drawks

Had a blast a Kyusha Golden Week Festival in Richmond. Lots of late nights getting Jolene back on the road, but met a ton of friendly folks and got this impromptu group shot at the drive out.

Hard to say, as I'm still fiddling with the suspension/alignment and I have barely put a few miles on the car so far.

Removed and reinstalled basically the entire front suspension about 4 times to get alignment close enough to drive the car to a good alignment shop. Of course it died about 8 blocks from home, thankfully in front of a car parts store. After puzzling over it for a while I realized that in the course of removing the original crossmember I had undone the engine to body ground wire and forgot to find a new home for it. Managed to get one starter bolt loose using a borrowed wrench and installed a new ground strap, she fires right up and made it to the shop where she is right now.

My T3 adjustable TC rods came in yesterday, which is the final piece to get my car back together ahead of the show on Saturday (any ratsun folks going to the Kyusha Golden Week fest in Richmond?). So last night I spent a few hours trying to find the sweet spot on LCA length + TC rod length + tie rod length + camber plate position. Holy shit is this a hassle. The adjustable LCA from JBC does what it says, but if you want to adjust the length it needs to be freed at one end, which makes zeroing in on an initial setting very hard. So after a few hours of mucking with it last night I /think/ I've got it close enough on the drivers side that I can copy the lengths tonight and get the passenger side done matching and drive it to get an alignment tomorrow morning. Also I got my downpipe wrapped in some fiberglass header wrap, redid my master cylinder heat shield in some gold reflective heat tape. So here I am less than 48 hours until the car show and I haven't gotten off jack stands yet, let alone driven it or gotten it detailed. Soooooo let's hope I can get it together.

I've got one of these thermostats waiting for a day when I'm ready to pull my heater core and do some other cooling system work. I do think it is wild how warm the sr20det runs, but apparently they just run at 205-220 normally if forum accounts are to be believed.

Woot! Found a local race shop, Norman Racing Group, and Dennis over there was awesome and tossed the reducer in the lathe and got them to the correct ID. Pretty dirty under here but, I got the, rack, LCAs, ball joints, and tie rod ends all installed. Unfortunately it looks like the stock TC rods really don't want to fit with this new geometry. I'm gonna see if I can get technotoy to overnight me a pair of adjustable ones on Monday. I'm feeling a lot better about my chances to get everything together in the for the show!

Well shit, it looks like at least some of the hardware in this JBC R&P kit is not correct... This is super aggravating, not sure how I'm gonna get replacement hardware and get everything installed in time for the car show next weekend. 😞 Included control arm bolts are ~14mm as indicated in the installation manual the control arm heim joint reducers are only 12mm however. The un-reduced heim joints are 16mm.

Got the JBC cross member, motor mounts and rack installed yesterday. Tonight I'll get the LCAs, TC rods and sway bar back in and tomorrow I'll see if I can get the steering rod back in. I'm a little worried about how hard it'll be to modify the steering rod armature. Not much room to get in there with a dremel between the engine, turbo, master cylinders etc.

Another few hours of wrenching, got the crossmember and steering pulled. It wouldn't be work without a hassle though. Splitting the steering shaft from the steering box was impossible, so I had to pull the drivers side motor mount and the front sway bar to get enough room to pull it as an assembly. Tomorrow I'll start putting the jbcoachworks crossmember and steering into the car. Only 10 days to get the car back together for the Golden Week Kyusha show.

Got the tranny hooked up finally. Classic jack under the pulley wouldn't get enough room though. I ended up using a jack under the crossmember to hold it in place and when swapped the bolts out for the TC rods bolts which are the same size but about 3/4" longer. With the longer bolts tightened with just enough threads to safely hold the weight I was able to let the xmember sag down and then jack up the front to tilt the engine way free of the firewall and get the tranny hooked up. When it finally slipped into place I was majorly stoked! All in I spent probably 10+ hours trying to get this buttoned up. Tldr: put long bolts in xmember save yourself a headache.

Went to stuff the tranny back in yesterday and cannot get the fucking bellhousing to clear the firewall enough to get the input shaft in... After several hours of trying including pulling the damn thing, hammering on the edge of the firewall/tunnel and cleaning/regressing the input shaft this is the closest I got it So today I guess I'm gonna have to lower the front crossmember or get engine off it's mounts to line things up. So that will probably force me to do a bunch of things I was gonna wait on doing. 1. JBC crossmember 2. R&P kit 3. Remote filter adaptor 3. Whatever else is gonna be easier without the crossmember not in the way. p.s. being able to stick a cellphone in the Gap and take a picture certainly helps figure out wtf is going on

Got the LCAs stripped and painted. Swapped the flywheel (note for the curious, factory sr20det flywheel bolts are 14mm 12 point bolts and are single use 125 ftlb dry stretch bolts, ARP ones are 16mm 12pt and are reusable with blue lock tight and torque lube @ 70 ftlb). Got the throw out bearing and pilot bearing swapped; never underestimate what you can accomplish with a mallet, some grease and a drill press working as a collet press! I managed to also break my clutch alignment tool, so had to spend a few hours waiting for jb weld to cure, but got the new clutch and pressure plate in too! Big days back to back. Oh yeah I got the tranny back from the shop too! 6 hours bench labor to get all the bearings, seals, and synchros changed out. The input shaft has no more wobbly play in it, so here's hoping that this thing is good for another many thousands of miles and hard launches 🙂

It's been a busy few days, wife was out of town and kid was staying with my in-laws so..... Pulled the transmission and sent it off for a rebuild since it had been making a crazy whine when engine braking. While we have that out I'm taking out the bananas stage 4 spec clutch and aluminum fly wheel the PO had in the car and putting in a competition "white bunny" clutch kit and light steel flywheel. Hopefully that will make for a bit smoother idle and pull away without having a super grabby clutch and 9lb flywheel. I've never understood why people put race clutches designed for 600+ hp in street cars making half that. No wonder getting rolling before going to a bigger slave cyldiner was so hard and also why the PO had to install a nismo clutch fork pivot after breaking 2 previous pivots! Since I have the transmission out I'm also going to install this datsport tranny tunnel cover to replace the "crafted" sheet metal currently there. Also pulled my LCAs and chopped them and welded up the adjustable kit from jbcoachworks. Depending on how my next couple weeks looks I might be able to get the R&P kit in the car too. I really need it to be put back together and drivable in time for the Golden Week Kyusha Festival here in Richmond next month. Oh yah, also swapped the brake pads out for a fresh set of Hawk HPS pads, they're replacing some wilwood street/track compounds that weren't giving me the initial bite I was looking for. Man I live doing pads on the wilwood calipers, just easy to slip them out the back of the caliper with only the one allen bolt holding the clip in place.

Woh never seen those ugly flattop SUs on a dime.

First free day without rain in a couple weeks, got out and put some miles on the dime roaring around wildcat canyon and Bear Creek. The R8 coils seem to run good. I've still got a bit of a weird idle that may be because the nistune ecu I have was originally out of an automatic; I've heard that the iacv control is a little weird on the auto ecus. I stopped for a cappuccino and had 7 different people approach me about my car as I was walking back to it. Including some kid (maybe 15 years old) who told me that Datsuns are his favorite and this was going to be a great day after seeing my car. I wanted to offer him a ride around the block, but figured that society doesn't really like it when you pickup random children in your car; too bad for him.