Kinks

on my R34 it was controlled off the DVD player.. ie there is no headlight signal that goes to the nav screen itself, it goes to whatever is controlling the nav screen. Not sure if stageas are same or different entertainment pack. It could be the same wire that provides 12V for the backlit buttons in the centre console. In which case, you won't get any backlights if you cut the wire.

Trucks have a lot of stored energy. That's why you should always give trucks and semis plenty of room. Even when you're not driving, apparently.

10W60 is way too thick. I'd only use that in a lawnmower with flogged out rings. If your oil is getting too hot, you need an oil cooler. Thick oil flows slower so it gives less cooling to internal components and piston crowns.

On your rear parcel shelf there is a plastic clip that covers the internal part of the washer jet and motor shaft. Pull the plastic piece towards you firmly and it will come out. Then see what's missing/broken/leaking.

Are you sure a truck wasn't driving past you?

If you leave the valley cover off you can change plugs without removing the crossover pipe. it's a bit more fiddly and you need a wobbly socket (uni joint) but it can be done. actually on my R33 I sliced the rear part off so the valley cover was completely flat (rather than bending down at the back of the motor). then you can get it in and out without touching the crossover pipe as well. but really it should only take a couple of minutes to pull the crossover pipe. front facing plenums have issues with uneven flow distribution - unless you buy an expensive one that has been flowbenched and proves even air distribution to each cylinder. that's a lot of money to spend to avoid a small inconvenience, but each to their own.

Temp gauge on R33 sits halfway until about 103C. Then it starts rising, I reckon it would show full scale by 110C. operating temp should be 80C (it's an idiot gauge). So if your temp gauge moves past halfway you are already WAY too hot. you did the right thing by pulling over and letting it cool down. 20 bucks says your radiator is blocked or your water pump is f**ked. outside chance of viscous fan failing. skylines don't overheat unless there is something very basic wrong. high idle will not make it overheat. high idle -> faster fan -> more cooling -> no problem. unless something else is already wrong.

I feel the same way about the tyre thread. Particularly since I've had several sets of tyres that felt great when new (and hence get good reviews) but when half worn felt like you were wrestling an angry and well-lubricated pig. Truly good tyres maintain their grip level right to the canvas (but obviously not the water-clearing ability).

Nothing to do with overboost I was nowhere near positive manifold pressure. Has nothing to do with fun police or poo poo or any other vague suggestions like that. The sensor simply expects to see pre-TB MAP to do transient fuel estimates and the ECU doesn't cope when you show it a vacuum reading. Likewise if you just left it sensing atmospheric pressure it would still be a pile of shit on transient throttle as well (and leaving it atmospheric would defeat the fun police...) The very same MAP sensor is now running my Adaptronic just dandy. Sensor doesn't care. Just the ECU is expecting pre-TB MAP.

It does, but the factory MAP sensor is plumbed in pre-TB (and hence pre-manifold). They seem to use some sort of pre-TB-MAP+TPS to calculate transient fuel requirements. I moved my factory MAP sensor post-TB (now measuring manifold pressure) and the car totally died every time I changed the throttle position. After about 2 seconds it magically came back to normal. So I can say the stock ECU uses AFM for steady state airflow metering and pre-TB-MAP+TPS for transients. Reason why I moved the MAP sensor was fitting an Adaptronic. Had to swap the stock ECU back in temporarily and it didn't like it! (Probably should have just unplugged the MAP sensor). No idea why they fitted it pre-TB. You'd think post-TB would make more sense. Oh well.

Stao's results are interesting, for some reason the R34 GTT seems very sensitive to any sort of restriction. I know with the standard SMIC, mine was horrible. It doesn't quite make sense why the motor is so sensitive but it seems to be an R34 thing. Plenty of people seem to have made around 300kW on 68/78mm coolers on the R33.. check dyno results and hypergear threads. Whether their results would have another 20kW with a bigger cooler, who knows.

Fascinating stuff, Stao. Love the detail you're going to, it is a puzzle. Would be nice to see intake temps logged as well, although the PWR straight fins / less resistance if anything I would expect to see higher intake temps. Possibly on the NEO, flow matters more than temp. Maybe this is to do with the camshaft and how efficiently the cylinders fill/scavenge. The Neo certainly seems like it loves to breathe, I noticed a "seat of the pants" improvement even from having a straight through muffler but I couldn't tolerate the noise so had a triflow put in.. but I'm guessing the JJR exhaust is some straight-through canon type thing (ugh).

^^ Yep. Slowing down that much (even close to the pit wall) is dangerous. Have seen F1 drivers do it occasionally when they've won the WDC.. but I don't buy the "suspension damage" bit at all. He is bullshitting. It's a straight bit of track, coast down until the next corner and THEN slow down or go off track and park it. He certainly had suspension damage after the accident though A 2 race suspension isn't enough. He is utterly unapologetic and doesn't seem to understand that what he did was dangerous.

yeah the standard gauge is kg/cm^2 which is almost identical to bar (there is a 2% difference which can be safely ignored). the standard gauges are known to be quite inaccurate. from "not bad" to "substantially wrong" depending on your luck my R33 used to idle at 2 bar but when the oil was close to changing would sometimes drop to 1 bar (or less) at idle and only 2 bar while driving (~3000RPM). certain brands of oil showed this characteristic more, some less. I suspect the gauge was overly sensitive around the lower end of the scale TBH never had a problem with the motor though, I drove it like that for over 100,000km so I don't think you need to panic about engine pulls just yet. Get an aftermarket gauge on it just for peace of mind though. ALL oils lose pressure when they warm up - they get less viscous which means less resistance to flow. Synthetic oils are naturally better at maintaining viscocity when hot, that (and their superior lubricating ability) is why we all recommend them.

Yikes. Not on my car thanks. Thread pitch and included angle are both different! http://pipeandhose.com/?q=node%2F2 The "force to screw it in" that 89CAL mentions is because the threads are binding. It's close enough to "work" - whatever that means.. but you will have a large amount of force on the 2 threads that are binding and the other threads are sitting there doing nothing. It won't be kind to either thread either. Spot the engineer huh Hanbear the 300ZX should have a water/oil heat exchanger.. primarily this heats the oil quickly to operating temp ~85C but it also means the oil shouldn't get too much hotter than that unless you're on a racetrack. 20W50 is extremely thick oil, are you using mineral or full synthetic? I only use full synthetic 5W40. You need to state oil pressure as a function of RPM as well. For example my car gets about 2 bar (30psi) at idle and then 3-4 bar at 3000RPM once fully warmed up (driving for at least 30 minutes). My last car showed less. The standard gauges CAN be unreliable so if you suspect issues it's best to use a good quality aftermarket gauge.

No, go to a proper shop.

Wow. Double AIDS. That sounds pretty serious. Poor R34

The "unplug TPS to lock 15 degrees timing" trick only works on stock ECUs. If you're running an aftermarket ECU it should have a way to lock the timing through the tuning software. So if you're not running stock ECU then unplugging the TPS did nothing and your timing will be walking all over the place trying to maintain the desired idle speed.

stock ECU?

I'm scratching my head a bit with my R34 as well. With 3" exhaust and standard SMIC it was well down on power, VCT seemed to make no difference between 4000 and 6000RPM, and it just wouldn't take any timing. Since then changed my coil packs to splitfires and put a Blitz return flow in and I have cranked in 6 degrees across the board without any pinging issues, and the car now pulls WAY better. Boost is untouched on 10psi (logging MAP afterwards indicates almost no change). Boost line is off the compressor elbow. So if the previous SMIC was a restriction it should have dropped pressure across it (and the FMIC should show more at the manifold). But that's not happening. Maybe it's air temperature related? R34s get pingy once the intake temps go up? Or maybe my previous coil packs were causing pinging (sounds odd I know.. but I DID have 2 intermittent coils)

The stagea base map sounds unusual. I would have thought you could load in an R33 base map.. unless there's something different about the Stagea motor. My R34 GTT adaptronic plugin fired up first time and idled OK. Needed some tweaks to the closed loop idle parameters to stop it from hunting. But there was nothing stopping me from driving it straight away. Mixtures were a little bit off, this will ALWAYS happen in a MAP-based ECU because FMIC, exhaust, turbo etc affect VE substantially. But you won't kill a motor running lean at vacuum. Besides which, turn on closed loop using the factory EGO sensor and it'll auto correct the mixtures at cruise. Do that, drive to tuner, sort it out. I had a wideband and wanted to tinker. The base map was perfectly acceptable starting point for me though. I self-taught over a period of months. I deliberately took it slowly to make sure I understood what I was doing. It didn't take me long to match the factory driveability. Of course I then took it to a tuner and in a couple of hours it was running WAY better. That's expertise for you. Taking you 6 months isn't the ECU's fault in any way, it's just that you're learning as you go. Same as me, I think it was about 6 months before I went to a tuner as well. Mark @ MRC Castle Hill (if you're in Sydney). He was great, explained everything he was doing and why he was doing it. That's the kind of guy who knows exactly what he's doing, and isn't afraid to share it because he has been doing it for 20-30 years and is much faster than you. Besides which, he has all the equipment (dyno etc). When you see tuners who act like it's some secret special sauce, run away. Unless you're tuning serious power, it's not rocket science. If there's one minor criticism about the Adaptronic it's that the ECU manual hasn't kept pace with the software. I am a tweaker and fiddler, I want to know what EVERY checkbox and option does. There are several that aren't documented but searching the adaptronic forums usually turned up the info I needed. The ECU manual has the basics about how to set up the idle control and PID gains and so on, so it's good enough to get you started.

Last year I watched every race (usually recorded). I tried to get through Monday without finding out who won. This year I don't even bother unless the news report (or someone who did watch it) says it was a good race. It's more than just Mercedes being dominant, the racing is boring and processional.

still for sale

bellmouth FTW

Top mount > *