GTSBoy

If you can't do the calculations in your head, you can use an on-line offset calculator to show you how far the inner and outer edges of the rim will move with changes in width and offset. For example, done in my head, your change from 10" +35 to 9.5" +38 will have the following effect, which I will describe in steps so you can follow it. The width is 0.5' less, so that's 12.7mm. Call it 13, because near enough. If this was the only change, both inner and outer edges would be an extra 1/4" (6.35mm) further in towards the centre of the wheel, giving that much more clearance both sides. But, with your change in offset from +35 to +38, which moves the hub face towards the outside of the wheel, you will move both those rim edges by 3mm. So your outer edge will now be about 9-10mm further into the guard, and the inner edge of the rim will now be ~3-4mm further away from the suspension. You gain more clearance everywhere, but it is biased away from being evenly shared by the change in offset. On the front wheels, you're only changing offset. The wheel rim will move into the guard by that 5mm. On an 8.5" rim, I would be worried that the tyre will foul the upright. I have 8" +35 on my R32 (so, yes, different suspension pieces, but the same basic design, so what is true for R32 may or may not be same same to the mm as R33). I have absolutely bugger all clearance from the tyre to the upright when sitting at ride height. That's with 235/45 tyres. If I want to go wider at the front, say to an 8.5", then I need the entire additional width to be on the outer edge, which would mean pushing the offset down to +28 (technically +29 would do it, but....who's ever heard of a +29 wheel?). That would leave my inner edge where it is and push the outer out by the extra half inch. Having said that last part, apparently R33 GTR wheels, which are 9" +30, fit on an R32. I can't see that happening on my car because it would use up 8mm more clearance. Maybe the way to do it is to stretch a 245 tyre onto them instead of using a tyre that will fit the 9" better and have a more upright sidewall. This aspect of selecting tyres to make less appropriate wheel choices fit remains an option. In your case....you have the car. you have the wheels fitted. Drive all 4 wheels up onto some blocks of wood so you can slide underneath it and have a look at all the clearances yourself. You will learn a lot and understand what happens when you change things. You can get someone fat to climb in the boot and see what happens when the rear suspension compresses. Do the same by having them sit on the radiator support panel at the front.

Makes more sense.

Well, being a Corolla, and there existing Caldinas and other 4WD Toyotas both newer and older than 1996, you'd think you could use a Toyota donor. But there's no point in discussing this as if it was a serious possibility. Dropping an enormous sum of money on a 30 year old Corolla is pure bong smoke.

I bid $20k!

No. Too old for BCM controlled anything.

You'd need a clutch too. So probably more like $4.50.

Oof. Braver man than me. Looks like it had a deep and long swim.

Care to explain the thinking behind this question?

That's not going to happen, given... Because that shot should be categorically impossible. Stock circuit goes direct from dash switch/dimmer to globes. Someone might have added relays and f**ked that up, so that the relays stay on regardless of the control side being on/off/unplugged. There's a big 3 pin connector (H4 style) behind each headlight that carries the Lo, Hi and earth wires, that plugs into a subloom that breaks out to connect to the separate Lo and Hi globes in the headlight. If there are relays added, they should be there, because it is the easiest place to intercept the stock wiring and interpose something else.

I would be suss that that behaviour was caused by the trigger kit. The trigger kit doesn't really care what the engine load is. It's just seeing moving metal next to sensors. It may fail to work at a particular engine speed, but wouldn't care if it was low load, medium load or high load. And it probably shouldn't change moment to moment. It's either good or bad, unless it is temperature dependent. The symptoms you describe are typically fuel or spark delivery related.

He means, "How much negative clearance is there between the back side of the wheel disc (or spokes) and the outer face of the brake caliper?" Brake calipers can foul by being too large a diameter for the inside of the barrel, or they can hit the back of the disc area. People often ignore the latter possibility.

No, on the basis that the CAS shouldn't be f**ked with, and if it is, it should be set back to the correct base timing with a timing light immediately.

What are these question marks for?

No, he was saying that the ignition timing (which is what people mean when talking about "timing" wrt a tune) was not correct. Meaning that for any given load cell it could have been too retarded (and thus giving away power) or too advanced (and thus being close to or beyond the point of causing knock, and thus dangerous, and thus silly to drive around while using the engine in such a away as to access that load site). We know your AFRs are f**ked. You're the one who told us it is blowing black smoke.

Pump issue.

Yeah....that's a bit of a shortcoming. There is no replaceable bulb/parts on these. The 3 wires are potted in the back of the housing and there is no way to open them up to see what type of LED is in there. To access the insides you'd have to do a full deconstruct by taking off the lens and gutting the chrome reveal trims and then remove the projector lenses. I mean, it won't likely be a commercially/consumer available LED anyway. They will just have mounted a COB onto some heatsink. You might be able to replace that if you got in that deep. I'm banking on having to buy new ones if they die. I will retain the option to refit the originals while I work on cracking a dead one of these open should that come to pass. I got mine from RHD. They (RHD) are a bit shit though, because there was some extra ~$100 "transaction fee" for the pleasure of buying from them, and then I had to pay a bunch of import duty to get them from the courier company once they were in Oz. All up, it cost me >$1600 to get them in had, which is a bit tough to swallow. But as per my other discussions on the matter, by the time you buy some decent Morimoto LED projectors to retro into original lights, you're halfway to that much money anyway, and then you still have to crack them open do the work, reseal, with the various elements of risk attached to those steps. As it stands now, I have perfect condition R32 GTR headlights in boxes in the shed, that are currently worth at least $500 each, probably more, and are only going to increase in value. If my car ever gets crashed again, I'll be much happier splatting some polycarbonate lensed aftermarket lights than genuine ones that are going to be effectively made from unobtainium. I mean really...when you get down to it, just throwing stupid amounts of money at things on these cars is now par for the course. I don't really have any regrets. The initial sting of it turning from a $1000 thing into a $1600 thing has already passed. I won't even remember it in a few months.

It's not true. The HICAS CU is the module that controls the assistance of the front rack (as well as doing what it does with the rear steer). The solution when ripping out all the HICAS stuff? Just leave the HICAS CU in place. It will still do the speed sensitive front steer assistance. At least....it does on R32. I can't promise it will on R33. But I can't see why they would change the system that much - the brains are basically the same - it's just the rack changed to electric actuation. On the R32, because my HICAS was faulty (aftermarket steering wheel had no position sensor, so the HICAS CU would go into a spaz state at >80 km/h and activate the isolation solenoid to the rear rack, which was not working properly and caused the rear rack to steer which caused me to need to wind in a half a turn of lock to keep the car on the road, which is just f**king stupid), I simply pulled one of the connectors out of the back of the HICAS CU. I can't remember any more if it was the smaller or larger connector, but whichever it was - the power steering remained normal and the HICAS stopped panicking and there was no HICAS light on the dash (because the light is fed from the connector I pulled out!). You have to leave one of the connectors and not the other. On the R32 that is. On an R33, it might instead be necessary to pull a wire or two out of a connector instead. You'd need to look at the wiring diagram to see. Then, after driving like that for years I just swapped out the whole HICAS subframe for one that was non-HICAS, along with the non-HICAS toe control arms (which gets rid of the the tie rods and ball joints in favour of normal bushes - which are now steel spherical joints on my car), and deleted the hydraulic equipment and replaced the PS pump with an R34 one (which was easy because it was attached to the Neo that I put in the engine bay). 25 years after the first HICAS fault, it is still otherwise normal.

The hydraulic part of the R/Z32 era HICAS is not the bad part. It's the brains of the operation that is the problem. Just not clever enough to do what it is supposed to do without trying to throw you off the road when you're driving above 7/10ths. And of course, the additional unnecessary wear points in the rear end.

For cross referencing purposes, see this thread for another option.

Another 30 months later and I have bitten the bullet and put these into my car. I got the chrome blingy ones because, after consideration of the black alternative, I realised that the chrome ones were by far the closest in appearance to the originals, and I thought that the black ones wouldn't look as good on a white car. And look good they actually do. There is a tiny little problem with the HB projectors making it look a little cross-eyed compared to the wider eyed stare of the original projectors. But they certainly do not look like they are weirdly out of place. They are also spectacularly bright and sharp compared to the dull, vague output of the original projectors. An unexpected outcome is that when on high beam, all 4 projectors are on. There must be a cross connection inside and a diode. The low beams do dim a tiny bit when the highs come on, so the extra drop across a diode would make sense. That, and the tiny, scrawny little wires they provide for the 3 pin connector. The return current for both HB and LB has to come back through the earth wire, which is the same thin little thing that the other two have. So there is probably quite the voltage drop on that wire. I measured ~4A current on each LED before I installed them. 8A through skinny wire is...dubious. And the other weird effect is that my set of 4x relays that I installed behind the original headlights with fat direct battery feed simply would not allow the LEDs to switch on. I don't know if I got something wrong in my head when I built the adapter harnesses needed to allow me to keep the the relays, or if there is some weirdness caused by the internal wiring of the LEDs. I shall have to look into it again later. Not eager to pull the front end apart again soon. Yes, I'd forgotten that to get the headlights out of the car you have to remove the bumper skin, which is an extra hassle.

It's not an oil problem. It is yet another BMW design problem. Best fixed by not buying that Eurotrash in the first place, along with VAG products and half of Satan's limo supplier's catalogue.

If it is the HICAS that is loose, then it will be the outer ball joints on the tie rods, not the tie rods themselves that need to be replaced. If I was having to do that job, I would be doing the next logical step and binning the entire HICAS shitstorm, which banishes those stupid ball joints and all the rest of the stupid HICAS along with it.

Oxidation <> conductive.

It'll oxidise like a mofo and probably not do anything. But it won't melt.

Take it from an engineer. You could use 20-60 and not notice any difference. They all thin down to approximately the same viscosity at operating temperature. Look here: The viscosity axis is a log scale, so you have to keep in mind that every major division up that scale is 10x the value of the previous division. And that shows that at the 0°C end of the scale the difference in viscosity between 10 and 50 SAE oil is about that factor of 10. At the 100°C end of the scale, the difference is much less, about half an order of magnitude, which is about 3x (rather than 10x). Meaning, as oils get hotter, their viscosity converges towards a common (smaller) value. This is a chart for single grade oils, not multigrade. Keep that in mind, we're only talking about the behaviour of a single grade oil across the temperature range, and the difference in behaviour of a single grade oils at the same temperature here. I will address the multigrade situation after. There is no line there for 5 or 0 SAE oils, but you can imagine that they are a similar space below the 10 SAE line as the the 10 is below the 20. Look at the 10 SAE line at say, 10°C and at 90°C, being the typical (worst case) difference between a cold start and operating temperature in most of Australia. Some places never go below 20, some are frequently down to 0°C, but the argument is no invalidated by those additions to the limits I'm using. The viscosity at 10°C is about 0.2 Pa.s (Pascal seconds, which is the common term for the expanded SI units shown on the chart). At 90°C, it is about 0.009. That's more than an order of magnitude difference. Do the same for the 50 SAE oil and you get about 2 and about 0.03. That's more like 2 orders of magnitude. But importantly, the viscosity of the 50 SAE oil at 90°C is still about one order of magnitude lower than the 10 SAE oil at 10°C. This means..... A light weight oil, like a 0, 5 or 10, is quite thin at cold conditions, but is still thicker than a heavy oil is when that heavy oil is hot. And the engine is definitely going to be happy with the thicker oil at that hot condition, so it can only remain happy with the thinner oil at the cold condition. The difference between a 0 and a 10 SAE oil at typical Aussie cold conditions no worse than the difference between the thin and thick oils between cold and hot. And in fact, much less than "no worse". As has been said above, the only reason maufacturers are speccing thinner oils for modern engines is to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. Thinner oils do pump faster at the first turn of the engine and so do provide earlier rise of oil pressure and supply of oil to rubbing surfaces (like cams). But really, for actual protection against these initial rotation conditions, we actually rely more on the retained oil which is kept there by the film strength (and by modifier packages that are added to the oil) anyway, and thicker oils are better at hanging on anyway, so it is probably a moot point. If I had an engine that demanded 0W-20 oil, I would have no issue running 10W-40 in it. The chart below is for multigrade oils (which adds confusion to the explanation, which is why I used one for single grade oils above). The multigrade oils have a difference viscosity curve, because they act like a thinner oil at low temps and as a thicker oil at high temps, so the scale gets compressed. You can see that the scale on the below chart is not logarithmic (is linear), and that all the oils collapse to the 10-25 cSt range when at operating temperature, and are much more viscous at 10°C (which is not shown on the chart, but you can see they would all shoot up above 100 cSt.