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Adam's Stagea Drift Car ... Wait What?


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I've always had a fascination with the Nissan Stagea, it's quite an odd car that many people either don't know about, or completely under-estimate.

Until recent times, I never actually had a good long look/drive of them. My first drive of a Stagea was a few weeks ago, and from that point on I knew it would be my next car.

I was never happy with the Kouki (Series 2) front end, and I was torn on whether to put up with it, or to buy an S1 and convert it to manual (the Zenki/S1 models never came in manual). I was leaning towards the S2 for a while, until I found something that caught my eye.

It was a Zenki DAYZ edition, with twin sunroofs and all the factory extras, it also had extremely low km's. Problem was, that that it was in Camperdown, which is over 2 hours west of Melbourne.

With a bit of planning, Jo (J_HUI), Yuan (RR-04-RR), Julie (MY-514) and myself were on our way to Victoria.

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5am Saturday March 5th was go time!, Yuan and Jo made it to our house and we caught a shuttle to the airport.

After arriving and checking, we had time left to spare. So we grabbed some breakfast ... my foot long was awesome!

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Here's Julie holding the tickets for our flight, Julie had never been on a plane before, so I was a little worried if she'd chuck a Marge Simpson and freak! ... thankfully, she enjoyed every bit of it.

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We landed in Melbourne at 8:20am, first thing we noticed when we walked outside were the yellow taxi's!, I don't think we saw a white one during our stay, wierd.

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Anyway, we headed to Budget to get our car hire sorted. We were orignally booked for a Hyundai Getz, but we recieved a free upgrade to a Toyota Corolla, as no Getz' were avaliable.

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After that was all sorted, we were off to Camperdown to check out this Stagea we traveled 1000km's for. All I had running in my head at the time is "God I hope this is the one".

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To be continued.

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No idea why the this thread has been moved, it is a build thread

The drive to Camperdown was lonley, we'd be lucky to see a car every 10 minutes. On the way we saw some beautiful things though, like massive fields of sunflowers ... it was like they didn't end!

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The further we went on, the shittier the roads got ... we were really heading into whoop whoop now.

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On our way, we went past a few lakes. It's pretty cool how you can see the deep spots in the middle.

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Ok ok, that's enough scenic touring for now.

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Fast foward an hour or so and there it is, the Nissan Stagea we travelled all this way for. It looked awesome just sitting there, so clean! much better then the photos posted on carsales.

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We spent a good amount of time checking everything, and found a few minor problems (as expected). I told myself as long as everything is in decent condition, and there is no rust in the chassis I'd take it. Anyway, after we scoped the car out, Yuan, Jo, Julie and I had some lunch and discussed about the Stagea.

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After we ate, we went back to the Stagea. I was hoping that I could haggle the price down a little, but the owner was playing hardball. I guess he knew he had the upper hand considering the effort we've made to see this car. So about 20 minutes of negotiations later, the car was mine!

So we were on our way! but before heading back to Melbourne, we had plans to go to Geelong.

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We travelled via the Princess highway, and after doing some stupid things this happened.

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Long story short, I've lost my rights to drive in Victoria for 6 months and was fined. I'm very lucky in a way that's for sure!

Ok, so why were we heading to Geelong? to pick these beasts up of course!

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Now it was time to head back to Melbourne, they were some nice twisty roads along the way.

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Here we are on the outskirts of the city. This is where things started to get conjested and crowded. I also had a problem arise with my newly aquired Stagea too.

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After driving around in this confusing place for a while we managed to find our hotel for the night. I think we checked in at about 6pm!

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We were all pretty knackered and chilled out for a bit before deciding what to do next. Yuan was keen on getting take out and bringing it back to the hotel, but Julie and I wanted to check out Ligon street. Apparently a lot of the restruants are very competitive and offer freebies if you eat there.

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We all started walking down to Ligon street and was stopped in our tracks as the restruant owner started haggling with us ... it was true!

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As usual Yuan ended up finishing his food first, and Jo almost finished all of his!

Ok, so we then took the hire car back to the airport and went out to Crown casino to try our luck. Yuan ended up coming out ontop whereas the rest of us didn't.

Anyway, after a long ass day we headed back to Quest hotel and got ourselves some shut eye for another big day just around the corner.

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at 10am we were out the door and ready to head back to Sydney. Yuan and I decided that we'll split the driving up every 2 hours. Yuan was the first driver out of Melbourne, I'm glad I wasn't driving ... it's confusing as hell! in some spots you have to share the road with these damn things.

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half an hour later, and we were just getting out of the CBD ... We all had a long day ahead of us.

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So it was time for a fuel stop and some breakfast. Yuan was still keen to drive some more, so off we went.

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This picture was taken at about 4pm and 400km's from home. The Stagea turned into a insect destroyer!

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Here's some windmills I snapped, on the outskirts of Yass, they were so peacefull to watch.

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It was time for dinner and our final stop before we were back in Sydney, and I noticed the turnoff to see the Big Merino ... I haven't seen it in it's new location before, and Julie has never seen it.

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Here I am with the Stagea at Cabramatta Hungry Jacks cleaning off all shit off the 900km drive. The Stagea ran flawlessly, and with four people, a set of wheels/tyres, one suitcase and three bags everyone was very comfortable.

It was an eventful weekend, we travelled over 2000km's and probably had upto ten hours sleep during the whole of it (Joe only had six). Actually come to think of it Julie and Yuan had like a million naps! haha.

So there you have it, our epic journey to pick up, my perfect Stagea.

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So, why a Stagea for a drift hack?

I like to be different, and I don't want to be picked up by the po-po everytime I drive it ... like my last car, a Mazda MX-5. I owned this beast for 6 years, at the begining of it all, it was very uncommon to see these things aggressively modified (low offset, wide wheels, low to the ground etc).

Anyway, I set it up for drift, and it was quite a good drift car, but a back condition has led me to part it out, and I'm thinking for the future a little here too. The MX-5 would become a burden when it was time to have a family, and I was looking at another 10-15k for some more power out of it (which was the point i was getting to). So I decided enough was enough and went for the complete opposite of what the MX-5 was.

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So there you have it! :D

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This month should be pretty big, I've got quite a bit of shit on order (seats, tie rods, cosmetics, engine parts etc) coming from Japan ... which has just left so yeah I'll be piecing the car up with the new parts.

After that, the next big thing will be ...

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Cheers mate.

got these in during the week ... should have quite a bit more coming this week (hopefully)

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and fitted one of these suckers

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Build the pressure

Oh yeah, took it skids on Friday too, starting to use full lock now, which is perfect timing as I have some inners/outers coming in.

Edited by RoadsterGarage
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Boing!

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The BC Racing BR coilovers for the Nissan Stagea are odd, the rears are height adjustable until your chassis is laying frame, but the front is a completely different story. So for a temporary measure, I had the springs compressed to "guesstimate" what height spring I needed to order.

The new spring size ordered was 150mm long which is just about perfect. Check out the gap between the coils, whoever says compressed springs don't effect ride comfort must be on crack! Not only were they a harsh ride, they would also bind on hard bumps.

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The new springs were installed without much hassle, and are much better than the compressed pieces of shit. Now I can go as low as I want!

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box of goodies Part I

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Y'all know about that big order that keeps on accumulating, well most of it has actually arrived! The first batch consisted of Greddy catch cans, Nismo gear knobs, HID kits and some Bride material.

The only thing I ended up fitting was the Greddy catch can. After about 20 minutes of figuring out where to put it that is.

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No idea when I'll fit up the other gear from this order, but hang tight!

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box of goodies Part II

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Here's the second batch of goodies in my Garage, these goods were organised by Rod at Tetsuya Garage over the past few months. This batch includes a NA grille, Works Bell boss kit, Kouki tail lights, KTS inners and outers, books and all sorts of other shit.

Oh, there's also a manual centre console chilling in the above photo too.

So, the only thing left to do was to get it all fitted. I started with the easiest thing first, the eyelids. I realised half way through the order that I realised that these weren't the eyelids I was after. But mocking them up on the car, I don't mind them at all.

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Next up was the grille, those factory clips are a pain in the ass to remove, but we got them off in the end. The grille transforms the front of the car completely, and I dig it.

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To finish the night off, Aytac and I tackled the rear tail lights. These were an absolute bitch to replace. We needed to rip out the whole boot trim (or as much of it as we could) and then fight the sealant in the centre lights. I ended up snapping the Zenki centre lights trying to get them out. We managed to finish up at 2:30am. But it was all worth it.

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The car is starting to come together now, I'd like a front lip and a few other things to tie the cosmetics together, but we'll see what happens huh?

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Hurro Kitteh fitted!

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Seeing that the Works Bell boss kit arrived yesterday, I decided to get it fitted. I actually intended to fit it last night but upon removing the OEM steering wheel, I realised that Nissan used security keys. So I had to get a socket to suit before I could do anything.

Other then that, it was all smooth sailing, and I had the boss kit installed within the hour. It's amazing how heavy the OEM wheel is, I would say that it would be at least 5KG heavier then the new setup.

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Not only does it look better, I've got more leg room too! Steering feels lighter too suprisingly. Now I want to get all the Kazama and KTS parts in, adjust the cars height and get an alingment.

Ok, now we are up to date!

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Sunday morning 7am, I was still awake from my fourteen hour sleep the day before, bored and eager to do something. After smashing up COD for multiple hours with Aytac I thought it would be a good idea to do something productive.

I headed out to the garage and had a look at these clear indicators from Japan. The indicators I ordered were for a Nissan Cefiro, which happen to share similar indicators to the R34 and Pulsar, with the only difference being the plug shape/size. So, I got out my files and started grinding into the back of the indicator, until the Stagea’s plug fit. This probably took me an hour to do. After that I managed to get some shut eye.

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Also, my Bride style seats arrived and just purchased a Greddy E-manage Ultimate with a Kouki WGNC34 tune for a bargin price!

So next up, I want to fit all my adjustable arms, get an alingment and put in the brides before next skidpan. I might paint the eyelids too.

Then sort out things like intercooler, dump pipe and manual parts while I wait for the Emanage to arrive before the conversion starts.

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