Beer Baron

he never said transaxle was a negative. no one has except you after misquoting someone. lol. he said the high weight and poor distribution was a negative. and that they switched to a rear mounted transaxle to combat this (not making any judgement on whether or not the transaxle is good or bad). read his post he said the weight is the ONLY negative. so how can he have been saying the transaxle is a negative too? ONLY.

yeah I agree with that. they are crafty little buggers and don't mind ripping of good ideas from other marques. but it's not a bad idea. learn from other peoples hard work, steal a concept, improve it, and make it cheaper to boot.

they are leading you up the garden path. trust me. forget the idea of transporting the car from f*kuoka (Kyushu) to Tokyo (honshu). waste of time and money. Kanda is a pretty big port and plenty of containerised freight, and ro-ro can be dispatched from there. I have no idea why they would tell you that Kanda is not a 'usual' freight point. usual for who? or what? thousands and thousands of cars leave japan from kyushu every year. spending 180K to send the car to tokyo just doesn't make sense to me. you would be better off spending 180K at a workshop in f*kuoka to get it running, then just send it ro-ro. then you save money on the freight also. but seriously, I can't think of anything freight wise happening in any port on honshu that can't be done at a port on kyushu. I would really try to get it on a ship where it is. that will be the easiest, safest, cheapest and fastest option for sure.

funky moneky just explained it above?! it doesn't matter where you are importing a car from. what matters are the laws in this country. have a look at the DOTARS website if you want info on what is eligible for import into australia.

well yeah I never said no one had done it before. there have been quite a few cars from other makers that have had variable torque split AWD, but no other production nissans had had it. which is what I thought we were talking about?

what i want to know is what the hell is: "It's got good rotation"... hmm is it a helicopter? or does it do great 360s at every corner entrance. I'm sure my car has too much rotation.

yep, they are definitely going to be the most likely place to get help. and this may seem obvious, but if the car is coming to australia why bother sending it to Tokyo? just ship it from Kyushu now. hey it may be the south but they have ports there too you know... plenty of roro in and out of kanda, but again I guess if your car is a non-starter you are going to be up for some more dough when shipping to aus too.

lol, don't worry the least I can do is take a shitload of pics I'll be taking the handy cam too, and my roll cage camera mount "just in case" I'm even thinking I might trade up from my 400D to a 40D. will have to see how much better they really are I guess. at the moment all I have is stress trying to get my sh1t sorted before I leave in 24 hours time, but I'm sure once I get on the plane and down that first asahi everything will be great

he wasn't saying the transaxle is a negative he was saying: "they went to a transaxle to compensate for high curb weight and poor distribution which (the weight) is the only negative". and funky. mid4 was a concept car with only one working prototype that I know of and never produced or sold. and bluebirds attesa was a fixed torque split 50/50 with a centre diff not a multi wet clutch electronically controlled transfer case... big difference. no other GTR had anything like the GTR attesa.

I hope so. anyway I think I'll try the 34 GTR one. it has the ports in the same place etc so it should be ok. the only problem I can forsee is the fluid level sensor and perhaps fitting the resevoir to it (that's if it doesn't come with one).

just one and a bit more days before I fly over. Can't wait. Nismo Festival this weekend, then Tsukuba time attack, and the next weekend I'm going to a private track day at Fuji Speedway. Now that will be nice don't forget to pack your woolies! hope you are primed for some serious drinking.

haha, yeah I can come across a little harsh. but don't mean to be if you have lots of time over there (like a month or two) then you are in with a shot for sure. but without an actual friend there to help you will have to rely on a stangers generosity to do you this favour (not impossible at all). honestly though, I think the best advice is find an exporter you can trust, and just let them do their thing in inspecting cars for you (whilst you are sitting comfortably in aus). I mean the good ones will have been inspecting maybe 30 cars a week for years and years. so no offence intended but they will be much better at picking the good cars from the bad than you (or me for that matter). so there is no need to be looking over their shoulder while they do it.

yeah well mark or anyone else for that matter I would say will not be keen on doing a guided tour for nothing. They generally charge 150,000 JPY per car, but that's only if you actually buy one. and considering they would be putting in more work, why would they do it for the same money? makes no sense. add to that the very high chance of you not finding a car you want (remember all auctions only run once a week, so if your chosen auction has no car you like you have to wait another week to try again). also mark lives as far south as you can get from tokyo so you've got bugger all chance of him coming to tokyo to show you around auctions for nothing. I don't think he will be keen on a 6 and a half hour shinkansen trip (each way) to show you around. or a 2 hour flight each way. I don't mean to be harsh, but it's good to have some reality here. If you want to buy 5 cars, and you're not picky on colour, spec or quality then sure an exporter may help you and try and get at least 3 or 4 cars for you in one day, at one auction. but apart from that you are making things hard on yourself. My advice. go to japan by all means. have fun. it's an amazing place. you may be able to find someone willing to let you tag along to an auction but I can't think of anyone suitable in tokyo that would be willing to do it. trekking around huge auction yards loses any fun factor after about 3 hours. after that it just seems like hard work (beleive me, I've been to a few over the years). trying to organise someone to trek around with you, translate for you and buy a car for you at 3 days notice is not going to happen. and there are much more fun and productive things to do in japan anyway.

of course they output that? that is pretty much all a hotwire AFM does is measure inlet air temp (ie density) then convert that to a voltage output. it's useless for what you want as you have nothing to decode that output to a temp reading. BUT what you want is an inlet air temp sensor. pretty simple concept. it measures air temp and converts it to a voltage output. GTRs have them from factory mounted in the inlet plenum (32+33) or the intercooler outlet (34 GTR). so the simple solution here is buy a 32 GTR inlet air temp sensor, plumb in in and wire it up you may need to swap some pins around on the loom plug so get a hold of the GTST plug pin out and the 32 GTR one too and match them up.

happy birthday dave you big hunk of man love.

well unless you are a member (ie dealer) of an auction house in japan you can't go in to view cars of any grade. be advised that any big auction shows thousands of cars a day. to see cars that you are interested in you ned to be able to use their terminals (again need access), then find a car of interest, note down the lot number. then use another lookup with that lot number to find where in the many yards it's located, and also note down where in the order it is to get an approximate time it will come up for auction. then you have to figure out the yards, get a shuttle/walk/run to approximately where it is, then search around for it. inspect it (you can't drive it anywhere), then get back to the auction room in time, then bid (again you can't bid unless you are a member/licenced buyer). even for dedicated and experienced car buyers it can take a month or more of physically attending 3 or 4 auctions a week (and more on-line) to find a specific car (ie grade 4B+, 32 GTR, late model). to be honest your first time in a japanese auction you will spend 80% of the day running around trying to find cars etc and most probably wont find anything worth bidding on. not many buyers will be willing to take you and hold your hand as you will just slow them down and they often have a lot of cars to get through for a lot of customers. this pretty much limits you to car dealers in japan. and most dealers get their stock from auctions. so you are now paying another middle man. and you need a dealer that speaks excellent english and that you trust to organise de-reg, and get the car safely to the port, and get you the BL in a timely fashion etc. all big leaps of faith if you have never dealt with them before and you can't speak/read/write japanese yourself. For a first timer with limited time (say 2 weeks) in japan you have little chance of buying a car at auction that suits you. and little chance of buying one at all. try and see if any of the import agents in aus will hook you up with a trustworthy exporter and they may be willing to take you out to look at cars, but I doubt it. Finding a quality quction car means covering lots of auctions, and having lots of patience. trying to make it happen on cue is not a good plan.

rent it? I was hoping mark and russ would pay me a little money for 'expenses' (clean underwear etc). then I'm happy to head up and have a steer.

yes! let's all get some perspective here. I think charlies story of bad luck after bad luck makes all our worst moments seem pretty trivial. you are the king of the bad luck GTR story charlie no doubt.

russ, you realise if you flog the 33 troy is going kick you in the nuts... such an awesome car. at least let's all have a few happy laps in it before you flog it.

having said that the R35 is a very big leap forward. but these days we have cars like the veyron etc that are just out of this world. and other makers like porche, bmw etc have not been standing still either. I think it's a big leap in packaging and marketing that's for sure. and in value for money too it's amazing. I would perhaps say it's an equally large leap forward for nissan sports cars.

try telling that to people in 1989. you'd be laughed out of town. think back to what other makers were doing in 1989. then you have the GTR which could run 12 second quarters out of the box, run to 260km/h+, had great brakes, handling the whole package, and was amazingly tunable and versatile. In standard form a 32 GTR is a very exciting car.

it most likely has a chip in it. many, many ecu's are used by tuning companies to put their chips into. they use remanufactured ecu's hence the sticker. it's no big deal. very common.

yep, get some decent (endless, project mu, biot, brembo) 2 piece rotors (324mm X 30 or 32mm) and run some F50 calipers. not too expensive and should be pretty good. and nice common pad shape/size too.

just clearing up there is no 'standard' power FC. the MAF sensor version is L-jetro (short for L jetronic), MAP version D-jetro.

well the Ljetro gets better economy as it runs MAFs instead of the twin map sensors on the Djetro version. they both come with base maps to start from. MAF sensors effectively measure air density/flow where as map sensors just measure pressure so under lots of condition the MAF sensor gives a finer reading. they both cost the same to tune, but the big difference is the Djetro costs a lot more to install as you need to remove the plenum to fit the pressure feeds for the map sensors (unless you want to risk dropping swarf into the engine). the Ljetro of course is just plug in. BUT I would suggest that 300rwkw updraged MAF sensors is a good idea. either VG30s or Nismos etc. standard 26 Mafs will hit 5.115v at about 260rwkw. you can still tune a car with them to about 300rwkw or even more if you want, but it's much nicer to have a sensor that is still giving usable readings right to peak power/air flow.