GTSBoy

Quoting this just to make sure it doesn't go away.

Put steering wheel back on. Put nut back on 1.5 turns. Beat the crap out of the back side of the wheel.

Won't be CAS. Unlikely to be coilpacks. More likely to be injectors. Rich from problem injectors is nowhere near as common as lean from (dirty) injectors, but it does happen. Are you all sure it's fuel and not oil?

Wiring diagram and a multimeter.

Wires are switched somewhere.

Clutch <> compressor. Compressor could be fine. Probably is. The compressor and clutch are going to be common with other cars. Take it to an auto electrician, particularly one who also does air-con regassing etc. And how can it be hard to find someone is San Fransisco to rebuild a compressor? I live in a backward city in a backward country where we all hang upside down from the ground, with a population of only a million or so people and I can probably come up with a list of 5 or 6 places that I would be able to get an air con compressor done. You have SF (pop 1M, LA (pop ~4M), the rest of California (~40M), every other city on the west coast, every city everywhere else in a country with 300 million people.

Of course it is. A 1" diameter increase on the wheel is a normal and trivial thing to do. No it won't. The aim when you put bigger wheels on is to choose a tyre width and (lower) profile to keep the rolling diameter of the new wheel/tyre combo to within a few % of the existing rolling diameter. If you have a known speedo error now (say, you can tell it reads 4km/h fast at 100 km/h, checked by GPS speedo or something equally trustworthy) then you can often choose your new tyre sizing to get rid of some or all of that existing error. Not that you would make this your first priority, but it is an available input to your choices.

It's not a pity at all. HICAS is a liability and interferes with vehicle stabiilty at the limit. It was only created to make the car feel more willing to turn in when driving at <7/10ths. Try to drive the car properly hard and HICAS fights the driver's inputs. Better neutralised than kept. 30 years later, the computers running 4WS systems are better. Back then, they sucked. Too simplistic.

What type of coils are dying? OEM? Good aftermarket (ie Splitfires)? Dubious aftermarket (ie, yellow/red/rainbow)?

I would suggest that that wheel would be no more legal than what you're using now. Sure, it will have an airbag.....but it is effectively a one off handmade thing that has no type testing at all. That is the very antithesis of ADR requirements and wouldn't stand up to 3s of scrutiny at a true roadworthy check (such as at the actual DMV, not some mechanic's roadworthy). I think you're just going to be spending money for money spending's sake here, rather than actually achieving anything useful.

I can connect to and talk to my HICAS CU with a diagnostics handset, but I cannot see the wheels turn, because all the HICAS hardware has been removed from my car and thrown in the bin, like it should be on all R chassis cars.

I have never heard of an aftermarket windscreen moulding for any car that wasn't an old chrome bumper classic for which there was a market for restoration parts that are NLA from the OEM. I am a fluid dynamics engineer, and I would advise you to not worry about it. There are so many other things to worry about first!

^ all-brand, not all-rand.

Who owns one? Not me. My friendly neighbourhood workshop does. Helps that it's my brother-in-law's workshop. But, any decent general automotive workshop needs to have an all-rand capable scan tool to do anything with modern cars. If a workshop doesn't have one, they just can't fix vehicle electronic problems these days.

Yeah - good luck. I've only ever managed to interrogate mine with a workshop grade scan tool. Like Snap-on, or similar.

What device are you trying to do this with?

True.

300rwkW RB20 is laaaaaaaaaaaaag followed by 2000rpm of power.

And besides which, who searches forums using the built in forum search engine? They are usually so f**ked up that they simply don't find what you want or have restrictive settings about not using words of less than 2 characters, etc etc. The only smart way to search any forum is to deliberately search it from Google. You can tell Google to only search a specific site, and awaaaaay you go. Been doing that since Google became useful more than 15 years ago.

I'm bid $21 each then.

If it would have been be sellable (before crash) for anything >$20k, then it is very likely fixable. Provided the insured value is the same. I had the front of my car extensively destroyed about 9 years ago when it was probably <$10k value and the cost to repair was ~$6k. The insurer came super close to writing it off. Parts will be more expensive now, which could make your repair price a lot higher than the $6k mine was, but so long as the fraction of (insured!!) value is low enough, they will repair. But, if your insured value is market, or agreed at <$15k....it might be a touchy area. The insurers are generally not willing to admit that the market values are as high as they appear to be.

BK, You should copy most of your post out to a new thread with a clear title to serve as a searchable guide to these synchro inserts.

Why would such a thing exist?

Acceptable. I'm actually with you there. f**king Acacias. They only live 10 years then they sucker all over the bloody place anyway. Take it down knowing full well that it won't take long to replace it with something else.

Chopping established trees is about more than the carbon balance. This one tree feeds an enormous number of rainbow lorikeets, rosellas, and lots of other birds that eat the blossom or live off the insects. Recently the flying foxes are eating there too. The possums that live there are semi-welcome, if they learn to stay out of the roof! Habitat loss in the suburbs is a terrible thing. I'm lucky. I live in what amounts to parkland - there's thousands of such trees around me. And I still wouldn't cut that tree down to improve my solar yield. In other suburban areas, such as the sprawling urban wastelands of Sydney and Melbourne, every large tree should be considered sacred. They are the last shreds of the ecosystems that used to cover the whole area and are tiny little islands of life in a concrete and bitumen wasteland. On top of that, I would rather have that tree for the shade that it casts on the house, which makes the place more pleasant on hot summer days. I'd hate to have bare brick walls (and the parts of the roof not covered in panels) facing the NW sun. I shudder every time I see those horrendous 2 storey McMansions with no eaves and massive walls facing W and N (or worse, massive windows facing W and N!).