DumHed

if my insurance dollars come through before they're sold I might have to grab em. Can't have too many sets of GTR rims!

CC: if you want you can take my car for a spin some time, being reasonably close to my work. My clutch is a very heavy solid centre (unsprung) 5 puck brass button, and I have no problem with it on the street. I can do hill starts on slippery roads in the rain and it hasn't been a problem at all. Now that I have the n/a engine though I might put something a bit softer in as the current one is overkill. I need an excuse to pull it out cos the thrust bearing is mega noisy and needs replacement

the reason the alignment settings are different for each side is that the road has camber on it, so the car needs to be slightly differenly set up on each side to make it track straight and give even tyre wear.

it's pretty stupid that a workshop can be that lazy.... A piece of fuel hose or similar fits directly on top of the board over the connector and is held in place by the ECU cover.

send me an email and I'll send some pics

yeah the joiner should be taking up that flex. That's why the factory setup has a rubber pipe all the way from the turbo to the AFM. A couple of inches of silicon pipe, or strong rubber hose will do the job. Pirtek or Enzed will have suitable stuff. You'll just need to measure the stainless pipe to get the right diameter.

I think that'd work fine. Just make sure the pipe's cleaned up 100% before putting it back on. A bracket to hold the AFM / filter end of the pipe would also be a good idea Also, finding a clip for the AFM plug would be a good thing for reliability - at the moment it could vibrate loose over time (like the daughterboard did)

I'm known for being dodgy, but some of the stuff on that car scares even me! It'll get sorted slowly though, and it should be a nice car. The daughterboard was plugged into the ECU with no retainer of any kind. In my previous ECUs I've put a small rubber spacer on the ECU lid that holds the board in place and have had no problems - but this one was just hanging off the connector! There are heaps of dodgy bits of wiring and plumbing that I would have been embarrassed to show anyone if I'd done it! None of it is un-fixable, but it really just shows a complete lack of attention to detail, and general laziness. Most of these things could have been done properly with little to no extra effort. Then there are other things like the rigid metal intake pipe to the turbo. It looks well enough made, and fits in fine - but did no one think about what happens when the engine moves under load? The intake pipe is working an an engine damper! The exhaust mounts are an amazing work of abstract art, with all kinds of random bits of metal tack welded together (only one is intact on the whole exhaust) All of this stuff can be sorted, but with a couple of minutes' thought when it was put together most of the problems could have been prevented.

I's well known that the CA and RB are extremely similar engines in design. It's also well known that the CA is notorious for killing bearings. What no one seems to be getting here is that the rocker arms in the SR20 are not its weak point. The hydraulic lash adjusters are. Funnily enough, the CA and RB (except the 26) also use HLAs, and although not as pronounced, have the exact same problem. If they did have solid lifters everyone would whinge because they couldn't just bolt in a set of aftermarket cams without a long and involved adjustment process. Many very high revving engines use rocker arms. F1 engines, jap bike engines (mine does 14500rpm), Honda VTEC engines, etc. Have a look at the internals of some time. The SR20 has a much more reinforced block (even being alloy it's heavier than a CA) compared to the CA, and much stronger rods. Plenty of SRs have been making 250+rwkw with stock internals reliably. I know of one that's been running 260 at the wheels for quite a while with stock rods, and after a teardown the rods have been tested and measured and are 100% within spec. No damage at all. They are actually a very strong forged and shot peened rod straight from the factory. One point that's worth mentioning too is that the HLAs are not a problem till you start upping the revs. On a high powered n/a engine you need revs to make power, but with forced induction you can just run higher boost levels. More boost is more stress, but lower rpm is less stress - so in the end you can make more power without excessive reliability problems. An SR20's strong point is its midrange, so why not just extend that instead of trying to rev it past its optimum range? Anyway, I'm not going to get into an argument, but I think people should sit back and look at the big picture. Revs are not the only thing, a big turbo is not the only thing, number of cylinders is not the only thing. With a bit of logical though you can see that the ideal path to more power is different for different engines. Just because you'd change rods, pistons, valvetrain, crank, etc in a CA to make more power through higher revs doesn't mean you have to do that on an SR to make power. Intelligent modification looks at the engine's stengths, and builds on those, rather than wasting resources trying to correct a perceived deficiency which, in the scheme of things, is not that important for 99.9% of peoples' goals.