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About 18 months ago I picked this up to make into a wood elevator. Thinking it would need a bit of a tidy up and it wold be good to go. I brought a gas set home from work and started to trim off all the shitty bits. Problem being, the only bits left were the main chain and sprocket as all the rest was shitty. Fast forward to today. Ready to lift some wood!

dragged it out of storage got a wof and some rego, and a well needed clean

Snuck out yesterday morning all loaded up and rode some gravel roads up Waipara Valley then up to Lake Taylor in North Canterbury. Such lush gravel roads and the lake was a stunner. On the way in it felt like I was on the west coast. Bike ran like a dream as usual and my bud on the GB400 clocked me at 105km on the flat in front of him. My weight on the back was a bit too much with a 18pk of lobros but was lighter on way home. Once we got to Lake Taylor we rode back out to Hurunui and to a bike rally at Balmoral Reserve for a evening of bogan activities. Won best tattoo again and scored a bottle of Jim Beam which ill prob give away to a mate sometime. Great foggy ride home this morning and home by 1030. Not a bad 26 hours away and $30 gas for 250 odd km

I installed the castor correction bushes, it was quite difficult to remove the radius arms, I ended up having to cut one of the bolts. Pretty sure one was coozed so good to replace them anyway. I put new pivot bushes in too, these had been done and looked ok, but no harm in replacing them. My trusty press came into its own once I had bodged suitable tooling, it is large and leaky and surprisingly shit, but always seems to get the job done. I also had a look at the radiator situation with some CAD. Basically it needs to lay forwards about 45 deg to get even close to the volume needed and to miss all of the suspension stuff at full compression. I talked through it with my radiator man, he is probably going to come look to minimise the chance of fuckups. Obviously this means a couple of electric fans. There is quite a good flow to the front of it, and he suggested cowling it to the engine as well to minimise heat soak into the cabin. The custom rad will no doubt cost money. Also I ran the last bit of brake line and mounted the fuel filter, which I had completely forgotten about until I rewatched the skid factory's TD42 conversion.. The low range lever is sorted. It ended up with a shorter throw than intended, but as it now has a shitload of extra linkages this works in my favour as this accounts for the extra slop.

I still vote chop and hammer whatever to make them fit, love me some diff clearance.

Bay...Bee.....Saab do-do-di-do-di-do.... Not much of an update, but thanks to the dynamic duo (aka @Carsnz123 and @JustHarry) Agnetha is now back safely tucked up at home. She is now up on stands at the front end and, with Haynes in hand, I have started disassembling the front suspension. Or at least I was until I ran out of tools and talent (will be on the scrounge for a breaker bar this week...and possibly some spanners). Oh, and the bonnet and front grill are now elsewhere to facilitate access to the donkey. If any one is interested, I have for sale some of the bits I no longer have a need for: Theres a suspicious amount of road gravel in this car....

I got this darling to Wellington late last week (after a hasty TM purchase)... and need to send it to a ship Friday 5th April for delivery to my new home in Chatham Island, so by goodness it's going to be done fast, rough and cheap. Immediate priorities are finding and fitting some missing parts (grill, glovebox etc.), raising the suspension as much as can be done with simple tools, smacking on some decent wheels, mud tyres, and if possible some paint on the chassis and tray. She's a 2.7 NA diesel so hopelessly slow, and I reckon the clutch is about to go, but apart from that she's OK for the money. 400,000kms, 4x4 and ~ $4k Five days and counting....

So things are getting a little out of hand

so yet again i failed at finishing a project and sold my honda chaly 90% complete, but for good reason, Blake had chucked his cb50 up forsale and i nabbed it and needed to pay for it somehow. quick rundown for those of you who don't know the bike, its a 85 cb50, with an xl100 motor installed, some bigger tires, coole lights, cool seat, genreal tidy up etc plans are to ride it and enjoy it go on some wild adventures on it, probably source another fuel tank to repaint in some wild colours, strip the wiring loom down to bare essentials and slowly rebuild the spare xl100 motor i have to eventually drop in there. only photo i have of it currently, enjoy

On Friday I managed to lift the front as much as I could (which meant ripping off the upper bump-stops and removing the front shocks (too short) and stressing the shit out of the torsion bars), then I took the wheels and tyres from another ute I have parked up in the bush (a mission in itself). But yeah, but NAH! The wheels fit but the tyres are just too big. I could cut off the front footsteps and flip the rear shackles to get a bit more clearance, but time is short so it's going to have to be smaller diameter tyres. I just love balloon tyres so I am sad, but needs must. Smaller tyres it shall be. Hopefully they'll be here by Tuesday 2nd April I'm on the hunt for some longer shocks. There's some good info on TradeMe from an Australian supplier so that's probably who I'll buy from. They can send the shocks to me on Chatham whilst the Atlas is on the ship. Probably.

Remade the muffler, it isn't quiet but it's much less offensive than it was. The extra restriction cost enough power that I had to rejet to get it back lol. HUGE thanks to @GuyWithAviators who kindly brought a few goodies back from Thailand for Chandler! Not that the needle will ever see speeds beyond 50kmp/h... So stoked with that front badge!

the passenger side sill....it was smashed in ...i tried with my huge dent puller but decided to cut into it........till the gas run out.

started on the passenger underside got a small patch done on the floor got the cap at the end of the sill done. the jack brace looked but looking from the inside it was rusted so i cut it out cleaned it up welded in a new brace and welded back on. and then moved onto the area under the pasenger headlight...i know its not factory shape but with a couple of holes it will drain heaps better

Just tidying up all the loose ends. Added aditional brackets to the new rear soft brake hoses so that they don’t touch the diff. Venting the gas tank. Wrapping wiring. Bonnet on My rear brake diff hard line might need another flaring as I have a slight leak at one junction.

And now thanks to the awesome boys at Vinny Fab. I now have an exhaust. Better pictures to come

I came across a couple of full lengths of used 1 1/2 water pipe in the course of my working week. Old mate and I had been discussing ways to keep our fire wood pile dry. This is what we came up with today. It's 4m wide, 2m high, and 4.9m long. We'll cover it in used sheets of 5.1m roofing iron salvaged from a burnt shed. Total cost so far is about 20 arc rods and a cut off disc.

Glad that the dream is still alive.

The thought is maybe chase up a better chassis if he has to, only paid $200 for it motor only needs a tune up or just swap the carb. I'll take more pics later after sun moves round.

Err, I think this is right..... It is a C10 Nissan Skyline, also known as the Hakosuka (boxy Skyline), the first Nissan to be called Skyline and the predecessor to the C110 Skyline or Kenmeri Skyline, a version of which you guys had over there. It's the fourth model to be called Skyline, the first three were built by Prince who were absorbed into Nissan. Does that help ? Feeling a bit 'Alan Thomas' now, maybe I should have started the this post "My dear fellow".

MUCH more success today! shortened up the brake pushrod and made some changes to how its retained. to further shorten up its length inside the master cylinder. bled all four wheels and it just seemed to go right today. pedal felt great. just how id hoped it would with the particular valving id choosen. the car doesn't have a booster due to space issues. but i didn't want a rock hard pedal like a race car. the valving i chose gave more mechanical advantage over the slave cylinders at the "cost" of longer and a bit spongier pedal throw. which is also exactly what i wanted. the car brakes just as good if not better than the original boosted brakes with incredible control over the brake pressure. you can lock the rear brakes up with moderate pressure, which isnt actually a good thing, however the fuel tank is dead empty and i limped back to the garage ending up on 19psi of fuel pressure, so itll probably stop doing that with a bit of weight, otherwise a simple 2 port bias valve will sort it right out! it feels like the fronts would lock up if you really stood on it harder than you probably ever would which is about right. very very happy as this has been one extremely long headache and im over the moon to have it finally working how i wanted it.

Will it read this? /spam //totp

Soooooo. About 3 weeks ago. This happened.

so i think i might have all the rust on the drivers underside done. rear guard......not bad at all and the arra at the front under the head light...made it a differant shape to factory but with 2 small holes it should drain better

time for the driver side sill....starting with the front end... thought it would have been a small patch but by the time i found clean metal it got bigger. then the rear of the sill (didnt see any rust but it needed straightening and i suspected a patch over rust)

started on the other half of the drivers side floor/jacking point straitened the jack mount and put back on. then there is this bit of the jacking point....it was stuffed this is all i could keep so made this and this is it all done.....time to move on to another bit

The shuttle was surging and running like shit. I suspected the fuel pump was on its way out so I whipped it out. All gunked up with dried fuel sadness. Luckily the tank doesn't seem to be rusty enough to need lots of work to clean it out. I thought I'd finally attack the new to me headers for the crx as they had some surface rust and peeling paint. Quick once over with the flap disc and a squirt of paint and they are presentable The crx rad support was pretty bent and buckled which pushed the rad into the manifold so that needed fixing. I had kept a nose cut off one of the shuttles I've wrecked so drilled out all the spot welds. A quick check to see how close the shuttle stuff is to the crx. Carefully cut the fucked mount out Some carefully trained seagulls later and its in. Bonus now the bottom of the t bracket actually lines up with the bolt hole. The gearbox should be ready this week so I'll chuck it in soon. Might give the rest of the exhaust a quick squirt of paint too as it's mild steel. I also chucked some non fucked headlights on too as the other ones were all yellow and the brackets were butchered on or broken

Sell it and make it someone elses problem. Looks pretty fucked to me. But i'm used to dealing with tin can thickness rust, not whole chassis encased in rust spec stuff.

Looks alright. Get it blasted and galvanized Can attach a chain or old wire rope to a drill and run it though the inside to knock any scabby bits off

Its great to see a car come back from the dead like this

When someone who isnt me posts a whole bunch of graphs on the internet Although stop labelling and scaling your axes, you're making me look bad

In a few days I’ll hopefully post a video of my son and I skating it. He’s only 6 but is seriously better on ramp than I am. I want to seal it to protect the wood.. the internet seems to say use polyurethane. I’m worried that it might make the ramp (plywood surface) too slippery? Does anyone have any experience?

So over the last few months I probably put another 1000km of daily duties and exploring . Then I had a big upcoming ride for Heyholes Stag party which was gonna be the Molesworth Rainbow loop but due to fire risk that was closed and Blizzo came up with a new route. Before the ride I changed the oil and spark plug and chucked on a new rear tyre and gave the bike a good check over. Packed up my spares and tools into my new 20L drybag and a 5L fuel can and headed off last friday morning with my mate Brent on his old Transalp. We rode to Culverden then headed up the Inland Kaikoura rd and had a much deserved beer and feed before he headed back to Hanmer Springs. I carried on up the coast and stayed at my folks place in Renwick. Brent showed me a few gravel back roads on the Inland Kaikoura rd and I clocked up 380Km that day. The next day I left my folks at 8am and headed up the Wairau Valley knowing the Wellington lads on bigger bikes would catch me leaving from picton a little earlier and we met half way up the Valley and cruised up into some twistys. My bike died suddenly but was a quick fix as the coil wire plug had just popped off. Carry on to St Arnaud and gas up before heading off the sealed road onto the Porika track which was steep and rocky but a fun challenge for my bike being so small . We then headed down into Lake Rotoroa after a couple beer stops and then headed onto Braeburn track and out of another valley into Murchison for late lunch and beers. From there we headed up the valley and over the Maruia Saddle then into Springs Junction then straight lined it to Hanmer Springs for a big night. Up first thing in the morning for a soaking wet and cold ride back home to chch while the others headed north up the Inland Kaikoura rd. My bike performed so well and kept up with the 200s and 250s well enought and held a good 90kmhr on its own . Prob smashed close to 950km over 3 days and only had sore ears due to straight pipe. My next mission might be Danseys Pass and pop into Cardrona Valley to see a mate. Best thing was all the old boys fizzing over the posties at the gas stations and being blown away how far away from home I was. Great fun on small bikes always !

That guy has no understanding of electricity and needs to be told so.

So I torched off the brake bridge I used the torch because I had hoped I could just reuse it higher up. But it was quite thin tube, and I had already drilled out the brake mount re-enforcing to wafer thin. So it deformed too much. Will just make a new one. Might do the same with the chain stay bridge. I think I could get away with bending the shit out of it. But may as well do two if I'm doing one

I changed some settings in the tune, I found that at 4 squirts per cycle I was hitting areas where the pulsewidth was just too low to accurately deliver fuel (like 2500 rpm with no load on the engine). I changed it to 2 squirts per cycle so that the pulsewidth is now essentially doubled. I think that this has helped with that problem, and doubling the PW at idle is probably also reasonable as well as at 1.5 ms before I reckon it wouldn't have been far from the nonlinear region. I took the car on a good thrash through the hills to retune the VE map and whatnot. Shown in Figure 1 from the datalogs. Figure 1, VE map Don't worry about it being greater than 100 (colourbar is the VE value), these numbers are essentially a nondimensional scaling factor, that coupled with the fact that I am running lower fuel pressure than the injectors are rated at (I'm running 3 bar above manifold pressure). You can see above 5000 rpm it really starts to drop off significantly, but it peaks around 3500 rpm (I'd as that this is around the max torque point) I also used the Duty cycle values from the injectors to calculate approximate engine power, assuming a 100% duty cycle flow rate of 210 cc per injector, an energy density of 34.2 MJ/litre of fuel and a thermal efficiency of 25% across the board (which is a huge assumption, but I'd say is fairly typical for a petrol engine). The results of this calculation are shown in Figure 2 Figure 2, power curve The colourbar is manifold pressure (in % of barometer). This would give a peak power of around about 58 kW (79 ps/hp), and the curve pretty much perfectly overlaps the one given in the JDM Starlet brochure for the 4K-E. I'd say that the power is probably over estimated by about 5-10% but isn't too far off. I've also found that the car can now get up Hackthorne Road in 4th gear quite happily where I would have needed to stay in 3rd gear with the carb setup. Figure 3 shows a map of the pulsewidth vs RPM. The colourbar is the manifold pressure value. The line of points along the RPM axis/0 PW is where fuel cuts were active on deceleration. Figure 3, Pulse width map Figure 4 shows the observed AFR of the engine, mapped to manifold pressure and RPM. I'm generally holding around the 13.0 mark at full throttle and cruising at around 16.5. My idle AFR is currently a little high at around 14.5, I'll probably drop this down to around 13 as that seems to minimize any effects of heat soak if the engine has been sitting for 10 minutes or so. I probably also need to adjust the VE values on the trace route back down to idle as occasionally it will miss the idle and stall after a hot start since I changed from 4 squirts to 2 squirts (used to be good with my old map). I'm currently not running any EGO correction, I may enable it at some point in the future once I am convinced that the O2 controller starts reliably (I've been having issues recently where it sometimes doesn't output anything to the ECU, but I seem to have gotten it to work reliably again). Figure 4, Observed AFR What is interesting to see from the VE map/PW map is the general operating range of the engine, where it's pretty much all used below 3000 rpm but above that I am generally either fully on the gas or fully off the gas. Then there are some areas which are never hit, such as low RPM/low manifold pressure, or just about anything below 1000 rpm in general.

It's funny how we forget that most people who are 'into cars' are not as into cars as others. No, It's not a Dolomite, a Toledo, a MK 1 or 2 Cortina or even a Toyota. Or American. Japanese cars are so off the radar here. If you tell some one a Hako Coupe is worth more than a BDA or Twin Cam Escort they just stare at you. 25 grand for a Datsun ? Pfft. It's just not cricket.

Pictureless update. will sort that out latter. Big thanks to Sam and the team at lineside auto electrical for sorting out my poor attempt at wiring a car up. It has life !!!!!! Light's, spark, fans, the works, and all done to perfection. Can't recommend them highly enough. Next, exhaust and fluids.

Action time. After sitting untouched for 4 years, and undriven for coming up 10 years, 2015 is the year. I have to let go and pay for some work to be done, as I just never seem to have any bloody time to work on the bloody thing. So that said, tomorrow it goes out for the first of a small list of things left to be done to finish it. First time in nearly 4 years that that garage door has been open. dirty little bitch needed as hose down Looking a bit cleaner, only gave her a quick whores wash. Back in her home, all be it only for tonight.

8 years after I pulled all the wiring out, today was spent trying to remember how it all went back together. Shit of an idea leaving it that long. Got a fair bit of it done, just have to make a hidden loom to the alternator and distributor. Dash is starting to look better.

The last lot of work done was to finish off the brakes and to get the coilovers right The pedalbox caused a few headaches, and some custom work was need to hide the resivours and lines And thats how she sits at the moment, almost finished but along way from done. I haven't built it to any trend of fashion, (by intention) I built it to how I always wanted, I tried not to ruin the lines of the car but improve the things I found I didn't like when it was going. I do think next time a little less chrome though

In the booth The colour is a bit of a custom blend and I got the painter to flow coat the clear, giving it a very deep look to the paint We even got a bit carried away and did the underside First time on her own feet in a few years After a long wait my engine was finished And in it's home I got it home after a year or so of going around town to work on it and started to put all the bits back together

I'm grabbing my 78 Premier from Palmy this week. Hasnt been touched in 8 years. Rego is expired/dead. Is 8 years too long for it to not still be in the system? Really don't wanna go through the hassle of digging up proof, as the previous owner is in OZ. If I need proof of change of ownership is a printed email good enough? Will probably have an issue getting acopy of his licence. Probably more questions to come on Monday when I am back home with it.