GTSBoy

The GK-Tech guys will tell you that the teflon lined joints are manna from heaven, and they will tell you not to put any grease on them. But my experience with grease has been much much better than my experience without grease. See this thread which was a general thread about the arms and sort of became my diary thread. I have since made some PVC sheet nappies to go around them to keep the water and dirt away and this seems to have been a very worthwhile effort. The entire upper arms is wrapped up in plastic. I'd take some photos, but they're 2000km away.

Not that there's any difference. It's all the same parts up the top. I had many sets of these in my car over a 15 year period. They flog out, especially at the front. Not really suitable for long term use on the road either. I had the first available type (from Whiteline) at the turn of the century. My experience, and that of everyone else with them led to Whiteline redesigning with a solid metal outer insert to reduce the amount of urethane, because the thick section of the original design collapsed in only a few thousand kms. But even the new design and all the copies (ie Superpro) do exactly the same thing. I was probably the first person to put grease nipples on them, before they even came in the kits - that's how beige their performance was.

I'm not assuming you're a numpty. I'm not (a numpty), and I freely admit to having set mine up incorrectly, despite trying very hard to set them up properly. This is simply because they are an absolute bear to keep perfectly set up while you tighten everything up. More to the point, having learnt my lesson the first time, I have had them apart many times since (as detailed in my own diary thread on the topic) and have managed to not get it right more times. Filling the boots with grease (which I highly recommend!) doesn't help with setting them up in the least. Makes it 10x harder. Sounds like me.... So I skipped these bits. But....I would not expect that the nuances of exactly how fiddly these arms are to get all 3 of the joints centred would necessarily register on any of those people in that list. Including and especially the engineer and the DOT. The suspension shop, maybe, probably, hopefully. But again - they are outside the experience of most such, so it's not unexpected for them to miss something. Even with this. Yes, I know. No, see that's the nature of it. If you set them up so that they only hit at a particularly large deflection, and you only bump them occasionally, then you could stress them a few times and eventually start a crack. And then, in the middle of just driving along with normal road undulation being the only input to the suspension, the crack makes it all the way through and they let go. Happens all the time with such things. Similar to how I shattered a CV joint just backing out of the driveway. Was fine driving the day before, was not thrashed backing out of the driveway - but that motion was the last straw in the ball cage, which had obviously had a long and hard life before that moment. Oh, absolutely. I know I'm "doing the wrong thing" by using them on the road. I went through a phase of inspecting them extensively and spent a lot of time developing sufficient confidence in them that I don't dismantle them every few months now, like I used to. But I still check every year (it's been a year, so I'm technically telling a lie about that, but I'm not driving the car, given that I'm 2000km away most of the time lately). Also possible. But the rod ends they use are not weak. They're pretty beefy. So it would have to be a batch/random problem more likely than a systematic product problem. Absolutely. It's another reason why I didn't want to load up my rear suspension with spherical joints. I don't need to add more inspection/maintenance load to my daily.

Yes. The ones that really matter. Not ones that are adjustable for camber. There are a number of designs. Some look a bit like the stock arms but have lots of locking screws on a sliding section in the middle, allowing you to change the length. These invariably have bearings in the ends, rather than bushes, and I am fine with that. There is no need for bushes in the FUCAs to make the NVH situation "nicer". Bushes up there are the enemy of good suspension location, because the narrow base of the FUCA mount in particular. Stupid design by Nissan that was fixed in the 33s. Some look like a capital I (with the cross serifs at top and bottom, not this non-serif bullshit that I'm typing with). Steer clear of all of these. They are all shit. Even the best ones (the UAS ones) have unavoidable weakness in the design. All the fixed length ones might as well be stock from my point of view. Doesn't matter if they are a different length to stock and correct a camber issue that results from lowering. If they're not adjustable, they're not worth paying for. That's Nismo, Cusco, etc. The GK-Tech ones are a lot of work to set up and they make your wheel aligner cry. But they are the only ones that I've found that do what they say on the box (which is to allow for a swivel articulation to remove the loading that the stock design forces into the bushes as the arm goes up and down. Again, stupid design by Nissan). I'm sure that there are others from the various brands sold in the UK and US (Driftworks as a potential example). The bushed Hardrace arms are not particularly different to ones with spherical joints. I'd be reasonably sure that you could actually swap back and forth between a bushed outer end and a spherical outer end on the rear arms if you had the parts. As much as Hardrace stuff looks likes any of the hooflungdung Taiwanese/Chinese/eBay brands, they have established themselves and seem to have earned a decent rep. So I am happy to use them and don't shy from recommending them.

At the front I have Tein spherical front caster arms, plus the GK-Tech FUCAs. Plus a Whiteline adjustable bar with balljoint droplinks. At the rear I have Hardrace (hard) rubber bushed adjustable camber and radius arms. Plus a Whiteline adjustable bar with balljoint drops. The rear is also a non-HICAS subframe (so, equivalent to a HICAS delete kit, but, better). So the toe arms are different to stock. I chose the hard rubber bushed rear arms for the logical reason. It's a streeter and it's already noisy and harsh enough, plus I didn't want to add to my maintenance load by adding even more spherical joints. All I was really after was the ability to set the camber exactly where I wanted it and dial out bump steer, which is a factor that most people just flat out don't understand and ignore. Anyway, the rubber in the Hardrace bushes is very stiff, so they are at least as good as poly, without the eventual creaks and groans that come from poly bushes, which I have also had in the rear (and the front) in the past. Lower arms and bushes are stock, for the purposes of not making the NVH situation hugely worse for a small/medium gain in arm control. I am prepared to go poly on all of those ifnwhen they age out.

Cam position is easy. #1 firing is simply set up with both intake and exhaust lobes on #1 pointing away from the lifter. They are independently rotatable. They don't have to be exact - just pointing as close to directly away as you can eyeball them. Then all the other valves will be open (or closed) to safe positions wrt their pistons. The other thing you can do is put #1 piston at TDC then back it down by, say, 10mm before putting the head on. This just gets the pistons well away from TDC on all cylinders as you put the head on, so that even if you have your valve angles a bit wrong, you shouldn't be able to hurt anything. Then, when it comes time to set up the timing, you just roll the crank that bit to bring the piston back to TDC and keep them cams as close to the right spot as you can and then throw the chain on it. The main thing with this just to work slowly and carefully enough with as much double checking as you feel is necessary at each step to make sure you're not leaning on it wrongly. Experienced assemblers of engines rapidly get past even having to think about it. Novices just need to know and apply the commonsense rules.

There was really only 1 interior in almost all the R32s imported into Australia, because only the ones worth importing (Type M, or whatever you want to call it) were imported. It's the same thing as the GTR, just different seats. So most of us haven't seen any of the other pov spec interiors. The 4 doors had slightly different seats because they didn't need to be tiltable. There was a lot more variety in the R33 space, because so many more pov spec 33s were brought in.

You always assemble any engine with #1 at TDC firing. Anything else is just asking for trouble. If the head is going back n with cams installed (where that is possible) then you also need to set the head up to match the engine angle. Or, when you're putting cams back into the head with the head on the block, then you need to install the cams at a compatible position to the engine position. Otherwise you're likely to drive valves into the pistons somewhere. In this case, you were turning the motor by hand and cannot see any places where the valves have scraped metal off the pistons, etc etc. That means that you simply haven't done the damage (created the swarf) that you see. So stop worrying about that. But.......Now you have to wonder why there is swarf in the head, when there absolutely shouldn't be. Whoever worked on it has not done a good job of cleaning up after themselves. I would not put it back together without a surgical inspection.

Front caster rods are THE first and most important place to consider spherical joints. They hardly have any impact on NVH but they have a massive positive effect on reducing fore-aft movement of the front suspension. This is massively required with the stupidly narrow mounting base of the R32 FUCA. I also maintain that any poly bush at all (or worse, rubber) in the FUCA is a bad thing. The GK-Tech arms are the only thing have tried that have been a workable solution to the problems in the R32 FUCAs, short of cutting the car up and fitting R33 style wide base FUCAs, which is simply not an option for most people.

Or, the engineer's approach to the problem? Close it up behind the inlet pipe and stop worrying about it? Or, the engineer's who cares about aesthetics approach to the problem? Put it in the lathe and adjust that part of the inlet a little bit. Then close it up behind thee inlet pipe and stop worrying about it. Function. Then form. Unless masturbate.

Well, you've done more than most OPs in these sorts of posts have done, so kudos for that. I would suggest probing the driver's side mirror's wiring while it is being driven in and out to work our what gets voltage when, then do the same over on the passenger's side to see if the power is getting as far as the mirror or not. Depending on what you find, you can blame either the mirror or the wiring. Then you just work either forwards or backwards from there until you find the fault. FWIW, this stuff is not always easy. The control boxes for the windows and mirrors are opaque black boxes (literally and figuratively) that are hard to understand what's going on inside. But with a known working example on the RHS, you might stand a chance. The other thing to keep in mind is that it was caused by the person who disassembled and reassembled the door for paint and you should have gone right back to them immediately to get it seen to.

No. It will not.

This thread pumping out the fat lols again! Time for V3?

One is neutral, the other is reverse. You can actually work out which is which for yourself by probing them. One will be closed (short circuit) in neutral.....the other in reverse. FWIW, on the small l box, I think the frontmost one is reverse and neutral is the rear one.

The 20DET RWD box and the 26/20DET AWD box both have a reverse switch. The reverse switch wiring will definitely be on the diagram. I'm 2000km away from my copy of the manual, so can't easily look for you. Keep looking.

The only good sounding V6s come from Italy.

Not an issue. Do a google for "wire in water jackets" or "welding rod in water jackets" and read the thousands of similar posts on thousands of car forums. Common as muck, apparently.

No that's R33s. Or was that boats? I keep forgetting.

viscous LSD is not worth a pinch of dogshit. Never has been, only gotten worse with age. Millions of words on this topic posted on these forums.

The wiring diagrams, including wire colour codes, are all available in the R32 GTR manual.

In Adelaide I can think of several instrument workshops that specialise in fixing this stuff. One on Torrens Rd, been there forever, might be shut now - might have moved to Main Nth Road Prospect. Called Gauge Works. VDO Instruments used to repair other brand/OEM iinstruments as well as their own. There's a few guys advertising from outside the (Adelaide) metro area also. And I see a couple in Melbourne. There has to be someone in Sydney. A quick google shows these 3

I was going to say I wouldn't try to feed the Dakota square wave signal to the dash. But....if what they are saying about the output being a squared off sine wave means that it is still an AC signal (ie varies from -ve to +ve voltage) then it might work. The Dash circuitry is looking for a frequency of the voltage crossing zero volts. I t=don't think it's looking for rising or falling edges or peaks or any of the other possible features of a sawtooth / sine wave signal. Just the zero volt crossings. So therefore, if the Dakota's signal contains those crossings, it could well work. What won't work is if the squared off sine wave is all on the +ve voltage side - which is what the square PWM signal that the dash outputs is. That's a different way of conveying information. The AC signal is about frequency as proxy for speed (which is easy to understand in your head) and the PWM signal is about equivalent average voltage as proxy for speed (which is easy to convert to a computer understandable value). If I were you I would beg, borrow or steal an oscilloscope and check out what your speed sensor is doing at some known/calculated road speeds and compare with the charts in the manual. If they are on spec then the problem is in the speedo head and you might be better off taking it to an instrument workshop to get it fixed rather than bandaiding the incoming signal. This because if the speedo head is crook it could continue to degenerate and you'd have to keep tweaking the bandaid in order to maintain correct reading, right up until it stops working altogether or you reach the end of the range of correction available. It might be something as simple as a dry solder joint or a dud capacitor.

Given that that looks like a torsional fracture plane I can see exactly how that would demonstrate the failure mode I described. The outer ring of the bearing has clearly been twisted off of the rod. Perhaps get off your high horse and accept that it could have been your fault. Also, keep in mind that you're not supposed to use these on the road and that it is intended that skilled and experienced race mechanics/engineers set them up. That's people who already know the risks of what happens when these joints reach end of travel. Caveat emptor has never been so meaningful.

Seriously, there is far better than even odds that this was your own fault. Not attacking you, as it is very very easy to set these up wrong. If you don't keep the spherical joints close to the centre of their range of motion when the suspension is in the normal position, then they can reach the end of travel just with normal suspension movement and then they stop being a pivoting joint and immediately become a rigid connection. This puts all the force that would have made the suspension go up-down (or whatever direction it's supposed to go on that joint) go into the spherical joint's thread and it only takes a few of these bumps to snap them. I managed to flog out a couple of spherical joints (but not break them) by not having them sufficiently centred. it's really hard to make sure that all 3 sphericals in the GK-Techs are centred, especially when they are in their boots and doubly especially when there is grease on them. They are good like this. Which bearing was it? I'm assuming (per my long paragraph above) that it was one of the separate sphericals, not the pair of captive ones in the main part of the arm.

Put the ECU into diagnostic mode and find out fault code is registered. The procedure for doing this (assuming it's an R34) will have been posted many times, so just search for it.