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So to start off as the title says my name is Reily. Sorry in advance if the pictures are rotated wrongly, i take pictures with my phone. I may come back and fix it when i have time but for now this is just a quick write up. Its probably gonna be messy as hell.
This is the tale of my GTR, although at this moment its a rather short one. About a year ago i had no interests in cars what-so-ever, however my beater was starting to show signs that it was getting worse for ware so i started driving it like it was stolen rather than trying to treat it nice and keep it running till i was done college. This got an itch started to screw around with cars, and my dad has always wanted a project car to tinker with. I started looking at cars, supras, integras, rx-7s(fc3s and fd), 350z, 240sx, and eventually landed on skyline. I found this forum and i was hooked. Not only do i love the gtr, but this forum gave me the option to buy its predecessor. I started researching, then started phoning around for insurance. When i heard quotes i had pretty much given up on my dream but i continued to look. Then one day DKSantos(i think thats his forum username, Fabio in real life) dropped the price on his shell. It had been posted for 4000 originally i believe without rims. He dropped the price to 2 grand and I figured that was about as good as it gets, kijiji shells were 3-3500 and looked much worse. Me and my dad drove up there a few weekends later to have a look, we were still skeptical and not sure if we were gonna go away with it. It looked good and we were happy so negotiations started. We ended up almost cleaning his garage and walking away pretty happy. What a shitty rainy day to go look at a car though.
All loaded up and ready to go, or so we thought.
This is where trouble begins already, as it seems with everyones skyline. The car was just a shell, as such it was in some states of disassembly. The rear section of the prop shaft was still on the rear diff but not up in its hanger bracket. As we were pulling onto the highway we hear something fall, a clanging, and then start smelling burnt rubber as the car is up on a tow dolly. We pulled over, phone fabio, he knows what happened he's on his way. In the piss pouring rain, on the side of an on-ramp, with lots of cars coming our way, he showed up, got down on our floor mats in the rain, and put the hangerbracket from the trunk on the car for us. Thanks again dude, would have sucked even more without your help, no tools n all.
We carried on our drive, however i don't know if it was because the propshaft fell, or just the car was out of allignment to begin with, the rear wheels were angled outwards a little bit. Any time we got up over 50km/h or tried to merge left the whole car swung out beside us and tried taking us off the road. 40km/h all the way home from toronto, a supposed 1 hour drive took nearly 4 and a half.
Pit stop for food:
Trying on bumpers upon arriving home(there were 2 included, 1 veilside all ziptied together and 1 oem with n1 vents)
oem
veilside
The plan for the next few months was suppose to be continue saving money to eventually afford an engine without breaking the bank, while doing small things to the body like cleaning up little bits of rust if there were any, fiddling with the interior and playing around in it ofcourse. I had bought my dream car and it felt great. First things first though, I had to spend a whole saturday and 3 trips to the dump with our utility trailer packed full to clean out my dads garage. He use to run an electronics repair shop and had lots of tv's sitting around that were scrap but he just didn't quite want to let go.
After 2 saturdays of working at that heres what it looked like with the car inside
A nice big heated shop with nice carpets for crawling around on the ground that doesn't matter if they get oily(they're no longer white btw).
After the car was inside i considered to read on the forums, trying to learn everything, researching what all i would need if i got a swap from a place like jdmtoronto or engine land. They came with wireharness ecu engine tranny clutch flywheel and that was about it. Would have to get intercooler piping and anything else that isn't directly bolted onto the engine. Sounded daunting especially since i'd never touched anything mechanical before in my life outside of oil changes on my sunfire. Thats when someone posted a front clip on these forums. He posted an asking price of 4g stating that he had no idea what it was and gotten it out of a storage deal gone wrong. Again it seemed like something worth checking out, so we got ourselves a trailer this time, and borrowed someones truck. Back to toronto we go. When we got there we did a compression test found all good numbers, 155 165 166 164 165 170. Seems good enough for me from what i know. Also first time hotwiring a car =]. We haggled a bit and again walked away happy thinking we had a nearly stock engine bay.
Ready to rock!
We got home, slid the skid off the trailer and pretty much called it a day. Sunday we started a bit of teardown, took off intercooler piping, removed pspump, removed intercooler/rad, and got the hot side of the engine looking fairly sparse. Was dinner time so we called it quits until next friday, I had a busy week between school/work and my dad has to work weekdays as well. I had pictures of our small teardown but unfortunately i had no intentions of writing this so they've long since been deleted from my phone.
That friday we continued work on tearing apart the engine bay. I was being quite persistent and pushing my dad to keep going, so with my non existent mechanical skills, and my dads farm yard knowledge of old cars, we continued onwards. It started getting dark and we were so close, all the electrical had been undone, abs removed and set asside, we were really close. I had borrowed an engine hoist from my place of work that week and i wanted to get it out. I grabbed a couple lights, and we went and bugged the neighbor for some nylon straps since we had no chain or anything. Strapped 2 around the block and 1 through since they were to short then put it up in the hoist and out she comes.
So after ~7 hours of work total and in the dark of night i had pulled my first engine. Was a rewarding feeling. Thats when we started getting surprises. We already realized there was k&n pod filters, not a big deal in my eyes, however fabio has since told me they are mounted on greddy piping. We got a set of z32 mafs with the shell, and what was this the car had r32 nismo turbos on it! what a great find. I had read horror stories about the ceramic wheels in the stock turbos, and while its probably not as bad as i think, it was something i didn't want to deal with. That was enough, tomorrow we can start cleaning stuff up.
Saturday work resumed, pulled the whole turbo assembly off, started cleaning and shining intercooler piping, put an attempt into polishing the manifolds but quickly gave up. It was thanks giving weekend so we got the engine into the shop(with some effort) and left it there. On thanks giving monday me and my brother in law unbolted the tranny and between the two of us managed to wrestle it off the engine. This lead to yet another surprise!
I don't think this is a stock clutch or flywheel guys.
Turns out i have an osgeiken ts2b which is somewhere between a 1700 and 2200$ clutch(ebay and osgiken can't decide). Its also fairly new, I havn't got a mic out to measure the plates as i don't own one, but they're close to 4mm which someone else selling this clutch says is new, 2mm is suppose to be dead.
My suppose to be stock engine bay now has: r32 nismo turbos, z32 mafs, mishimoto rad, kakimoto 3.5" cat back exhaust, a 2 disc clutch, and has supposedly only done 50,000km in its life time.
Heres a picture of the turbos which have since been serviced, one needed a rebuild theo ther was okay'd. Cherry turbos in St. Thomas did the work I highly suggest them. The guy runs the business out of his garage and has been doing it for 20+ years. I dropped them off, within 5 min he okay'd the one and had the other torn apart. Not a single piece was still together. It needed a new bearing with parts and labor and shipping back to me it cost 475. I thought this was relatively reasonable especially the condition it came back
Looks brand new!
This is the tale of my GTR, although at this moment its a rather short one. About a year ago i had no interests in cars what-so-ever, however my beater was starting to show signs that it was getting worse for ware so i started driving it like it was stolen rather than trying to treat it nice and keep it running till i was done college. This got an itch started to screw around with cars, and my dad has always wanted a project car to tinker with. I started looking at cars, supras, integras, rx-7s(fc3s and fd), 350z, 240sx, and eventually landed on skyline. I found this forum and i was hooked. Not only do i love the gtr, but this forum gave me the option to buy its predecessor. I started researching, then started phoning around for insurance. When i heard quotes i had pretty much given up on my dream but i continued to look. Then one day DKSantos(i think thats his forum username, Fabio in real life) dropped the price on his shell. It had been posted for 4000 originally i believe without rims. He dropped the price to 2 grand and I figured that was about as good as it gets, kijiji shells were 3-3500 and looked much worse. Me and my dad drove up there a few weekends later to have a look, we were still skeptical and not sure if we were gonna go away with it. It looked good and we were happy so negotiations started. We ended up almost cleaning his garage and walking away pretty happy. What a shitty rainy day to go look at a car though.
All loaded up and ready to go, or so we thought.
This is where trouble begins already, as it seems with everyones skyline. The car was just a shell, as such it was in some states of disassembly. The rear section of the prop shaft was still on the rear diff but not up in its hanger bracket. As we were pulling onto the highway we hear something fall, a clanging, and then start smelling burnt rubber as the car is up on a tow dolly. We pulled over, phone fabio, he knows what happened he's on his way. In the piss pouring rain, on the side of an on-ramp, with lots of cars coming our way, he showed up, got down on our floor mats in the rain, and put the hangerbracket from the trunk on the car for us. Thanks again dude, would have sucked even more without your help, no tools n all.
We carried on our drive, however i don't know if it was because the propshaft fell, or just the car was out of allignment to begin with, the rear wheels were angled outwards a little bit. Any time we got up over 50km/h or tried to merge left the whole car swung out beside us and tried taking us off the road. 40km/h all the way home from toronto, a supposed 1 hour drive took nearly 4 and a half.
Pit stop for food:
Trying on bumpers upon arriving home(there were 2 included, 1 veilside all ziptied together and 1 oem with n1 vents)
oem
veilside
The plan for the next few months was suppose to be continue saving money to eventually afford an engine without breaking the bank, while doing small things to the body like cleaning up little bits of rust if there were any, fiddling with the interior and playing around in it ofcourse. I had bought my dream car and it felt great. First things first though, I had to spend a whole saturday and 3 trips to the dump with our utility trailer packed full to clean out my dads garage. He use to run an electronics repair shop and had lots of tv's sitting around that were scrap but he just didn't quite want to let go.
After 2 saturdays of working at that heres what it looked like with the car inside
A nice big heated shop with nice carpets for crawling around on the ground that doesn't matter if they get oily(they're no longer white btw).
After the car was inside i considered to read on the forums, trying to learn everything, researching what all i would need if i got a swap from a place like jdmtoronto or engine land. They came with wireharness ecu engine tranny clutch flywheel and that was about it. Would have to get intercooler piping and anything else that isn't directly bolted onto the engine. Sounded daunting especially since i'd never touched anything mechanical before in my life outside of oil changes on my sunfire. Thats when someone posted a front clip on these forums. He posted an asking price of 4g stating that he had no idea what it was and gotten it out of a storage deal gone wrong. Again it seemed like something worth checking out, so we got ourselves a trailer this time, and borrowed someones truck. Back to toronto we go. When we got there we did a compression test found all good numbers, 155 165 166 164 165 170. Seems good enough for me from what i know. Also first time hotwiring a car =]. We haggled a bit and again walked away happy thinking we had a nearly stock engine bay.
Ready to rock!
We got home, slid the skid off the trailer and pretty much called it a day. Sunday we started a bit of teardown, took off intercooler piping, removed pspump, removed intercooler/rad, and got the hot side of the engine looking fairly sparse. Was dinner time so we called it quits until next friday, I had a busy week between school/work and my dad has to work weekdays as well. I had pictures of our small teardown but unfortunately i had no intentions of writing this so they've long since been deleted from my phone.
That friday we continued work on tearing apart the engine bay. I was being quite persistent and pushing my dad to keep going, so with my non existent mechanical skills, and my dads farm yard knowledge of old cars, we continued onwards. It started getting dark and we were so close, all the electrical had been undone, abs removed and set asside, we were really close. I had borrowed an engine hoist from my place of work that week and i wanted to get it out. I grabbed a couple lights, and we went and bugged the neighbor for some nylon straps since we had no chain or anything. Strapped 2 around the block and 1 through since they were to short then put it up in the hoist and out she comes.
So after ~7 hours of work total and in the dark of night i had pulled my first engine. Was a rewarding feeling. Thats when we started getting surprises. We already realized there was k&n pod filters, not a big deal in my eyes, however fabio has since told me they are mounted on greddy piping. We got a set of z32 mafs with the shell, and what was this the car had r32 nismo turbos on it! what a great find. I had read horror stories about the ceramic wheels in the stock turbos, and while its probably not as bad as i think, it was something i didn't want to deal with. That was enough, tomorrow we can start cleaning stuff up.
Saturday work resumed, pulled the whole turbo assembly off, started cleaning and shining intercooler piping, put an attempt into polishing the manifolds but quickly gave up. It was thanks giving weekend so we got the engine into the shop(with some effort) and left it there. On thanks giving monday me and my brother in law unbolted the tranny and between the two of us managed to wrestle it off the engine. This lead to yet another surprise!
I don't think this is a stock clutch or flywheel guys.
Turns out i have an osgeiken ts2b which is somewhere between a 1700 and 2200$ clutch(ebay and osgiken can't decide). Its also fairly new, I havn't got a mic out to measure the plates as i don't own one, but they're close to 4mm which someone else selling this clutch says is new, 2mm is suppose to be dead.
My suppose to be stock engine bay now has: r32 nismo turbos, z32 mafs, mishimoto rad, kakimoto 3.5" cat back exhaust, a 2 disc clutch, and has supposedly only done 50,000km in its life time.
Heres a picture of the turbos which have since been serviced, one needed a rebuild theo ther was okay'd. Cherry turbos in St. Thomas did the work I highly suggest them. The guy runs the business out of his garage and has been doing it for 20+ years. I dropped them off, within 5 min he okay'd the one and had the other torn apart. Not a single piece was still together. It needed a new bearing with parts and labor and shipping back to me it cost 475. I thought this was relatively reasonable especially the condition it came back
Looks brand new!
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