GTSBoy

pffft! My alignments are starting to take 3-4 weeks each. Bugger overnight - that would be a dream! Overnight is when I leave it on stands with the rear suspension in pieces, hoping I can remember where I was at when I come back to it. I have to set the car up on a level surface so I can get decent camber measurements, then try to set the RUCAs to the right length to get that right. Then I have to put the car somewhere else where I have enough room to set up the bumpsteer gauge (laser, paper, mirror), so I can dial out that. Then I need to go measure camber again because changing the tension arm length affects that also. Then I need to measure toe, and I can't do that to my own satisfaction at home, so I have to put it on an actual aligner. Then I have to go back and fix the camber again, and if that took more than a half a turn, decide if I want to set up the bumpsteer measurements again. I previously had the bumpsteer almost completely banished and then I started changing things again! And that's only the rear end. Not even gotten to talking about the front yet. And this has been going on in the context of me discovering a seized bolt in the LHR FUCA bush at the upright, hence needing total disassembly to replace that bush and the others that were not far away from the same outcome, replacing sphericals in the front end and making a mistake that resulted in needing to do it again, which is only half done right now. It's a selfmade nightmare. Only have self to blame, etc etc. But regardless, I am so complelely unable to utilise the services of a normal wheel aligner that I have no choice. I haven't found a shop in my city that does "race" alignments - and by that I don't mean I want my car to be set up for racing, but the set of adjustments that I have available and that need to be used to do the alignment are the same as you'd find on a race car. I haven't looked everywhere, but there doesn't appear to be the equivalent of the motorsport focused shops that are present in Sydney and Melbourne. And such an alignment would cost $300, and you only want to do it once in a while, and you don't want to find out that you have to replace bushes and bearings and such while you are spending that $300 so you have to come back and spend it again a week later. So I stay living in my self made nightmare for the moment.

Well, yeah, obviously. But then you have a turbo with 270kW "design", meaning it will have the higher boost threshold and lag of a bigger turbo, but only doing the work of a smaller turbo. That's the suck. That's actually exactly where I am right now, because my stocker exploded and I got Tao to do a highflow for me. I got a low pressure actuator on it and don't push it past ~10 psi or so, where the stocker was being run at ~12 psi. it makes a little more power than the stocker did, but it lags like a bitch. But, if I run any more boost it starts to ping and the ECU goes into panic mode, which cuts all the fun, so it clearly needs to be tuned. But, until such time as I (which is not I, it's my bro-in-law) can actually get the dyno working again, and get some injectors, and do all the swap over of those and the R35 AFM, I can't attempt to use the turbo the way it really deserves to. So what I have now is something that drives worse than what it did before it filled the cat with little pieces of turbine. I will tune it eventually, and probably only push it up to ~250-270 rwkW, which is pretty close to the max for that highflow anyway. I would imagine that by getting the tune right, and with newer betterrer injectors, we can probably make the boost come on a little earlier than it does now.** And if I do not think that the top end reward is worth the low end sacrifice, I will sell it off and convert to a G30, because the smaller ones of those come on boost very nicely on a 25 and make more power than I realistically need or want. The only reason I didn't do it at the time the turbo blew up is that I wasn't ready to sink a lot of money into an Artec manifold, reverse rotation turbo, the AFM and injector upgrade that would have been immediately compulsory, and the dyno was being problematic.*** It was easier and faster to just put the highflow on. And then, as I mentioned in an earlier post, even that is not "easy", because Tao's highflows use a shorter core than the Hitachi, so the compressor housing moves backwards in the bay, necessitating that all of the pipework had to get modded. ** And maybe just maybe, check the valve clearances and put new shims through, because I have recently seen firsthand on another motor that sloppy clearances on the shims can cost a lot of effective timing and lift and really slow an engine down. 3S-GTE in a Caldina got new shims, closing the clearances from just above the max to right down near the minimum, and it is a massively different car to drive. On boost the better part of 1000 rpm earlier!

Gas springs (ie boot/bonnet struts) will be charged up to about 200 bar. That's a bit scary. Suspension dampers will have maybe 10 bar of N2 pressure, which is just a sneeze, where I come from. Anyone drilling holes in anything, pressurised or not, without wearing safety glasses deserves swarf in the eyes.

Stock equivalent turbo replacement is a bit of a nightmare. The old Hitachi ceramic things were pretty good for their time, but they have primitive, vintage aerodynamics. The only thing they have going for them is a light turbine**, and there are plenty of other light turbine options these days, in both materials and CNC manufacturing methods. So, the old stocker makes absolutely no power at all compared to its physical size and its (not very low) boost threshold and response. ** and the ONLY thing that was good about the ceramic turbine was that it was light. In all other respects it is a nightmare. To get a turbo that is anywhere near equivalent in terms of power capacity (ie, to avoid it being "bigger" and needing tuning/fuelling/etc) you have to physically downsize. And that is not a "stockish" replacement. Doesn't just fit where the old one did. At least a frame size down, probably need a new dump, probably need new inlet and outlet piping made on the compressor side, new hose connections as D said above. I say, if you have to suffer that much work, you might as well do the same work to fit an even bigger (than stock) turbo, have more power (and hence have to do injectors, ECU, etc), and love life, instead of suffering with stock power levels. Or, you get a light highflow from someone like Hypergear. A highflow that has not been pushed too far from stock. There are still modification consequences here though. HG's cores are smaller than the massive Hitachi core, so it is shorter, moves the compressor housing backwards and requires mods to the air side piping. Plus new hoses. Looks stock, mostly fits where the stock one did (with the previous caveats mentioned), makes a bit more power but can be run at stock boost levels and not cause too many ECU problems. But, seriously. It's 2024. Like - 25 years since the R33 came out. It's time to put an ECU in it. I Nistuned my car (on RB20 ECU then later again on the Neo ECU) and it was the single best thing possible for minimal money. Dial out the R&R bullshit, fix up the fuelling and timing to make it more efficient for normal driving (cut fuel consumption by >10%). Nistune is not an option for you unless you change the ECU, so you might as well just do a standalone. it will be worth it. And then you can tune it up to the limits of the injectors and AFM, which is pushing 200rwkW and enjoy some actual squirt, instead of the lazy barge-like motion you get from a stock engine, turbo and management.

He can't post pics until he's at 10 post count.

That's less offensive than the previous gen.....except for all that ugly black tupperware around the edges. Blerck!

WRXs are a pure pleb boring car these days. You need to get an STI to even get close to what a WRX used to be.

And you need to wear a backwards flatbrim, have neck tatts and other displays of dubious taste.

Vinyl paint always ends up coming off interior trim and looking like arse. For the a pillar trims.....just try cleaning them with fabric shampoo? Maybe ditto for the headliner.

That's a short. Find the short. It will be somewhere between that fuse and the headlight. Start by removing the plugs from the back of the headlight and dimmer switches, and measure resistance to earth. Supply side (power from the fuse) should have none. The other side should have resistance compatible with whatever globe(s) is there (which is relatively easy to say for a normal globe, perhaps not as easy to say for LEDs). Anyway, if you have very low resistance, you defo have a short. Then you just have to run the wiring like you're running the bowel of a dog (on the operating table) that has swallowed something it wasn't supposed to.

You shouldn't need to massively fatten up the mixtures for cold conditions. For one thing - 0°C is not that cold. For another, the Haltech will be using the IAT sensor to tell it how dense the air air, and calculate the correct amount of fuelling. Then the cold start enrichment is added as a % on top of that, so it should scale with the main fuelling. You might also doubt the IAT sensor at this time. You're not using one from an RB26 are you? Using a nice Bosch sensor or similar? Happens. Some wideband units take great pleasure in killing their sensors. Put another wideband in the tailpipe and compare. Or just swap the sensor to a brand new one and see.

Well, you wouldn't use 2nd hand bearings out of another engine anyway....so just buying the proper bearings is obviously what you're going to do. The crankshaft would be common. The conrods might be common. There is essentially nothing else you would be able to use.

Buy some GKTech ones, with sphericals instead of rubber or poly, and enjoy the lower control arms going exclusively in the up-down direction, instead of the forewards-backwards direction that squishy bushes allow.

I shall assume that was primed, not running. Now it is time to suspect the wideband sensor.

Put a pressure gauge on the fuel rail.

Some of them keep working fine. 9 out of 10 of them end up causing an absolute misery bleeding the system and get thrown on the workshop floor in a tantrum and never thought about again because they were never really needed and just added crap to the car that we could have done without. Same-same with HICAS, A-LSD, and various other stupidities that over eager 10x engineers thought we had to have.

Poor bleeding. That stupid damping loop in the plumbing that should be completely replaced with a braided hose. Just the first 2 that come to mind.

Clutch is same same. Tailshaft is not. Diff will drop in. Half-shafts will not mate up (5x1 on turbo, 3x2 on NA). There is also the strong possibility that your auto NA gets its speed signal from the sensor on the diff, not the gearbag, and that will leave you without a speedo. You can do all this, you just have to do a lot more than you thought.

Dude - we all run massive clutches on the original non-GTR master on everything other than a GTR.... The boost was never required.

Paint is only structural when applied to the outside of Chinese and Indian cars. Otherwise it should never be present between mechanical joints that were intended to be metal to metal. Pain slips, slides, cracks, compresses, and add thickness that wasn't intended to be there. It comes firmly under the category of "just no".

And boosters can be rebuilt by the same sort of brake shops that will rebuild a brake booster.

Yes, but no. You need to keep the mating surfaces bare (ie the flat faces where the caliper and upright pads touch the dogbone) and also the internal threads will remain bare (unless there are no internal threads - do they use nuts on all the bolts?). So you can slow down obvious external corrosion, but not all of it. Anodising would be required to provide decent protection to the alloy, but I'm not actually sure if you should anodise something that is all about the strength. Anodising does reduce strength significantly. Like, up to 50% on some alloys for high thickness coating.

'Sgot nothing to do with them being Japanese. The climate in the north of Japan has similarities to the UK - the cars are made in the knowledge that they have snow and salt, and they rot there. Cars made in the US rot like buggery in the US. British cars have always rotted regardless of the weather. They will rot indoors in a climate controlled bubble! The brackets are not unsafe yet, but they will get that way. They may well corrode where the bolt threads are in contact and the bolts could just jump out without warning.

Dissimilar metal corrosion. Aluminium is less noble than steel/iron, and will corrode preferentially when in contact with it and a conductive solution (ie, wet road salt). Tends to suggest that those brackets should be made in steel for a shitty climate like the UK.

I've not looked at a GTR without the booster there. Is the hole and mount on the firewall not just the same as GTSt? I would have expected it to be. Nissan don't change panel stampings if they don't have to, and you'd think they'd just order/design the booster to mount to the same place.