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Ooooookay. So the next milestone is done: 4-linking and rear coilovers sorted and some strengthening up front. Continuing on from my post last August (!!! what?!), now that I have got the suspension parts from ShockWorks, I took the car back to Tim at ShoresNZ to finish off the 4-linking and coilover conversion. It started off with cutting out the old rear turrets and building some butty new ones that are able to hold the weight of the car. Tim builds these as a bolt in mount: The rest of the rear end included welding up all the link mounts, building new ones for the shocks, swaybar and panhard rod. Tim also made a new panhard to suit the new setup. I also had Tim build some gussetting around the chassis to firewall interface, as having the side intrusion bars as part of the half cage tends to stiffen the rear up to the bottom of the A-pillar and leave it all flexy up the front. Ideally you'd just have a full cage but I don't really want to do that. So this should hopefully add some strength and stiffening to the front of the car. Next thing is to get the rear end properly rebuilt and coated. And obviously continue with the other million things I'm working on!

Wow. Mine was two letters and two numbers and was $1000.

Yes, I did this earlier this year. Call Kiwiplates or live chat on their site. Tell them that is what you want to do. They will contact Waka Kotahi and have the plate pulled out of the system and made available for purchase.

I'm currently doing this. Requires significant mods to the shock towers, essentially rebuilding them much stronger.

Cheers Clint, you're the man

Thanks Clint. Happy to do it another way if needed. Just wanna make sure I do it right! Another question of the fun bumpstop kind - since I'm swapping to rear coilovers, strengthening the towers and all that jazz, can I now just rely on the bumpstops integrated into the shocks? My understanding of the manual suggests it's ok.

Sweet, hopefully Clint comes back with the go ahead for certing purposes.

https://palmside.co.nz/collections/seat-brackets/products/seat-mounting-kit-x-members This kind of thing? Would not require crush tubes as it's not bolting through an open section. I'd wonder about which is strong enough though.

@cletus What's the deal with making seat mounts like this? I have Sparco sliders that I'd like to bolt to them. Is welding them with end plates like that ok? I don't need them to be removable, and I'd only be able to put doublers in the trans tunnel, not in the sills. Should be way stronger than the stock mounts that I was going to make an adapter plate for, since they are just spot welded in!

Last bit of the recent puzzle is the suspension, which started probably a year ago. I always had custom springs and a nice uprated Whiteline swaybay up front, but never really got around to doing anything with the dampers. Now that I've gone 4 link, I decided to coilover the rear and find some suitably good front shocks to match. I spent countless nights measuring and making spreadsheets. I looked into rear coilovers from T3, Fortune Auto and others, and fronts from GAZ, Bilstein, Koni, Avo, Spax, etc. Nothing really seemed to be exactly as I wanted it. So I figured fuck it and decided to go custom. Looking around, I first called MCA but I didn't get the feeling that they would really put in the effort I needed for my setup. Then, while asking @Truenotch what he'd done for his race car, he mentioned Shockworks over in Aussie. I gave them a call and got a real good vibe from them. They were stoked on my project and keen to help, so I got together all the details they needed, including the corner weights of a stock Gemini as seen a few posts above and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited... I'm still waiting. But now I'm in Melbourne waiting for the Grand Prix to start. So I figure I'm close enough to go out to their shop and give them a kick up the bum. I coax my sister into borrowing a friend's car and driving me out into the Dandenong ranges which is where they are located. I'm glad I did this, because it really lit the fire and not long later, here we are: Looking damn fine. And now I can finally set off the next season of my Rube Goldberg machine which should see the car back in with Tim at ShoresNZ to finish the diff and coilover conversion and then hopefully off to the paint shop! The last new bit for the suspension is a Whiteline swaybar for the rear. The car never came with a rear bar so this should be a good upgrade. I borrowed an AE86 one from @slacker.cam to mock it up and it fit good, so I bought one:

Next up are the rear brakes. Not a whole lot to say about these. They're the same AE101 Levin brakes that I used on my Hilux diff before. Pulled them apart, had the external bits gold passivated and the bodies coated by HPC. Bought a kit and put them all back together. I've also got some new Znoelli rotors to complete the rebuild.

Last one for tonight. I bought some new seats. Cobra Nogaro. They are super nice, have inflatable lumbar support and low hips for using regular lap belts. I am also waiting on some of this Porsche multicolour fabric to retim the cushions.

Shit I'm lazy at updating this thing. Just gonna trawl my gallery and make a few posts. Aaaaaages ago I posted about trawling Pick-A-Part to find a decent pedal for my e-throttle setup. If you recall, this is what I ended up with - it's from an Outback (stock Gemini pedal on the right): I was always keen to keep it looking stock, so I built a jig that is very gross but worked well, cut the Gemini pedal off and, after a lot of bending - including the use of a forge to heat up the arm - welded the pedal on. No one will ever be able to tell! FORGE POWAH!!! All done! Need to clean up some welds and have it powder coated still. Let's see if it fits! So yeah, there's only one bolt that actaully goes in from the stock setup. But that's all good, I'm going to build a new mounting platform for it anyway so I can shim it in and out and fine tune the pedal offset between it and the brake pedal.

If I'm CNC'ing up some steel caliper brackets (with dog-leg), is there a certain grade of steel plate I should be looking for?

This week, two long term parts of the projects have arrived, like a fine wine plucked from the cellar. The first is a pulley set from Ross Performance Parts over the ditch. Isuzu 4Z engines are old but are having a revival among enthusiasts striving for good reliable power. For most of us, this means we have to develop new parts. While I'm waiting on others to develop parts for the top end - a new cam, high ratio rockers, etc - a few days ago I finally got my greasy mitts on this harmonic damper and waterpump pulley that I commissioned Ross to develop over a year ago. We got a group buy together and made it happen, and I am beyond stoked with how it turned out, but let's let a picture do the talking: Look at them! The majesty! The next part started off as a simple request for a nice crossflow radiator and spiralled a touch. A huge thanks to Skeleton Welding down in the depths of the Mainland for putting together this intercooler / oil cooler combo for me. Well, he made the intercooler and modified a CSF oil cooler to fit nice and neatly. They turned up this afternoon and... wow! Such craftmanship! A perfect fit with zero ability to see the car in person. I opted for no in/outlet piping so I can get it all lined up at a later date, but it is looking great. Now that I have this, I can measure where the radiator needs to be mounted, and using the Ross pulleys I can figure out where the fan and (hopefully) shroud need to be positioned. This pictures, you ask? Just look!: A last update follows on from the post above. You'll have seen the new dash switch plate I made, trying to look as retromod/periodmod as I could. Well I finally had a go at trying to get the stereo switches to work. Now that I've finally got a 12V signal on the work bench I could finally have a go. Here's a video proving it works! Stoked with this too. Just need to wire in the volume pot to the panel and that's half of it done.

It's been a while since I've updated. Not a heap of progress. I'm at a place where I need the rear shocks (at the very least) so I can finish up the diff and coilover conversion. At the same time I'll sort the front gussets and then we should be ready for paint. Otherwise, here's a few pics of what I've been up to since my last post: The fender mirrors I got from Malaysia were in pretty good knick apart from the plastic mounting plates. I spent a bit of time mucking around with Fusion and managed to print out a pretty decent replica. I'll probably get them printed in nylon when I actually put it all together. Also had the hardware chromed so it should last a while - not beautiful but you don't see it and it should do the job. I picked up a MUA-5 Rodeo gearbox which is larger and stronger and allows me to switch to a hydro clutch. Bolts on and works with my existing flywheel. The remote shifter is super gross but unfortunately the gemini one, while I could easily mod the bolt pattern, is about 5mm too short. It shifts but I'm not into it. I'll figure something out. Bought an old barry's parts collection for no real good reason other than to have some spare parts. Anyone want a set of 4x100 Rostyles? Took a mate's gem out to be corner weighed at Road Race and Rally. Needed this figures for the getting the shocks made, which I'm waiting for from Shockworks over in Aussie. Been mucking around with printing new demister funnels since every stock one in the world has snapped at the bolt holes. Also had a go drawing up headlight surround clips. These will definitely need to be printed in something stronger too. @Jerm CNC'd up the Bosch DBW throttle body adapter that I designed. Super happy with how it came out. Got some new SSR centre caps made up in Japan. These are the MKII style, but I like the picture better than the MKIII one. I drew up and had laser cut a new dash panel for all the different switches I need, including the bluetooth stereo. Took ages to find a font that was similar to the original! Unfortunately I had to ditch the Brembos as I could just not make them fit with the SSRs. I even bought shorter bolts and they still hit them with the deepest offset disc I could run. So I swapped for Wilwoods and bought some new Znoelli rotors for front and rear. Front ended up being s13 Silvia 4 stud rotors. I drew up and printed a new caliper mount, the one in the pic is not quite right. Thanks to @slacker.camfor helping me do the hard measurements yesterday and for helping me redrill the rotors to suit the Gemini hub. I've drawn up a new one that should be perfect. I also finally welded up the Wilwood brake master cylinder mount. Pretty happy with how it came out. I have also decided to run the plastic reservoirs as it's just waaaay easier. That's about it!

Last time I bought gauges was from eBay. Autometer Sport-Comp. They are nice looking but not super cheap - just checked and they are about $200 NZD each on eBay.

Yeah, I've thought about this. The hardest part with that is that the back of the rotor is deeper than the front of the hub's caliper mount, so it will always need some kind of dog-legged bit.

Thanks. I'll make it out of steel. Could probably size up to 10mm at the caliper side just to be safe, just doesn't leave much room between the bracket at disc (approx 3mm).

Will it be okay to make this bracket out of aluminium? Caliper mount area is 8mm thick, steering knuckle area is 10mm thick. Holes for mounting caliper are threaded.

Cheers @sr2! I guess I should clarify that the standard car has solid rotors and twin piston calipers with a 48.1mm piston: 1,817sqmm. I upgraded to the 38mm floating and am going back down slightly to the 35.1mm fixed. So relative to a stock car the Wilwoods are up 213%, and the VT sliders were up 250%. I reckon the actual pad contact area will be relatively similar - hard to know as measurements for pads are not the actual material but the overall size! My thoughts re the loss of clamping area - I was probably over braked before, if that's a thing. I know of a few actual race cars that run the same rear brakes as I have, and front 4-pots with 36.1mm pistons (Rx-7 calipers). If they can stop a car at race speeds (albeit in a car that is probably lighter than mine), then I think the 35.1 pistons should be ok. Hopefully any discrepancy will be small enough that changing pad compound and making adjustments to the bias will be enough to compensate.

Interesting stuff - thanks! I'm going to go with the 35.1mm pistons. Can adjust MC to suit if necessary.

You caught me! Nah, the setup I had on there before, while working well, needed to have the steering lock reduced so the calipers didn't hit the LCAs. It also pushed the track out 10mm each side, which is cool if you want wide stance but I'd rather my wheels sit inside the stock guards nicely. I also need to find a disc to make these clear my wheels, but that's another issue all together.

I'm upgrading my front brakes from a sliding setup to 4-pots, but having trouble figuring out which Wilwood calipers I should buy in terms of piston size to ensure it works with my current setup. Right now it feels good under foot. Current setup: Front calipers: 2 piston sliders 38mm x 2 Rear calipers: 1 piston sliders 29mm x1 Master: 1" Boosted Bias valve for the rear Pedal ratio: 5:1. Wilwood have a few options for the piston sizes, with all four being the same size: 44.5mm, 35.1mm or 25.4mm. Some things I've read say to only calculate the area of 2 pistons (one side) in a 4pot setup, but surely all pistons need to move? What will be the result if I size up or down piston size? Cheers

Yeah, I'll have a look. Would be good to get a warranty locally if possible. Shipping might push the price up too.