Jump to content
SAU Community

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 231
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Adam-drifting-Julies-S14.jpg

The day had come, Friday. The day my R33 had to be complete and ready to be tuned, and trailered to Raceline’s Wakefield Matsuri.

After our efforts late into Thursday night, the Skyline was good to go for its tune at Mick’s Motorsports. When it had arrived Mick attempted to connect with the Haltech, but found the consult cable was faulty. Maya (Anthony’s other half) rushed to Mick’s to obtain the E11V2, then took it to Haltech to get repaired on the spot.

Once that was complete, she went back to Mick’s Motorsports and the planned tune/run in resumed. We all honestly thought nothing else could go wrong from here on in, it was the light at the end of the tunnel. I had heard nothing for a couple of hours from Anthony and I was starting to worry. Shortly after I received an SMS, it was from Anthony stating the car made 315kw on 16psi. I was over the moon to say the least.

Not only did the “new” engine last the tune, but it actually made some decent power. Although there was one last curve ball thrown at us. Anthony attempted to drive the car back to my house after the tune had been completed. He got a street away from Mick’s workshop until the engine cut out.

7:30PM, Anthony gave me a call and said “Your not going to believe this, I think your timing belt snapped”. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t believe it. Until he asked if I had picked up the car trailer yet.

Jeff and I headed out to where my Skyline was, and loaded it on the trailer. Anthony was keen as mustard to get the car back the stop, rip it apart and find out what the hell happened. So we did just that.

He started by removing the cam covers, and checking if the cams were seized. Anth spun them with a wrench and they moved freely but something was making a nasty sound, we all knew what it was.

Anthony then took off the timing belt cover, the Power Enterprise timing belt was still on the camgears, but looked to have part of its casing removed. He looks down and said “f**k, I found the problem”.

Idler-loose.jpg

What you’re looking at is the idler bearing sitting in the timing case. The engine builder has not only over tightened the bolt, but he didn’t use a high tensile item. This stupid mistake has cost me is not only missing out at Matsuri, it’s going to cost me a new head assembly. As the pistons have bent the valves when the bearing fell off.

What gets me the most is that many people have spent a stack of time on getting this Skyline of mine up and running, and because the monkey who put this engine together had obviously no clue to what they are doing, we all suffer.

IMG_0847-764x1024.jpg

I really don’t know what I’m going to do from here on in. I have no faith in this engine that has been slapped together. I’m thousands in debt and I’m basically back at square one.

The Run It Hard! gang still headed out to Matsuri at 12:30am Saturday morning. Paulie and I managed to convince Julie taking my spot, she had a blast and will be going to Wakie a lot more often now. I even got to drive her S14 a little bit, as you can see in the first picture.

No matter how hard we fought against the shonky engine, we were defeated by something so simple. Something that any engine builder should never get wrong.

Nail in the coffin

It's shit to say the least. The engine builder won't return my calls so I've taken it to fair trading.

The car is back at my joint for the time being. Everything will be put on hold for now I think.

560579_364554876927000_278229208892901_950805_1574226799_n.jpg

A little update:

I recieved a call from fair-trading today, shortly after I got a call from Jo. They want to "inspect" the engine.

I'm interested to see what they have to say for themselves.

horrible luck mate, hopefully only good to come from here on in! this thread has made me cringe at the thought of my engine to be stripped and rebuild with all the goods in the next few months so fingeres crossed!

well that just sucks a big fat one sorry to hear mate..

Cheers lads, can only get better from here, surely? lol we'll see what happens.

drinks.jpg

Last night after I went out with a few of the Run It Hard! gentlemen, I managed to get to my computer and go on a hunt.

I’ve been doing this hunt every week or so since the pair of 18×12.5J Lehrmeisters arrived. I was looking for another pair. Hoping to make a set of kick ass wheels.

But they’ve been impossible to find. Upon my searching, I discovered they were replicas of the AC Schnitzer type III wheels. I also discovered that AC Schnitzer destroy replications of their wheels in public, among other things.

I kept digging around, and I could only find a couple old advertisements in the US and UK. There is no information to be found on these wheels. They are no longer listed on the Lehrmeister website, I couldn’t even find any images of them, after searching multiple terms on Google Japan.

lehrmeister.jpg

I told myself, that if I couldn’t find a pair tonight, I’m going to order some Work Meisters.

It was 4am, my eyes were closing shut but I just had the urge to keep going. I felt like I was hot on the trial, even though I was on the verge of exhausting every resource I had.

My persistence has paid off, I did in fact find another pair of these Lehrmeister wheels in 18 inch. The width and offset is less than desirable but that’s an easy fix. I’m just so happy that I’ll be able to have a matching set of these awesome looking wheels.

MIX AND MATCH

URAS-slammed-R33.jpg

Sunday was the day that Ali was ment to swing by, and have a chat about this engine failure we have on our hands. Here I was hoping to get something happening with it all, instead of the car sitting around.

He was ment to be at my house “around 2PM” to “inspect it”. I got a call from Jo at 2:30PM stating that they wouldn’t make it. So they’ve struck again, further delaying this whole ordeal.

Julie, Anth and I were pissed to say the least (more so Julie, she was furious!). So instead of getting all worked up. We to put the 33 on its guts.

Uras-slam-R33.jpg

This is the final ride height for the car. I’m actually surprised the ISC coilovers have so much adjustment, they are maxed out though.

URAS-R33-kit.jpg

t’s all I have to tell at the moment. Here’s hoping this whole ordeal gets sorted out swiftly.

WAITING FOR NOTHING

  • 2 weeks later...

New-head.jpg

’s the charm

The belief that the third time something is attempted is more likely to succeed than the previous two attempts. It is also used as a good luck charm – spoken just before trying something for the third time.

If you’ve been following the build on my R33 the past couple of months, then you’ll know I’ve had just no luck with it so far. Well as the saying goes, ”The third time’s a charm”. I’m praying that this saying can pull this car into gear and demolish the curse that has been set upon my Nissan Skyline.

Tuesday morning, 12am I met up with Daniel and I purchased a RB25 head off him. It’s missing a few bits and pieces which is all good. As it has the complete valvetrain which is what’s needed to get the RB25 back to life.

This will be installed, and a few small things will be changed on the car at the same time.

If all goes well (seriously, how many times have I said that?!) I might just make that epic day at Eastern Creek, that Driving Sports are currently organising.

THE THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM

Schwing! the game changer once again!!

tucking.jpg

After roughly 6 weeks of struggling to get in contact with Alister and Joanne from Hyperform/Powerplay. I’ve finally had some progress regarding this engine failure.

2 weeks ago, I had advised them that I will be taking legal action if my demands aren’t met. At the time this is what the Dept. Of Fair Trading had informed me to do. Anyway tonight, the eve of the 14th day, I received a call from Jo. The “conversation” got quite heavy (as you’d expect) about what went wrong, how it went wrong, the variables on what could have caused it to go wrong … basically trying to say because they weren’t the last person to work on the car so it could be anyones fault.

As you could imagine, I reacted to this and shit got out of proportion. I think it was well deserved though, seeing that it’s taken over six weeks to get where we are tonight. I think it’s long over due and that this should have been over a long time ago if they wanted to put the effort in.

Anyway, Jo and Alister are happy to issue me a refund once I return the engine. I’m going to do just that, I want this ordeal to be over with so I can get on with getting my R33 up and running again.

PROGRESSION

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



  • Similar Content

  • Latest Posts

    • Update 3: Hi all It's been a while. Quite a lot of things happened in the meantime, among other things the car is (almost) back together and ready to be started again. Things that I fixed or changed: Full turbo removal, fitting back the OEM turbo oil hardlines. Had to do quite a bit of research and parts shopping to get every last piece that I need and make it work with the GT2860 turbos, but it does work and is not hard to do. Proves that the previous owner(s) just did not want to. While I was there I set the preload for the wastegates to 0,9bar to hopefully make it easier for the tuner to hit the 370hp I need for the legal inspections that will follow later on. Boost can always go up if necessary. Fitted a AN10 line from the catch can to the intake hose to make the catchcan and hopefully the cam covers a slight vacuum to have less restrictive oil returns from the head and not have mud build up as harshly in the lines and catch can. Removed the entire front interior just shy of the dashboard itself to clean up some of the absolutely horrendous wiring, (hopefully) fix the bumpy tacho and put in LED bulbs while I was there. Also put in bulbs where there was none before, like the airbag one. I also used that chance to remove the LED rpm gauge on the steering column, which was also wired in absolute horror show fashion. Moved the 4in1 Prosport gauge from sitting in front of the OEM oil pressure gauge to the center console vents, I used a 3D printed vent piece to hold that gauge there. The HKB steering wheel boss was likely on incorrectly as I sometimes noticed the indicator reset being uneven for left vs. right. In the meantime also installed an airbag delete resistor, as one should. Installed Cube Speed premium short shifter. Feels pretty nice, hope it'll work great too when I actually get to drive. Also put on a fancy Dragon Ball shift knob, cause why not. My buddy was kind enough to weld the rust hole in the back, it was basically rusted through in the lowermost corner of the passenger side trunk area where the wheel arch, trunk panel and rear quarter all meet. Obviously there is still a lot of crustiness in various areas but as long as it's not rusted out I'll just treat and isolate the corrosion and pretend it's not there. Also had to put down a new ground wire for the rear subframe as the original one was BARELY there. Probably a bit controversial depending on who you ask about this... but I ended up just covering the crack in the side of the engine block, the one above the oil feed, with JB Weld. I used a generous amount and roughed up the whole area with a Dremel before, so I hope this will hold the coolant where it should be for the foreseeable future. Did a cam cover gasket job as the half moons were a bit leaky, and there too one could see the people who worked on this car before me were absolute tools. The same half moons were probably used like 3 times without even cleaning the old RTV off. Dremeled out the inside of the flange where the turbine housing mates onto the exhaust manifolds so the diameter matches, as the OEM exhaust manifolds are even narrower than the turbine housings as we all know. Even if this doesn't do much, I had them out anyways, so can't harm. Ideally one would port-match both the turbo and the manifold to the gasket size but I really didn't feel up to disassembling the turbine housings. Wrapped turbo outlet dumps in heat wrap band. Will do the frontpipe again as well as now the oil leak which promted me to tear apart half the engine in the first place is hopefully fixed. Fitted an ATI super damper to get rid of the worn old harmonic balancer. Surely one of the easiest and most worth to do mods. But torquing that ARP bolt to spec was a bitch without being able to lock the flywheel. Did some minor adjustments in the ECU tables to change some things I didn't like, like the launch control that was ALWAYS active. Treated rusty spots and surface corrosion on places I could get to and on many spots under the car, not pretty or ideal but good enough for now. Removed the N1 rear spats and the carbon surrounding for the tailpipe to put them back on with new adhesive as the old one was lifting in many spots, not pretty. Took out the passenger rear lamp housing... what do you know. Amateur work screwed me again here as they were glued in hard and removing it took a lot of force, so I broke one of the housing bolts off. And when removing the adhesive from the chassis the paint came right off too. Thankfully all the damaged area won't be visible later, but whoever did the very limited bodywork on this car needs to have their limbs chopped off piece by piece.   Quite a list if I do say so myself, but a lot of time was spent just discovering new shit that is wrong with the car and finding a solution or parts to fix it. My last problem that I now have the headache of dealing with is that the exhaust studs on the turbo outlets are M10x1.25 threaded, but the previous owner already put on regular M10 nuts so the threads are... weird. I only found this out the hard way. So now I will just try if I can in any way fit the front pipe regardless, if not I'll have to redo the studs with the turbos installed. Lesson learned for the future: Redo ALL studs you put your hands on, especially if they are old and the previous owners were inept maniacs. Thanks for reading if you did, will update when the engine runs again. Hope nothing breaks or leaks and I can do a test drive.
    • No those pads are DBA too  but they have colors too. I look at the and imo the green "street" are the best.
    • I’m not sure what happened I told them about sonic tunes free OTS tune and the next the I know .. I was booted..   To funny 
    • Yea - I mean I've seen my fuel pump which is decades old and uh, while I'm not saying this with real knowledge... but I sure get the ick at using anything in the fuel system that produced the state of that pump. Many years ago I went through multiple pumps (and strainers) before I dropped the tank to clean it out with extreme violence. I'm talking the car would do maybe 50km before coming to a halt, which resulted in me cleaning out the filter with some brake cleaner and going on my way. None of my stuff ever looked like what came out of your fuel tank. I don't think I'd be happy with it unless every single component was replaced (or at least checked/cleaned/confirmed to be clean here).
×
×
  • Create New...