Toyota Mark II

Almost all generations of Toyota Mark II looked incredibly charismatic- especially the two-door model produced in the period up to the year 1980. The last Mark II produced by Toyota was also a coupe and had a body series X 30/X 40.This model was produced from December 1976 to August 1980. Exactly this model will be discussed in today’s article.

I had never seen this model in Yerevan before and the first time I heard about it from the workers of Toyota Service Center, to whom once an owner of Mark II turned to repair the engine.
Having found him, I did everything in my power to help him have the engine repaired. How that man treated the car further- was a big question, since we no longer saw each other.
By the way, these are the photos taken in that period.
A few years later, one my friends decided to enrich his retro car collection with Toyota Mark II X40 (coupe version). Our search did not last too long, since there were very few such Toyotas in Armenia.
Soon we found the very car, which is described above. It was a forty-minute drive from Yerevan to a village called Ushi. We were delighted to see the car in such a good condition. Of course, there were some missing details, unoriginal parts and minor damages on the body. But the good news was that the metal wasn’t corroded at all. However, the most interesting was under the hood. It turned out that after repeated attempts, the owner had failed to fully restore the native engine and replaced it with a carburetor-engine of soviet GAZ-24.

 This engine is well-known for its simplicity in operation. However, under no circumstances can this straight-four engine be compared with the native six-cylinder multipoint fuel injection engine.
It didn’t take much persuasion to make the owner agree to sell the car, but only on condition that we bought it without the engine.  So we had to exert every effort to manage to take out the engine before dark and send the car to our garage on a tow truck. We had set off for Ushi with light luggage and without having thought of an instant purchase. And therefore we only had a couple of wrenches, a bent screw driver, pliers and an adjustable spanner. It's hard to believe, but it took an hour for us to remove the engine, which was so valuable for the former owner and so much unsuitable for us.
At present, this Toyota is at an initial stage of restoration- all the missing components are intensely searched for. We have found the original engine only quite recently.
That’s all for now.
Watch for updates to be informed about the restoration progress of this car.