Samon

My R33 GTS+t has done just under 200,000kms and either cracked a piston or two or broken some rings (haven't taken the head off to have a look)... whatever the cause my compression is down from 200PSI across the board to 60/90 in cyls 3/6. A rebuild will cost an arm and a leg, and on a 200,000km old car I really can't justify the cost. I'm thinking of just picking up a second-hand engine from a wreckers or on here somewhere with not *too* many k's, and swapping it over. Seeing as I don't care about this engine now, I'm wondering if it would be possible to run it on the 4 good cylinders for a little while, just for kicks. I'm obviously not expecting any decent power, but just wondering if this would actually be possible? I mean the other 4 cyls are in fantastic condition... My thought was to just remove the two spark plugs from the dead cyls, as 3 and 6 are evenly spaced in the firing order it shouldn't totally kill the engine... and disconnect those two injectors as well. This way there won't be any load (from compression) on those two cylinders, and there shouldn't be any air/fuel escaping past the rings creating crankcase pressure and blow-by. Any thoughts?

If it's like my Xenarc, and I'm pretty sure it's the same for the Lilliput ones, it goes into standby mode when the VGA signal goes dead... but it still draws some power in standby and I'd say if you didn't drive for a couple of days you'd have a flat battery, so you still need to switch the power to the screen itself on/off with the ignition/acc/whatever. I've moulded the screen in flush with my dash with no buttons... I never pushed any of them when it wasn't moulded in... why would I need them now?

Yeah, Destinator engine... actually though it comes with FreeDrive (or was it MapMonkey... I can't remember!) so I didn't purchase it at all The maps, I'm still using I think it's 2005 ones... found them on the interwebs somewhere a while back... And the GPS receiver, I'm using a Holux USB one that I got from eBay for around $60... fantastic. 8-12 satellites at any time, seems to be pretty quick to find a first lock (i.e. usually about 5-10 seconds max!)

Okay, no actual pics of the install at the moment because as I mentioned before, it's not in the car at the moment... but here's a couple of screenshots of the 'front-end' app "RoadRunner" running my custom (yeah, I was pretty new at Photoshop at the time, okay?) skin. The GPS is as previously mentioned 'FreeDrive', and I just made a skin to match it so that it looked like it was part of the same app as the rest of the front-end. The 'video' screen is nothing to bother screen-shotting, just the general open, play, stop, skip-back, skip-forwards, pause, etc buttons and then a big media window... the phone integration used to work but then I got a new phone and it no longer did. I never got around to removing it from the skin. When I get around to re-writing the whole front-end from scratch, I'm gonna try and go for a more OEM look... i.e. less of the green swirl and more clean lines, etc, kinda like something you'd find in a high-end luxuary car I'm planning to build some sort of monitoring to hook into the GReddy eManage ECU I'm running, maybe on-screen gauges or something... just for the tool factor really, but hey, it's cool and I'm a software developer who likes a challenge!

Because the 'headphone' jack is only designed to power... well.. just that - headphones, the soundcard doesn't provide anywhere near the power required to drive the speakers in your car. You need an amp. At minimum, a 2ch one with the front and rear speakers wired in parallel will suffice, but a 4ch one is much better as it allows you to have the fronts/rears at different levels and doesn't put the amp under as much load. If your soundcard is a true surround-sound one, you just use two 3.5mm=>RCA cables, one for the front and another for the rears (And a third if you go the 4.1 setup with a sub). If you go with a simple 2 channel one, you just use a single 3.5mm=>RCA cable and then use Y-cables to go to the amp's front/rear inputs (or use the amps bridging switch if it has it...).

how many K's, and what is it out of? R33? S1/S2?

Lol I got practically everything off eBay Actually, there's one here, it's got a broken power supply so you'll need a 5V 1A power pack if you're running it from your inverter, but otherwise that's a killer price!

I've got a Carputer in my 33 too... well, did... but it's out now for some improvements while the car is off the road (blown engine ). I picked up a practically brand new Asus Centrino laptop which had a cracked LCD (2.6GHz, 512MB Ram, 60GB HDD, WiFi, Bluetooth), a Xenarc 7" touchscreen, Holux USB GPS dongle, and the required cables (power, vga, USB and audio) for just over $600... lots of eBay sniping there! I fitted the screen into the dash by just cutting the dash surround where the stereo was out a little to fit the screen, then fixed it at the back so that it was only just proud of the surround. Ran USB, VGA and a power trigger wire to the boot, where the lappy is. Used a universal car laptop charger to power the lappy, and built an auto-power-on module which detects the accessory power and then triggers the power switch on the lappy (also checks the USB port for power so that it doesn't power it off if you have to re-start the car!). A standard 3.5mm->RCA cable went from the lappy headphone socket to the amp. I played around with a few different 'front-end' software packages... Centrafuse, FrodoPlayer, Amp, etc before settling on RoadRunner. I use FreeDrive for GPS navigation, and built a custom nissan-themed 'skin' which blended the two together nicely. After a while i got sick of the crappy audio quality from the onboard laptop sound card, so I invested in a Creative Audigy2 NX external USB soundcard. I made up a USB-power cable for this to power it from the USB port (instead of the normal 240v->5v power adapter). At the same time, I installed another amp and sub, and hooked the sound card up in a 4.1 configuration. The sound quality from the Creative box crapped all over the onboard setup... Anyway, a little while ago (actually... over a year ago now ) I decided to mould the screen actually into the dash surround, rather than having it kinda just sitting there. I wanted the whole OEM look. It's been a very long-running project, many hours of sanding, filling, sanding, filling, sanding, filling, sanding, priming, sanding, priming, sanding, painting, sanding, etc.. but it's almost completed finally! It's looking absolutly fantastic, when I finally get it finished I'll be posting some pics up. While it's out I'm possibly gonna write my own custom front-end software (I'm a software developer)... not that it's not working perfectly as it is/was, but hey, I like a good challenge My attention has been focused on getting the car back on the road, but once that's done I will get stuck back into this and get my long-running project finally finished!

How many KM's? Why did you remove it?

Not sure if this is what you're referring to, but go to the top of the first post on the page, click [Options], then click [switch to: Standard]

Yeah, that's what I think I'll do. I've had a few different quotes for rebuilds... the best was about $2500, but then I've either gotta find the time to remove/refit or pay them another $500-$800... I have a line on an engine with about 60,000kms on it for $1500 but I'm still looking around. No real rush as I've got the Lancer, but I'm really itching to get back in the 'line!

Spotted a very clean black R33 GTR VSpec around 6ish tonight at the High St Road Shops in Wantirna South. Chick driving.

http://www.skylinesaustralia.com/forums/in...t&p=1268594

6k.... well that's a fair whack more than I was expecting.... I was hoping more around the 3k mark Excuse my ignorance, but I was under the impression that a full rebuild basically left you with an 'as new' engine... i.e. all new bearings, pistons, rings, valves, etc... am I misunderstanding?

After almost 200,000kms I'm now down two cylinders and am looking for either a re-co engine or to have mine re-co'ed (preferred option!). Can anyone recommend a decent engine reconditioner in the SE suburbs... preferably who doesn't charge the earth! I'm not looking to get a 'race' engine built... i.e. no forgies or anything like that... basically just return the engine to a similar state to it came out of the factory. If I get a chance later on in the week I'll go through the yellow pages and make a fair few calls, but just wondering if there is anyone you guys have used that you'd recommend! Cheers

Hmmm... E85... With a (practically) brand new engine, running an eManage Blue and with low-compression turbo pistons installed, maybe I could give that a go... the availability is getting better and because it's just a weekend/fun car it's not an issue if I've gotta go out of my way slightly to fill up... lol a tank will probably last me over a month as it is! I'll obviously just focus on getting it back on the road first, but after that I might consider going down the E85 route...

I'll try to remember to take some pics of my setup on the weekend...

No pictures here... but I just got some aluminium angle from Bunnings and made up a bracket which used the screws from the fuel-pump cover. Currently got an amp, PC power supply and USB soundcard in there... soon to put another amp in as well

Yeah certainly not a nice feeling, but at least now I'll be starting out with pretty much a brand new engine, with low comp pistons, etc, so I'm gonna try and get a turbo ECU to match it and then it should just run like a brand new one! I'll probably still run the eManage so that I can extract a bit more power out of it, but I'm aware that the rest of the car (gearbox, diff, etc) is still almost 200,000km old... so I'll need to go a bit easy there too! On the whole tho... doing it was an awesome learning experience, I don't regret a second of it - even blowing it up means I'll learn how to remove/replace the engine, etc.

Hey guys, just thought I'd share my recent experience doing my NA->T conversion... Well over the past few months I have been gathering up all the required bits and pieces to do my NA->T conversion... just picking up bits as I came across them cheap, etc. Anyway, took 2 weeks off over xmas/newyears and spent a fair bit of time out in the garage ripping my engine to bits and then putting on all the turbo bits. I actually picked up a blown R33 S2 RB25DET engine (broken rod) really cheap, and used heaps of bits out of that. The water supply for the turbo was T-pieced into the heater line just before the heater tap, and returned into the block via the standard banjo fitting... my block had the hole there but just with a blanking bolt in it... Oil was taken from the oil banjo on the block, again which had a blanking bolt in it, but for some unknown reason the oil return WASNT there... I had to tee it into the head oil return line, so I put a much bigger fitting on that line to cope with the extra oil. The engine came with the stock dump pipe which I used, and I picked up a pacemaker 3" front pipe off the forums. I already had a full 3" exhaust system sitting in the garage which was on the car when I bought it but was too big for N/A (not to mention incredibly loud and droney) so this meant I had 3" all the way from the dump. I looked at swapping the injectors over without removing the plenum, but it just looked like too much stuffing around, so I decided to swap the plenum over to the turbo one as well... though in reality the only real purpose that this served was to provide a line to control the factory blowoff valve and somewhere to connect up my boost gauge! I made a custom pod box and used flexible intake hose from the AFM to the turbo, and bought a CoolingPro FMIC with piping to suit. I just had to get one little piece of piping (turbo to cooler) made up and that all just worked. I grabbed a TurboSmart manual boost controller and hooked it up between the FMIC cold pipe (already had the nipple) and the wastegate actuator, and wound it right out to basically nothing (i.e. just whatever the wastegate spring would hold) for the time being. I bought an eManage Blue a while back, but it was second hand and had the loom for an S15/200SX. I figured I would just chop up the loom to fit the 'line. Clearly I wasn't thinking too much at the time... but didn't click that that was only 4 cyls. So I couldn't actually hook up the injector or ignition harnesses, just the AFM (and tach, etc). I hooked it up, entered the injector size values and exported the blank map to the unit. Now it was time to actually start the engine! Of course the battery had gone flat as I'd been running a 12V worklight off it, so I had to jumpstart it, but to my excitement it kicked over straight away and it all seemed good! (actually... to be honest I had a massive exhaust leak which turned out to be that I'd forgotten to do up the dump-front pipe bolts did them up and it was all good!) I noticed it sounded like it had a bit of a miss at idle, but just figured that would all be sorted with a tune... Anyway, put the front bar (cut the reo to fit the cooler and cut the 'mouth' of the front bar (R33 S1 Type M) for better airflow... and coz it looked awesome!), headlights, grill, bonnet, etc back on and took it for a bit of a spin (no tune yet, just the adjustment for the injector sizing...). I can certainly relate to 666DAN's observation that it sounded like an electric leaf blower under there! I had the 'lid' off my custom pod box, but you could hear it spooling up soooo loud! And the BOV noise was incredible Now, because I hadn't had it tuned yet, I knew I couldn't push things, but even so, it was like a totally different car to drive! at say 1/4 to 1/2 throttle off from the lights it would move off fairly gently and then just start spinning up the rears as the boost built! Once or twice I put the foot down fairly hard and under load it started to ping/knock... so I immediately backed off! Anyway, went for about a 30 minute drive, on the way back I stopped at a set of lights, they went green, I put the foot down (but not hard enough to loose traction) and looked in my rear view mirror to see... well... nothing actually... all I could see was blue smoke. I couldn't even see the car behind me. I took it fairly gently from there home... I got home, popped the bonnet and it really sounded like it was running on 5 cylinders. Not good! I decided I needed to do a compression test. Removing the little hose which connects the oil breather on the two rocker covers showed lots of oil... out of interest I removed the FMIC hot pipe and saw LOTS of oil. Not a good sign! I grabbed a compression tester and tested each cylinder... 200 - Wow! better than I expected! 200 - Very good in fact! 60 - Ah. That would be the problem! 200 - Okay 200 - Still Okay 90 - Bugger! So that's where I'm at. I was a little worried at the start about putting a turbo on an engine that, while it seemed to run well, had done over 180,000kms. I'm thinking it might have already had low comp on one cylinder (hence the 'miss at idle' I noticed even before I ever force fed it...), but now it's certainly got two down! Ah well... time for a rebuild, I say!

The engine... how many k's on it?

I've got two amps (and some other goodies) in that little spot beside the battery... nice and out of the way, out of sight kinda thing...

No pics, but when he pulled me over the last two times he was in a marked XR6Turbo...

He's certainly not an idiot... back when I was on P's he pulled me over one day and asked me to pop the bonnet. When he saw that there was no turbo (R33 GTS) he asked me "so... what's with the 5 wheel studs?". I nearly fell over! I mean I certainly didn't expect him to know about the whole 4/5 wheel stud thing! I just said something about it having a different diff and that that's how I bought it... but yeah, he's pretty cluey on these sorta things! He ended up giving me a canary for my aftermarket steering wheel ("not enough padding") and rear tires (which were a little on the low side anyway, so fair enough). Funny thing was though, he wasn't wearing a badge of any kind, so when he gave me the defect notice I saw his name and it all clicked. I must've smiled or something... Other Cop: "what's so amusing?" Poptart: "He's just seen my name and recognised it." Me: "Something like that..." Poptart: "So... am I as mean and nasty as everyone says I am?" Me: "Haha... ah... 'no comment'... I'm just surprised you knew about the 4/5 stud thing..." Poptart: "Theres a lot we know that you don't think we do..."