yoeddynz

Yeah oldschool threads pop up everywhere. Probably the main way new members find this forum. My personal preference for wiring is to not use those (ugly) crimp fittings. I buy the bulk bags of uninsulated 6.3mm spade terminals. I then crimp and solder them and use black heatshrink over them. I just like the uniformity of the black and know that the wire will never come out. Takes a little longer but I never have any desire to rush wiring jobs because I get so much satisfaction from it. I collect looms from any car I happen to be splitting and if i get components from the wreckers I'll take as much loom as I can. I've built up a good collection of various cable this way, in all the colours so I can often match the actual factory colour codes. I'm keen to get some of those bulkhead din/military style fittings for the Imps next engine install - aliexpress have loads and I'm sure many are fine in use. Must order something soon actually.

I think oldschools very own @ProZac might have been involved with the hpacademy wiring course?

We had one of those ISO tab facing tools in the last shop I worked in. Neat little tool. Worked well on alloy frames but was hard work on some steel frames.

Yeah all steel and heavy as. Very basic and quite grunty. Once you have one you start cleaning up every single bit of wood. It's an ocd sufferers best toy. I can't bare to stack wood up in my shed stack inside without giving it a skim. Then I can select through the nicest looking bits for the next job.

I'm still using an old Ryobi thicknesser, bought second hand for $250. Fuck its been punished, done a shit load of work and still goes strong. The newer ones seem to have more plastic, as is often the case.

you have the same table saw that we have. Shit they are a nice saw. It was a fair chunk of money when we got ours about 8 months ago but well worth it. Some really nice features and well made.

Well then. Its about time for an update on K11dom. Leaks. Fucking leaks... Nup - not them. The more annoying ones that happen in a car that shouldn't leak because its not British. The ones that you cant locate the source easily. You think its fine, you've fixed the obvious hole or sealed up a gap and all is good. Then a week later you notice that the car has that stale wet whiff. Bugger. Back to square one. Well Milly and Molly already had this annoying little habit from the beginning and Minky remained bone dry. So we presumed it would be the standard k11 scuttle leak we had read about in plenty of threads on various Micra forums... OK. The Micra forum. Well actually there's two but one, an Australian forum, has fizzled out and has that look of a windows 98 created chat room where aftermarket ECUs were only just becoming a thing and wheels over 14" were considered large. I digress. So Milly and Molly leaked. Minky watched from the sideline all smug face and happy because she was the planned keeper. But she too wanted some leaky fun and started to go whiffy in the passenger footwell. FFS ! So after a few rounds of pulling the mats out on a sunny day, undoing some trims and lifting the carpets to dry out, propped up with wooden blocks, letting it dry out and thinking 'well that's nice now, dry and whiffy gone, maybe it was just our wet shoes or a door not shut properly' and then only to have it come back after another decent bout of rain, we couldn't put up with it anymore. So this happened... Hannah stripped both scuttle panel covers from Milly and Minky. Its actually a really quick job. One of those 'bloody wish I had done that ages ago' jobs. Sure enough they both had the failed clip seal that eventually craps out on all K11s... This little green clip sits right below the windscreen. Its a nothing more than a lower location guide for windscreen fitment. Its pushed into the panel and seals with a shaped rubber washer of about 1mm thick behind it. The rubber breaks down and falls apart. Now for some reason the person in charge of designing this aspect of the K11 decided take make sure that the hole the clip fits in is sited right above the ventilation intake... So the water runs right off the bottom of the screen, through the perished seal and down through the vent, through the fan and out the bottom onto the floor. In this pic you can see a drip of water making its break for freedom off the fan motor base below the plug. This will explain why Millys fan had stopped working... So we removed, cleaned and with some decent adhesive sealer sealed both the green clip and the one to the right of it. The second clip doesn't hover above the intake but its better to not have water festering about the clip holes anyway. We did seal Mollys clip later on, if only to stop fish from breeding in her footwells as she sat out the back of the shed (the area we now refer to as 'the place where cars go to die' ) Luckily none of the cars had any rust around the clip holes. Its a common rot point for UK cars due to the salted road spray running off the windscreen and doing its marvellous thing in good fashion. Here is just one sample photo taken from 'one of' the aforementioned micra forums of some classic clip rot... So all sealed up and now dry as a bone Hannah happily reinstalled the dried out interior bits and we revelled in such lovely clean, whiffyless and dry interiors. Until it rained again. Fuck. The floor behind Minkys passenger seat was sodden. Like properly wet right through the carpet, underlay and up the tunnel edge. I couldn't understand how it could get so wet? I presumed we must have left the passenger door cracked open and with the last torrential rain event (we've had enough of them already- it feels like the tropics here, only with frost) there must have been a leak straight from the top edge of the door onto the carpet. So out with the blocks of wood again. This time I had to remove the underlay stuff and wring it out. Most of it disappeared into the bin actually.. Anyway..same story. Dried it all out. Thought that was that and lessoned learned to check the doors. Then Milly started to smell bad. Really pongy. WTF!!! The back window started to go misty but the carpets were dry as. A few days later I popped open the boot and found a towel hidden in the spare wheel well that we had used to wrap up the noisy wheel nut wrench/jack handle. It was sodden and smelled like a dead ferret. So that got binned. Righto - here we go again! Some how the hatch was leaking. First port of call was obviously those world famous forums. "It could be the hatch seal. Or the seals between the rear light pods and the body" they remarked knowingly. But ours were fine. We tested them. We had great fun taking turns to sit inside the boot and watch for leaks as the other ran a hose around the hatch. Nothing obvious. There was a light gap at the top corner where the seal didn't quite press against the hatch but that wasn't the cause. We added some foam just in case. Kept looking. Nothing. So we left it, annoyed and feeling a bit defeated. 'Maybe it was the hatch not being closed properly" I muttered with a tiny grasp of distant hope. "bloody Japanese cars. They shouldn't do this. Might as well be British. Even my Imp stays drier" I muttered even louder. Roll on another week or so. Fairly dry weather keeps our spirits sailing high. Cars are dry. Things are looking up. Then more rain. And more smell. I could have lit a match. This time it was Minky. She had 'that whiff' again. It smelled around the rear seat area. We lifted out the seat base and sure enough underneath it really hooned. "fuck- there MUST be a dead rat under here" I proclaimed with a hint of almost excitement at the thought of not finding a dead rat but finding the cause. I could hug the dead rat I was so happy. But upon lifting the seat out we found no dead rat but instead a damp seat base. "WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!!!" was apparently heard as far as Golden bay. The seat base was wet but the top was not. Right. This means war! "Get that hose!" I shouted as I scurried my way into the 'boot of certain death smell but no dead rat' and watched for tell tale leaks.. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing......hang on! There was a tiny trail of water running down the seal. It had to be crossing over somehow. We opened the hatch and followed the water beads. They tracked down the seal around to the bottom corner and disappeared. We popped the seal off and found a little hole between two panels... An intentional hole by the looks of it but in a silly place. Water tracked through the hole and down the inside of the panel. Its been doing this a while. Note the water track lines... The same shite design feature was found on Milly too and she even has the same little rusty water stains. From that hole it runs down the panel onto the boot floor and along a pressed channel that leads to under the seat (a perfect design..) Once the cavity under the seat is full it runs off forwards and cascades off the edge down beneath the carpet behind the passenger seat. It almost seemed unlikely when you glanced at the pathway, like as if a Nissan engineer had been reading a book full of Escher drawings while on the toilet and decided he'd design in a backwards waterfall into the K11 for shits and giggles. The tosser. So I had to design in my own anti waterfall features. My first line of defence was to block the hole. I used some self adhesive alloy tape... I then cut a hole in the seal so the water that was tracking down the seal would fall through the hole and out on the outside of the hatch opening.. My last line of defence, just in case the other points fail, was to drill a hole in the channel on each side, paint it, and build a wall with epoxy putty so any really determined water has no choice but to drain out... Take that water - I am the master of dry!!! So far its worked. We have had some huge rain events since and both Milly and Minky are dry and no horrid smells. Molly is still out the back, probably full of fish I shall sell my design fixes to Nissan. If they actually care. Hopefully this will be useful information to the hordes of future K11 owners residing on oldschool...

This thread is one of my favourite reads! Lots of good pics and description of the work involved. You've done a fucking sweet job! What's cool for us readers is that you'll be selling this and having to start all over from the very beginning in Takaka. Neato! I'll come round, use your spotting knife, drink your tea and watch as you build. I might even offer some sage but useless advice.

But really what actually happened was this....

I noticed a huge difference in the K11 we have that has the LSD. That hillclimb up the road from us- you can really hoof it out of the tight corners with no scrabbling for grip especially when its a bit damp. Great fun! Super happy we got that car because that gearbox is pretty hard to find in a K11. We had one of those new rally spec echos/Yaris? go racing past us the other way when out on the pushbikes yesterday- I'm guessing it was a turbo 3 pot? Fuck it sounded cool and looked sweet with its pumped out arches!

I made a plate to suit my viva and just made sure it looked suitably old and original. They didnt even need to check it because, well why would they- it was just an original plate still attached to the car as far as they were concerned. Was a bit of a mini mission to make it so as Michael seez- save all that bother and get Archtype to make ya one. Maybe once you've got it put in salt bath or something to make the fresh alloy go off slightly and get it to 'look old'

Just avoid smoking your bong under the house?

Is that so any potential leaks would only drop out through the front instead of settling under the house?

Cool. A totally suitable amount then

wow! So the axle torque of circa 2000lbft- what's the equation to convert that back to engine torque?

@kws try this... https://www.niceproducts.com.au/category/34757-wheel-nuts They have loads of sizes and once you know the ones you want you can order them through ripco.

You've got a nice knob though.

Your car is a mess. Just saying

More...

Sorry for late reply/update on todays meet. Just had a very keen k11 foamer visit us so its been a whirlwind of nissan March chat. Anyway- yeah as Will said- great turn out. Thanks so much to those that made the effort to come along. What a great bunch of mates to know. I totally enjoyed the banter at the picnic table today and it was worth the trip for that alone. Pies were great (for those of us lucky enough to get one- sadly a large bunch of motorcyclists had also decided that Pelorus bridge for lunch was a good idea and I think they scoffed most of the pies) I took a few pics (well Hannah did) so here we go...

Quite excited to see what car Dave @avengertiger managed to cobble together from the many bits in his yard...

its looking to be a fine day!

I'm sure that man with your skills could make one working Avenger out of 7

Bagsies the venison pie then!

Please do come along Andy. Would be good to catch up. Hopefully we can help persuade you into sifting about on the classifieds for another choice old classic