GTSBoy

Are we not talking about triggering the various solenoids in it though? We're not talking about a "pump". There's no pump, right? The pressure comes from the MC. The ABS unit just opens and closes valves. 4 of them.

There's plenty of OEM steering arms that are bolted on. Not in the same fashion/orientation as that one, to be sure, but still. Examples of what I'm thinking of would use holes like the ones that have the downward facing studs on the GTR uprights (down the bottom end, under the driveshaft opening, near the lower balljoint) and bolt a steering arm on using only 2 bolts that would be somewhat similarly in shear as these you're complainig about. I reckon old Holdens did that, and I've never seen a broken one of those.

Hmm. Perhaps not the same engineers. The OE Nissan engineers did not forsee a future with spacers pushing the tie rod force application further away from the steering arm and creating that torque. The failures are happening since the advent of those things, and some 30 years after they designed the uprights. So latent casting deficiencies, 30+ yrs of wear and tear, + unexpected usage could quite easily = unforeseen failure. Meanwhile, the engineers who are designing the billet CNC or fabricated uprights are also designing, for the same parts makers, the correction tie rod ends. And they are designing and building these with motorsport (or, at the very least, the meth addled antics of drifters) in mind. So I would hope (in fact, I would expect) that their design work included the offset of that steering force. Doesn't mean that it is not totally valid to ask the question of them, before committing $$.

That's probably OK. That's a face to face compression joint between two surfaces with the clamping load provided by those bolts. So.... it's unlikely that the bolts will end up feeling that load in shear, unless the clamping surfaces are not large enough, bolts not got enough tension on them, etc etc to prevent the two faces from moving wrt each other. Which... I would hope the designers have considered, seeing as it's probably one of the most important things the upright has to do apart from resist collapsing in its own right. But yes, it would definitely be worth asking them what their safety factor on that part of the design was. I tend to think that the casting, being a casting, is not necessarily the strongest bit of material in the world. It's about an inch square, and when you think about the loads that are being put into it, you have to wonder what safety factor the Nissan boys (and every other OEM engineer who has designed all the millions of other uprights that look essentially the same) used to account for defective casting, aging, severe impacts on the wheel, etc etc.

The smart approach is to use the gearbox loom from the manual car. Makes it a lot easier - just plugs into the switches on the box and plugs into the main loom up near the fusebox. Then you only need to deal with bypassing the inhibit switch. The other approach requires you to use the wiring diagram to identify those wires by colour and location, perhaps even indulging in a little multimeter action to trace them end to end to make sure, and then.... you will have the answers you need. The R34 wiring diagram is available on-line (no, I do not have a link to it myself - I would have to do a search if I wasn't able to go to the copy I have at home).

About $4k brand new, available from vendors in Oz, or via an importer from Japan. Although that is for an R34 box, so you also need to buy the push clutch front plate (brand new from Nissan) and swap that over, and drill the bellhousing for a push clutch slave cylinder.

I forgot to come back to this. If the Sika is not stiff enough, and you can dig it back out (which should not be take for granted as being possible!), then I would try a 2 part polyurethane resin in a durometer a bit stiffer than whatever the Sika measures up at. It would suck having to buy a pot full of it to use just a thumbleful, but whatever.

I am starting to think that it has to do with the tie rod correctors. The forces between the tie rod and the steering arm are supposed to be close together (in the vertical direction). Spacing the tie rods down adds in a larger amount of torque, from the force being applied further away (ie, further down) and it appears that the casting will sometimes just say, "nope".

You'd be insane, when a brand new 8HP is ~$4k, and all the work to put a 6 in would cost the same as an 8 and the 8 is a completely established swap. If you think that getting a cheap Falcon box is going to make it a cost effective exercise, then you're not accounting for the extra $10-15k that the task will consume.

They're all horrible. X-Trails have had a nasty sounding 4cyl since forever, no matter what engine family it came from. The CVTs only made that worse. Then the whole Renault thing only made every Nissan that was contaminated by them even worse again. The only fun I've had in a X-Trail was having it blown sideways across a frozen Minnesota highway at 90 mph trying to make it to the airport to get out of the frozen hellhole of Hoth. Nearly died. Was great fun.

The wiring diagram for the R33 RB25 is freely available, and is essentially the same same as most other RBs (just with differences as to which pin # does which job). To get the ECU to power up, you just need to provide power to the ECCS relay, and have the other power feeds that come in from the top left of the wiring diagram (wrt the ECU) that give perma power to the fuel pump relay, the ECU itself, etc etc, all connected. When you put power on all these it will just come to life. It's pretty clear from the diagram what needs to happen. Just follow the lines from the 12V + supply stuff in the top left over towards the ECU. I've even posted snips of such diagrams (not for vanilla 25, I think for Neo and 26) to various threads here in the last few months, talking about what it takes to get the fuel pump and FPCM up and going. Search these up and they will help get you started on doing the same with the vanilla 25 diagram. Hell, for all I know, I've done the same with that one in years past and have forgotten.

I'd ask the shop what they used and use that. Mixing coolants is sometimes OK, sometimes not, and you have know the details of each coolant to know whether it's a good idea or not.

Put another overflow bottle (ie, a 1.25 coke bottle or similar) under the overflow hose and see if it is being pushed out there or if it is disappearing into the engine.

Starting on a stand is no issue. You just have to wire everything up, give it fuel and cross your fingers that the stand is robust enough. Arranging the inlet plumbing is often the hardest part, without any surrounding structure to hang some of it from. No need for coolant if you only want to run it for <1 minute. As to the gearbox - I think the little Aisin box is a bit stronger than the other small Nissan boxes that went behind SRs, but I wouldn't be too keen to test its limits with the torque of a boosted 25. I don't know if you can retain the box and the tailshaft. The box won't connect to the RB without an adapter of some sort, which is either a plate that will push the engine forward (which is not good for fitting it into the bay's available space) or push the box back, which messes with the box position and tailshaft length - OR - cut and shut work on the bellhousing, which is a long way from "least modification". I'd be buying a new 370Z 6 speed or similar, doing what has to be done to that to make it fit RB (ie, cut and shut bellhousing) and the requisite tailshaft custom/mods.

Uses the factory sensors? Which are currently the problem?

My thinking is that if the O2 sensor is shot then your entire above described experience is pure placebo.

Make sure you use the spherical bushes** on the lower arms, ifyou do that. ** at least, if not the whole replacement lower arm.

The tap for coolant flow control will be stuck open. It's not just the air door motor that dies.

I said Garrett style. Not Garrett genuine. And something in the G30 550 range is what you want. Not those pokey little old fashioned T28 sized things. The intake ports in the head are small. There is little benefit in fattening up the runners and leaving ths actual ports small. Just run what you've got. And on the subject of Nistune vs Haltech etc..... You know you can control the transmission with decent standalone ECUs these days, right? No need to keep any of that old Nissan bullshit. Don't get me wrong - I use Nistune on my Neo. But it is a DET, so the number of bodges and workarounds I had to do to make it work in a chassis without ABS, TCS, etc, is quite small compared to the herniated arsehole you will have trying to make it work on a motor that doesn't have some of the things that the turbo ECU wants to see. Just easier to bite the bullet and go aftermarket outright.

Hmm. Only when the f**king thing is actually working. Still can't find the leak. And that's with dye being put in the last 3 times!

And what is the significance of the Italian word for "reserved"? AFAIK, it means nothing WRT GTRs.

There's no way that we can tell what they were for because they are not stock. Somebody had something installed that needed an earth and took it 98% out.

Yuh, if it's 45°C outside, my car is driving in it.

I like their veal scallopini.

No. The castings are all the same. As you have the inlet off, simply measure the diameter of the inlet ports and compare with the freely available on the net sizes of turbo and NA. The NA ones are small.