Neostead2000

Well the things I make are entirely custom and built from the ground up, unless it's a factory replacement part like the GTR Indicator surrounds. I made a slight revision to the gauge panel and now it can be printed in 3 separate main parts, which then get assembled simply by using some grub screws. I already sent one to a chap in the UK and he seemed very happy with it. I just checked and the shipping cost to the UK is about the same for Australia too, about $12. The good thing is now the panel can be placed in a bubble envelope which allows the quicker and cheaper shipping price.

Update on this. I didn't chase the dual filament bulb idea simply because after looking more closely at it, it was way too big to fit inside the parker light section. I also didn't want to cut the housing and add another light source near the parker. So I used the GTR surround CAD file I had designed and slightly modified it to fit a Micra K11 indicator (the one on their fender). It uses a 5 Watt bulb so now the dilemma was fixing the quickly flashing relay. This was easily remedied by buying a plug-in 3 pin relay which has a knob to control the pulse, cost me $5. It goes in the place of the factory relay under the steering wheel. The indicators now all blink properly and even though this Micra indicator is a tad smaller than the GTR one, I find it sits more neatly in my custom surrounds and should be more than enough for tech inspection and letting other see my intentions on the road!

Got the panel finalized and printed. Wasn't too fussed with smoothing it out at this point because it was the prototype and going into my own car, but I'm super stoked with how nice it fits. They are angled perfectly when you glance at them from the driver's seat; not too low, not too high, and at least the left hand doesn't cover the 2 gauges from the left going right. I might offer to make these and sell to people, but I'm unsure how many people would be interested in it, also considering I'm in EU so shipping would be a pain? Let me know what you guys think

I haven't done this page any justice. Initially I wanted to keep it regularly updated, but I've had some moments of pause then moments of too much progress and too many pictures, so I failed to catch up. I decided to make an Instagram page to showcase the entire process with even more pictures, so if you're interested in following up, please do drop by: https://www.instagram.com/skpro_jects/ If I can find the time, I will update it here also, but I really cannot find the time. I'm doing 10-11 hour days every day to get this Skyline finished up by the end of this year!!

Actually I do not know and cannot find a regulations sheet anywhere. I'm more worried about whether people infront of me would be able to see whether I'm indicating left or right, and I assume not since right now the only indicator is on the side fenders.

I soon have to pass initial inspection (rego) and they check for functioning parking lights as well as indicators. As I understand it, the R33 in general has 1 indicator light at the front of the bumper, one on the side of the front fender, and 1 parking light inside the edge of the headlight. I am running an S-Roc Greddy front bumper which came without any indicator facets and I am reluctant to gluing on LED strips or drilling holes. My other car has a very similar headlight design, but the corner parking light is a dual filament bulb which glows dimly at all times but when you use an indicator, it starts blinking with it more brightly. Could I take that same setup and apply it to the R33? I could find a socket with 3 wires (two signals and 1 ground), then use the same 21/5w bulb. Then splice the fender indicator signal wire to 1 wire on the socket, splice the other signal wire to the one for the parking light, and connect both ground wires to the third wire on the socket. Would this work?

UPDATE to my own enquiry from October 11. It turns out my belt WAS in fact overtightened, and upon re-reading the factory belt tensioning procedure, I believe I simply did it incorrectly the first time and added extra tension on the pulley. Basically the FSM says to install the tensioner pulley and spring, time the belt, then leave the pulley nut LOOSE and turn the engine over by hand more than 2 times (I did 4 full revolutions). After that, you need to hold the pulley with a hex key without moving it further in or out, simply keep it there while you torque the nut to 52-55Nm. I did that a second time now and I could feel the belt was looser this time around. Started the car multiple times afterwards and the belt whine completely went away!

Ok another update dear god I hope this is the last one!!! I managed to make the car start and work with the custom 24-1 trigger disc! I checked the CAS connector signal wires once more and noticed that pin 4 (1* crank) signal had 5 volts as it should. But pin 3 (120* CAS) signal had 0.223v, which should be 5. I then suspected the ECU itself, as I noticed it had been opened before due to the warranty stickers being slightly off. So I took it apart, carefully separated both circuit boards and started looking at it dumb. I traced the 41+51 and 42+52 pins and they went to Jumper locations which seemingly had no jumpers positioned on them. It appears the previous owner must have swapped them or it may have come from AEM this way. I placed the jumpers on locations JP1 (1+2) and JP2 (1+2), leaving JP3 and JP4 disconnected entirely. Placed everything back, selected the right type of signal (falling edge if going from 5v to 0) which is CONTRARY to what AEM have listed on their instruction sheet. I put the CAS back in ballpark area and what do you know, she fired right up and running even better! I quickly set the timing back to factory 10* advance and now it's running fully sequential injection and ignition. Basically the takeaway is, AEM is absolutely trash with very misleading instructions and outdated information. To think they still offer these series 2 ECUs for nearly $2000 or more is insane. I paid $1100AUD for mine so I guess it's worth it. Now I can finally focus on tuning this damn thing!

That's actually a good point you two discussed because when I tuned my Mitsubishi, the VE table was a true % efficiency table with psi load on the Y axis and RPM on the X axis. It was very straight forward; I knew that *in general* my motor was close to 100% efficient around 5000-6000 RPM so I knew around those load cells I would have to aim for pretty much 100% VE as a value, and when I was done tuning it, it took a very nice form and had logical steps from cell to cell. Now when I jumped onto this AEM, Josh is right, it doesn't have a "true" VE table. It just has a fuel map that you can set to be based off TPS or psi load (from the MAP). I chose MAP-based of course, but I noticed the values did not correspond to VE percentage, but rather you could choose, as GTSBoy said, whether to display the values in injector ms or RAW. And the RAW value apparently just goes up to 255 because that's the max value programmed into AEMtuner. This threw me off when constructing my initial base fuel map because now I had no bearing on the value scales. However, after further tweaking with it, I understood that it's just arbitrary numbers. What's important is to have a decent and logical AFR map, then have a good, calibrated O2 sensor to compare against and simply start adjusting the fuel map on a cell by cell basis, until my target AFRs match my real AFRs. In the end, the map should take a similar shape as if doing standard VE table, and the VE is still static based on the hardware so there was not much point in getting hung up on that. I'm still learning, this is only my second car that I have started to tune so I'm in no way an expert and clearly lacking some further understanding, but I will get there eventually. Also slight update, I ended up buying a metal spatula from the general store. It's normal steel, 0.3mm thick precisely. I took it to a laser cutting studio and had them cut out the disc from it. It was near perfect, just needed a light wet sand with 120 grit to get rid of any potential burrs from where the laser starts it's beam. It looks proper and fit incredibly snug onto the shaft, slightly better than the OEM disc I might add. There is also plenty of space on each side of the disc inside the optical head. And of course, AEM failed me once more. I loaded up their custom settings for their custom disc and guess what? NO START! I swear with this car, it's 1 step forward, 2 steps back. I had a starting, running, perfectly idling car with the stock disc and custom settings. And now with an exact copy of the AEM disc, and with their proper settings which are meant to be PnP, it doesn't even get spark or fuel. If I set the crank signal to read from both rising and falling edges (which normally you shouldn't do), then it makes spark but no fuel. And when I try to time it with a light, I only get a flash at the start of the crank and at the end. Gonna give it 1 more day today and if I can't make it work, I'll throw in my stock CAS disc...

I took a genuine 33 GTR indicator Surround from my buddy's car (left side), spent quite a lot of time measuring every single angle and dimension, then drew it up completely from scratch in solidworks. A friend has a 3D printer and we ran 1 prototype which fit but needed very slight adjustments. I then mirrored the surround and printed the right side which fit perfect. I will have to print 2 more for my S-roc bumper and may even offer to sell them online if people are in the need for those. I'm also currently finalizing a single DIN triple gauge panel for 52mm gauges which are slightly angled towards the driver. The panel can fit under the HVAC unit, however I am missing the radio bracket as well so I need to make that first. I will post pics once I get those made.

I'm guessing this is the go-to timing belt whine thread, so may I also share my issue. It's a brand new OEM Nissan (pitwork) timing belt and tensioners, stock 20Neo cam gears (clean teeth), perfectly timed, followed factory manual tensioning procedure and rotated the motor a few times. Afterwards the motor sat like that for nearly 8 months, and just the other day I fired it up for the first time. It makes a noticeable whirring sound almost exactly like in the above video. I have attached a video of me twisting it 45 degrees and also pushing down on it. To me, the tension looks and feels right for a performance motor, and would assume it's normal for it to be noisy when new until the rubber smooths out and overall stretch sets. You can see that this Nissan belt has almost a leathery texture on it. That said, this is my first ever RB motor so I cannot compare. What do you guys think? 386933436_6671508806232360_1461388097453349415_n.mp4

Just updating some threads I started (because f**k when people never come back to say what happened!!). After making my own engine loom with the single ECCS relay next to the ECU connector, the car fires up and runs fine with no lights on the dash (aside from the HICAS which I have yet to troubleshoot). The extra connector does in fact appear to be for the ABS module which never came on my car, so it must have been put there from the factory as a default option. Also the TOAD alarm was easy to remove. I pulled out the cabling from the engine bay (for the extra horn and hood switch), then the signal wire from the trunk latch, and then tidied up the ignition barrel wires from which they got the power from.

It very much supports Speed Density and that's how I have it configured and will be tuning the car. You need an accurate and working IAT sensor in order to get the right density calculations, though. I opted for a BMW E46 IAT M10x1.5 threaded sensor since that one is identical to the one used on an R33 GT-R, direct replacement.

HUGE UPDATE!!! SHE STARTED! In the most random fashion, the universe sent a savior right to my doorstep. A guy showed up who apparently doesn't even do cars for a living but he has experience with AEM 1 and 2. He took a quick look at my setup and found 2 problems right away. Firstly he said I needed to change my windows settings to allow the decimal point to be "." instead of ",", then to allow it to run up to 2 decimals. Apparently this makes AEMTuner let you do precise numbers and various other things. Secondly, he said I couldn't set the timing right because I was using the wrong resolution for the teeth sync. Meaning, since the EMS expects 6 teeth, the synchronization will be between 0 and 6 teeth maximum. And what I was doing until then was inputting big values such as 20, 50, 100, 180, 256 even (max value) and always wondering why the timing was either +60 deg advanced/retarded or marks not even visible... So I set my "Ignition sync" option to 1 and started measuring the timing while cranking. We slowly upped that value to 1.395 teeth which essentially tells the ECU that the CAM reference signal is 1.395 (out of the 6) teeth away from true sync. At that point, the timing was very close to 0, I think we left it at 5* retarded of TDC. The guy was 100% certain that it should fire up if we got the timing at least close to 10 BTDC. I honestly was not expecting it to start up so I didn't even have my phone in my hand, but as my friend went to crank it one last time, the lil' RB came to life like it was nobody's business!!!! It started so nicely and quick, and it held I think 1600 RPM super smoothly. We quickly saw that there were a few minor issues such as an oil leak at the brass T fitting for the oil feed, #4 injector not firing (tested it in different ways, we suspect its blocked), and it seems i have overtightened all the belts so they were squealing. But she fired up and ran, that's what matters. From now on I can take it from there and set idle tune, AFRs and take care of the belts and leak. Additionally, Zeth from NZ worked out that the injector/coil phasing was in the right order, but the tooth count was incorrect (set incorrectly by AEM, as with many other things, which I highly suspect was so that you are forced to buy their disc anyway). He told me to set my phasings from 0 to 6, again, using the logic that there are only 6 physical slots from which the ECU reads from. So, for anyone reading who wants to start his RB on an AEM Series 2 ecu with STOCK 360+6 Nissan CAS wheel, here are the settings which hopefully will help you out and save you time and frustration! For the phasings, RB fire order is 1-5-3-6-2-4, but the phasings must be like so in order to retain that order: Inj/Coil #1 = 0.000 Inj/Coil #2 = 4.000 Inj/Coil #3 = 2.000 Inj/Coil #4 = 5.000 Inj/Coil #5 = 1.000 Inj/Coil #6 = 3.000 Then you start cranking your motor with the timing light (blue loop on the back of the harness is perfectly fine) and start increasing the "Ignition Sync" value slowly. Maybe start with 0.5 and go up to 1-1.2 which should make the balancer marks within view. Then adjust it by the decimals so 1.255, 1.258 etc until you get it to your desired timing. For a 20 Neo it's 10 BTDC, for a 25 I think it's 15. You may also have to adjust your CAS clockwise (retard) or anti clockwise (advance) to get it super close. That said, I'm aware this is NOT the optimal setup since it's still doing batch fire which can get sketchy and I assume I may have issues at very high RPMs, but for the time being, the important thing is the car can start and most probably drive fine with more tweaks to the maps. I will end up making my own CAS wheel once I get the material. I hope this will help somebody 👌

Edit: After spending the entire Saturday reading about cam synchronizing and discussing it with a great fella from NZ (props to Zeth) as well as reading through the inbuilt AEMtuner info boxes, I have a slightly better understanding of what may be happening. The AEM EMS is hard coded to read a 24 tooth wheel for 1 full engine cycle (720*), or 12 teeth per 360* revolution, period. AEM have inserted a "stock 6 cyl Nissan CAM disc" option for some reason which loads up with 6 teeth for spark/fuel/wheel. When you view information about the "Spark Teeth" option, AEM say: "Is usually set to the same value as option Wheel Teeth for sequential ignition and set to half of Wheel Teeth for waste spark ignition. " So, if you wanted to run waste spark/batch fire, you would set the spark teeth to let's say 12, and wheel teeth to 24. Otherwise if both options have an equal amount of teeth input, it should work as sequential. ODDLY, the stock setting of 6-6-6 (teeth) right now on my car makes it do wasted spark, but that is because the magic behind all the calculations and the way AEM have built their transcoders or whatever they're called. In other words, these coils will always do batch fire if you run the stock cas, simply no way around it. And that is if you manage to even start the car at all! This explains why my coils are firing the way they are. There is still much to learn, but I have already lost an entire week trying to make it run. It almost looks like there is no way to make the AEM read the stock CAS properly, so I will have to resort to making my own trigger disc by getting the thinnest piece of metal I can, then manually lapping its face for hours until I get the desired thickness. I've been told by an AEM user that he's done this to at least 5 different cars with custom trigger discs and they're still running flawless. I'm writing all this so that people (like me) in the future could have an up-to-date reference about this issue without having to read 20 different posts and talk to 10 different people and watch countless youtube videos. Will keep updating!