My $500 R31 Ti Daily. Love The Box!

[trustr32]

Well as I'm about to sell this car I thought I'd share it's journey over the last 2 years with everyone so it doesn't just get trashed and forgotten forever. I'll just give the story of how it came to be followed by a crapload of pics if I can find them all but the cars been completed for a year and a half now so its not really an ongoing diary but an already completed project. While I say that this got way out of hand and we shouldn't have gone this far with a shitter it's turned out to be an awesome learning experience for me and Jack and will transfer onto our good cars which we are both slowly doing up so in the end it was worth it.

I bought the car a bit over 2 years ago when I was in between cars it was on the side of the road just out the front of someones house and I finally got sick of driving past it every day and wondering so I eventually went in search of an owner. Turns out it was the first house I knocked on and the lady was even selling it! I took it for a test drive and called my mate Jack (Mr.Untouchable) as he was a bit more in the know and he came down to have a look at ti with me. It was a bit of a no brainer anywayas the car was only $500 and soon I had handed the cash over and gave the keys to Jack to drive it upto my brothers palce to leave the car I was borrowing there. Long story short after doing a few single spinners on the way there I arrived to hear him limping the car up the road with a monstorous ticking coming from under the bonnet.

Turns out after about the third roundabout the oil pressure dropped and the oil light came on not good. I left the car at my brothers and got some oil flush and new filter and did an oil change with some thick as treacle oil which gained a bit of pressure but still had that lifter noise. I drove it for a few weeks until it became unbearable and I decided to do an engine swap. My boss had a VL motor under work so I drove it under the workshop one night and started to pull it apart.

The only photo I have of the car as I bought it minus the mag.

It started off so simple just pull the old one out and put the new one in but then I thought maybe I should paint the engine bay just incase I want to tidy the car up later on. I also managed to source a VL 5speed and all the gear to do a manual conversion.

While the car was under work I convinced myself I may as well start doing the bodywork and it all went down hill from there... Now me being an enthusiastic 2nd year painting apprentice I thought I could change the world turns out I needed a bit of help and as he was a 2nd year panel beating apprentice I managed to convince my mate Jack that had helped put the car in its current state to come and give me a hand. At first I was keen as and Jack barely wanted anything to do with the car but after the first few panels had been repaired and primed he started to come round to the idea that we could do a pretty damn good job. so each repair got better and better and the nights got longer and longer and thats how we spent every weekend of winter 2009, freezing to death in 2 degree weather working all day til 2am sunday mornings trying to get this car done before summer.

We did a fair bit of custom work on the car we removed the aeriel, boot lock all the dodgy door moulds and smoothed up those sections of the doors and guards. I plastic welded the rear Bumper into a one piece and got a series 3 bumper and had to cut the side sections 18mm shorter and re join the so I could use the series 2 filler panel. We also decided to remove the Ti driving lights and fit a pintara grille and the whole effect reminded us alot of an oldschool boxy r34 front.

Anyway shit thats a massive post lol. I'll have to search for a few more of the photo's of when I was painting it.

[trustr32]

I found a few of when I did the first few bits and pieces to test out the paint. The others must be on my laptop. I decided to go with Honda's Phantom Grey/Super Green Pearl in Debeer basecoat with Debeer High Solid clear, its the colour that came out on the Accords but it turned out to be a bit darker in Debeer than Dupont which was what I had done the engine bay in but I didn't mind once I had seen the colour in the full sunlight.

Edited July 28, 2011 by trustr32

[thrtytwo]

pics of complete ?

[Sir Lord Van Von Vader'ham]

+1 love the box

[XRATED]

This box looks pretty cool in the flesh...

[Mr. Untouchable]

My baby lol. bout time it got a build thread.

some serious man hours went into this, really have to see the car in the flesh to appreciate how damn straight it is and how well the paint is done.

custom cam and modded ecu and mini spool makes for some cheap thrills too. 109kw's of box love.

while most other young men are out chasing tail and pissing up their pay, we sad souls are dragging old unloved nissans out of the sticks and giving them makeovers lol.

hurry up with pics brodie, typical slow ass painter

[XRATED]

Still needs a nistune and a 75hp shot gas!

[Mr. Untouchable]

Still needs a nistune and a 75hp shot gas!

yeah when it was on the rollers summers said he could do quite a bit with it if he nistuned it.

and yeah, with a 75 shot it would love life!

but the man has a GTR half built. half built GTR means fully broke lol

[trustr32]

My baby lol. bout time it got a build thread.

some serious man hours went into this, really have to see the car in the flesh to appreciate how damn straight it is and how well the paint is done.

custom cam and modded ecu and mini spool makes for some cheap thrills too. 109kw's of box love.

while most other young men are out chasing tail and pissing up their pay, we sad souls are dragging old unloved nissans out of the sticks and giving them makeovers lol.

hurry up with pics brodie, typical slow ass painter

I'll give you typical slow ass painter when the GTR's running ya bastard at least I'm still trying to make a living as a painter......Well maybe making a living is a bad choice of words think of it as more of slowly contributing to my imminent death by lung disease.......... Na ok I really want to quit lol. Well I got a few more pics off my old phone as said laptop has shat itself and now my phone wont give up the last few always has to be something difficult in everything I do! Well as promised here's a few of when I painted it.

Alright thats when the car was painted and first came out of the oven then around at my brothers shed where it awaited the bonnet and front bar to be finished. It wasn't all smooth sailing though when i got the car painted and all the engine/gearbox in and running I noticed it was leaking coolant from under the extractors bloody welsh plugs! So wheile it was still in the shed I replaced all the plugs I could reach on the block and geez was it fun... Not!

[Mr. Untouchable]

this photo does not do the car justice, and it has been refined a little since then.

still, not bad as what started as a 500 smackaroo daily.

[trustr32]

So now it was painted I also decided to paint the chrome mouldings around the windows and the wheels. For the wheels I was thinking bronze/gold but eventually went for black which I'm glad I did as it looks tough. I also bought new monroe GT shocks and Kings Ultra low springs but it wasn't low enough so after much careful planning We chopped out 2 coils on the front and about 2.5 on the rear just to get that perfect "tucked" look.

Just a few pics of it when first put together

And on her first ever outing

I've got a video on my computer of Jack reversing it out of the shed before I got the exhaust done with just the extractors going to the cat and dumping straight out under the car and it sounds bloody tough I'll have to work out how to upload it somehow. Originally the plan was to run a sidepipe out infront of the lefthand wheel but mocking it up showed that there would be a max clearance of about 1inch under it so plans were thus abandoned.

Once everything was pretty well back together the car looked like this and stayed like it for about 8 months until one night Jack and I spent about 3 hours trying to track down a missfire that was occuring at about 4800-6000 when the inevitible happened....... it overheated and cracked the head

So off the road it came and the head got sent in to my mate Jaymie at Tas Engine Reco. who fixed up the crack gave the head a full overhaul and tidy up. While it was in there I decided to get a bit of cam work done so I talked to Matt about it saying I wanted the most aggressive N/A cam regrind he could organize and that's exactly what I got. Crow Cams did a custom cam for it and while it was in there Jaymie did a 5 angle valve job on it on the D/L for me

Jaymie and Jack came down and helped me put the head back on along with a new water pump and timing belt and we fired it up. Good feeling and man the car pulled alot harder. Where the car used to lean off about 4500-5000 and stop making power it seemed that it got a new lease of life. Seemed like normal till about 4500 then just pulls like a 14 year old all the way to limiter. I got a crappy Ebay chip for it and got it put in another computer which we put in and improved things even more.

I still maintain to this day that the best mod I ever did to this car was install a mini spool. Acceleration improved by 15-20% and predictability when cornering is an even bigger and dare I say it "safer" bonus. I don't know why people would complain about them there not very noisy and MAN they cut a nut lol.

[trustr32]

this photo does not do the car justice, and it has been refined a little since then.

still, not bad as what started as a 500 smackaroo daily.

Typical panelbeater bloody impatient! Couldn't wait for the finished photo's hey?

All up the car made 109rwkw on GT garages dyno at a dyno day so not that bad for a N/A abnger really. I had to get a new centre bearing in the tailshaft after a few months as the spool chopped what was left of the old one out completely. I also got the windows tinted to finish the look of it. Oh I had the old nissan rocker cover and a few spare hours one day so I tidied it uo a bit.

The car got defected for being to low about 5 months ago so when I swapped the suspension over I did all the rear bushes and front swaybar bushes with nolothane bushes stiffened the back up nicely before it used to twist the car when you'd floor it then back off complements of that spool again I guess.

Before

And after uughhh

Back to normal

As it sits now I just need to paint a new front bumper as the one on it has hit 2x wallabies and 2x utes the utes not my fault I was stationary at an intersection and the utes collided in front of me and spun around to land on the front of my car lol no biggie. I decided to stick with a standard length series 3 front bar and just modify the filler panel to hide the bolts on top but I'll post up pics of that when it's done.