Homologation preparation

Since the car has to fulfill some mandatory things for the homologation process, I have to change some parts and bits.

After the car pick up, I have noticed that the car had extensive oil losses. The interessting thing though is, that this only occured once after pushing the car hard in the first 3 gears. Afterwards, after the cleaning it newer hapened again. I also noticed that I have too much oil in the engine. Will have to exchange the oil anyway in the next few days.

After looking at the car from the underside i noticed that the steering boot was broken, so this is one part which needs to be exchanged.

Everything else was looking very good and doesn't need to be touched or modified.

I also think that the oil leakage problems are linked to the sandwich plate of the oil relocation kit, but since I still have the HICAS in the car, it is impossible to get to it with a wrench and to tighten it. This will have to wait after the homologation process and after I have removed the HICAS.

Also, as it is stated in the Austrian law, i need a rear fog light. Finding out that it costs approx 400€ in Japan i had to pass on this one so i decided to make my own fog light.

So, I took the left reverse light, put it in an oven at approx 90-100 °C for maximum 5 minutes. (Offcourse I removed the bulb before) and had 2 parts afterwards. I decided not to clear the glue as I will use it again after I have finished the product.

The first thing for me was to wash all the parts. For this I used a standard toothbrush, warm water and standard kitchen cleaning substance to remove any oil and make it really clean.

As it was a simple bulb with reflector thingy, i decided to find a LED fog light and implement the circuit board of it into the standard housing.

And this was clearly the hardest part - finding a LED foglight which was looking decently enough and had the measurements that would fit into the standard housing.

After some hours of searching I came up with this little thing:

It is a Polish product from a company called SecoRüt, it is declared as a rear foglight (red) for 12V-36V and enough for me, it had an E-Number even though the producer claims this number is not valid after I open the housing! I really don't care since I won't change the reflector and the circuit board.

After some research I've also found the correct measurements for this!

So i started thinking that since I need something in approx. 60x70mm, if I take away the housing and only leave the circuit board I should be able to get there.

After taking apart the housing there was a big white round plastic thing which was approximately 2cm in diameter and 1.5cm high, where the cables came out. My plan was to use the standard cables with the standard Nissan connector so i started to saw this white little thingy. Ans so I did until i reached something hard (was hard for 2 sec. or so) and then i reached something hard again, stopped and then started thinking. It was like "If I can use this light for a voltage range from 12V to 36V there has to be some electronical circuit on it, but where is it?". And this was the moment where i realised that I've just destroyed this PCB and I'm probably screwed and will have to buy a new light. So, I thought since it was late already, I will scrub the rest of the white plastic away and will take it to the local electronics store where I was heading anyway to buy some parts to see what they will say.

NOTE: since I'm thinking to switch to the LED reverse light in the future i will probably use the same light (with white LEDs) and use the cables going out from the board and just add the connector pins in order to use the standard Nissan connector.

The guy there started calcuclating quickly and after only one minute he knew which resistor I needed and how the LEDs were connected to each other. 2 minutes later we had a working light again :)

He saved me a small amount of money, but he definitely saved my day!

After fiddling and fuddling to get the circuit board fitted into the standard housing (i had to grind away a part of the circuit board which was too much anyway) I decided to take the original reflector, modify it and try it out and I was impressed by the light power! so, after some modification on the connector, this is the outcome of nearly 4 hours of work alltogether. I glued everything together with the liquid plastic.