes, with every service the calliper guide pins should be lubed up with silicone grease, as the design is quite bad and they end up seizing and rusting in place. When I have done mine, they were jammed in pretty good. It took 2 bottles of WD-40, a claw hammer and a lots of swearing in between that to get them off! 🙂

No need with every service. I greased mine up 2 years ago after getting new pins. Changed discs and pads the other week and it was still very well lubed, calipers slid right off. To be safe, I'd do it every 2 years or 20k miles whichever comes quicker. It's an easy job, but when you're doing an oil change/service it's a PITA to take wheels off and calipers just to grease them up. Doing it annually is excessive. 

19 hours ago, Las Palmas said:

I believe this to be correct.

Here I see a lot of 220D driving around and the license plates tell they are all more than 10 years old. I have not seen one of them pushing out black exhaust even uphill (where we live it is either up or down more than 50% of the time), most of the diesels look well maintained and when looking at used cars I have so far not seen one Lexus diesel. A lot of RX, NX and of course an abundance of IS, SE and CT.

Sure, as anything goes, there's a difference between well looked after cars and poorly looked after cars. However some engines are very sensitive to negligence - perfect example of this diesel. I personally don't see the point of owning IS220d when the MPG and tax difference between Petrol and Diesel is minimal (for automatics anyway). I average 42mpg on the motorway at 74mph. Town, my average is 23 but if you don't drive like me, 27-28 is doable. I tried. This diesel is riddled with potential headaches you wouldn't have to worry about with IS250. I'm not saying don't get the IS220d, but given the age of these cars, it's gonna be harder and harder to find a good diesel, much harder than IS250. 

16 hours ago, ColinBarber said:

Passing an MOT isn't the full story. You could still move the CO2 tax bracket to drop a EURO emissions level by making modifications that aren't tested on an MOT.

 

The law

Under the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations (Regulations 61(7) and 61A(3)) and the Road Traffic Act 1988 (Section 42) it is an offence to use on a road a vehicle which has been modified in such a way that it no longer complies with the air pollutant emissions standards it was designed to meet.

The potential penalties are £1,000 for a car and £2,500 for a van, lorry or bus.

Under the Road Traffic Act 1988 (Section 75) it is an offence to alter a vehicle in such a way that the use of the vehicle on a road would be unlawful. A person altering the vehicle (if they knew or believed that the vehicle would be used on the road) could be found guilty of an offence under the Act.

Potential penalties are unlimited fines.

Sure there is a law for everything. You would have to seriously ***** someone off for them to go to such extent. It's a virtually invisible mod until you start digging for stuff under the car. Most modifications are to owner's discretion. Something as stupid as wrong size/format number plates is probably the most common thing I see, but there's not much of an enforcement when it comes to stuff like that. 

9 minutes ago, Linas.P said:

Some cars are easy to tune and very rewarding, so it is possible to find car which let's say has "conservative" tune from the factory and with little bit of tinkering add 30% of power. BMW B58 engine good example - it is turbocharged petrol which could be found in various different power levels from something like 280hp all the way to 376hp from factory. As such if you get model with 280hp (say BMW M240i) it is easy just to get it chip tuned to nearly 400hp without making any other changes. And there are loads of such examples of TD and turbo petrol German cars...

But Lexus is not such car where gains can be made easily or cheaply. So whereas on BMW or Golf £300 can buy you 100 more hp, on Lexus £1000 will get you 20 more! It is absolutely not worth tuning Lexus, just not the car which is "tuner friendly". 

Now I would fully agree with John - if you want more power just get IS350... but wait... they never sold one in UK 😞

You absolutely cannot compare a turbo car to N/A car. 20% power increase is a general figure with no supporting mods on a turbo car. If you want more, de-cat and better intake (if OEM is restrictive) is the way to go. With N/A car you have nothing to tune unless you go straight for a de-cat and that give you roughly only 10% increase in general.

I'd be all over IS350 if it was manual, but sadly, never was, and it never even made it to UK. This doesn't mean you shouldn't modify or do anything to a car that isn't the "performance" version of your car, which in this case would be IS-F. The best way to get power out of IS250 or any other N/A car for that matter is Supercharger/Turbo. SC is better in this case due to high compression on these engines.

There is a couple Lexus cars you can tune. RC200t and the IS200t. 4 banger turbo, get over 300hp easy, but I wouldn't go that way because in a car like that, it just seems wrong to have only 4 cylinders. 

52 minutes ago, Linas.P said:

it is 100% illegal and immoral to do that on road car. 

Having a de-cat is not illegal as such. You can still pass MOT with only one lot of cats if the car is hot before testing. If it passes MOT, it's road legal.

2 minutes ago, Linas.P said:

Taking NA cars to tuner is a thing which is far over blown... there isn't much to be gained from engine like 4GR-FSE, especially on stock engine without substantial mods. Sure if you supercharged it or turbocharged, then taking new set-up to the tuner will matter a lot!

Well, taking a stock NA car to a tuner is pointless, yes. However, like I said, headers and mainly full de-cat is the most substantial mod you can do to any car if you want power. Even on 4GR-FSE engine. We have 4 cats in these cars, remove them, get a tune and you can easily get 20hp increase. Nevermind the horse power, the torque increase is the most noticeable thing, for that alone it's worth spending the money + tune can increase the throttle response which isn't great on this car. It's a common thing, but I'm not surprised people don't do this on these cars - I mean look at the clientele. It's not exactly a sports car and people don't buy it to get any sporty feeling out of it - I might be one of the few curious ones. But that doesn't mean you can't get a little bit of something out of it with the correct mods.

I got an IS250 to explore the platform. It's cheap, reliable, sounds good, rwd, manual, 200bhp and most importantly has LSD. Can't really get anything like that for similar money. I'm gonna have a go at installing front camber arms from a different Toyota this weekend. I'm surprised there is nobody in the UK that goes to such extent (with suspension mods) with these cars yet - considering IS200/300s became quite popular to modify. Sure, many have lowered it and what not, but trying suspension components from other Toyota's is kind of an unexplored territory and it's exciting to try these things. Many parts are cross compatible but if nobody tries it, we'll never know. I'm not here to preach about what you should or shouldn't do, but saying that something doesn't work etc when it does is wrong. 

I want to dye the headliner and pillars black this summer, I was wondering if anyone ever done it before or any car? I'm only looking for a recommendation on a good fabric dye. 

Thanks

Just to put it out there, at 145k miles it might be worth considering replacing bushes. Diff and some arms. Mine is on 153k now and all bushes look fine, but the diff bushes are definitely worth doing regardless because the diff will flex less under acceleration. 

6 minutes ago, DanATR said:

Well, with all the upgrades and removal of the seats from my ATR, which are much lighter then the seats in the Lexus, over all gave me a 2second increase. Fact. it went from 7.2seconds down to 5.1seconds. (This is with an Accord Type R here, not a 250 Lexus)

Your talking to some one whos done this and done loads of track time. If you did a standing start or 2 laps around a track, with two identical cars, one with and one with out all the junk, I can assure you, you WILL see a diffrence. 0.6 seconds is LOADS!

100% agree. Standstill acceleration doesn't mean anything, losing 150kg will make a massive difference around a track. Later braking, better cornering, the lot.

Any online plate maker will make them. You just have to get him the sizes if it's not offered online as a standard size. I presume you want a massive plate to fit whole bumper cut-out on the back?

On 6/5/2021 at 8:59 PM, Linas.P said:

Customs SS headers can certainly be made for £500/650, however I am not confident they would be better flowing than even terrible factory ones. And that is for what? 8hp maybe? My £1000 claim was for HKS/Greddy headers which were properly engineered and have some graphs suggesting this "8hp" gains. To be fair they cost more than that and you won't find them anywhere anymore anyway, so it is moot point... and even the gain is easy to fake even on dyno. What I am saying is that in - in theory it is possible, in practice is quite unlikely and certainly it won't matter. 

Weight of the car obviously contributes to acceleration, however I doubt that removing seats and sound proofing would give you 2 second advantage. We are talking about like 100kg here... I have no such chubby friends, but having 2 people in the car certainly does not add 2 seconds to 60, so I doubt removing equivalent weight would make such significant difference either. Just to be clear what we are talking about - official IS250 0-60 is 8.1s... holding the brake for little boost before launching achieves ~7.5s already. So if what you saying would be true, then IS250 should be 5.5s to 60 with -100kg? No I don't think that is realistic... That is faster than IS350 with 306hp which only manages 5.7s and it would be just a second slower than IS-F with 470hp. Sure it would make car faster by maybe 0.2s, but not 2s!

Even if you strip the car to bare shell, with engine, wheels and single seat.... I doubt IS250 would ever do 0-60 in under 6s. Just not enough power, not right gearing etc.

Don't forget, these gains everybody claims - such as 8hp increase from going with different headers is a stand alone gain. You change intake and headers to catless system which you then take to a tuner. That's where the real gains appear. Induction kit is waste of money performance wise, it just looks pretty and sounds better. Exhaust (cat-less system and headers) on the other hand, you can easily see 25hp gain on a car like this with a correct tune, not to mention significant torque increase. I'm eyeing up some headers from the states, and I will get them once I find someone capable of tuning this car. And that's the only problem in the UK. There just isn't really anybody who messes with these cars so getting a tune is difficult considering how locked this ECU is. Bottom line, it is doable and it is worth it for the NA gains. If you were to go through so much money on a turbo car and you'd get barely 30hp, that's disappointing for sure, but NA game is just difficult/restricted. And yes, the ECU is "self-learning" to a point, all modern cars are like this, but changing headers and ditching cats will throw CEL because the car doesn't know what to do - it's too much of a change and not something the car would just learn on it's own. My GT86 is a perfect example of this. Same 12.5:1 compression ratio, direct injection engine that's already producing 185bhp from the factory. By installing cat-less headers, you can feel car is more responsive as it breathes better, but the real gains come in to play when you actually have it remapped/tuned. Then you go from 185bhp to 220ish with an increase of 40lbs/ft of torque. 

Someone said "if this and that worked, the manufacturer would've done it" no, that's not right. You find most cars being restricted on power due to massive cats that choke the performance purely so they pass emissions. It's all about Greta and polar bears these days. Remove your cats and get it tuned, you'll have gain on every modern car.

Another thing I forgot to post about was my new seat. I'm not a big fan of leather seats - even more so when you want to go for a "spirited drive" or in summer. I put a BRIDE X Cusco collaboration seat into my IS250 I got from work last year. I was waiting 4 months for the BRIDE seat rail to come from Japan, but I finally got it last month and now it's all in. Took me about 45mins to fit it. Driving experience & position improved by a lot! It's a suede-like material so it holds you in the seat very well, it's a half bucket seat so you get all the upper body support without sacrificing comfort as you can still spread your legs 😂 Driving position is a little bit lower which is what I needed because I'm 6'2 and I found the factory seat a bit too high even in its lowest setting. 

Small brake update

I changed my rear discs and pads the weekend. Simple job this time round. I used standard replacement Brakefit discs (310mm vented) and EBC Ultimax (OE Grade) pads.

Discs cost £83.56 (pair) and set of pads is £26.53 - If you need any parts like this, let me know I can give you discount as I work for www.part-box.com

Some time ago I was struggling with changing the pads as I couldn't take the rear calipers off due to them being seized. Managed to hammer (with rubber mallet) the calipers off and replace the slider pins, although one of them was seized in so bad I had to drill it out. Anyway, 1.5 years and 20k miles later the calipers slipped right off.

I checked the pins and they were fine, didn't even need re-greasing. Some people say you should do this every 6-12months but I really don't think it's necessary. I re-greased them anyway since the calipers were off, but I wouldn't go out of my way to grease them up every year. Every 2 years seems more realistic - especially if you binned the standard pins and replaced them with brand new ones at some point.

On 6/1/2021 at 2:22 PM, Mincey said:

still going strong at 136,000 miles. I bet it still sounds good.

I should hope so! I'm on 153k now and I have no reason to think the car hasn't got another 150k in it😄