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Since I've partially exhumed this wreck recently, I thought, fuck it! How about another thread? This story harks back to the mid/late 2000s. Blue diesels and 440ml woodies were still 8%, (occasionally 12% too) I owned a running driving old school car. A fella posted up on the datsun forum, that he was going overseas, and his project was for sale. The car was in Upper Riccarton. But he was doing seasonal work in Marlborough to pay for his overseas trip. I arranged to go see the car, and met one of his flatmates. It was looking a wee bit worse for wear. There were a few parts missing, and thw differential was in the boot. ( causing the rear sub frame to hang down. Giving the rear wheels some funky angles that would make a triumph blush. No motor, box or front seats. He' had it transported down from somewhere in the north island by rail. (Presumably where he was from) they bolted an old wooden kitchen chair to the seat frame, so they could rope tow it from the freight depo to their flat. (These were feral uni students btw) I viewed it on a Thursday arvo. The guy was due home late on Friday night. Saturday morning rolled around, and I was taking my 1200 to race at the drags. I swung past their flat. I was greeted by a bunch of shirtless lads, sinking piss fuck all past breakfast time. One of them was standing on a skateboard, on the roof of an early 80s Mazda 323. They had a ramp at thw end of the bonnet, and the others were chanting his name trying to get him to drop in down the windscreen. (The things that happened before phone cameras eh) I introduced myself. The fella said someone else was coming to see it that afternoon. I said fair play, let my know eh. And I set off for Ruapuna. However, before I got there, tragedy struck. I'd forgotten to turn the fan on, and the rad overflow spat out superheated water. This converted my coke a cola overflow tak into a whiskey miniature sized bottle. Realizing I was never going to pass scrutinizing, I turned around and headed back to these lads flat. I said to the guy, How much to buy it now, and you tell the other guy sorry? I forget the number he threw up. But with me not racing, and just saving enough to rent a car trailer, I gave him $250. Yes, its live rego too. Here's a picture of the car when @- i5oogt - and I moved it from my house, over to mums. (My garage was being demo'd to build the new garage) Must be a while ago, cos I still have hair? DISCUSSION

Fuck i love this thing. Nothing to report, it's just being awesome.

This weekend will mark the end of the second logbook for this car. I was lucky enough to meet a previous owner a couple of years ago and he sent me the original logbook, so I have the complete competition record for this car. This weekend's event will be its 98th competitive event and the 55th with me behind the wheel. Its first event was the Pukeora Road Hillclimb in Waipukurau in October 1994. Pretty cool to have all the history! I whipped the passenger's seat out and found half of the Shotover Delta underneath. Queenstown is the dustiest place I've ever lived and the dust is this super silty mineral slurry that gets stuck to everything. Gave it a wash after work and it looks ready to go racing tbh. Quite excited to get to Ruapuna finally! I've raced every other track in NZ and the car also raced at Bay Park in 1995, so am very keen to tick off Ruapuna and Levels this season.

Got the big valve head back. speaking of valves, ended up having to replace most of them. so fresh set in both sides. shit happens when everything is running super tight clearances. Grabbed a few pictures for a better comparison to show how much the ports have been moved compared to stock head

Got distracted by the exhaust which i had anticipated would happen, and had purchased some 2.5" stainless bits a few weeks ago. First I split the underside of the OEM headers and pulled them in a bit tighter, then used my mediocre TIG skillz to close them up again. Then there was the EGR port which I thought I should block off.. Then I added some downpipe and such and tweaked it til I was happy; Then added a V band fitting at an appropriate place and Tigged it all up. I did remember I needed to add the AFR sensor nut in there, but was chilling with a beer by then, so another day.. Should be dooorty enough...?

Alright, it's been a couple of months so it's probably time for an update. This is going to be super high level. I wish I was engaged enough to show every minute thing I was up to, but tbh I wasn't even taking photos. The paint was finished up around early may. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Here's a bunch of pictures of it at the shop and back at my place. There are a few bits that I want to have touched up, but otherwise it's pretty damn good. Once I got it back, I didn't really know where to start. I still had a bunch of stuff that needed to be powdercoated, mostly suspension bits, so I decided to get on with the sound deadening. I don't have any great pictures of it, but it's not really that exciting. Here's a progress pic somewhere near the beginning. Got the powdercoated parts back: diff, crossmember, springs, 4-link bars and bunch of other brackets and stuff. I needed to replace the steering column rubber that mounts up against the firewall, but you can't get them, so I CADed one up and printed it from TPU. Hopefully it holds! I got the crossmember in, which was a massive pain in the arse - hopefully I never have to remove it! Then I threw the front suspension in with the FabHouse upper arms, stock lowers, slotted ball joints and the ShockWorks dampers. Then I got the rear end in. Took a bit of futzing as I've never put the 4-link arms in myself, but wasn't too bad. I did end up seizing the thread of my panhard rod, so had to have that remade. Thankfully the team at Suspension Developments were super easy to work with and it was pretty cheap (a lot cheaper than the original unit that was made, potentially out of the wrong material). Rear brakes are in too. Excuse these awful pictures. Next I put the front brakes on and things are starting to look pretty good. And the booster/master: And that's about where things are at with putting it all back together. I've got a few things I want to do before I put it back on the ground and send it off to have the brake and fuel lines made. But I'm happy with the progress On the engine side of things, the head has been at the head shop for a long time. I ended up finding out that the head I had was too soft, which was a bummer. You can get aftermarket heads but they all have these tiny ports that are okay but not the best. However, through some stroke of luck I found a NOS head from AMC which are an old Spanish manufacturer. It was from the 90s I think. So anyway, we got some blank valves and machined them down to suit and now I'm just waiting on a flow test and to figure out what I'm going to do about the cam. The other news is I have been working on a billet intake manifold for about 2 years now. A mate over in Aus does cut and shut OEM ones, but wanted to make his own, so I decided to use my little CAD skills and draw one up. Yesterday he let me know that it had arrived. He'll be welding it to a cast plenum he bought. If it all works out, I'll grab one too. I'm also working on a master cylinder brace, at the whole braking system - spacer, booster, master - are only held to the firewall with 2 bolts and there is definitely some flex. Hoping to have this machined soon. Otherwise, that's it for now. Hopefully on it's wheels in a week or so! But still heaps to do.

Got shouted a day knife making class, it was very interesting, and I am surprised at how good it turned out, given that I made it lol Having good tools makes a big difference to how something turns out

Second time lucky, got the Lada up to the snow and ticked off some bingo lines: -Comments on how we traded them for butter -Flash as modern car throwing shakas while passing us -Lost at least one important fastener (3 of 4 exhaust downpipe nuts) So far no return of the fuse issues, looking like it was the reverse light wiring, win!

Now I'm settled into the new place in Christchurch, it's time to get ready for the first SS Cup race meeting in a couple of weeks. My filler neck decided to do wees at the end of last season and it made an absolute mess of my engine bay. It's amazing how much mess a small amount of water can make. Thankfully @JustHarry has access to a TIG just around the corner from work, so he gave it a fizz up for me: Turned out decent considering how dirty the crack was. And it's time for new brake pads. The Winmax W5s did me well last season, but it felt like I was overworking them and I wanted to try something with a bit more initial bite, so I've gone to the W6.5 compound this time around. The W5s were getting pretty tapered, but still have loads of meat left... Thinkiny maybe I'll cut them down to fit in the rear. And a shot of the trust old calipers. These are at least 32 years old.... maybe even older. They're not perfect, but they still work well enough.

The hands have come right mostly, have managed a few more days on the rig but definitely on the go slow. Was working day on day off and it was killing me having all this to do, days off with sunshine and having to rest instead! I've ended up replacing the whole width of the trunk floor sandwiched between the rail and the rear panel..which is practically new the whole way across too. Whipped the trunk lock latch off to get in behind it and that's soaking to knock the surface rust off the back side. Basically finished in the rear now, the passengers side came up better than the drivers so I'll have another crack at that side..at least it's not rusty steel I'll be dealing with so should move fast. Still have to buzz up 4 wee holes where rust from the rear wheel tub has made it through and into the second skin, visible from in the boot..small fry shit. That just leaves the actual trunk floor and behind the trim on the rear 1/4s and we've got the body knocked off! Zapped up the blowouts on the splash shields that were blasted and epoxied Dug all the dirt and old bitumen out of the rear 1/4 pockets and vacuumed them along with the cabin, water blasted the underside as well.

Few updates over the last 6 months. Good news is it still seems to be a strong engine and box. Less so the brakes. Found a set of JDM Enkei MESH wheels with the original center caps, now running 14x6 +15. Little bit of touching with the fronts at full lock but not too bad. We then pulled most of the accessories apart in the engine bay and rebuilt the alternator and surrounding wiring. Freshened up the belt, wrapped the headers and slapped a couple of new webbers on the side. Gave it a full tune, reset the distributor, jetts etc. We also managed to find a datsun NOS race steering wheel and some of the internal gauges/centre console, once weve done the panel and paint we will start on the interior and bring in new rubbers/dash etc. Most of the work and tune done by Bad Penny in Hamilton. Next up we will hit the body, take care of a small amount of rust and give it a full panel and paint. Then move on to the interior, new dash surround, front seats need recovering and trims,/doorhandles,/cards,/etc. Carpet is probably good but we will see.

Been mostly messing with the gearshift, first and foremost making sure the cables fitted through the hole into the cockpit and did it without too bad a kink. Both things worked out well, although I need to raise one of the shift levers at the box 10mm or so for it to be a nice flow of cable. I had to trim a wee bit off the other end of the cable mounts to get through the hole, but its sweet really. Next I cut down the Suzuki shifter and printed a mount to clamp it down onto the X tunnel, this is the final iteration in PA-CF, although I also ended up bolting those bits together. The cockpit end of the cables ended just behind the handbrake lever so I hacked together something to mount them using the mount holes of the handbrake bracket, but which sat down in the tunnel. It got hacked about so much and was so ugly that I decided to replicate it in print, that way I could optimise the angles and positions pretty easily with a couple of iterations. As part of that I cut off the ends of the cables and welded some M6 threaded rod to them using (obviously) a printed jig. The final version of that bracket is currently printing in PA-CF. I then added some M6 rod to the cables and extended them to the gearshift. I will replace most of that with some ally rod with an internal thread to stiffen it up as it is a decent run of unsupported, thinnish pushrod. One of the gearstick connections was a bit difficult to use so I hacked in an M6 rod end I had in the stash; I cut and shut that gear lever to angle it backwards a bit, and with all that in place and the cables connected it shifted gears! Exciting shit. I will print a cable exit gland in TPU for the cable entry, I have printed a test of this that seems to work ok, so will make a real one at some point. Now that was basically sorted I dropped the engine out and spent a bit of time tidyling up the engine mounts, I built these with holes tight on the bolts to keep it all aligned, so I opened these out to more reasonable clearances and tweaked some alignments. Here you can see the front and rear engine mounts after a bit of diddling; Next i will brace the shift stuff at the gearbox end and tweak that lever, than I might sort the fuel pickup situation....

After a bit of time since I started this project. It was finally cert time.

Got it close enough for another test run, aint gonna make it look pretty as waste of my life, so straight off the burr some more width would have been nice, but someone put an oring groove in the way. Pretty much everything from the throttle exit, down to the valve throat has be at least tweaked. Ideally it would have more height at the divider/valve guide area. got a little out of it, but its basically maxed out before ending back up into valve spring area. dont really want to take any out of the floor. So have gone a bit wider to get more area at that point. Plus trimmed a bunch out of the fin on the floor. think i math'd wrong or didnt at all, when i decided the big fin on the floor to the port divider was a good idea, to take up some area. As was the smallest part of the port. From there back out to the throttle exit has been opened up. managed to fix the manifold to port floor transition along the way also, as the angle was a bit off. Its still not full ham spec ports. to do that would have to make new inserts or weld up the o-ring grooves. If it actually gains power and doesn't loose a bunch through the middle thats probably the next move. TL;DR. bigger ports, nicer transitions

Bit of a fuck around with thw master cylinder. I ducked into the brake shop after work today. Showed them the handful of seals I needed. The guy had a measure up, looked at his computer, had a measure up, and went out back. Came back with a girlock box that looked both ancient, and filthy. (Had a "I've been sold once before, and got returned because it wasn't the right thing" look about it. So he sold me a kit with new pistons, seals etc. Tbh, I really just wanted new seals. But obviously he didn't have any, so he sold me what he had. $23. (I'd seen miscellaneous brake seals elsewhere for $4.50 each, so I guess the price was about right. Upon arriving home, I compared the new pistons to my old ones. They looked reasonably close, but not identical. What concerned me was that the hole in the back of the cylinder which accepts the push rod from booster looked different. A careful measure up revealed the replacement one was 2.2mm shallower. Now I've learned not through my own experience, but from other people's that if this shit isn't right, you can have a bad time. At old school nationals 2011, I remember @Avenga brakes got jammed on. (And Cletus adjusted his pushrod a bit shorter, which cured the problem) Then another time, @datto_610 had a similar problem. (I had to slap his pushrod in thw lathe that time, and machine a bit off to make it short enough) and yet another time again, @- i5oogt - had a rebuilt master cylinder he got off (i think) @Carsnz123, and had the opposite problem. (The push rod was too short to properly actual the cylinder/make it pump fluid) Fore armed with this knowledge, I very carefully measured how much push rod was poking out. (With a veiw to making sure I only made it 2.2mm shorter) Unfortunately the fucking adjuster nut on the pushrod was seized solid. Not really having the fight in me to try unseize it, I said fuck it. (NGL there was actually an over supply of expletives laid down during this process) so I carefully removed the seals off the the new pistons, and fitted them to my old ones. I honestly reckon I could of got away with just replacing the rearmost one. But while I was in there etc. Typing all this bullshit now, it's kinda dawning on me is that pushrod still ain't right, (its never been run on this booster before) Then I'm going to be cursing my name for not persevering with unseizing that pushrod adjustor. Anyway, after dinner I bolted it back on, and used a big plastic syringe to bleed the air out of the cylinder. Tomorrow I'll enlist the assistance of one of my crotch goblins to properly bleed the system.

Got my engine back from the machinist. Bored out for OEM .05 OS pistons and rings, Kelford cams and springs, everything balanced and ready to go. Water pump is a hybrid of a RWD rear half and a FWD front half so I can keep all the factory cam covers but have the RWD water lines, just took a little resetting of the impeller shaft. Tried grey for the cam cover but wasn't sold on it so went to wrinkle black. Started cutting holes for the cops, still not sold on that as it looks pretty good without it too. Fitted all the new coolant lines, thermostat and the Flos.ie RWD conversion kit, had the throttle bodies cleaned up and the manifold blasted. Need to figure out the vacuum lines and new water flow and the list goes on....pretty daunting the amount of work and $$ still needed but enjoying the challenge. Split my gearbox and swapped out the shifter linkages for the earlier longer ones so I can retain factory shifter position in the car. Never done that before and took me a while but everything went back together and looks pretty good. New linkages fitted, ready to be sealed back up with fresh seals and gaskets

Few more pics showing how I made the manifold, the steel was from sinco with flanges to suit 4g63t and td05. Had one block in the car and one on floor next to it to do most of welding on. Things I had to consider was clearance from bonnet, steering box, engine mount, brake cylinder. The alternator position will be changed, this will suit the radiator pipes route better too big thing I'm stoked on is all the bolts are easily accessible, most aftermarket 4g63t manifolds are a prick to get to the bolts/nuts, but not this one.....

Pulled rear screen this arvo.. Using the wd40 and knife method.. Almost.. Actually came out pretty easy, about 40min. Multiple points of incursion, this being the only one with a hole, only in the outer skin though.. The glue along the bottom was pretty much unattached the whole way except for a patch by the brake clean, Looked bad but seems to be solid, the trim rail will have to come off as its under there, much like the 929 it's a rust trap, I'll fix it and just glue it back on. Drivers side, some flaking but again, seems solid.. And passenger.. Had a poke around and again seems solid but I'll have a closer inspection, no holes tho All in all looked bad but might be ok.

Well, I have sold this car and the new owner is picking it up on Saturday. These are the last photos of it, after raising it to legal ride height, fitting the RGs, and road testing some recent work on it thanks to assistance from Brad/dellorto (cambelt, waterpump, front main, cam seals, Mugen engine mounts, CV inner boots, sump gasket, PCV O-ring, oil cooler O-ring, fresh MTF, oil and filter). Good to go! It's garage space will be filled with a GR Yaris turbonugget. I might do a thread I dunno, it's probably not overly interesting.

Brakes all back on & adjusted, seem fine now. Handbrake works too. Got back at lunchtime with the new rims. They're wearing old but hardly worn 185/70 Pirelli Cinturatos. I got them off the son-in-law of the deceased owner who had them on his Staaaaag..... Been sorting out some nuts this evening. However, this afternoon I bolted them up. Gonna go 185/60 and roll the arch a bit. The other side is already done. Dunno why. Crazy Japs. Anyway, you want pics, and I don't blame you. Me likey Oh, and boobs !

Forgive me for I have sinned.

Overnight parts from Ebay. figured this would be quicker and easier than attempting to resurrect the collection of OG stuff I have. I might keep my OG lenses, because I've heard people say the repro stuff has a nasty habit of losing its colour/going clear after prolonged exposure to UV. (Bold of me to assume a Koito lens will fill fit a repro housing)

The brake stuck on again and the Limited slip diff isn't very good with its slip limiting action and I got it stuck in the lawn @Beaver is a mega gc collected a gearbag for me, AND took some of my hoard away as payment. What a legend Even put the jimney to the test and pulled the tonner out of the lawn I've now got a sprinter gearbag which is heaps stronger than the car option I have. It also has a easier shifter arrangement to retrofit compared to the three rods from the car setup Makes driveshaft shenanigans easier. I think i've found a Driveshaft uni yoke to suit the sprinter gearbag which is a option if I cannot find a sprinter shaft Nice in cab shifter position too Thankfully with Mercedes lego the clutch I already have fits on the input shaft and the release bearing even is the same so I only need to order a new slave cylinder and couple of seals for peace of mind

What is this? Two updates in two weeks? How good is it to be able to 3D print parts at home? I needed a way to mount my clutch reservoir and after toying with a few designs and some professional advice from @slacker.cam ended up with this: Printed from ASA and clamps together around the cup with some embedded nuts: Mounted up I reckon it looks not half bad: Then last night with the help of my long time friend and OS co-founder @Jerm we waterjet cut out the trigger wheels for the front and rear WSS pickups: Once these are painted up and on the car, I will be very close to getting it back on four wheels.

Split the drivetrain to check the clutch fork as per @kws's suggestion. It looks kindof new once I cleaned the clag off, maybe it has been replaced? The spigot bearing and the thrust bearing were both crunchy, plus the clutch plate looked a bit raggedy even though it still had some life left, so i thought I may as well splash out on some shiny boys;

Pinched this back out of the trueno. Put a 7a sump on it when put it in trueno, which hit the sump guard on this car, since sticks out the front further. cbf'd dealing with sump stuff, so removed the guard for now and spaced one of the mounts a touch. as was just touching x member in one place. few other small things i need to sort out, but head should be able to go on tomorrow. Decided i will just chuck it back on as is for now. Get a fresh baseline before changing the ports

Tuck it in

Since I've been nerding of the port shape stuff a bit, and have had a variety of interesting feedback on it. Including a few people saying that the current cross sectional area is plenty. I decided to see what sort of papers Toyota had about the development of the engine. On the JSAE website: https://tech.jsae.or.jp/paperinfo/en/ You can do a search and then it was only 11 bucks or so, to download some articles from Toyota. Pretty cool, although, needed translation. Most of the 4GR/3GR stuff was moderately interesting but not overly applicable. I always assumed that DI engines fairly heavily leaned on a stratified charge mode to get good economy. One of the articles said that these motors are designed for homogenous charge nearly 100% of the time. That's the only time it ever uses stratified charge is on cold starts to warm up the catalytic converters extra quickly. But there were a few cool diagrams, this one is about what sort of compression ratio an engine can run, based on bore size and type of gas (from an OEM perspective) Interesting to see that bore size is such a factor, I would not have guessed. But also goes to show that direct injection is a huge advantage for knock resistance. They had some cross sections from their CFD testing when developing the engine. Looks as though the purpose of the naca duct geometry at the port is to encourage more air to flow fully around the back side of the valve as well. So probably a good idea to just keep it there. Then this was interesting comparing the amount of friction gained/lost from the predecessor engine (2JZFSE) Interesting that it gains efficiencies in a lot of places but then loses a bunch again, to "other" which is probably stuff relating to having 2x banks instead of 1. Anyway, so keeping all of this in mind / disregarding it all. I've ordered a hand reamer to try and enlarge the ports anyway on a spare set of heads haha. There's a long enough straight section, that is near enough to a circle already that I think it'll be interesting to try. Because, why not? The whole point of using these cheap, garbage can engines is to not feel bad ruining testing them I've got my motor back in the hole, but not fully back together yet. I think I will cry tears of joy if my gearbox shifts gear properly now. Being unable to change gears properly has been my biggest remaining issue to figure out.

I don’t believe it

Couple skiddies from the weekend:

The boss has been away in the UK for a couple of weeks so I have had extra shed time so have been getting through a bit of stuff.. Hacking a stepper motor onto the instrument cluster to drive the speedo, firstly by making a tiny drive adapter then printing a mount; Then making a trigger wheel that needed to be clamped around the driveshaft, so the clamp bolts may as well be the trigger. I will try to use a Safari ABS sensor I had lying around, mostly because it is probably robust enough. I have six spots on the wheel, hopefully that isn't too much resolution for the Link. I may mount it a bit further away from the exhaust tho. I also started to lay out arrangements for the cooling pipes, I tried to spin the head outlet around into a more convenient position but it was still a bit shit, so i decided I may as well just make what I needed. I also hacked about one of the OEM pipes to achieve the same ends, including some convenient piping to the oil cooler. The main pipes will be running close to the exhaust so I will hard pipe them past that bit. I have ordered an AliX special bead roller, so I'll get more of this done when that arrives... I'll get a whole lot of those bits zinc plated once I am happy with the layout...

Hiiiieee, I got the doors and lower tailgate back on the car. Pretty happy with how it all came out, some dust, but mint besides that. Next up is painting the bonnet & scuttle panel. Then I have lots of fiddly little things to paint, like window frames, bumpers & grill and stuff.

Spent the last couple days swapping the 32/36 Weber on my old starlet for a rebuilt 28/36. Sold this to a good mate about 5 years ago and delving into this started feeling like a warranty claim.. nah he's a GC and has been the 'charity sparky' on the shed at home so it feels good to be able to do something for him. Throttle cable was hanging on by one strand and fuel pump had a drip too - new ones en incoming. Door hinge pin might need some love, and I'm swapping the rack while it's here too. I got a bit carried away, it's a nice little car so it only felt right to do a tidy job. Added a flowery little heat shield to plug the gap in the manifold. Made carb spacer to throat down the manifold hole and get a nicer transition into manifold.. prob pointless but who cares. Also had to make a air cleaner adaptor so we can use old air filter. Everything I made, I made twice. How it goes on some quests! Can't wait to take it for a hoon, seems to run pretty well.

Lil' close-up of the chode lobes just because. Inlet: And exhaust with a factory lobe for comparison: Plenty of duration... it'll be interesting to see if they make any power. I also don't think I've covered this earlier in the thread. These cams are from a 3SGE Beams engine built by Lynn Rogers for TRD New Zealand and it was run in the Barrie Thomlinson Altezza and/or Phil Hallebreakers car. The engine has "BT4" stamped into it, so I think this was the 4th engine for the team. They would have rotated through the engines throughout their life cycle. One of the cars ran at Bathurst in the enduros too: The class was limited to 11:1 compression and ~10mm valve lift, but they didn't have any other rules. I picked up this engine along with another ex-touring car 3SGE with the intention of using the high compression bottom end I'd had sitting around... until I took it apart and noticed something weird about the pistons and rods. That gudgeon pin is really high up in the piston... Yep, it's right up inside the oil control ring and it's Teflon coated. Pretty advanced for the year 2000 or so. The regulations limited compression, valve lift etc but I guess it didn't say anything about changing the rod and piston dimensions 😄. Now it makes sense why these engines supposedly revved to 9300 rpm in their day. Being a long rod motor means the high comp pistons from my other engine won't work, so I've decided to put this engine back together in the same spec as it was in the touring car. The only difference will be reinstating the variable valve timing because I'm pretty sure TRD would have run that if they were allowed. Rough measurements say these are ~8mn longer than stock. Factory Beams 3SGE rod ratio is 1.6:1 and these will make it around 1.7:1. I'll chip away at this to try and have it ready for the second half of the summer race season.

More overnight parts from aliexpress/treasures of the Orient. The replacement boots showed up really quick. (I'm going to order two more lots for my other datsuns) Unfortunately the retention clips took a bit longer to show up. For whatever reason they had no grease nipples. (Only blanking plugs) I found a grease nipple which I slapped in to replace the grease in each joint. Then slapped on the boots, and fitted the retention rings. Shouldnt Be a biggie to thow it all back together now.

Sunday dawned and it was a drizzly, cold day... And my only "wet" tyres are 245/40r15 Nankang AR1s, which are absolutely garbage in the rain. As you can tell from a couple of posts ago, I didn't have any grip, so just mucked around doing skids and having fun in the rain. I got lots of compliments after that... Turns out the crowd enjoy a skid 😄 Watch me get swamped off the line in this one: The final race of the weekend was even wetter with zero visibility off the start... and I almost T boned an Evo at Pothole corner. He was spinning for so long then started rolling backwards, so I darted left across the grass. It was so close to being a big crash! More skids, couple of battles with an Altezza and the Evo (both on full wet tyres), followed by more skids again. After that I decided it was time to get better wet tyres. There's no stock of 15" full wets in the country right now, so I've ordered a set of Hankook Z213 "wet tarmac rally" semi slicks. They are the same rubber compound as a circuit wet, but don't have as many radial grooves. Z213: Z207 full wet: The Z213s will be great for damp conditions as they are, but I really want a full wet... so put out the call to look for a tyre groover. This is what popped up from one of my friends: What a cool tool! It's German and has got to be from the 70s or earlier. I gave it a test run on one of my dead slicks and it works well! This one's for @GARDRB: The next round is at Levels at the end of October. I'll get these wets prepared just to guarantee it'll be dry for the rest of the season.

Ran it up today. all the following on same intake trumpet. but the total length will be sightly different Green - non high port, long rod bottom end Blue - high port , long rod bottom end red - high port og bottom end As can see its doing opposite to what im trying to do. some of its runner length difference, but the high port consistently has less top end even when changing runner length red wiggly down low as cant get as much cam timing out of this bottom end, plus not keen to bend more valves right now. So since its not down on midrange time to make the ports bigger. will try to get a nicer transition from throttles through to the port divider at the same time

Hmm... Funny brake things. So the reason the handbrake had gone lame was that the lever at the backplate end had fallen out of its locator, probably due to the shoes getting all spiffed up. Re did it all and now barely any handbrake on the drivers side, as well as zero footbrake. Wheel cylinder jammed solid. It's only 7 years old, the other one is fine. Has a little mark in the bore but nothing dramatic. piston's a bit mank. Maybe it's been seized for ages & I never noticed. Weird. Took 100 psi of air to get it out & that was after a lot of penetrating oil & freeing up. Anyway, all back together now, rubbers seem fine, hopefully it'll plod on for a bit until I get some replacement ones. Also, picking up the rims in the morning. / pics

Currently learning a few things, 1. Welding is hard 2. Welding is fun 3. Grinding bad welds is hard and less fun 4. "that pock-marked metal's probably fine" - no it isn't My mate brought her welder over for the Sunday and we got to welding a bumper support, which has a few bad rust holes. I drilled out a bracket's spot welds to get behind it, went fine. No pics of the actual weld - imagine newbies who have done a quick four-session course starting on their first real project and what you imagine is probably pretty accurate. We spent most of our time grinding and finding (or creating) new holes. With things getting and and late in the day, I yolo welded the bracket back on in haste. Bad mistake. I didn't pay any attention to aligning it and it was totally off. Swapping grinder attachments got old the first time around so perfect excuse for me to get a new one to help remove it... ... which I did, with much more struggle this time around ... ... and created more holes in the process... But at least it's fun!

Picked up the AJ6 which isnt even for this car. Including the incredibly rare manual bellhousing and flywheel

Since such things are now available, I ordered a replacement steering column grommet off ebay. my old one was kind old and fucked. Plus it had the extra hole where the now redundant column shifter used to protrude through. Everyone knows that drafts in an old car make it not a nice place to be. (All of my old cars have been drafty tbh) unfortunately to remove thenold one, i had to remove the column shroud, the undiactor stalk assembly, and unbild the steering box off the chassis rail to drop the death spear column down. (Wee bit of a faff) but i got it off. the next challange was a fixing mount which is spot welded to the column i really didnt want to tear the new grommet trying to squeeze it over that. Everyone on a post I created on Facebook said they tore theirs getting them on. I tried to make a cone out of an empty toilet roll, but the cardboard just ripped. So plan B was the cut the neck out of an L&P bottle, and slide it over. Then I sat the grommet it a bowl of boiling water to soften it up. I hooked it out of the water, dried the collar of the comment, and liberally coated it with silicon grease. It still took quite a bit of pushing! (I had to use one long skinny screw driver each side of those ears to persuade the grommet to go over. After dinner I reassembled everything. (Which was also a faff too)

Slowly getting this thing hacked out. done most of the inserts on mill again. probably takes about the same amount of time as doing it by hand, due to all the setup time, but less manual labour and easier to get them the same. Because just firing and end mill down port on random angles, still need zing down the bumps and finish by hand. Which is where im up to. Some parts of it were actually smaller than the original ports on this head. so makes sense why it was making less top end. But still quite possible the whole high port thing is a fail, or not playing nice with the rest of the setup.

I was getting mad at the new adjusters not turning and blaming them for my incompetence. Turns out the picture I had with coloured springs was wrong. I had the springs on the wrong side and they were locking the adjusters in place Swapped them and strangely enough they work. Quick adjustment and test drive and the catchy/grabby bullshit seems to be gone which is good. Will see how it goes. I've lost the plastic trim clips so chucked rivnuts in place of them Couple of M5 screws and washers and the trim piece is back on Dropped it off for a wof. Fingers crossed it passes

Dropped off for a full facial , manicure, pedicure and full dermal lift.

Welp... a little sad update on the RX-7. I finally had an interested buyer who pulled through with the sale and he drove it away today to Montreal and is currently en route on his ~7 hour journey home. I'm happy that I had some fun with it (though I only did about 3000km in my ownership), but I knew I just wouldn't have the time, deep pockets or the skillset to do what I wanted to do to it and I'm better off focusing on the Evo wagon while in Canada and the Galant VR-4 and Diamante(s) while in NZ.

Just a small update this time, as I've actually been out driving it, not just fixing it. General Update I've been driving the car to work a couple of days a week for the past couple of weeks, to get the KMs up towards the magical 1000km for running the engine in. So far I'm over 300km on the odometer now. Still a long way to go, but we're getting there. Driving the car did show up some issues, though. The main ones were the driver's seat, the tyres, and a fuel smell in the cabin. Recaro Install I love the original seats; they're so typically late 80s, with their shaped bolsters and reversible "shoulder" support But after driving to and from work a couple of times, I quickly realised I'm too generously proportioned for them. You can see how low the "headrest" is in this photo; it's barely at my neck, let alone anywhere near my head, and it's not adjustable. This is a particularly concerning issue if I do manage to track this car. I found the base quite short under my legs too. The solution was to replace the seat. Thankfully, I found some near-new genuine Recaro rails for the CN21S Alto in Japan for a good price, so I grabbed them A friend was also generous enough to donate a Recaro seat he no longer needed, which was (and still might) destined to end up in the Marina. But since it was just sitting around in my garage doing nothing for now, I bolted the rails onto it and dropped it into the Alto. It's an old Recaro Idealstiz CS84. I believe it predates the car by a few years, but it also suits the interior nicely. The cool thing about this seat is that the height/angle is adjustable. The rear height is adjusted by an electric motor under the seat and a control on the LH lower bolster. I don't have this wired up to the car, so I used a jump pack to power the seat and adjust it (I don't intend to change it once I'm happy with its position). The front is manual. It really confused me at first, but I eventually found a Japanese site that explained how to adjust it. On the underside, there is an orange toggle. It's not really a switch as such, but it moves a locking mechanism to allow adjustment. In the middle, the adjustment is locked. To adjust the front, reach under the seat with your right hand and slide the toggle towards the middle of the car. With your left hand, either push on or whack the backrest of the seat. This should cause the front to raise up. To lower it, do the same, but whack down on the front of the seat base (not the adjustable thigh rest, though). Release the toggle, and it will lock in place. One little issue, which seems to be well known in the CS84 community, is that if you have the front adjustment down, you can't lower the back adjustment down far, or the underside of the seat will contact the locking mech on the rails and stop the rails from locking in place. Very not idealsitz indeed. Raising the front up allows it to clear, and the rear can be lowered down. Some have converted the rails to have the locking on the outside to get around this, but it seems a bit extreme. The Recaro is much more supportive, and the headrest comes up much higher and is adjustable. I will say, though, whoever thought it was a good idea to put a big plastic switch block right on the lower bolster... well, there is a reason they don't do that anymore. Tyres I knew when I fitted the Suzuki Sport wheels that the tyres on them wouldn't be around forever. I kinda wanted to get a track day out of them, but after driving it for a couple of days, I found they were unbearable on the road. They had a pretty cool tread pattern, but Nankang AR1 semi-slicks just weren't for me. Nankang themselves market them as "90% track, 10% road" The worst thing was really their inability to grip in anything resembling dampness, which is a bit of an issue considering it's currently winter. Even when dry, they had no heat in them when commuting, so their grip levels weren't great. Less risky issues were that they had considerable road noise at pretty much all speeds, and at open-road speeds the balance wasn't great and they vibrated quite badly. Not to mention they're an 80 treadwear tyre, which is mega soft (RE003s are a 220 treadwear). After much research and digging through manufacturers' resources to see what was available in the size I wanted, I found that anything decent was no longer available, and I had to make the compromise between either having the right size (175/60R13) but in a cheaper round black thing with a name I hadnt heard of before, or go smaller (the same size as the semis - 175/50R13) but get some nice proper Yokohamas instead. I went with the Yokohama Advan A539 in the smaller profile. Very cool looking tyres My wife was roped in to help and had the tyres fitted and balanced to the wheels for me. Even on the ground, they look way more purposeful than the semis. Once fitted to the car, I was very happy with how they looked. It's a shame they discontinued the 60 profile A539, it would fill the guards just that little bit better They're technically slightly narrower than the semis; for a 175 width, the AR1s were actually 182mm "section width" and overhung the wheel a bit more than I liked. The Yokohamas are a better fit. The grip seems to be good from them, both in the dry and damp. I haven't driven in the wet yet, but I expect they will also do well. The vibration and road noise are gone, and the ride compliance is better now too, since the sidewalls aren't like bricks and the tyre absorbs some bumps. Much happier with these, even if they won't be quite as good on the track. Front Swaybar Bushes I'm pretty sure these are the only bushes I hadn't replaced in the whole suspension, as I got the wrong ones for my swaybar. I ordered the correct ones and took a few minutes to replace them today. Pretty easy job on this. Jack the car up, support it, and do one side at a time. Remove the bolts, remove the clamp, remove the bush. Fit the new bush, refit the clamp, and finger-tighten the bolts (new ones in this case) Once both sides are done and the car is on the ground, reach under the front and tighten them up. I couldn't find a spec in the manual, so just a gutentight. The old bushes were a bit flogged. Hopefully this tightens the front up a little bit more. These are quite important as they control movement of the lower arms forward and backwards. Fuel Smell This one was a bit of a concern. Ever since I put fuel in the car, if you left the windows closed overnight, the inside of the car would gain a certain raw fuelly smell. It didn't appear to be leaking anything, but it definitely had a smell. I removed the back seat and unclipped the inner trim panel today to take a look at the filler neck and associated hoses. They all seemed to be connected, with the clamps in place, and no signs of any leaking or weeping. Until I stuck my arm inside the guard and felt around at what the parts book calls the "liquid vapour separator"... Excuse the bad photo; it was really hard to get in there, but the orange arrow points at the top fitting on the white separator tank... which has nothing connected to it. It turns out this orange hose here is meant to be connected to it I tried to pull it to see if it extended to reach, but it had no intention of doing such a thing. I confirmed this was the right hose by connecting an air pump to the hose off the carbon canister in the engine bay and seeing that air was coming from the hose in the back I scraped some of the grime off the hose, and sure enough, it was orange I ended up finding some fuel hose that fit the tank fitting, and then another, bigger fuel hose that fit over both hoses to create a joiner The way the system should work, in simple terms (because various valves in the system complicate it), is that the fuel tank makes fumes. The fumes go through the separator via the filler neck, any liquid, I guess, drops out of suspension and drains back to the tank, and then, via my bodged hose and the orange hose, the fumes travel all the way to the front of the car, where it goes into the carbon canister to be absorbed. When the engine runs, the canister then releases those fumes, and they enter the intake manifold to be burnt. Nice. What was happening was that the tank was making fumes, which were going into the separator and then venting into the inner guard. Not nice. I don't know if there was a section of hose that should join to the orange hose missing. I had a look in the guard to see if I could find something, but nothing was visible. The car is sitting in the garage overnight with the windows up, so hopefully in the morning it will smell like watermelon goose and nothing else. Manual Changes - Cluster and ECU One small change I made a while back, because I was bored, was to disassemble my clusters and swap the auto tacho for the manual one, which has a higher redline. I had obtained a couple of clusters from Japan. Bottom left is my stock AT cluster (7500rpm redline and 10k rpm scale), the bottom right is CN21S MT (8500rpm redline, 12k rpm scale), and the top one is from an older 550cc MT CM11V Alto Works, with an even higher 9000rpm redline. CN21S Auto CN21S Manual CM11V Manual Interestingly, the CM11V cluster had a buzzer on the back. The others didn't, but still had the connections and mounting for it I chose to completely strip one cluster down because I like disassembling things, but really, to swap the gauges you only need to remove the relevant screws These are the five screws that secure the tacho, and other than removing the lens on the front, the only thing holding it in The gauges all come out in sections Because I'm weird, I wanted to keep my odometer, despite having replaced almost the whole car. It was tempting to wind the 99999 one over to all zeros and start fresh, but it didn't feel right. So I built my cluster back up with the higher RPM MT tacho but left everything else as is (other than removing the bulb for the cat over-temp sensor light, which is long gone). I plugged it back into the car to test, and it all seemed to be working fine One small PITA getting the cluster in and out is that the speedo cable needs to be disconnected from the gearbox and pulled into the cabin enough that you can actually fit your hand behind the cluster. I've gotten pretty good at it now after a couple of goes, but it still sucks to do. To help the cable go through the firewall grommet, I sprayed some silicone spray on it. It looked pretty good, much better than the lame old low RPM gauge Unfortunately, I had to do this all over again and refit the 9000rpm gauge instead, as there was something wrong with the 8500rpm gauge, where it seemed to stick at anything over about 4000rpm and just didn't respond smoothly. Thankfully, the 9000rpm gauge is working perfectly. The other change I made from AT to MT was swapping to the stock CN21S manual ECU. I was having some weirdness when driving on the auto ECU, such as bogging down and the engine feeling like it was holding back just before it came on boost, and at low RPM creeping in traffic, the engine seemed to stutter a bit. Swapping to the manual ECU got rid of all these issues, and the engine seems to respond better. I still have the tuned Suzuki Sport N1 ECU, but that won't go in until after the engine is run in. Mirrors Finally, I replaced the exterior mirrors. The driver's one has been driving me nuts when actually driving the car, as it vibrates and shakes a lot and is almost unusable. The lens has also been bodged in place. I managed to score a pair of mirrors off Yahoo Japan, and they were even the same blue as my car. What I didn't know until I had already bought them was that there are two different types of mirrors for the Alto, a low spec and high spec (plus an electric option). The ones fitted to my car are high spec, where the mirror head is meant to be fixed, and the glass is pushed around to adjust the angle. On the low-spec ones, the whole head of the mirror moves around to adjust the angle, and the glass is fixed in place. There is also a slight size and shape difference between the two. The top one is the high-spec one off my car, whilst the bottom one is the fixed-glass low-spec one. You can also see the magnification of the glass in my old mirror. I don't know if this is normal, but it created a big blind spot right where I didn't want one and made it really hard to use. The mirrors are super easy to remove. This cover pops off with one clip down the bottom holding it on And the three screws are all that hold it in place. The new mirrors look fine; you'd never notice they were smaller. If anything, they look a bit cuter. The paint isn't perfect, but it's no worse than the rest of the car; they're shinier than the rest of the car, so I'll need to address that soon. The driver's mirror no longer vibrates when the engine is running, and adjusting them is easy enough. It's quite funny being able to adjust the passenger mirror from the driver's seat, just by leaning over. I did notice that the base on the old driver's mirror was cracked through, so I suspect it was probably hit at some point. End That's it for now. Still plenty of things to be done, and plenty of ks to cover. Once I hit 500km I will dump the oil and filter, refill with more of the run-in oil, and that will take me through to the 1000km mark, where it'll get changed out for proper Castrol synthetic. So far I am very happy with how it's running. The engine revs nicely, boosts nicely and responds sharply. It doesn't smoke, and other than a little tapping from the lifters on a cold start, it's quiet. I think I built a good engine. I haven't taken it over about 6000rpm or so, and don't hold it in full boost, only short squirts of it, so I'm looking forward to really giving it the beans. It does make some great turbo noises, though!

Been ticking away at making a manifold for this, wanted it to be low mount. My first time making a manifold and tig welding mild steel. Definitely learnt a few things along the way Sufficient bonnet clearance also Pulled off the car cover and sat the panels and wheels on to give that inspiration and motivation. I feel this is important with long term projects

There may be a set of these in my life in a minute. Appliance Wiremags, though not particularly JDM YO. they are made in Japan & have a few more mm poke than my Watanabe's. Got a bit of an Enkei mag mesh thing going on And they're local /pic of not the actual ones for Fred