yoeddynz

Sitting here, Wednesday morning, having a strong coffee and reading Daves graphs. Sublime.

12-15,000 RPM is available if you use this gold....

Plus it will add sik soundz bro - possibly even a mean as pulse.

....and a dumpy muffler.

But its got supercats! Are they not the be all and end all of performance tyre? @Mof - I'm not sure yet. I'll take the m/c off molly and have a looksie.

Oh also, thanks to a kind of unintentional and tenuous reminder by @Sunbeam I forgot to mention another bit to the thread. The older motors had really heavy cast iron alternator/air con and powersteering pump mounts. The facelift engines have alloy ones. All the same in mounting points etc but a heck of a lot lighter to the tune of a huge 2.4 kg weight savings! ... When your dealing with such little engines every bit helps

umm Anyway. Fitted some sway bars this evening (stock sway bars that swap straight in, which, like all the other parts swapped over, are found on most K11s except the real poverty spec models) Looking forward to test drive with them. Brakes seem fine after some good use scuffed all the rust off them. No leaks evident from the engine bar a wet sump plug gasket but I plan on giving it another oil change soon- just because its been such a good little (stock standard) engine Will book it in for a wof now. Quite keen on swapping over the PFL front end asap, but not so keen on having to paint it all. We are planning on building another shed soon and I would like to make a section of it into a small spray booth type area. Not big enough for a full car but at least fine for painting panels/bicycle frames.

Never. Because that's how we roll in Tasman. We are all very bad cowboys up here.

Well that was a bit more involved than I expected. But it was also as much fun as we had both hoped it would be. The conversion this is. Nooooooooooooooo!!!! Not that type of conversion! Nup- the conversion of Minky into a 'SSS' Micra is what I'm talking about. So fuck off Brian. Both Hannah and I have spent way more time on these little cars than they'll ever be worth (well actually- word on the street is that K11s ARE the next big thing within the trendy JDM world to soon start soaring in value..) But we dont care because its been fun and we now have a neat little car in the combination that we wanted. Plus its bloody mint in condition so for the tiny bit of monies its cost us we now have a very good, low mileage modern daily. Bargain. Lets go back a couple of weeks though. Hannah started stripping Minky down. Out with her little 1.0 auto. We will flick those off for sale - low mileage and it great condition. Then she cleaned the engine bay out and it came up pretty sweet. Not rust anywhere. K11s can be prone to rust along the bottom of the radiator support and Molly has some decent rot going on there... So after Hannah cleaned the area we painted it black (easy to touch up in an area so prone to chipping/road grime) and I also filled the cross member with cavity wax.. Whist in that area we swapped the radiators. Minky had an auto one with extra pipes no longer needed plus a outlet in a different place which meant an uglier hose. So out with Mollys radiator, the bolts which were pretty rusty and gave Hannah a mini battle... The battle was worth it though ! .... because.... Is what Hannah found behind Mollys radiator. We have no idea how long its been residing there but its quite rusty and could have been dropped in there by someone in Japan. It still works which is good but even better is the fact that its of a particular size! This must be sort of like finding a reverse black hole of the automotive trades world when one of these gets spat back out onto your lap... We almost had to have a sit down after that and just ponder life. Anyway. Then Minky was removed from the hoist and Molly was heaved up in the air for the next stage of the conversion. We wanted her disc brake rear end. Luckily all the bolts holding it in place freed off nicely and it was removed with no dramas. Unlike many UK cars where those bolts are well known for being seized solid from corrosion. While in there I also removed the rear anti sway bar, the front one already removed ages ago when we had pulled out Mollys engine. Minky is devoid of such sportiness and will happily be gifted these treats. We wire brushed the surface rust off and painted it all. Came up sweet. I also removed the calipers and gave them a workout, freeing up the slightly sticky pistons that had been sitting a while with no use. Luckily the pads and discs are fine. While Molly was on the hoist I lifted Minkys bum in the air onto some stands and removed her drum brake axle, bolts having all been loosened while she was on the hoist. Axles were then swapped and it went well. Only other thing needing swapping was the hand brake cables, easy. I am as yet unsure if disc equipped k11s have a larger master cylinder bore - no real info on this and it doesn't seem mentioned on any threads I have found. From what I have found when looking up new M/Cs there is one with a bore 1mm larger. Possibly this is fitted on Molly and we can swap it over if needed. The brakes seemed fine on the floor so test drive will tell for sure. I didn't take many photos at this point but here's a few of the axle in place.. While Minky's springs were out Hannah cleaned them and found out they are Apexi progressives with a 30mm drop. Nice. With Minkys drum brake axle swapped into Molly she was lowered back to earth and we could begin the dash swap. We stripped out Mollys setup first, just in case we might find a stumbling block. Luckily it all came out sweet as and much easier than I expected. We ended up removing the full loom as well because a workshop can never have enough automotive wire.. Hannah had a little helper... Empty.. Then it was Minkys turn. Much bigger (uglier) dash came out leaving this... Dashing... Now to look for those differences. I know you're in there! Where are you? Ah- I see you. Steel frame work behind the dash. Yep- one of those things was not like the other. In fact one of those things was not quite the same. The support bars were different. But luckily the mounting points on the A pillars and floor were exactly the same. The heater assemblies were also exactly the same, as were the heater controls. They just moved them up the dash for the facelift. So with both cars stripped out I slowly built Minky's interior back together with Mollys bits. A few drill holes were needed. Oh and also- while the whole lot was out I thought best to add a clutch pedal because we might need that. Luckily the auto equipped cars have the same pressings and they even have the bolt crush tubes mounted in place! No hole for clutch cable... Hole for clutch cable... Couldn't be easier. Thanks Nissan... Tarted up Mollys clutch pedal with some black zinc it.... Now wiring time. There were a few plugs that needed changing. Facelift Marches * and Pfl Marches share the same instrument pod. Its identical. Its just the ugly dash they changed around it. *actually- some facelifts, maybe Euro versions, had digital speedos. But not so Marches. So this is nice. But the plugs are all different on the back as are all the lights inside and wiring traces, esppecially with one pod suiting an auto and not having a rev counter (which we just had to have!!!). Made trickier by the fact that Japanese built Marches use many different colours for things compared to European Micras and we only had wiring diagrams for the latter. Those diagrams were infact pretty useless for a lot of it. So we had to do a bit of paperwork, head scratching and suss some things out... This involved scribbling on paper, looking up stuff on nerdnet and beer... Kevin thought it best to sleep this one out... Eventually we had it all sussed (we hoped). One annoying thing was that Nissan decided to save pennys by not including the required trigger wire for the rev counter into the loom from the ECU. I had to make one up, fit it into the ecu plug and run it up through. Then , with carefully scribbled notes to hand I started splicing mollys set of plugs over to Minkys loom, adding and subtracting what bits wee needed.. My new wire stripper tool was much better than my old one. I like new tools, even better when they are getting used!.. A neat little thing I have not seen before was a little reed switch on the speedo, to send a pip signal back to the ecu/abs for speed... (take note @Roman ) Electrics all sorted I turned to swapping over the steering column. Mollys one had black plastics to match her dash and a very nice leather rimmed steering wheel. Bonus points also awarded for being height adjustable. Extravagance! I needed to swap the lock barrel over - because whilst having two sets of keys is sort of quirky cool when you own an old shitter its not going to wash it for a modern... Dash assembly was fitted back in, with each piece of the jigsaw carefully cleaned (although not at all to the super high levels of monsieurs @ProZac or @Snoozin ) , plugs were plugged in and steering column fitted. It was looking good!!!... ENGINE TIME! Oh lordy- how far should we go with cleaning this little beauty of CG13 goodness? I was strong and didn't get too carried away. But it made sense to give it a bit of a tickle while out and so easy to get to. I admit I did spend a bit of time cleaning up an gearbox that no one will probably ever see, but for which hides an LSD within, again, something very few but the most geeky of K11 boffins would ever spot. I couldn't help myself... Minky was carefully lowered down over her new heart. What a thoroughly exciting moment (for a car geek enthusiast) and everything bolted up fine. I had to do a bit more wiring detective work because autos and manuals are a fair bit different with the switches for reverse and neutral... I fitted a new water pump because it makes sense when its such a prick to do in situ.. The exhaust from Molly was swapped over. The main pipe was bigger by 3mm but I had also discovered that the 1.0 exhaust had a sound deadening reducing plug halfway up one of its straight through mufflers, only visible when the exhaust is off and you look in with a torch. Oh plus - Molly has a nifty little chrome tail pipe extension that cleaned up well and looks better than the 1.0 pea shooter. We also changed the dizzy out. The facelift cars ditched the Mitsubishi dizzy for a beefier Hitachi unit that apparently has a more robust coil. There was a bit of heat decay to the plastic trim on the ignitor terminals so I plopped a bit of epoxy on them. While in there I noted that it has a 4 point optical trigger. Just the one I couuld see. So without an obvious cam angle sensor this surely means that the injection must be batch - not fully sequential. Discuss... With all the fluids topped up, gearbox filled with brand spanking new oil, blessed by the Castrol gods because LSD and the battery charged up with much excitement and a smattering of nervous energy I turned the key. Will the thing start? No. No it didn't. Ha- but only because I had removed the fuel pump fuse so I could build up some oil pressure on an engine that has been sat for ages. Fuse in and it started straight away - just like a good little K11 should Neato! So we did the correct thing and took it for a good hard hoon! Wow! The engine pulls really well, the box has a super nice gearshift action and the LSD is a delight on all the narrow twisty roads we have around our place. I think for normal shopping car duties it would obviously be a waste but as soon as you start really using the gears out of corners there is no scrabbling at all. It just pulls out from corners beautifully like a good front tugger should. The rev counter works! Yay. Got that right then.. The exhaust sounds nice. It has a subtle burble and a sporty sound when revved hard but not at all noisy. The car really needs the anti sway bars fitting asap but for now its ok. The 70 series profile budget 'supercat' tyres, although in good tread, are comically noisy when heated up and started chirping everywhere. A shame because even though unfashionable in their height they fill the arches nicely. We ideally need 14" wheels anyway because there is barely a well rolled joints worth of space between the calipers and inside of the steels at front. If we want to upgrade the front brakes the 13's will have to go So anyway- its all good. Lots of fun little cosmetic jobs now (ignoring the elephant in the room that is painting and then swapping on the PFL wings, spoilers and bonnet. Here's some pics I took yesterday evening...

That van is still going strong and he fucking loves it!

going by the amount of time that the likes of Barry, Kendal and a fella in chch I have used (his name eludes me right now) have spent on various cert jobs I have done, plus the paper work, the training costs to get there and the fact they then have the responsibility on them, I don't actually think the costs are very much at all. The folk who grumble about the costs are probably the ones who did not follow the rule book or just ignored the certifiers suggestions and had to keep making changes because of stupid decisions on their own behalf. I'm just still fucking thankful we still have a way we can go about to legally build or modify our own cars because its always on the back of my mind that this will get scrapped by the dogooders one day. I have many of my own project plans I have yet to even draw up and am hoping for a happy future of making things.

Cheers. I'll get some photos later- its very simple.

Well I got back into this and finally finished building the box and have now filled it with tools. Very happy with the finished product. Continuing on from my first post I added a few more bits. First off was a lid that covered the stainless tray. This was 18mm plywood left over from the shed build. I hinged it off from one side and made a swing out support to hold it up when its opened. Then I build a lift up section along the back to hang spanners and screwdrivers off. I added a lid to this bit. I ripped down some bits of eucalypt timber left over from the coffee cart we recently built for a customer ( that's another thing I must put some pics up of because it was a cool project!) These bits of timber were then profiled into corner cappings. With them attached Hannah then oiled it all and varnished the flip back lid. I made some handles. One main one for shifting it about the workshop and then a swing up one with more leverage that is for moving it offroad. I found a little handle we have had for yonks. Ideal for the lift up section... Finally a little box on the side for a few often used cans- wd40, spraygrease, zinc it black etc. I took no photos of all this because I was just absorbed with the build. Now complete I filled it with all the tools I use on car jobs etc. This was super fun because it meant I could shuffle loads of stuff about and off the walls. I could also move my old toolbox that took plenty of useful 'Flat six' sized space and put it under the bench. The bench area became a bomb site with stuff all over the place as I did a workshop bench spring clean. Got rid of lots of crap and re-organised a load of stuff into new trays I'd bought from Bunnings. This satisfies me no end. Anyway- back to the toolbox. Which now has a very catchy name. The 'Wheelybox 2000' pics. Closed up and ready to move... and opened up (a pic sort of like a toolbox equivalent of 80's Lambo poster with all the doors/boot/engine covers open).. In action... on the move.. detail shots... ( should have done a narrow depth of field shot of the cans through an open window...) the tray.. and for your amusement - this is what happens when I do a spring clean... So happy with it. It going to be a bloody useful asset to the business and save a lot of walking back and forth to the bench, especially when doing jobs on cars, trucks and tractors etc outside. Should have done it ages ago! My next plans for the bench area are to paint the plywood walls a bright colour and probably add a window over the bench - especially as we have chopped down loads of trees and we would now be able to watch the sunset through it as I tinker with Goldwing engines. I'll update the bushblock thread with that sort of workshop tinkering though. Better get back onto the Micras and the Imp 911 first eh....

@cletus What are the chances that one could build something like this and make it road legal in NZ.... If the builder were to do all the obvious cert things like the suspension arms are crack tested, bump steer is dialled out etc etc

Yeah por15 is available here.

A true kiwi tuner would pop that pin out and grind a flat on it with a Makita - for extra advance lumpy cam doort.

Yes it is. Its all totally gone to plan and I'm glad its not turned into just another fucking project..

There is room below that last drawer for a battery etc...

Yeah ditto having a pair of them if you can afford it. Mine are on a stand so I can wheel them around the workshop closer to the job which saves time if using them heaps.

Haha- I could make a train! Ones enough for now though cheers. I'm already doing a decent enough job at not doing required work on the imp project!

Fuck it looks like that stingrays lucky day. Could have been worse! Yeah I really should do something eh. There is the remaining locking bits on the back of the drawers but the rest of the mech wasn't there so I will have to see if I can make something that uses them. Failing that I could just have a couple of loops/rings, one top and one bottom and drop a length of wooden dowl down through them. Or even just a rubber strap or bungy cord.

Minky is now under the knife. She's on the hoist and Hannah is taking her heart out. While up in the air I took the chance to snap some photos of her undercarrige. This is the first time we've actually put her on the hoist and looked underneath. WOW! She's sooo tidy and in such fantastic condition! Even the exhaust looks almost new... Here's the lowering springs. I have no idea what make they are but they are red so they must be fast... While Hannah was draining the autobox oil out.... I spotted a very exciting thing... Most JDM Marches normally have a daft arrangement where the fixed part of the caliper is cast into the strut bottom which means you can't swap in bigger/better calipers and appropriately sized bigger discs. The front brakes on this car are different to our other two cars (those two being PFL Marches) This car has front sliding calipers that mount to the struts in the usual fashion, like most cars, with two bolts. This is also the same setup that European K11 Micra have. This is fantastic news! The one thing that lets a hard driven march down is the brakes which are a bit lacking, especially on long descents like Takaka 'race' hill. I cooked the brakes on both our pfls down there. But with the Euro spec front brakes we can swap in the larger discs and calipers from a Sentra/Primera/'insert some common as muck nissan here' So yeah- happy about that !

For ages I have wanted a small tool bench with decent wheels I could wheel across our rocky yard for working on cars/trucks/tractors outside. Its always been on the back of my mind to build but I never got around to it. Earlier this year a retired friend gave us a load of old tools and workshop stuff including his old tool cabinet. It was pretty beat up and had tiny little wheels but the drawers work really well. So now I had a base to start with. NZ made. Guessing its 80's going by the font on the sticker. NZ made wheels too... I started with the build by hacking it apart... Luckily the drawers bit I wanted was self contained.. I had kept a section of old stainless steel bench top left over from some project I cant remember. It was missing one end but I had a plan and it was always going to be used for my ideal toolbox design.. I cleaned it all up, removed all the tar like glue that was on the underside and cut, bent and welded up the other end to match. I also welded up a drain hole it had.. I ripped down some eucalypt timber and cut it into an angle profile then used it to edge the stainless, now glued onto a sheet of ply. So with the top sorted I started on a frame. I needed some wheels and I had just the ticket. I have had these two wheels stashed away from when I did my apprenticeship back in the mid 90s. I was building a scooter that used a weedeater motor but never finished it. I had thrown away the rest but kept these new wheels. I still had the bearings they came with too. I machined the ends of some thick pipe to suit and made an axle... I bought some 100mm castor wheels with locks for the back from Mitre 10. Now a frame to mount them on. I rummaged through the steel rack and found suitable stuff to use... The drawers sit in place like such... I removed the handles and Hannah cleaned the drawers up so I could lob some paint at them.. Now I could start cladding it in plywood, using stuff left over from the mezzanine build. I had a pair of 500mm drawer runners from Bunnings left over from the kitchen build. Handy for a large drawer below the others.. Folded up a bit of sheet steel for the front... Made some stainless handles to match the others... And this is where I am up to so far... My next thing to sort out is the slide up section that all my spanners will go on. Then some handles, and finish the top cover that will be hinged so it can open out doubling the top area and exposing the stainless tray. We've already had some fun today going to Bunnings and Mitre10 selecting a few tools to add, the idea being I can almost clear the work bench area fully of car related tools. Itching to get back into finishing this now

Far out. Such detail. I'm impressed. Thanks for sharing. I only want an fd even more now so I can tinker away on it like this. I think if I wrote in such detail about a k11 people would tune out quick? Those alloy pedals are lush!

But yeah @Roman knows what's up. Then later on, when we've recovered enough, we'll swap the preface front end, with the spoiler etc across. But that involves painting and I don't get off on that.