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Not a huge amount to update. The Gem is back in my (work in progress) garage for the time being, which is nice.

I got the tires fitted to the wheels:

225/45 semi is so much bigger than a regular 195/50!

And I because I have the car back, I was able to have a go at fitting the intake manifold. Looks good to me!

A few more additions to my reckless spending that may or may not be necessary.

A post popped up on the Gemini Owners Facebook Group with a guy selling new, billet lightened flywheels for G200Z engines. Luckily the 4ZD1 uses the same 6 bolt flywheel (the E1 flywheel is slightly larger and uses an 8 bolt pattern). I jumped on this immediately and had one sent over. It's about 2.5kg lighter than stock and looks great:

Next

Next, another dude who runs a shop called FabHouse posted up that he was now selling tubular upper arms. The benefit of these is that they have a much larger platform  to enable an adjustable ball joint to slide to its maximum camber. They are also adjustable where they mount to the cross member, meaning that I could pull them in for even more camber if necessary. I am not that clued up on wheel alignment stuff, so I'm not sure how this will also affect the toe in/out. I guess I just have to make sure they are both adjusted to exactly the same point?

Bit of a potato-y photo. There are a few things I'm not sure about: the ball joint platform is not knurled and is powdercoated. The joints themselves have knurling on them, so I hope that is enough to stop them moving around. Also, the holes in the platform - the bolt holes and centre - appear to be hand drilled, and not exactly perfectly. They are not terrible but not perfectly round. I hope that none of these things are going to be a problem once it's all bolted up. I certainly hope that this is not going to affect the ability to cert them. Especially because the same shop will be making similar lower arms to enable the use of a coilover spring on a threaded insert, allowing height adjustment. My talks with @cletus have tentatively approved this type of suspension mod, but I guess in the end it will be determined on how well the parts are made. I guess the upside of being in NZ is that the x-member modification to allow the new spring seat to be inserted will need to be welded locally (as I'm not going to send a cross member to Aussie), so can be better watched over. The shop also said that the spring locator is also laser cut, so no hand drilling! Here's hoping.

I've also managed to find some factory Isuzu fender mirrors out of Malaysia. Funnily enough, my car actually came with fender mirrors but they weren't cool when I was 18 so I pulled them off. I don't want to think that I got rid of them, but I have a haunting memory of throwing them in the bin. What an idiot. Anyway, I've got these replacement ones that are more proper than the ebay specials I had on there before. They definitely are not perfect so will need some cleaning up and I think I am going to have to 3d print a new mounting plastic part as one is chipped and finding a new one is basically impossible.

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For now, last, but most definitely not least - ya'll remember my SSR MkIIIs that I bought off of @mikuni (ex his Piazza - trying finding this stuff in 4x100!) years ago and have had on the car for ever, well, here's them:

Anyway, these were going to look way too Aussie drag-spec for my liking when trying to get 225s on them (they are 15x7 ET26). Me and old mate @EURON8 spent many evenings mucking around trying to figure out where I could find some rims that were going to be wide enough to suit the tires. I finally settled on some Minilites after looking around. However there were some issues. The first is that the they only come in 15x8 or 15x9. The cert rules said that 9" wide was out of bounds for a 225 tire. The other thing was that despite it being quite obvious that I was going to have a shorten my diff, the highest offset on the 15x9s, and even the 15x8s, was too low. I would have ended up having to really push my fenders out or run some flares in order to keep the brake calipers inside the wheel wells and from hitting the floor on full compression. It was a similar issue on the front, waaay too low of an offset, even despite the fact that I had decided that I was going to have to run a staggered setup to avoid similar issues on the front.

Anyway, after much much mucking around, many nights with measuring tapes, and difficult emotions in leaving the SSRs behind, I decided to change tack. I spoke with my panel beater and he was certain that if the fenders needed to be pulled out, that he could do this without too much disturbance to the stock lines of the car. The one thing I was super anal about was ensuring that the the vertical section on the outside of the wheel arch (does this have a name? I've noticed on modern cars this has got really massive!) needed to stay intact. I am NOT a fan of those rolled up wheel arches which push the vertical section out and into a point, if that makes sense. Pretty common on "stance" and drift cars when they're trying to fit wider rims. Anyway, I digress, with this information from the panel beater I decided that I could go wider on both the front and back (still with a diff shortening) without an issue - I hope! So I boxed up the wheels and went to the post office. Then I waited, and waited and waited.

Then these showed up!\

A huge thank you to Aidan at Pine Engineering for adding 0.5" to the fronts and 1.5" to the rears. So now I'm running 15x7.5 ET17 on the front and 15x8.5 ET4 on the rear. I'll be running 205/50 on the front and 225/45s on the rear, which are within a few mm of each other in terms of side wall. I'm so stoked with how these turned out! Annoyingly, perhaps, the tire to wheel width cert rule changed while they were down at Pine!

The next step is to mount up the tires - Nankang semis - and see how they fit. Once I've done that I can determine how much diff I need to shorten on the rear, and whether or not I want to muck around with the brake setup on the front to reduce the track which is currently +10mm on each side due to the current brake upgrade. There are options to go back to stock track if I make some changes, but I also want to make sure that the fender pull is relatively even front and rear, so we'll see. The car is still at @EURON8's place and I can't go over because of lockdown. Covid's really wrecking progress here! Anyway, that's the gem update for today. As per usual, click on discuss coupe in my signature to let me know what you think. I'm keen to chat!

Extra pics:

While the tail light surrounds were happening, I sent my inlet manifold over to a dude in Tasmania who modifies the stock rails with custom plenums, for a very good price. I guess I could have had this done locally but he had a bit of a production line going and it ended up cheaper this way. Plus, I think it's good to support people in the Gemini community.

I don't have a before picture, but essentially I sent him this (excuse the stolen image):

and received this in return:

It's nicer than I expected. The plenum to runner transition is fully smoothed out on the inside and looks great.

While I'm here, I want to run boost by gear and was trying to figure out the best way to get a speed signal into the ECU. I could have built some kind of trigger system at the rear hubs, but that seemed like a bit of a pain. Taking it from the gearbox seemed to be a way better option, especially as I'm already running some wiring for the reverse sensor anyway. The problem was that I also need to keep the cable for my speedo. This was one of those moments when you know what you need but just can't find it, even though it MUST be out there somewhere. I'd seen adapters for converting speedo cables to a signal for an electronic speedo, but needed one that still enabled the cable to be used. Fortunately, after some searching I came across the Brantz gearbox sensor, which fits between the box and the cable, and sends off a pulse. Pretty cool! Anyway, here's Wonderwall some pics :

I think this thread is due an update. Let's do it multi-part.

If you look at the top of this page, you'll see where I got to with trying to have my tail light surrounds vacuum metalised. A bit of a stalemate in trying to find somewhere to restore the chrome on them. I ended up deciding to look in Aussie and found a place called A Class Metal Finishers, south of Adelaide, who said they could rechrome the ABS plastic. No one I could find in NZ told me that they could do this, or if they could, that they could guarantee it would work. A Class said no problem. I sent over 2 sets of surrounds, they chose the best ones and put them through a full rechroming process, similar to what would have been done at the factory.

And I am very happy with the result.

These pictures do not do them justice. I actually think these might be better than from the factory - they feel about 25% heavier than the ones I sent away! Now they just need to be repainted in the right places and I'll be ready to start cleaning up the lenses and other bits of the tail lights.