joshuaho96

There's a bunch of smaller shops that don't quite attract Singer money but are still hiring from that same pool of labor. Those are the body shops that you go to when you can't afford a Singer, but your old Porsche needs some serious bodywork. You can't exactly take those cars to the usual insurance body shops. When I say restomod, I mean they'll do something other than 100% OEM/OEM-equivalent aftermarket parts R&R. In the Porsche world this would be stuff like taking a 50k 964, doing a bunch of deferred maintenance/unwinding the nightmares the previous owners did to the car because a lot of people that own these cars tended to be penny wise, pound foolish types, then maybe some relatively simple off the shelf modifications to things like suspension, transmission, engine, headlights, etc. and you've spent 130k USD. When even the worst houses in the poor neighborhoods are worth 1M USD and the nice houses in wealthy neighborhoods are worth 3-10M USD suddenly 130k spent on a 50k car seems cheap.

If you talk to restoration/restomod specialists in the coastal US they will turn their noses up at 150k USD jobs. Things are mildly insane here these days.

My advice is if you need a big build done do it in Japan. The yen rate is so favorable and there are shops that can be genuinely trusted and not micromanaged/carefully monitored every step of the way. Garage Yoshida is obviously my preferred option but they're so busy these days and all interaction with new customers has to be mediated through BBL/Toprank now.

Yep, in my case as soon as I started hearing weird noises I backed off the tension until it sounded normal again. Delicate balance between enough tension to avoid that cold start slip and too much damaging things.

Everything I found online said never use it because it'll dramatically reduce belt lifespan. No, but I have seen excessive v-belt tension cause the audible bearing noise from excessive radial load in things like alternators. So don't overdo it. Ideally you set it to manufacturer spec using a proper belt tension guage. I tried the "clicker" type gauges but those cheap things are trash. They read way too low even when you're careful.

This is kind of where I've ended up for the most part. It's easier for me, easier for shops that don't have to deal with my weird criteria/picky standards, etc.

Once the belt slips it can very easily cause a cascade that encourages more belt slip. Check the pulleys carefully and see if the grooves have cupped. If it has it's time to replace the pulleys. If the rubber has glazed you also need to replace it. Shouldn't be shiny. From the factory there's a lot of exposed fibers(?) on a v-belt that will go away as it's broken in but some should still remain visible without sticking out significantly like a new belt. I went through this on my dad's Camry recently. It would keep slipping even after setting the tension higher, only solution was a new belt.

I know mentally you're set on the ATS clutch but honestly I'm a big fan of the Nismo Super Coppermix Twin. It's much cheaper and in some ways I think it's a better design for a street/circuit car.

Nominally yes but I’m not really at that stage yet. Outsourcing to Japan is also a relatively good deal at the moment because their currency has devalued much more against the USD. You would assume this but a lot has changed from the pandemic. Mechanics are in short supply and demand for fixing old cars has gone up from the cost of new cars. 250-300 USD/hr is not an unusual shop labor rate in California and you’re paying that regardless of whether the guy is competent or not. Coworkers have been quoted 3000 USD for a water pump and thermostat at a dealer on an N54. Oil changes went from ~75 USD to 150 on fairly normal cars like Civics. The cost of the oil and filter hasn’t even kept up with inflation.

I mean the other day I had to walk someone through diagnosing why their timing belt was walking off the cam gears. At least one of the issues was a bent tensioner stud. Local mechanics have found runout on the CAS mechanism causing weird failures. I'm also no saint here I've documented some of the things I've had to learn the hard way. Something I discovered recently is that my CA emissions catalytic converters weren't even welded correctly to align the downpipe to the main cat and they tossed the support bracket that goes from the transfer case to the downpipe to support everything there. I spend a lot of time chasing down these decidedly unsexy problems and the net effect is it feels like I never actually get to the original objective (flex fuel, VCAM, oil control, cooling, etc).

I think this is just a product of how the US market works for this stuff. Shops are expensive and there's no real way of knowing what kind of results you're going to get, people don't really have the institutional knowledge. I have heard too much at this point to really put faith in anybody "full service" except maybe DSport and they aren't really a full service kind of shop. If you go to the right place I have no doubt they'll get it right for you. Some locals have set it up right but the cost really is nuts and even now they're still fighting issues. And you know I'm a crazy person who thinks things like twin scroll, relatively short low-mount cast headers, PCV recirc to intake, recirculating BOV, right-sized for ~400 whp, MAF load, validating all of that to a standard comparable to OEM test programs, etc are relevant. For what it's worth, multiple local owners at this point have been stuck in a perpetual cycle of blowing a motor -> getting someone to rebuild it -> some missed detail causes the bearings to wipe and spin just outside of break-in mileage or drop valves or some other catastrophe -> cycle repeats. I usually only find out about this because I'm perpetually helping random friends with diagnosing car troubles, Skyline or otherwise. The single turbo stuff if I'm honest is mostly secondary, it just doesn't seem to achieve the numbers in the ~2000-3000 rpm region that I would expect given the results I've seen here or in Motive's videos. I don't really know what we're missing here in the US to be causing this. Lots of people like to emphasize the necessity of finishing the project first and foremost, but I'm not made of money and I can't afford to be trashing a 15k+ USD engine build with any regularity. Or spending my relatively limited garage time these days unable to triangulate problems because too much was changed all at once. Also, even if it isn't a catastrophic failure I would consider spending the cost of single turbo conversion with nothing to show for it to be pretty bad.

Among other things yes. Making sure to either use an oil pressure regulator or the right restrictor size for your oil pump/range of oil viscosities you intend to run, making sure you plumb the lines correctly, turbo should be placed such that it siphons properly even when the water pump isn't turning so you don't boil coolant in the turbo after shutdown, oil return should be low resistance and also preferably picking the one that is most likely to return to the pickup as opposed to some other irrelevant part of the pan. It's far from impossible to figure this out but I have seen people really, really struggle and if that's the case it's easier to just take the path of least resistance. To me, bolt-on twin turbos are a fixed cost whereas single turbo is almost unbounded.

Turbos don't require pulling the motor apart so that's "easier". I would recommend the Nismo R3 turbos instead if you want to do stock twin turbo. It doesn't make as much power as the 2530s but it's only like ~50 whp off the mark and should have better response (ball bearing CHRA, slightly smaller turbo). A local that went with a Garrett G30 and 6boost manifold recently nearly burned his car to the ground after the hood insulator started melting and and burning so if you go single turbo I recommend doing a lot of research and validation work to make sure you don't do the same.

That's what the people want, unfortunately. We can argue about whether this is cultural or marketing but in the US people like big SUVs because they want the capability all in one vehicle.

There's absolutely no way the turbine is nylon when EGTs peak somewhere in the region of 800-900C. The compressor can be nylon.

I mean yes, if you're starting from scratch on an unknown engine yes you don't need to be doing all kinds of math in the background but if you're doing relatively minor changes like AFM + injectors + boost up with some aftermarket turbos it takes quite a bit of math if you want to do something like maintain OEM fuel + timing tables but compressed and then a bit more load scale up top. I think I've spent too much time working on big engineering nightmares though so I'm a big fan of trying to constrain the scope of whatever work I'm doing as much as possible and trying to get it right before moving on. For example, a local owner just did the usual E85 + single turbo conversion to his R32 GTR and nearly burned his car to the ground doing some spirited driving up the local mountains. Turbine is unshielded and too close to the hood insulation. It's tough to balance "just get the project done" and "seemingly small details can cause massive setbacks I'm not willing to deal with".

Nistune needs something like an entire excel spreadsheet in which you build an abstraction layer that converts everything from real units you can actually measure into all of the various tables. The number of unexpected dependencies hiding in how the Nissan ECUs do math is a pretty impressive optimization trick for 8-bit MCUs but good god is it awful to actually work with in practice.

Kind of surprising, with cars this old I've seen a lot of them suffer from high idle due to internal vacuum leak. Fuel trims look fine but the cold start valve just wore out from all the heat cycles and won't close up all the way. Rather notorious issue in some models of the Toyota 4Runner:

IACV has an air bleed plug in this part of the engine manual. I'm guessing if it isn't bled it will cause weird idle behavior as the cold start valve won't get hot enough to close properly at the usual rate.

If you fully flushed and filled it's probably good for 5 years. I would not push it any further than that. Generally speaking coolant is more by time than by mileage. Rust wants to happen whether you're driving it 50,000 km or 80,000 km.

Modern transmissions like the 8HP lock up as low as ~12 km/h. And they will stay locked even with full throttle in gear. Far, far cry from the days of 3/4/5 speed automatics when they only locked up on overdrive gears and even then only if you didn't put too much torque through it. Manual transmissions are pointless unless you personally enjoy shifting gears.

Now that you mention it I can see those too. More subtle. The lighting and low resolution makes it hard to assess super well what's going on but what is visible is bad enough to pull the motor.

To me that looks like a rust ring in the bore. An engine that has sat for too long in humid conditions without fogging oil in the bores?

Stock ECU has compensation, you won't damage the engine. Personally I recommend getting an acceptable catalytic converter, it doesn't need to be OEM and super expensive but a cheap universal one to keep it from being super obnoxious to be around. Decatted cars smell pretty awful.

It is correct: https://www.amayama.com/en/genuine-catalogs/epc/nissan-japan/skyline/er34/6617-rb25det/engine/220 Looks like you can get one for 50 USD each from the UAE which is a pretty good price IMO.