djr81

Yeah, well forum rules preclude me from expressing a full opinion. But specifically, in this instance, what I am saying is that the compliance workshop needs to be found BEFORE you buy a car. What you now have to work out is the cost of transport ex East and compare this with shipping the car in a container (As opposed to on a car transport). You may find there is little in it. I suggest getting on the phone to your broker & demanding from him a list of compliance workshops, their location, costs for compliance/transport & the timeframe for doing the work in a given manner. After all that is what you are paying him $1100 for. No point having a dog & then doing all the barking yourself.

Well, I can see where you made your first mistake. Anyway, you need to ask Geoff what compliance shops there are in WA, or look it up on the DOTARS site. From what I understand this needs to be sorted BEFORE you ship the car. I have heard of this being done. It is not uncommon for shops to effectively sell compliance to each other. Some GT-R's in WA have been complied over east because of a shortage of availability over here. It is ok to do it this way, but there are some key questions you need to ask: Who is the shop? How much are they charging for compliance? How are you going to arrange rego? Who is paying for the freight across from Vic/NSW? What about the non standard gear - ie how are you going to get that? Good luck with it & make sure your broker looks after you.

Just take it to Hyperdrive & ask Ken to look at it for you.

Just to clarify - are you worried about the strength of the spacers or the strength of the studs? If the latter you need to ask the vendor what grade (eg grade 8.8, 10.6 or whatever) the studs are.

Dave, I am a little confused - are you asking after the S14 or the R32? Because answers to the question will be different depending on which car you are looking at. On the assumption it is the R32: Mostly making suspension adjustments amount to trying to reduce the worst effects of the limitations of the stock suspension eg too little camber compensation in roll on the front end of the GT-R and too much on the rear. If you are talking about the GT-R don't worry about the rear end too much - focus on the front as that is where the gains are to be made. With regard to the roll centres (Note plural). The idea is to incline the roll axis (an imaginary line plotted between the two centres) forward. This allows a transference of load away from the fron end of the car and hence reduces understeer. This is the reason R32's are sensitive to rake. How are you going to measure your centre of gravity? I ask because it is the roll couple you are really chasing rather than just the roll centres.

Well I put a set on approx 12 months ago. They have done a number of track days, approx 5000kms and are completely shagged. If you are keen enough you can destroy a set in one track day. The other thing that amuses me is how much of a difference some people expect them to make in a one minute lap. You may be lucky to pick up a couple of seconds over a good set of street tyres. Nothing more. Certainly not the 4 or 5 seconds over a minute lap that some people believe.

At the front end the most common replacement are the bushes for the upper suspension arm (inner & outer bushes) as well as the caster rod bushes. Back end doesn't need doing so often. Prices can be gotten from the Whiteline website as well as any number of vendors on this forum. As for what is available - well pretty much everything. You can buy new upper arms, new lower arms, new bushes, springs, caster rods, sway bars, dampers, cancell the HICAS.... Enough bits to rebuild the whole suspension. Most people go with a bush kit, some new coils/dampers/swaybars, some caster rods & bin the HICAS. This is a pretty comprehensive package & will transform the handling.

It is the same thing. Adding wheel spacers effectively changes the wheel offset. Legend has it that GT-R's don't really like having this sort of thing done to them...

Theoretically the best location for the roll centre is slightly below the centre of gravity. When you change the ride height, you change the c of g, however. When you change the ride height, you change the suspension geometry which changes the roll centre. When the car rolls, you change the suspension geometry, which changes the roll centre. The front roll centre will be at a different height to the rear roll centre to help transfer load away from the front tyres when cornering. If someone has set a roll centre to be a metre below the ground they will be cornering the car on its door handles. What you need to do is measure up & model the suspension geometry as a first step...

Are they worth $80? Well, you don't get much for $80 anymore. You will be able to record some 0 - 100km/h times, some quarter mile times & that is about it. Once you have done that, you have got pretty much all the useful info you will get. Max gee function isn't of any real use. Have a look at the newer RR & SS models. They have a data logging function, so you can look at you runs on your PC & work out what works better where. This makes them orders of magnitude more useful. I would recommend the RR - I have one & found it to be excellent. I think the website is www.gtechpro.com or similar. They cost more than $80, however...

I run them on the street & they exhibit the following characteristics: They tram line like a bitch. The stiff side walls give you a rough ride. They make a shit load of noise, especially at 80 to 90km/h They pick up every bit of shit on the road & fire it up into your wheel arches. The don't last very long. RE55's are like the Falkens, the major difference being you get proper grip to offset the cost & the other hassles. With a proper set up & a clean track - 1.25 laterals gees of fun should be yours to have.

Probably two ways of skinning a cat & maybe not much to choose between them. Couple things: Not sure a locked (welded) diff is legal - certainly isn't over in WA. I would much rather they be confined to the circuit than go on the road. They are actually fine for circuit work, but the have slightly odd effects on the cars handling - I for one don't like seeing them used on the road. Skyline's can get camber adjustment - you just have to do it by a different means, ie adjust the effective length of the upper arms.

Merlin, I don't think anyone is arguing against the assertion that a spring + sway bar package will be infinitely better than either springs alone or sway bars alone. My point is that the amount of adjustment (& adjustability) you get from sway bars is more than what you get from springs alone. You dramatically cut the amount of body roll on stock suspension when you install the whiteline sway bars. So maybe it works both ways. Using high spring rates (& 8kg/mm is high) & lower ride heights greatly reduces the influence of the stock sway bars. Using the uprated sway bars restores their influence on the cars handling. For $450 you get your adjustability back. What I have done on my car has been geared toward generating grip at the fron as a means to better my lap times. The rear end only really comes along for the ride. That said one adjustment on the anti roll bars at either end of the car makes a substantial difference to the handling. Drifting only happens when someone else has an oil down or I crack the shits for one reason or another. The other factor no one has really picked up on is the diff. Different diff, different suspension set up. Someonestolecc is suggesting using a locked diff & then in the same paragraph talking about driving it on the road. From what I have seen the only thing proven is that trying to drift on too tight a budget just ends up looking ghey.

At the risk of being entirely unhelpful, maybe I can put my 10 cents worth in. I have upgraded the suspension on my car in steps - first the sway bars, then the coils/shocks then fine tuned the ride heights/camber/caster/toe settings etc. From doing that I can assure you that upgrading the sway bars first is the best first step. Why? Because it allows two things: 1. Less lateral weight transference in roll which helps make the car easier to drift. 2. Adjustability via the sway bar settings which allows you a better first set up. The important thing to note is that the sway bar setting will, in all probability, change if/when you change springs. So getting fixed sway bars mean you are either compromising your set up on stock springs, or compromise it later on when you have upgraded the springs as well. If you are really unlucky your fixed swaybars will be wrong for both types of springs. As for the argument about spring rates: from using the whiteline springs on the circuit I would be inclined to use a higher rear spring rate to reduce the amount of squat the car gets when accelerating/drifting. This is somewhat different to the basic philosophy whiteline used when developing their packages. Bottom line: You are not going to get a good set up for $800. At the end of the day you need to do both springs and sway bars. So just start with $450 for adjustable bars & save for the rest.

It is amazing how suddenly everyone is an expert in how much rebuilding RB26's cost & also how people can know to the last km how much life a car has in it. All this without even seeing a car. To be honest, importing a car from NSW is probably not the best way to go about it. If you want to look at the car before buying it, you will need airfares & accomodation plus a few days to organise it. (Say $1000). If you do buy it you need to transport it over (another $1000 atleast). Yeah it is cheap, but I don't think it has been registered - which means you need to be careful with paperwork to make sure you don't run into any undue hassles. Truth be told it is much, much easier to buy a car locally. You can look it over, get it checked out & be assured you won't have any problems with registration etc. After factoring everything in, prices will work out much the same in the end. Golden rule for buying GT-R's: Buy a good one, not a cheap one. If you are marginal on funds, don't buy one at all.

Couple things: The clamping force applied by the calliper will not change regardless of the size of the rotor you put on the car. It only changes depending on how hard you put your foot on the middle pedal. The tangential (lateral, radial, call it what you will) is a function of the clamping force and the brake pads friction coefficient. Nothing else. The braking torque going into the hub via the rotor is affected by the rotor size, but this isn't a concern because at the end of the day the hub is stronger (much) than the forces generated in any amount of late braking. Your infra red pyrometer (thermometer) won't work on your shiney brake rotors. These things work on the emissivity of the object being measured & need a matt black object. So you can measure tyre temps, tarmac temps, but not the temp of anything shiney. You will have to relay on old fashioned temperature paint. It doesn't matter in any case, because the temps of the rotors on the track matter, not after you have done a cool down lap tend not to matter.

Yes, but not for the reasons you think. Assuming you are not braking any harder than before then the amount of heat going into the rotors will be the same as before. Remember when braking the kinetic energy (equals half mass times the square of velocity) of your car is bing converted into heat which goes into your rotors. The difference is that a larger (effectively a heavier rotor) can "store" more energy at the same temperature as the smaller rotor. So you should see the rotor temperatures reduce. This is not a function of the mechanical leverage of the system, however. Best bet is to put effort into cooling ducting as this will help you dump the heat. As for 900 degree pads, well have a think about the temperature beyond which your cast iron rotor will start to really suffer. No point having (for example) pads that work to 1000 degrees c when the rotors turn to shit at 700 degrees....

Just out of interest - what alignment specs did they useon your car for a "drift" set up?

This is what I did. Fits above & forward of the Attessa unit on the parcel shelf. Just be careful you don't drill through wires when installing it.

Yeah Carroll Smith has some useful things to say, but the info contained within his books is now getting somewhat dated.

It is almost certainly a camber issue. Put the car on the ground & measure (or photograph) the -ve camber you have at the back end. The fix is to get some offset bushes from Whiteline & fit them up. Either that or raise the car some.

Oh, I reckon you could get from zero to 100km/h in ten seconds with that....

It is not good. you should be over 300rwhp.

Um, sorry but it is still stainless steel. What does happen is that the yield strength of the material deteriorates as temperatures rise. Additionally stainless steel has a much higher coefficient of thermal expansion than carbon steel(s). Combine this with the thinner gauges typically used (relative to carbon steel) and in a poorly designed system you can get cracking. "Steam" pipe (I wish people wouldn't call it that) is not mild steel. It is a relatively high yield strength carbon steel and is used with any number of materials aside from steam. Welding done properly (For same - same metals, ie not dissimilar materials) should deposit metal that is the same as or better than the parent material. Cast and/or fabricated carbon steel manifold tend to retain heat better mostly because they are thicker than equivalent stainless steel manifolds.

Actually, I think he means a kerb. If you are going somewhere other than a specialist like Wilkinson's it pays to know what alignment specs you want in the car. Chances are the nearest Bob Janes will have absolutely NFI. The other thing is to ask when the shops alignment machine was last calibrated. Sometimes this never gets done, so your $60 will be mostly wasted.