KGC10 Skyline 2000GT Build

[dat77sun]

wow, just read this whole thread, this thing is just simply gorgeous! ive always loved these

[Babalouie]

Slightly random update.

My good friends at the HoonTV video production house told me that the Hako vid would be shown as a warm up for the Fast & Furious 6 movie, and it looks like it's embedded in some sort of infomercial :)

Apparently "you weren't boo-ed" :D

[Babalouie]

I reckon it's fair to say that nothing quite brightens up my day, as much as a care package from Japan :)

Ooh...I wonder what this could be.

There's plenty of cool stuff, but But first, the easy part.  My reverse lights are in reasonable condition...

...but one side is cracked, the rubber gasket a bit crazed and the whole thing has been blackened by soot from the exhaust.

They remove easily enough.  Not by unscrewing the lens from the front, but by unbolting them from behind the bumper.

Interestingly, the new ones have a little wodge of felt in the drain hole.  I wonder if this is to filter out the soot from the exhaust pipes, which seems to work its way inside and blacken it from the inside out.

Much better!  (and yes I know it's crooked in this pic, we sorted it out later) :D

One other item in the package were new door striker rubbers.  You might recall that my original ones disintegrated, and I found that while 510 ones are smaller, they can be stretched over the Hako striker as a temporary measure.

New rubbers now installed, and the doors click closed nice and solidly now.

[Homeboyx]

How am I barely finding this thread now? 

THIS x9757!!!!

 

Spectacular car you have there!

[Babalouie]

Sorry for the lack of updates in recent times, guys...what happened was that 3yrs ago, I went and bought a fancy-car to use as a daily, and in the end it turned out to be really, really maintenance intensive, to the point where I didn't have time to work on the Hako! Anyway, it got sold about a month ago, so we can go back to regular programming :)

 

Christmas holidays are a time to clear your mind of work, and spend some quality time with your loved ones (oh, and your family too).

 

Boxing Day meant that while everyone else was in the house trying to think of ways to use up 20kg of leftover ham, I get to be in the garage playing with Christmas presents.

 

First job of the day was to fit the awesome new tension arms from Techno Toy Tuning. Gabe from T3 makes plenty of products and is a passionate supporter of J-tin, but when parts for the Hako appeared on the T3 site, I was quite bowled over! Aftermarket parts from a US vendor...for a Japan-only car! :) Many thanks to the SoCal Hako-owning community for helping to make this happen.

 

The T3 pieces are beautifully made, and are remarkably stout, with a heim joint that is approximately the size of my fist :D

 

So off come the stock tension arms...

 

The T3 arms are adjustable, so before I remove the stock arms, I measure the length in place.

 

The T3 arms look like they'll happily survive a bomb blast, and are much bigger than the stock arms :)

 

One difference I noted about the T3 arms are that they are straight at the flange, whereas the Hako ones have a little angle. We will explore the ramifications of this anon.

 

Another critical difference is that the T3 arms are solid mounted to the chassis via these special washers, rather than rubber-bushed.

 

Installation's pretty simple, I dismantled the T3 arms, then bolted one side to the suspension, and the other side to the chassis.

 

Then I wind down the coilovers, and jack up the suspension arm a little...then it's an easy matter of muscling the two bits together and bolting it up.

 

I left the two bolts at the wheel-end of the T3 arm a little loose, so that once it's bolted up, the arm can find its natural angle against the suspension arm. Once the heim joint is done up, I tighten the suspension end up all the way. Before I move on, I jack the suspension up and down, to make sure the heim joint is at the right angle, and doesn't bottom out rotationally as the suspension moves.

 

Straight away, I notice that the (straight) T3 arms have put the suspension arm at quite an extreme amount of twist. Compare the stock passenger-side vs the T3'd driver's side suspension arm.

 

Gabe from T3 said that this wasn't a concern, and was a result of the Hako having very long droop travel, and the longest suspension arms of any Datsun. Once it was at normal ride height, Gabe said, it would all settle at a more normal angle and be fine....and so it did! The suspension arm is still at a slight angle, but you can see in the foreground of this pic, that the rubber suspension bush isn't distorted in any meaningful way...well not enough to be worried about anyway.

 

The next job is to replace the steering tie rods. Now, popping ball joints out requires quite a lot of force, and I find that with old cars, they're really jammed in there and the usual picklefork method of hammering out the ball joints seldom works. Picklefirks work fine on newer cars, but with old junk, you often find that at least one or two of them won't yield, and so you have to come up with a better solution anyway. The one method I find is quite foolproof are these things:

 

You tap them into place as deep as possible with a hammer, then start to wind the jaws together...and then there'll be a loud "BANG!", and the tool and the tie rods will fly halfway across the garage. Hmm...I wonder which are the new ones...they look so alike :)

 

The new tie rods are from Victory50, and look like they are parts from a later Nissan, but modified for use on a Hako. The ball joint head is a later non-greasable type, and is smaller. The threads look like they've been machined down to be compatible with Hako, and the taper looks like it's had an insert pressed onto it. We've found that the taper on C10 Skyline balljoints are quite different to any other Datsun, like Z, 510 or even Kenmeri. So it's not surprising that Victory50 had to go to quite a bit of trouble to make these.

 

I measure up the new ones as best I can...the fact that they are quite different parts mean that the old trick of counting how the turns as the original parts unscrew, won't work.

 

The only snag is that as I'm done, there's a light clunk as I swing the steering from lock to lock. I trace it back to this inner balljoint, which touches a bolt on the crossmember as it passes. Or rather...the split pin does.

 

I replace it with a new pin that I bent in a somewhat less elegant way, and that frees up enough millimetres to be fine. I think this is because the crossbar on my steering has a slight banana-bend to it, that isn't standard issue...I guess it must be from an accident sometime during its life in Japan....on second thoughts that looks awful. I'll do it again.

 

The last thing, are these.

 

The Hako has these snubbers that act as lock stops on the steering. I've never felt them during normal driving at all...when you reach full lock it isn't because you feel it hit a defined stop, it's as if you reach a point where the steering binds up. I figure this isn't good, so fit up these new stoppers with their plastic hats, and adjust them to 3.5 turns lock to lock. I'm not sure if that is the factory setting, and I think I might have to restrict the lock a bit more.

 

And that's it! A nice little refresh of the front end, and at this point the only things we haven't restored on the front suspension is the steering box and idler. Baz at Datsport has offered to take them apart and have a look whether anything needs to be done, so at some point I think I'll take em off and let him have his way with them.

 

For now, the steering feels nice and tight and more precise than before. Over bumps it seems as if a layer of slack has been taken out of the front end and it's much more solid-feeling. The steering is also about 1/8 turn out of whack too, so it seems that I suck at measuring up tie-rods and she'll be heading in for a wheel alignment on Monday. There's a few more jobs to do next week while I'm still on vacation though.

 

Oh, there were also a couple of other cool things recently...

 

I'd totally forgotten I had this.

 

I bought this in 2008 at the Tokyo Nostalgic Show, from this stall selling vintage posters and catalogs and stuff. I'd hidden it so well that I didn't find it again until now :)

 

Also, I came across this service: http://www.japaneseodometercheck.sto.my/

 

These guys can somehow get a copy of the last Japanese registration certificate, and so I sent them the details of the Hako. It seems that the last time the car was registered, was in 2004, and the mileage at the time was 91,000km...and when I bought the car in 2007, the mileage was still the same. Hako has a 5-digit odometer, so who knows how many times it has been around the clock, but by the sounds of it, the car didn't turn a wheel at all between 2004 and 2007. When I bought the car, the dealer said that the paintjob and restoration was about 3yrs old, so I'd say 2004 was the point where the previous owner gave up on the restoration and mothballed the car.

 

That explains quite a lot about the condition of the Hako when I got it! :)

 

Happy holidays, everyone :)

[jser12]

I almost forgot about this build. I miss it a lot. Thanks for the update.

[Babalouie]

Project Hakosuka may be many things, but one thing is for sure is that in the past 6yrs, it's certainly never been boring :D

 

Like the time I found a 4 inch long piece of sheetmetal floating about inside the sump...oh, wait...that was today :) I guess I better start at the beginning....

 

This morning, I used my engine beam to raise the motor off its mount. Basically to fit new engine mounts and a new oil pickup.

 

On the one side, I hook a chain to an unused bolthole on the cylinder head...

 

...and on the other side I used a hole on the side of the block.

 

Then slowly twist those big handles on the engine bar, and the engine rises off its mounts (which I unbolted from before). A few inches is all it needs before there's enough room to wiggle out the old mount.

 

The main reason for this job in the first place, was to investigate an oil surge issue. It mainly happens on the track, where I can see the oil pressure falling in hard left hand turns. But unless the oil level is all the way full, I can reproduce the effect on a winding road taken reasonably fast. So off comes the sway bar, which is necessary to make room to slide out the sump (after its gazillion bolts have been undone)

 

And straight away, I think the mystery is solved...with the sight of the oil pickup at an er, shall we say...rakish angle.

 

You can kinda see how it would affect the oil pressure in hard turns. On right hand turns, the oil pickup acts like a scoop for any oil sloshing to the right side of the sump. But on left handers, the hat on the oil pickup acts like a shield for oil sloshing to the left, which temporarily starves the pickup of oil.

 

I've sourced a new pickup, specifically for Hako Skyline, from Kameari Engine Works, and what a lovely bit of gear it is.

 

And, you can see straight away, that it's at a somewhat different angle to the pickup tube off the car :) I guess I can't be too hard on the guy who built the engine. When the motor is on an engine stand and is bolt upright, the angle of the pickup probably looks quite okay. I imagine it didn't occur to him that the L-series sits on quite a slant in a Hako.

 

Next step is to make a new gasket for the Kameari pickup, which is easy to do. Just take some gasket paper, and gently tap around the pickup (use the old pickup of course!) with a ballpein hammer

 

This will make an imprint on the gasket paper, and in fact will usually partially cut the holes as part of the process.

 

Finish the job with a blade, and hey presto, new gasket.

 

It's a good time to fit up the new engine mounts, which are much softer and fatter than the old ones.

 

Slot them in place, but leave them unbolted for now...all set, right? Just button it all up and look for the nearest winding road? Well, yeah. That was the plan :)

 

So I start to clean up the sump, so that I can fit up a new gasket and get it all back together. That's when I notice something rattling around inside one of the wings.

 

It took a bit of wiggling to get it out, but...here we are :)

 

Righto. What the hell is that doing in there.

 

I think the answer is this. The sump has a plate just behind the bowl, to prevent oil from sloshing to the back of the sump during acceleration. In Japan, the middle section of this plate was cut out to accommodate a really kludged up oil pickup tube which fouled against it.

 

During the rebuild, a new plate of steel looks like it was welded across that gaping hole. But, it looks like the welds didn't hold and that plate of steel went for quite a tour around the inside of the engine. But rather shockingly, all I can see in the way of damage to the rotating assembly, are a couple of nicks in a few of the crank weights.

 

And the odd scrape mark.

 

But the bores, rods and pistons looks to have escaped unharmed. My theory is that the crank swings below the gasket line of the sump. The builder probably didn't measure things right, and shortly after the rebuild...or maybe during the rebuild, the crank hit the new steel plate and tore it free of its welds.

 

The mind boggles as to how the engine is still a happy healthy running motor today. The thought of that plate getting whacked up into the bores, or sliding down into the bowl of the sump and getting sucked up into the pickup tube...thus blocking it off...is quite sobering. There's plenty of engine-kaboom scenarios which could have played out...but I reckon we've had quite a measure of blind luck here, and if the Hako sump was a conventional one, that bit of steel might have bounced around for a long time, causing more and more damage. But I think that shortly after that plate of steel came loose, got clobbered by the crankshaft and began its new life as a metal pretzel, it was sufficiently twisted that it fit into one of those holes that lead to the sump wing. And it probably never came back out again.

 

I suspect that this probably all happened a very long time ago, and that bit of steel has been trapped in the wing of the sump for years. You can see the witness marks on the inside of the sump as it got reshaped by the crank...

 

The question now is...what do we do? (It's not a rhetorical question...if you have an opinion please do share :))

 

I think that the engine is...rather amazingly...okay. The question is whether we need to reinstate that plate across the back of the sump. Naturally, I would like to hear that it's not necessary and we don't have to tempt fate again by welding something in its place. Or...would it be okay to rivet say some 2mm aluminium in its place?

 

Let's discuss. It's good to talk :D

[Babalouie]

The consensus seems to be to stick it back together without any improvised baffle, so today that's what we did :)

 

However before I got too carried away, I measured up how the new vs old oil pickups would fit. Here's the new one:

 

It's parallel to the floor of the sump and sits very close to the bottom

 

Measurements are that the mouth of the pickup tube is 8mm off the floor of the sump.

 

The old one, on the other hand, sits at an angle.

 

And because the mouth of the pipe is at an angle too, the top edge of the mouth is 28mm off the sump floor, so it's much more susceptible to sucking air as the oil sloshes around.

 

So I figure the new one should make it a lot better than it currently is

 

Time to fit up the sump, and Baz from Datsport's tip was to apply contact glue between the sump and the gasket

 

And between the gasket and the block, you apply an even smear of thick grease. The grease should remain solid and prevent leaks, and if you need to remove the sump again, the sump will drop without tearing the gasket, so you can recycle it a few times. Stewart Wilkins at SSS gave me similar advice once about sealing up a rocket cover gasket, too.

 

Then it's on with the zillion bolts...the ones above the wing with the plug in it are especially hard, there is only just enough room to stand up the bolt in there, let alone get a spanner to it.

 

Then lower the engine slowly until it's almost resting on the mounts. This part was easier than expected, the mounts are generously slotted, so there was plenty of wriggle room to get all the holes lined up.

 

And with that, she fired up and idled just fine :) I'll go for a proper drive in the next few days and report back as to whether the oil surge is still prevalent on hard left turns.

[Farmer Joe]

holy crap! 

 

i cant believe that piece of metal was hangin out in the engine like that... 

 

the new pickup looks alot better.. 

[Babalouie]

Well the surge seemed to be largely under control if I overfilled the sump by half a liter, so 5.2L in total. I guess it's also a good thing that the car's only been around Wakefield and Marulan which don't have much in the way of proper left hand corners. Eastern Creek would be another matter entirely tho, but I never did a trackday there.

 

I'm in the middle of a nice morning drive now and I'd say the surge in left hand turns is sorted. I deliberately filled the sump to only 3/4 on the dipstick and have given it a pretty good go and the surge hasn't reappeared.

 

 

The latest round of upgrades seem to have improved the car quite a bit too. The front end is now a lot tighter feeling and precise, and the new engine mounts have made it a lot smoother. It no longer shakes the car side to side at idle (which in hindsight was kinda a cool feature).

 

But I reckon there's now a cloud over the workmanship on the engine. The cylinder head was done by TK and is fine, but I reckon one of the projects for 2014 will be to pull the motor and freshen up the bottom end.

[Babalouie]

Now that the engine has had so many new parts in the past few days, I figured it would be a shame not to give the car a bit of a birthday and treat her to a nice tune up. Actually I think this really is the 6th anniversary of the Hako setting sail from Japan for Australia (well, give or take a couple of days).

 

First I pull the plugs and install a new set of NGK BP6ES. The old ones have a nice dry colour, so nothing seems amiss. #3 has a bit of crud on it...

 

...but I'd say that's because I've plumbed the return pipe from the crankcase breather into cylinder #3. I guess the catch can doesn't quite do a 100% job of scrubbing the oil mist from the crankcase vapours.

 

Then some new plug leads. 6yrs ago, I was kinda grasping at straws to try to figure out why the engine wouldn't run, and so grabbed at some $6ea leads from the local parts store just as a test. Anyway, they seemed to have worked well enough since then, and I didn't actually manage to get over to Magnecor to get a nice set of custom leads made. However, nothing lasts forever, and the old leads are showing quite high resistance, most are in the 8-9 KOhm range, and a couple are 12-13 KOhm. I think I have a Toyota workshop manual somewhere that says that leads are toast when they get over 20, so they still have some life left.

 

But just the same, some new leads (of the same $6 brand!) measure at 3 KOhm, so the old leads were certainly past their prime. Just changing the leads seems to have made the engine feel fresher and more crisp, I guess any big carbed and big cammed oldschool motor relies on a supersized spark to smooth over its driveability inefficiencies at low rpm, so every little bit helps. And at $30 a set, it won't hurt to throw new plug leads on every couple of years from now on.

 

Then a quick check of the ignition timing to see that it's still at 12BTDC (it was...), and so we move onto the carbs. The first thing I check is the idle mixtures, which is governed by these screws here. It's an easy visual check, in that I know that the right idle mixtures on my setup are when the idle screws are 7/8s a turn away from closed. Which for carb #2 & #3, have the mixture screws at this "quarter to three" angle.

 

Whereas for carb #1, the screws are at this "angry eyebrows" angle instead. So these are all fine and there's no need to fiddle.

 

Next, I move onto sync'ing the 3 carbs together. They have to act in perfect unison, so they all have to be closed at precisely the same time at idle, and open at the same time when you hit the loud pedal. First step is to pop off the droplinks on 2 of the carbs.

 

I leave the middle carb connected to the linkage jackshaft. The reason for this, is to disconnect the 3 carbs from each other. This way, any adjustment you make to one carb, won't pull the others out of whack.

 

There are a few schools of thought as to how to sync carbs, but I like to do it this way. So I first remove the brass plug on one of the progression ports on each carb.

 

You can see here that the progression ports are 3 tiny little holes, and normally that bowl is full of fuel. When you crack open the throttle off-idle, the function of the little holes is to give a little slug of enrichment to improve response. But, they are also useful as a sight-window into the position of the throttle flap. If you look really closely, you'll see the throttle flap covering the top half of the top hole.

 

Repeat this check on the other 2 carbs, and if need be, adjust the throttle flap position with this screw. That tiny little progression hole is maybe a millimetre big, so I figure that this is as precise a way of zeroing the carbs to each other as can be. I think I last adjusted these a 3 years ago on the bench before installing the carbs, and they're still in perfect adjustment, so it's not something that will constantly need to be corrected. And this method seems more precise than messing around with devices that measure airflow at the intake.

 

Now that the carbs are all zeroed to the same position, you need to make sure that the 3 linkage arms are also zeroed. It's no point getting the carbs just-so, and then when you reconnect the linkages, it pulls one carb open slightly when the other 2 are closed. So I loosen the linkage arm on the jackshaft, reconnect the droplink (after putting a little dab of lithium grease on the sockets)...and then gently taking up the slack, re-tighten the linkage arm on the jackshaft.

 

And then you're done, a 15min check that can be done annually :) IMHO, the most important part of tuning the carbs, is getting the throttle flaps sync'd perfectly, so that they all open in perfect unison (and you get a perfectly synchronised dump of fuel from the progression port holes!), and that's what gives that nice, crisp response.

[72240z]

Syncing the carbs generally refers mechanical linkage AND flow, just doing the linkage still leaves the carbs out of sync. I guarantee if you use a carb synch tool they will all be flowing differently even though the linkages are all set the same. Mainly due to differences in the butterfly's/casting/machining/bent shafts etc.. What your doing here is a great start but the next step is to have the cleaners off and actually synch the flow using one of these...


Cool project btw Idk if I have chimed in before but I have been subscribed for a long time now. 

[Babalouie]

Over the years, most of the parts I've sourced for the Hako have come from Rubber-Soul.net in Japan. And recently I paid them a bit of a visit when I was in Osaka (more on this story a little later...)

 

Nobody on their staff speaks English and they don't ship overseas, so I've always ordered my parts through a local. So it was quite a treat to finally go to the treasure-trove of Hakosuka goodness :D Needless to say, it's impossible to leave empty-handed

 

The easiest things to fit when I got back, were the new front indicators. My old ones were in decent shape, the rubber seal had fallen apart, but the handmade one I kludged up in 2007 seemed to be holding. Anyway, it's nice to have new things.

 

The new ones do seem a lot "brighter" than the old ones (which are resprayed silver inside).

 

I can't help but feel though...that I've made a "clean spot" in the front end now, and the indicators stand out a mile :)

 

Another interesting discovery was that the headlights aren't stock. I think the oem items are Koito sealed beams, but at some point (probably in the 70s) my car got a fancy upgrade to Cibie Iodes, which mean that the bulbs are H4 and replaceable.

 

Another item picked up at the Autobacs in Japan, were a pair of PIAA Night Techs, so the old H4 bulbs which gave the headlights a blue tinge can now be retired.

 

I...think...the new one (on the right) is a little brighter?

 

Another little engine bay detail that has bugged me for years, is the poor state of the brake booster and master cylinder. The MC has been rebuilt, but the reservoir lids were a slightly loose fit, hence the tape to keep them on. The booster also copped a really awesome brush painted finish at some point in the past, which I've been too lazy to rectify...but now is a good time, because I also picked up some parts to rebush the pedal assembly.

 

The clutch and brake pedals work just fine, but they do have a little side to side play, which makes it feel slightly rickety. Both clutch and brake pedals are attached the same way...the pushrod has a pin which is held in by a C-clip, and at the top the pedal swings on a shaft that is welded onto the bulkhead, and there's a split pin to remove before the pedal can slide off.

 

New vs old bushes. I'd expected the old bushes to be either ground to dust, or cracked, but they seem fine, if somewhat thinner than the new ones.

 

The new bushes press on quite firmly and I've put plenty of lithium grease inside.

 

The brake pedal was a bit more complicated, as there wasn't room to swing the MC pushrod around. Loosening the booster allowed it to slide fwds a bit, which made all the difference though.

 

Ah yes....that booster does need a lick of paint :D

 

Luckily, I'd remembered to pick up a firewall gasket while I was in Japan.

[Babalouie]

And with the booster repainted and a pair of new reservoir caps, it is better than it was :)

 

Another little detail I wanted to take care of, was the finish on the front sway bar, which had a little surface rust and overspray on it. I'd replaced the droplink bushes years ago, but the D-bush is still original. And for some unknown reason, years ago I decided to paint the D-bush brackets silver.

 

So the swaybar goes away to get sandblasted and powdercoated, and there's a new set of bushes ready to go.

 

With the radius rods and tie-rods replaced recently, the front end is looking pretty sweet. I think there's just the steering box and idler to rebuild, and then it'll be all-new.

 

The great thing about visiting a proper resto shop with plenty of stock, is that you pick up little things like this. The proper fasteners for the cowl panel.

 

So rather than random self tappers, I re-tapped the holes and fitted up the proper bolts.

 

Much better!

 

The big ticket items I was hoping to score in Japan, were a set of exterior door handles, but they seem to be at the point where all the NOS ones are gone, and the repro ones are only just starting to be available. Rubber-Soul didn't have any, and the other thing I wanted, which were the C-pillar vents, were available, but were at unobtanium prices, so I think I'll wait until those are available as a repro.

 

The other thing that I needed to sort out...was a pinhole leak in the radiator. It was coming from where the fan switch boss was brazed onto the top tank, so out came the radiator and I dropped it off at Alexandria Radiator Services to get sorted, and to get it cleaned out and serviced too.

 

At first I thought that a service was a bit of overkill, but then the guys reminded me that they built that rad for me 6yrs ago. In my mind, it's still new! But it came back all nice and fresh, and now with an extra thick layer of solder around the fan switch boss.

 

I'd picked up a repro sticker in Japan, so that went on...

 

And it goes back in easy as pie. This is a stark contrast to the half-day I am setting aside to swap the radiator in the FD...this rad goes back in in 10mins.

 

The last job...is to fit the new gearbox mount. I'd renewed the engine mounts quite some months ago, but as far as I knew, the gearbox mount is still original.

 

...the old mount unbolts easily enough.

 

And then I support the gearbox with a jack, then unbolt and lower the crossmember.

 

New vs old...the old one looks to be in good shape. A few of the Hako owners in the US had reported that their mounts had split, but this looks aged and hard, but not in such bad shape.

 

And in it goes!

 

Quite a flurry of activity this week...stay tuned for the blog post on the visit to Rubber-Soul :D

[Babalouie]

Got a nice treat today! Adrian Hodgson, a journalist friend of mine, asked if I'd like the Hako to get a feature, and needless to say, I said yes.

 

So a few months ago, I rocked up to the Express Magazines studio, and Chris Sorgsepp reeled off these gorgeous pics. Jason Round did a great job on the words, too.

 

Hako's been in a few mags over the years but not a cover before. And it's also the subject of the centrefold poster too :)

 

For Ratsun friends in Australia, this issue is on sale now...go out and buy ten :)

[q-tip]

How did I just find this thread?...nice ride man, and good work!

[bonvo]

Many thanks to my friend Mark at HoonTV for making a pretty spiffy vid of the Hako

 

i was just poking around youtube and stumbled across this video was thinking oh thats a nice hako then it did the engine bay shot at 5:42 and i went "wait....I KNOW THAT CAR!!!" lol 

[Babalouie]

An Interesting Development.

 

http://japanesenostalgiccar.com/2014/08/16/news-kpgc10-nissan-skyline-gt-r-sells-for-242000/

[yellowdatsun]

The engine holder beams are the cats pajamas. I have one, and it makes certain tasks sooo much easier. Something that would normally require you to pull the engine, or at least hoist it up with a engine hoist, can now be done with the engine in place without disconnecting anything. It's a huge time and lifesaver.

[SlimerZ]

Hello,

 

  I just recently purchesd a 71 skyline gtx here in the states.  I'm wondering if you could get me in touch with your contact in Japan so that I could get some pieces from rubber soul as well as another website.

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

[Babalouie]

Sorry for taking so long to reply, Mike but I use www.jessestreeter.com As long as you can send him links and screenshots of what you need from Rubber-Soul, he can order them for you, ship them to you and you can paypal him.

 

Since forever, the carbs have always had wet bottoms. They were rebuilt in 2008 and had new gasket kits, but it was never annoying enough to make me want to do something about it.

 

So tonight I figured I'd see if I could improve things. I've got some new gaskets and I'm swapping over from rubber softmounts to Bakelite spacers.

 

The Hako has softmounts, which are rubber O-rings instead of regular gaskets between the carbs and the manifold.

 

You can see the metal plates that the rubber rings live in, and the other part of the equation are these rubber washers and cups instead of regular retaining nuts. These allow the carsb to move around a bit on the rubber rings, and the idea is to isolate the cabrs from the engine vibrations, and conventional thinking is that without them, the fuel will be shaking around so much inside the Webers, that they won't work very well. But I've never seen anyone use softmounts in Japan, where they prefer Bakelite spacers instead. And there are plenty of oem cars, like the E49 Chargers, which just had the Webers bolted to the manifold with a paper gasket only.

 

And the annoying thing is that everytime I remove the carbs, I always find that a few of the rubber washers have split, so quite possibly they are contributing to some leaks between the carbs and manifold.

 

Off come the carbs, and yes, they all have wet bottoms. I'll be replacing the gaskets for that square plate in the middle.

 

Remove the plate, and you can see the underside of the jets.

 

And rather than a paper gasket, the square plate takes a rubber gasket.

 

While everything's off, it seemed a good time to give the heat tray a bit of a spruce up...

 

And on go the jdm-spec Bakelite spacers, which need two sets of gaskets. I have to say, that when I was refitting the carbs, the Bakelite spacers are much easier to work with. The softmounts require the retaining nuts to squish the rubber washers an exact amount, and this was hard to judge with the retaining nuts that are under the carbs (and the heat tray makes it a real fiddle to access the nuts). So it's nice to just be able to do up the nuts until they're properly tight instead.

 

But while I was refitting the carbs, I figured I'd have some fun with a new toy I'd bought recently, a pair of lockwire pliers.

 

First, I cut down some ring-terminals and drill a little hole in them. This will form the base for the lockwire to anchor to the carb.

 

And this is how it works. I cut off some lockwire, and loop it around the ring terminal. I drill a tiny hole in one of the ears of the jet cover butterfly nut, then I clamp the lockwire pliers, at the spot where I want the twists to finish (at the butterfly nut).

 

And then you pull this silver knob on the pliers, and as it comes out, the pliers twist the lockwire neatly.

 

Then I loop one end of the wire through the butterlynut, turn it 180 degrees, and clamp the lockwire pliers on again.

 

Give it a good twist, and cut off the excess.

 

Now, in the interests of full-disclosure...in 8yrs of owning the Hako, the butterfly nuts have never, ever come loose. So this is pure rice. But it looks great :)

 

Well, let's see how we go...hopefully the heat tray stays spotless. And it'll be interesting to see if it drives any differently with the Bakelite spacers instead of softmounts.

[Just Joel]

Details! Very nice :)

[Babalouie]

So. It turns out that I'm an idiot :)

 

After the little refresh on the carbs, I buttoned it all back up....aaaaand she wouldn't start. It didn't take long to notice that the coil lead was hanging off, so I figured that I must have snagged it with a spanner as I was refitting the carbs, and I reached down into the engine bay to plug it back in again. But then I noticed...hang on...where's the little metal nib on the end of the coil?

 

It had broken clean off, and was jammed up in the coil lead. But judging from the corrosion on the broken terminal...it's been like this for quite a long time. I must have whacked the end of the coil as I was twirling a spanner (probably refitting the carbs) years ago, and blithely refitted the coil lead without noticing that I'd broken off the end.

 

Now those of you playing at home, are probably wondering how it runs at all, if the coil lead has nothing to connect to. But the reality is that 45,000 volts is a hell of a lot, and is enough to make the spark jump across a gap from the broken terminal to the broken stub inside the coil lead. The Hako runs very well, so I presume the MSD6A might have been masking the effects of this (it stores energy between zaps to deliver an even bigger zap). But just the same, it will all work better if the coil was connected to something, and rather than be annoyed, I was quite excited by this discovery. An easy fix, and free horsepower (the best kind!)

 

I give Rocket Industries a call, and a few hours later a new MSD Blaster3 coil arrives at my office.

 

I was worried that the original coil lead might have been fried from all the arcing inside, but the new coil comes with its own coil lead fittings, so I'm going to modify a regular lead to fit the Blaster3, which has a male fitting at the coil terminal, rather than the more common female type.

 

I prise off the original metal fitting from one end of the new lead, and remove the boot. Then I crimp on the MSD metal fitting with some pliers, and slide on the supplied grey rubber boot.

 

All done.

 

Well, she hasn't started so enthusiastically from cold like that before...

 

And to drive, it's cleaner and sharper...there's more at the bottom, the middle and the top end too. Hako hasn't felt this frisky in years. Free power (well...$77 for a new coil)...the best kind :)

 

Oh, and the new gaskets on the carbs are doing the trick, too. The heat tray has never, ever been that clean and dry after a long drive before.

[nad015]

awsome little details.

consider the locking wire idea for the mickey mouse hats stolen :thumbup:

 

last time i drove my car i heard something fall out of the engine bay, i looked in the rear view mirror to see something small tumbing into the gutter.

i pulled over opened the bonnet and noticed a mickey mouse hat was gone.

half an hour looking and i found it again.

[Babalouie]

A couple of months ago, I replaced the 7yr old Blaster3 coil (which I accidentally broke) with a shiny new one.

 

...which broke.

 

Actually this time it wasn't my fault.  One day I noticed that the coil had a puddle of oil under it, and upon closer inspection, it seemed that it sprang a leak.  The coil canister is actually filled with a light oil, which presumably is a non-conductive medium that allows the guts of the coil to transfer heat to the outside of the canister...without also transferring all the current and killing everyone.  It was just one of those things, and Rocket Industries were quick to offer a replacement under warranty.  But after getting to chat with the guys, they started to recommend the #8252 coil instead of another Blaster3.  The #8252 is actually designed for use with the MSD6A capacitive discharge box, is reputedly unbreakable, doesn't use oil to cool it, and is almost three times the zap.  MSD actually say that it's only for use with MSD6A units and can't be used with a regular ignition.

 

And she's a big sucker, compared to a regular coil.

 

 

Now, the logical place to put it, is this little corner of the engine bay, which is where the old coil lived, and is about to get a bit busier.

 

First I relocate a relay out of the way, to make room in the only possible spot for the #8252 to live.

 

The #8252 is mounted on anti-vibration rubber feet, which I've had to space out here and there with a washer or two to compensate for the slightly curved mounting surface.

 

And since it's insulated from the body by those rubber feet, it needs to have a separate ground wire.

 

MSD provide a nifty waterproof plug, and since it's all in the family the wiring is colour coded to what comes out of the MSD6A.

 

And there it is.  Pretty easy install, just the four rubber feet to drill and mount, and three wires (positive and negative wires going to the 6A, and that separate ground wire).

 

Haven't driven it yet, but she sure seems to start easy!  This is from stone cold, with no throttle.