joshuaho96

Tomei USA made the change a while back to their own spec cams to cut cost, I don't recall when exactly it happened though. WD's experience with snapped Tomei cams is possibly a crappy casting but I wouldn't be surprised if the previous owner just completely failed to adhere to proper procedure setting timing belt tension or installing the cams. Tomei JP's cams are made in-house although not all of their components are built in-house. The stories and photos I saw were not posted to Youtube or anything like that, it was a local private Facebook group. HKS' cams are fairly conservative with valve lift so I don't know if it makes any sense to go with them, you can go up to ~9.15mm before you have to clearance the head for a high lift camshaft. Something I've wondered for a while now is just how much of the improvement with these drop-in cams can actually be attributed to the lift/duration changes when they seem to be making non-trivial changes to cam timing as well.

There's a lot of drama around Tomei USA, you can look at this post to get an idea: https://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134044 Personally I don't buy Tomei USA parts because in the groups I'm in I've seen people get Tomei USA cams that don't even fit in the engine because they were machined so far off from correct. On top of this I have seen people claim that they have gotten head gaskets that were faulty from the very first turn of the key. Obviously there's some doubt as to whether the machine shop/engine builder adhered to all the necessary requirements to ensure that the deck/head were properly prepped and all that fun stuff but they claimed it was. That combined with a few other people mentioning issues they've heard was enough that I will never buy a Tomei USA part. If you think spending a little more on shipping to get a camshaft is expensive I would probably think hard about the cost of potentially having to do a camshaft replacement twice or having to spend weeks RMAing your part to Tomei USA and getting a replacement that may or may not be any better. Also, consider what your goal is with these cams. If you want better response more cam duration is probably counterproductive which is why Tomei JP makes the type R Poncam. The 260 cams cause mild idle lumpiness which you may find desirable but is caused by poor combustion stability at idle.

Every car will smell very strongly of raw fuel at cold start. Upload your NDS1 log and I can take a look.

The entire R34 factory service manual is online. It's in Japanese but you can use Google Translate for pretty much all of it. Use the EPC/electronic parts catalog to figure out what parts to order. Did you get the car PPI'd prior to purchase? I don't see any undercarriage photos. Hopefully you got the VIN and got some vehicle history as well.

AFAIK the FA24DIT is tuned a lot better from the factory, putting aside the other questionable decisions. I still don't understand why Subaru insists on shipping cars with such questionable tunes from the factory. It's fixable, but it just seems wrong to void a warranty just to linearize the torque vs accel pedal input curve.

I would start looking for line breaks in the cylinder 1 injector circuit. That's a pretty simple circuit to follow. It is very strange to me that your engine runs at all with that ignition circuit code, when I had it my car straight up would not crank over at all. It's possible that it will go away if you clear it but if it doesn't you probably shouldn't ignore it. The other mystery error codes are kind of concerning, not sure what's going on there. Could be a lot of things causing it.

When you say stutter every few seconds do you mean the idle dips and recovers? If so make sure you are 100% sure you can trust the provenance of your spark plugs. I have gotten counterfeit ebay spark plugs before and while it mostly drove normally I noticed that at idle it would stumble and then catch itself cyclically. I have no explanation as to why that happened but replacing the spark plugs with OEM plugs sourced from a trustworthy source the engine ran normally again. Does the ECU report any codes when you check via the laptop? You're going to have to figure out whether the control module is actually reporting error codes that should cause the warning lights to turn on or if it's something wrong with the cluster/wiring harness.

I'm pretty sure that these cams adjust the centerline and thus the relative timing of the intake/exhaust lobes no? I'd be curious to know what happens if you adjust the cam timing a little to get it back to stock.

Right, just important to keep in mind that everything is engineered together as a system so you have to make those adjustments if you're going to do something as significant as deleting the AWD system.

https://nissan.epc-data.com/skyline/dr30/3734-fj20t/trans/F4002/43207/ Check this EPC, I guessed as to the correct spec but it seems like NF30 Leopard rotors might work?

The F80 even stock sounds awful even compared to an RB26. I don’t know how but BMW figured out the ideal exhaust setup to make that engine sound as terrible as possible.

From: https://www.bmwusa.com/vehicles/m-models/m3-sedan/overview.html

BMW in classic fashion decided that TwinPower could either mean a single twin scroll turbo or two turbos. I still have yet to figure out why they bother with twin turbos on the M3 when it seems obvious to just slap a bigger single turbo on the B58 and call it an S58.

https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1995-nissan-skyline-23/ Personally to me the car just looked ok, nothing remarkable but somehow people were throwing down insane money for that car. I’m not sure why people pick some cars to do this to but not others.

It’s entirely dependent on the buyer. On BaT not too long ago an MNP R33 with a lot of mods sold for 105k USD but a stock red R33 with some questionable quarter panel repair didn’t break 50k USD. One of the cleanest stock silver R33 GTRs I’ve ever seen up for auction in Japan didn’t even break 100k USD a year or two back. But a reasonably decent but not exceptional condition stock LP2 R33 up for auction in California went for 235k USD.

Modifying cars the right way has never been cheap or easy. Really, just the operating costs of a normal car are pretty shocking if you actually keep track. There's a reason why car dependent nations like the US/Canada/Australia lead the world in spending on transportation in the household budget. And that's not even including the costs of all the externalities like traffic deaths, the massive environmental impact of building massively sprawling car dependent infrastructure, and the collective time everyone loses sitting in traffic.

Any thoughts on the 42R compressor map they have? Seems pretty average to me but I haven't done a detailed comparison against others.

Seems like they do it on their single turbos for some reason. No idea why. Their smallest 42mm twin turbo setup for the RB26 doesn't use it and it has a compressor map that looks like this:

OEM piston ring end gap is 0.24 to 0.34 mm. Japanese RB parts tend to be more street oriented so they try to target clearances closer to OEM. Piston to wall clearance on OEM pistons is 0.035 to 0.055 mm. Keep in mind that too much ring gap will cause issues with blowby and thus oil control. On the other hand too little gap will cause the ends to connect and cause the engine to seize. I would contact Tomei directly and see what they recommend to target for your application.

Even in the JZ engines it's pretty well known that having combustion in the exhaust from anti-lag can absolutely wreck your valvetrain.

AFAIK in the R35s disabling the AWD makes them especially awful to drive because the suspension isn't really optimized for rear-end grip, it leans quite heavily on the AWD system. The R32 to my knowledge is similar, the rear-end has a pretty ridiculous amount of anti-squat from the factory.

Yeah and the STI/WRXs are even cheaper to buy right now. I tell everyone that you have to have some weird brain damage like me to be willing to bother with the sheer amount of pain in the butt involved in these cars. They aren't super complicated by modern standards, a BMW N63 or really any modern GDI turbo V6 makes the RB26 look like a joke by comparison but there are still a lot of tricky details to get right in these cars unless you want it to just be perpetually broken.

Also, let's be real here the new Nissan Z is probably going to be both cheaper and faster than any GTS-T/GTT. RB noises are cool and inline 6s are smooth but it's really hard to argue with what seems to be a real winner. Hiroshi Tamura interviews are surprisingly low on the marketing BS and he seems to get what matters and why.

My advice is don't learn to wrench on cars with half the parts catalog NLA and pretty much every bit of rubber is perished, it really sucks and is incredibly unforgiving if you make a mistake. I know a guy with an ST205 GT4 and he is pretty depressed that he can't figure out a bunch of mechanical issues and also sourcing parts is either insanely expensive or totally discontinued/NLA. Also, you cannot rely on these cars as daily drivers, nor should you really want to. Your local driving environment may be safer than mine but in my area the number of SUVs and lifted trucks is massive and people drive horribly. Arterial roads have speeds of up to 80-90 kph/55 mph but it's interrupted by traffic signals and terribly designed highway off-ramps and on-ramps so you can have that 90 kph traffic interacting with 40 kph/25 mph traffic. I have seen what accidents look like in these cars and I'd avoid it at all cost. If you have a GTI my advice is start there and actually learn to work on those cars. Don't listen to cargo cult bro-science, actually try to understand the engineering and the underlying principles. Don't be like half the people I run into on Facebook groups asking how to delete "useless crap" like the AC idle up valve lines. Do all the maintenance and upgrades to that car while you figure out how to land a job and stable living situation that allows you to actually afford a Skyline without ruining your life in the process. Also spending 30k in "upgrades" on your GTI doesn't seem well-informed either, if it's a daily driver don't go wild modifying it into something that it isn't. My daily is a bone stock LS400 because I cannot be bothered to deal with unreliability when I need to get to work. If you really want to get into these cars because you're afraid prices will get even more ridiculous than they are now, all I can suggest is negotiating with your parents to have them buy and own the car with an option to buy it from them when you turn 25 at the price they paid plus maintenance costs. I wouldn't recommend buying anything other than a GTR or GTST, everything else is basically taxi spec and "converting" it will cost far in excess of what it would cost to just buy what you wanted to begin with.

Pikes peak is paved due to the environmental concerns, the old track had too much runoff supposedly.