Last night..

I did a tiny amount of work on the car. Had planned to do more but the ol’ back wasn’t having it.

So, Tuesday Nights at Toby’s continued…I ended up mounting my GTSPEC C-pillar bar. It mounts to the rear seat belt upper mounting points. Well, like all hatches, at some point in my car’s life the rear seat belts were removed, so I didn’t have any of the hardware. Luckily, Toby came to the rescue and had some spare Gallery Fresh bolts lying around that were the perfect fit, so I mounted that up with those.

Excuse the iPhone pic/dirty interior. I’ll probably get a better one soon.

The last thing I did for the night was to remove the roof spoiler. It just wasn’t really “me” and made the back of the car look too chunky. I’ll probably post this on zilvia for sale with a bunch of other stuff soon once I figure out which one it is. I’m really liking the look if it without it so far.

I had planned to do something like This with my Pivot RHU-M last night as it is currently just double-stuck to the bottom of my steering column shroud, so it always falls down and annoys me, but I didn’t have the motivation to do it, what with my back acting up and being tired from school/work (last semester of undergrad…yessssss)

In other news, got some new stuff this week. Got the 180SX belts and interior panels on the way, some red bride logo fabric on the way to spice up the interior a little, got a new turbo inlet pipe for the Z32 MAF, Z32 rear calipers showed up, and one other thing that I’ll make a post about later this week when it gets here.

2011 Broadfield Nissan/Datsun Cookout– Sun Oct. 16th

When: Sunday October 16th

Time: 10am – whenever you leave… you just can’t spend the night

Where: Toby’s house… 1101 Canyon Creek Rd. Normal, IL 61761

Why: To give back to the Nissan community. Please show up in a Nissan or Datsun. Toby is not handing out free food to a Mustang owner.

Events

Cookout — Free food and drinks
Forza 4 — FREE Viper alarm system or Alpine radio for the best lap time(must use steering wheel)
Comedy — Make fun of Damon(Greg)
Cruise — Some local driving and fresh air
Discounts — 20% OFF attendance coupon good for every product Toby carries. Custom work is exempt!

Please post if you are coming so we can get a head count. Include number of guests if applicable. Also post up what kind of grill meat you prefer… brats, dogs or burgers. NOTE: If you post that you are attending but then change your mind, please let us know ASAP.

BE THERE.

Small Update

Small update today, just filling you folks in real quick.

The other night when I cruised over to Toby’s again to work on the car, I had planned to relocate the boost controller, re-center the hub, and remove the tweed from my doorcards. Well I’ve been having some nerve problems in my back lately (I’m 23…wtf) so my mobility is pretty limited, and laying across a sillplate rewiring my boost controller did not sound like my idea of fun. I ended up only just pulling the tweed of the doorcards, which only takes 10 minutes if you’re wondering. Basically you take a hook pick and grab the edge of the tweed and get it start coming off, making sure not to go thru the vinyl (I used a 90* hookpick) then just peel away. You’ll have to pull of the handles of the doorcards. Here is the end result. Way better than the stock tweed that feels like rubbing your arms on fiberglass insulation.

I need to clean my doorcards off. They have a summers worth of sweat and grime on them. Also might put some 3M Adhesive Remover on a rag and clean where the tweed used to be so it’s nice and uniform. Eventually I will be covering these inserts with red Bride logo material. I will do this the way Toby and Damon did (Toby came up with it), where you cut out the vinyl on the insert of the doorcard, then use adhesive from a spray gun (think paint gun) instead of just spray adhesive that you’d get in a can to wrap carpet on a sub box or something.

I got my Z32 maf in the mail yesterday. Can’t wait to get that wired in. I will probably get a new exhaust soon assuming the MAF fixes my idle hunt. I’m leaning towards a Buddy Club Spec 2 again. I know it fits well (ground clearance is probably number 1 concern) and I usually am not a fan of canister style exhausts. But I’m not about to put one on until my car has a smooth, consistent idle.

Worked on the car a little last night

Alright so I went over to Toby’s again last nigh to do a little work on the car. I ended up not getting everything done I wanted to do but oh well, we’re working again tonight.

So when I bought my car the rear hatch area was pretty trashed. The carpet on the back of the seats was nasty grey stuff, I only had one side of the inner quarter panel carpet, etc. Well a friend was getting rid of an S13 shell so I ended up snagging the missing pieces from that.

Here is pretty much what it looked like when I started. Just imagine one of the side panels being in.

Here’s a pic of one of the panels I got. They’d been sitting in his shop garage for a while so they were pretty dirty etc.

Spent a while with the ol’ vacuum on each panel and this is what one panel looked like after I cleaned it a while.

Well the next thing I noticed was that the carpet panels were grey, but my new rear seat carpet section was a nice rich black. That bugged me, so I picked up some duplicolor fabric paint and wanted to dye the panels black to match the carpet.

Here is what it looks like all back together. I also put in my Cusco Type OS rear strut tower bar that I picked up from Damon a while back. I couldn’t stand putting it in when the hatch area was so nasty though haha.

I also forgot to a get a picture of the front of the interior when I got the carpet and floormats in, so here’s that. The horn button is missing bc I need to take the hub back off and straighten it out. Right now the steering wheel is pretty gangster leaned when the car is going straight, it bugs the shit out of me. I’m having Matt from Zilvia track me down a set of 180SX seat belts and interior plastics, so that will be awesome when I get those in there.

I finished a little early since my project was pretty small, but Toby on the other hand was obviously balls deep in his project, so I sat around and watched him a while. Here he is pounding the firewall out so that the heartbeat of America fits in there.

Hopefully tonight I’ll be moving the boost controller out of the footwell area where it always comes unstuck and falls on top of my feet. Also need to sack up and get the hub straightened out. Tried last night but I’m a little bitch and couldn’t get the hub off. Oh well.

Picked up an S15 helical differential and non-HICAS subframe yesterday as well. The CUSCO 2-Way in the car is just more than I need. And I want to get rid of any remnants of HICAS on the car. I just need to pick up some PBM Subframe risers to firm things up and that can go on. I may end up getting a DSS Driveshaft depending on what kind of housing the S15 diff comes in. If it’s an Open/Non-ABS Housing then it won’t drop into my housing, which is VLSD/ABS. The ABS housings are a little longer so the driveshafts aren’t compatible to the best of my knowledge.

Also picked up some DMAX Rear floor mats, Z32 MAF, Z32 Front Conversion Lines, and some other stuff.

Random pic from yesterday

I was over at Toby’s on Sunday while he worked on the car. We have another work day or two planned this week. I may be lucky enough to have the world’s best garage, but it seems like lately I only get stuff done when I’m working on it at Tobys place. I’ll probably post some pics of the progress tomorrow. I also ordered some cool parts today so I’ll try to take pics when that stuff shows up

Here is where he’s at. Prepping for paint

More parts and stuff

Ok so I’m going to go ahead and skip doing a post or several about all of the Import Alliance stuff from July. It was awesome but I didn’t really take any pictures, so you can cruise on over to Damon’s Blog or The Chronicles for coverage of that. Damon did a pretty good job chronicling the trip down there etc.

Random pictures from IA:

So I’m still piling up parts for the hatch:

First thing I think I bought for the car was a new rear view mirror since on the way home from Seattle, probably well over 12 hours into one of the days I had some dude tailgating me with HID’s so to stop further laser-eye surgery i hit my rear view mirror (since the little “night-time” tab didn’t work) so that it wouldn’t point into my brain. Well ever since then it won’t stay where I put it, it just vibrates down. No pics of this KILLER INSTALL though because seriously, its one clip thing, and 2 phillips screws. It’s not like I’m damon here (Trollface.jpg).

Since my last post I picked up a kevlar RPS13 rear garnish (something I’ve wanted for a longgggg time, but never had a car to put one on haha), Nardi 330mm flat steering wheel, WorksBell SPLASH hub, and probably some other stuff. Well I finally found some free time last night so I cruise over to ol Greg’s house (Toby’s house) and I put the wheel and garnish on and removed the monster 4″ boost gauge that came in the car while Tob did some more work on his engine bay and Jason did some little stuff on his LS1 FD.

Some pictures of new toys and the old boost gauge on it’s way out.

I’m going to post the boost gauge on zilvia for sale before too long here, although I don’t have particularly high hopes of it selling for much. If it doesn’t sell, I might try to make it into some sort of Flava-Flave esque chain and wear it for a new years party or something.

So next on the list for the car is Z32 MAF (I think my SR MAF is on its way out, so that’s why the car idles a little rough/jumpy), APEXi Power Suction intake or whatever to run the MAF, and an exhaust. My exhaust is currently stock and scrapes going into my garage, so it’s developed a little leak. Few things are more lame than a leaky stock exhaust on a 4 cylinder car. Sounds like such garbage right now. Of course Ganadors could sneak their way into the priority list somewhere in there if some pop up on Zilvia.

Hmm..think that about covers it for today. I’ll be back when I have more stuff to talk about. Need to get back to designing this website…

New brakes, etc.

Ok, no pictures for this post so sorry in advance. Just thought I’d post a little update on what I’ve been up to for the last week or so with the car.

I got a Cusco OS rear strut tower bar from Greg (Damon). I need to get the carpet pieces for the sides of the hatch area. When I track those down I’ll put in the strut bar and take some pics.

Found a dude on zilvia selling 30mm aluminum 300ZX brakes. I bought the fronts off of him. I also ordered a rebuild kit from nissanparts.cc. I plan on really going through these and powdercoating them, zinc plating all of the bolts, et cetera. The last thing I ordered for the front brake setup today are the brackets that space the calipers out so that you can run 350Z Track edition sized rotors (12.75″) instead of the 300ZX rotors. I’ll keep piecing together the brake setup (still need a ton of stuff), then eventually tear into it and redo the entire brake system and get rid of the ABS. I still need non-ABS brake hard lines, conversion lines from the hardlines to calipers, rear brake calipers, brake rotors front and rear, e brake setup, BMC, brake booster, etc. I imagine it’s going to be a significant undertaking to get rid of the ABS, but it should be fun.

Little update..

So last week I had a few parts show up for the car. I’ll start with the smallest.

When I got the car it didn’t have a Nissan badge on the bumper, which kind of bugged me since there was an indentation on the bumper for it. Russell from NissanParts.CC let me know the factory US one works fine and you just hacksaw the little pin that comes off the back of it off and you can use it.

Next order of business. New carpet. The carpet/floormats in this thing were DISGUSTING. You can’t really get a feel for how nasty in this pic but whatever.

So I went ahead and ordered a stockinteriors.com black carpet pan for the front and rear.

I work 8am-930pm pretty much every day so it took me three days to get this in, as I could only work on it from about 10pm until when I fell asleep. Usually about 1:30am I’d start kinda winding down and call it a night. The first night I got the interior and old carpet out, as well as installed the new rear section.

I put the new carpet pan on top of the old one and left it in my garage during the next day so it warmed up and really mimicked the shape of the old carpet.

The second day I started doing a little bit of trimming and cutting on the new pan. Here’s where I finished that night.

I didn’t get a picture of it all finished up just yet, but it turned out pretty good. Here’s a random picture of my new DMAX floormats as well. I got these at the same time.

I also put in my Bride Zeta 3, but once again, I’m a scum bag and didn’t get a picture yet.

Random closing picture with Damon (weird calling him that instead of Greg)

Seattle Trip / New car

Well I made it back.

The trip started out interestingly enough: I thought I had a 545 flight, so I showed up at 4:30. Turns out it is a 445 flight, but luckily the flight was delayed 2 hours. So the flight finally leaves around 6:30pm, but at this point I’m worried because I thought my second flight would also be delayed 2 hours, so I’d be making Niko ( guy I’m buying the car from) stay up even later (it would be around midnight local time when i landed). It ended up just cutting into my 3 hour layover time so that was nice for all parties involved. My landing in Chicago was a rough one, it ended up giving me a bit of whiplash I think! Had an hour to relax and have dinner at O’Haire before my connecting flight to Seattle took off. That was an 8 hour flight of no sleeping and pure boredom. It was an aisle seat too..no fun

So I land in Seattle at 11pm local time / 1AM my time. Niko picks me up at the airport, takes me over to the car and we sign some paperwork. It’s pretty late but I just flew across the country and bought a car so I’m not that tired. Let’s also remember that I’m from a small midwest town, and have never been more than a few hours outside of my town without being with family or a group of friends, so things were a little uneasy. I decided to try and drive a little while. I made it about 2 hours before I figured I’d pull over and sleep, it was about 3am my time. I pulled into a rest stop and hopped in the passenger side, locked the doors, and leaned the seat back. Between the cars constantly coming and going, the uncomfortable seat, and being extremely cold, I didn’t get much rest. I woke about 2 hours later with back pain so bad I couldn’t feel my legs, hands shaking from cold so bad I couldn’t get the key in the ignition etc. So I decided that that was probably all the rest I was going to get in that 5-star resort, and to hit the road again. At this point I began reconsidering my plan to sleep in rest stops in the car all the way back across the country.

I pull out of the rest stop and realize I’m in the middle of a national park, it’s sun-rise, and there are snow-capped mountains everywhere. Pretty wild. Where I’m from there are no hills, mountains, lakes, rivers, anything. There is ony corn. Lots of corn. I drove for about 2 hours before I started falling asleep again. I guess I overestimated how much rest I got from the 2 hours of sleep in the car. So I found a Motel6 on the side of the interstate and pulled in. I got about 4 hours of much needed awesome sleep. As i was checking out and walking out to the car I snapped this pic.

I hopped back on the road and started driving. At one point I got pulled over on the first day in Montana for speeding (80 in a 75 I think it was?). Problem was, the car came with a Pivot 100mm boost gauge on the steering shroud that blocked the speedometer! Not my style, but it would have to stay there until I got home. So I get pulled over, I have the previous owner’s Washington plates on the car, my Illinois drivers license, a bill of sale, and my insurance card for the car. The officer has me step out of the car and come sit with him in his while he checks everything out. I ended up explaining to the cop why I flew across the country to buy a 1991 Nissan, which he was perplexed by (he probably thought the car was stolen, and understandably so). Note to self: next time I fly out on a trip like this, figure out a way to get temporary tags that are registered to ME, instead of trying to drive across the country on someone elses tags. The officer ended up buying into my story and told me to enjoy the trip, and stop by some national parks in the area if I had time.

After a few hours I pulled over and snapped this picture with the trusty iPhone. Reminds me of something out of a Fallout game or something.

I plugged in the GPS and it said this:

500 Miles to the next turn and it can’t calculate the arrival time. What did I get myself into.

In the next picture you’ll see a flood on the side of the interstate. Well what you don’t see is that that flood decided it would be sweet if it crossed the road, and flooded it about 1 foot deep for 100 yards. So I sit in traffic for about an hour near Livingston, Montana as everyone has to creep through it. I get up near the front of the line and decide to pull over to check out the flood and see if it is possible to make it through in my car. I walk up to the State Trooper keeping an eye on things up near the front and ask her how deep it is. She says “It’s only about a foot deep, you should be fine”. I kind of give her an “Are you serious?” look, and glance back at my new car, which is probably about 2 inches off the ground at the lowest point. She’s like “well, you don’t have much of a choice, it won’t be down for another 3 or 4 days”. So I just had to go for it. it was scary, but I made it. I felt the car get a little floatey at one point. So i make it to the other side, heart beating about 180BPM. I see a cop on the other side and he’s just laughing and shaking his head. Not that funny, man. Anyway, car was fine, no electrical shortages, no hydrolocking, etc. Moving on..

Overall in the first day I think I drove about 20 hours. So about midnight rolls around on the first day and my GPS has me hop off the interstate in south eastern Montana and get on some state-highway for a little bit. Long story short, worst roads ever, deer everywhere, creepy Indian reservation that seemed very impoverished, almost run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, almost get mugged at a gas station when I do finally find one, etc. Finally find a hotel about 3am and try to hit the hay. Thing is, I’ve been driving for 20 hours, and I’m afraid to fall asleep because I think I will crash; my brain doesn’t realize that I’m laying in bed, it thinks I’m still driving. I finally fall asleep and wake up the next day around 9am and drive 16 hours and make it home. All in all it was a little over 2000 miles in 2 days. Thanks to everyone that called me throughout both days of the trip to chat and keep me positive and awake, that helped a lot.

Safe and sound and cleaned up a little

Update time

Well i figured I’d post a little update. Since last I posted, I sold the coupe. So now I’m just rollin the ol 91 celica. The Good news however is that I fly out to Seattle to pick up a certain s13 hatch on Tuesday. Should be a lovely 3100 mile, 34 hour drive back. I have 3 days off of work to make it back. I’m just going to drive until I’m tired each day. If I see something cool I’ll pull over and go to it. Bringing my camera so I will probably snap some pictures along the way. I plan on posting updates on my way back so stay tuned.