Lots has happened

Hi all!

As holidays are coming up pretty fast, I have also changed into turbo boost mode.

As You might recall I have this to do list for the garage. Now here is the updated version:

• Paint the wall behind the sink and where the heater was
• Get the sink to work (exchange the siphon which the guys broke during their work)
• Clean the f****** mess

• Clean the working room
• Install some breadboards above the working desks

• Buy stainless steel plates to cover the working desks and install them
• Install all the fixed equipment (drill, bench grinder, bench vice...)
• Refill the compressor oil
• Clean the groove again and fix the wall cover panels.

Now, as You can read and see, I was really busy the last couple of days to finish the main parts of the garage before I start taking the car apart. After all, I really want as clean as possible garage for working.

New parts and plans

After having my garage cleaned and after some loooooong talks and calls to Leo few things have changed.

The biggest change is that I'm not going to use the R35 brake setup for the car as it simply doesn't give enough flexibility to use a wider wheel combination ranges. I would basically be limited to 18" or bigger wheels which would be PITA when going to some track days as a good wheel needs a high side wall, which is impossible with 18" wheels on this car.

Instead of the R35 brake setup which practically is gone already, I will be going with the Stoptech brake system. 

Now there are some benefits from it, comparing to the R35 brake system:

• Lighter and smaller
• Much more combinations of wheels and tires can be used with these
• Spare or refurbishing parts are much much cheaper
• The brakes can be homologated easily without any issues
• Caliper adapters are already delivered with the kit and are therefore not necessary to machine
• The color is black which means I don't need to repaint them as I wanted them Black

As You see a lots of benefits.

I have also weighted the car and I have to tell that without the seats and some small parts it weights 1470kg which is far tooooooo much.

If possible, I would like to get it under 1400kg but it will definitely be difficult to get it there - very difficult that is.

Some new parts arrived from whiteline and even though everyone is satisfied with them, I wasn't as there were two most important packages missing, the HICAS lockout bar has cracked paint (which I really don't matter and I hope it's only paint and not the material as well) and it seems that one bushing set was used already. The vendor was informed and is now checking the issues with the supplier. Still, not satisfied.

I have a tough decision to make about the seats as well. Firstly I was going to go for the Cusco/Bride Vios III full bucket seats but it seems that the Austrian bureaucracy is just really fucked up and that it is impossible to get those seats homologated for a street car. I hope to find out tomorrow. If this is true, I will have to go with the Cusco/Bride Stradia II which are unfortunately nearly 6kg heavier then the full bucket ones but are good looking as well :)

I have also made a list of things to do until my deadline. The deadline is April, 15th 2014 as I am planning to drive to the "Carfreitag" event on the Nürburgring on the 18th. 2 days after this event I will probably drive to a guy in Germany who is able to get my car legal with all modifications and give me all the papers necessary, which are needed for the Austrian government.
Unfortunately the list is very long and I hope to get it all finished until April.

So, here it goes:

• Abflug Frontdiffuser
• Adjustable front tierod and front upper arms
• Take out the engine, clean it, seal it and give it some new things like oil and water pump, timing belt...
• Integrate Tomei oil sump baffle plate
• Fluidampr Crankshaftdamper
• MAYBE integrate an oilcooler for the differential
• Relocate the battery and the window washing water container to the boot
• Paint the engine bay
• Mount the SARD breather tank into the engine bay
• Paint the engine valve and timing belt cover
• Implement the Nismo Engine and Gearbox mounts
• MAYBE a Carbon drive shaft
• Kansai Strut brace front
• Okuyama fixed strut brace rear
• Door sealing on the door side as they are porose and partially broken
• Remove the underfloor sealing, clean the underfloor, fix the car jack bump and paint the underfloor
• Paint the rear subframe
• Exchange all bushings with new one from whiteline
• Brakeupgrade to Stoptech brakes
• Remove HICAS
• Apply the gold heat reflective foil in the engine bay and on the underfloor above the gearbox if the price is ok
• New steering wheel as it seems that mine is for race use only
• New seats - probably Bride Stradia II
• Remove the rear view mirror and the whole assembly as it is ugly and use a new mirror and stick it to the window
• MAYBE exchange the cockpit with a newer one without bubbles
• BIG MAYBE if there is enough time - build a new airbox and rear seat cover

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,
RoB

Garage is comming on pretty well

Hi all,

My last post was long time ago as I was on a business trip and had a lot to do.

Now I've finally found some time to write some news on here.

My Garage is finally getting done as we speak.
What has changed?

Firstly, I have washed the whole floor with the pressure washer. Now, even though I'm not 100% satisfied, it looks much cleaner and I can work with this. The agreement with my landlord was to have a nice floor put in the garage somewhere in the summer next year. Can't wait :)

Second thing was to put all the shelves into the garage and fill them with the stuff which I have collected over the past few weeks/months.

The most important thing for working in the garage this year was to get the heating system installed by the landlord. Unfortunately he didn't tell me this in advance and started to work and sledgehammer through the wall without having the car backed up or all the stuff covered up.
What I ended with is shelves and stuff full of dust which i can clean after they finish the job (off course, who else should do it? it's not their fault that all of a sudden this stuff appeared in the garage while they were working!?) and paint the wall where the heater was before.

Also, notice my new sink with a small closet for various stuff! I like it. And I have warm water. Like it even more.
You can see the new blower with the heater as well. I really don't understand why they didn't go higher with it, but I actually don't care as long as this thing works properly.

Next things to do:

• Paint the wall behind the sink and where the heater was
• Get the sink to work (exchange the siphon which the guys broke during their work)
• Clean the f****** mess
• Clean the working room
• Install some breadboards over the working desks
• Buy stainless steel plates to cover the working desks and install them
• Install all the fixed equipment (drill, bench grinder, bench vice...)
• Refill the compressor oil
• Clean the groove again and fix the wall cover panels.

Basically not all of the thing are necessary and some of them will be done when I have to wait for some car parts and won't have anything else to do.

Keep on reading :)

Few days left to homologation and some new parts again...

In two weeks from now on I will bring my car to the homologation garage!

In the meantime I have let the car be technically inspected and there are 2 issues at the moment:

1. the bushings of the front upper control arms on both sides are damaged and need to be prepaired or exchanged! I'm not sure if this is a problem for the homologation but I really wouldn't want to change those parts before winter as I'm planning anyway on upgrading the suspension parts.

2. one hose of the fuel tank bleeding got loose so I need to fix it.

Further on, since I'm a kind of an perfectionist, I decided to make the same modification to the reverse light as I made for the fog light.

This time everything went quicker and the result is extraordinary! Now I can really see something when driving reverse!

This week, some new parts were delivered from jdl-brakes.com

One HKS Hi-Power cat back exhaust which was delivered with the Jasma certificate (which for some reason is needed in Austria for the homologation)...

...and since I'm planning on upgrading my brakes to the R35 GT-R brake system, I also ordered new Alcon brake discs and some Ferodo pads!

As sometimes everybody needs a little luck in their lives, I was lucky enough to be sent on a business trip to the UK! Good thing is I have ordered the brake calipers there and have picked them up personally in order to avoid some high postage costs :) Thanks to Graham once again :)

Keep on following :)

... and on the car!

After giving You some updates what happened in/with the garage, now some updates on the car.

First of all I finished wiring of the rear fog light. Now it includes the functional rear fog light and the illuminated switch. I also decided not to go on with the stock connector type and change the connector to an AMP sealed type one.

Since I will no longer use the radio, for the fog light I used the radio fuse. Unfortunately, for this I had to soldier the wires to the fuse connector. Normally I wouldn't recommend any soldiering in the car because soldiering is basically always a weak point but at the moment, for the homologation process I wanted it to look clean and professional so I didn't really had a choice.

Don't be confused by the reverse light. The car was in reverse and the engine was offcourse not running. Just wanted to see the contrast and the difference between those two lights. I decided I will definitely change the reverse light and all other lights to LED types as soon as the car is homologated.

The next thing was to exchange the front left drive shaft boot. Before, it looked something like this:

Now this was a special adventure. First my father organized some aftermarket boots but after removing the shaft from the car we quickly noticed that the aftermarket boot was a crap. First of all one of those two came without the clamps and both came without the grease!? WTF?? Anyway, they wouldn't fit anyway because apparently the housing of the engine side of the drive shaft isn't round at all. Doesn't matter, returned the aftermarket boot without any problem and ordered an original one from Nissan. 1.5 hours later it was exchanged and the car was ready to drive again. Yay :)

Some minor works were to adjust the front toe since the car was pulling to the right and to put the interior back together again after the long time. I also gave some other parts a nice cleaning and put them back into the car again. And I took the nasty rusting stuff from the car, grinded it and put it back onto the car. Sorry, no after pictures.

I know, this stuff is not really visible, but I know that there is rust on the car and I don't want to have it!

I also took the wiper arms off the car and after some grinding I gave them a new color treatment. Looks nice :)

Off course not to forget that I finally installed the torque split controller controls. The initial plan was to use the clock housing since the clock wasn't working, but my attempt to drill through it was not successful. So I decided to make the front plate out of carbon which I had at home and use the back of the clock housing to cover up the PCB of the torque split controller controls. Here's everything put back from the drivers point of view:

Next steps: finding a proper LED lighting for the interior and homologating the car. This should happen next week or latest in two weeks! Then if the garage is finished, I can finally remove HICAS and search for the oil leaking spot which I assume is the sandwich plate for the oil relocation kit.

Until then, keep on driving! :)

Cheers

A lot has happened in the garage...

Hi all!

My last days of my vacation are here and I've finally found some time to write some news on here!

A lot has happened after my return from the business trip.

First off I finally finished (only 85%) my working desks for the workshop. After a long search I found the perfect wood for the tabletop. It's a screen-printed plate. Very hard, a bit heavy and usually used as trailer floor. So I guess it will be alright for my usage. It's bolted together with the table frame with 4 M8 bolts.

Nearly simultaneously the owner finished painting the garage and the working room so I've decided to move all the stuff from the garage to the future moving room.

As one of the last steps in the last two days we finished mounting all future lights in the garages (not yet in the working room) and mounting all of the electrical outlets and switches.

Unfortunately the electrics guy can't work on wiring of the garage until next week because some main electrical parts like fuses and the junction box is missing! Wonder why nobody thought about that before?!

Next steps will be to wire everything, to "dress up" the cavern and make some mountings for the drill and duplex machine. And offcourse, to install some light in the working room.

Cheers