scathing

Just the effect on your ABS and TCS/VDC (whatever you've got). I'd say so. The car understeers more with the staggered setup, which is "safe". I went to using the same sized tyres all round on my Z33. I noticed I picked up a bit more front end grip, but the tail didn't get any looser as a result. I found the front more eager to turn in, and I could pick up the throttle just as aggressively as ever on the way out of the corner without having to add a dab of oppo. VDC/TCS is the only thing heavily affected, in my experience. My Z33 has TCS. When I ran the same sized tyres all round I found the TCS kicking in when I throttled hard (3rd gear rolling when stock in the dry, so no chance of actual wheelspin) and the problem was even worse when trying to accelerate out of a corner. Even mild throttle openings would trigger the TCS. My ABS worked fine, however. I've heard similar complaints from VDC-equipped Z owners who've done the same thing.

I thought you had 30 days to clear a canary, where you could still drive the car around? You must have failed the attitude test hard if they red stickered your car for missing a gearshift pattern.

That sentence, on a Skyline forum, is 24 carat gold.

From the web site showing the 2009 available size chart: 19x9.5 +23 19x10.5 +18 Roll the rear guards to be on the safe side. There's a little camber adjustment in the rear, which should help make the wheel fit. You should be able to run a small spacer on the front too, if you're aiming for a wide stance. 19x9.5 +14 on the front will probably be pushing it unless you run aftermarket camber arms.

You need to evaluate totals, not just a small fraction. If you want to talk about size and weight, you also need to consider the far larger fuel tank a rotary requires. Inside a car, the fuel inside tank is also a mass that changes as the vehicle runs, which means the car's weight distribution changes as you drive. In a performance car, that's a bad thing. You could locate the fuel tank close to the centre of gravity to reduce this effect, but with the tank in a rotary needing to be bigger for a given range that's more difficult. Also, torque and total area under the power curve are also things to consider when you're talking about performance. Not just power vs weight or size. The more chambers you put in, the greater the load on the eccentric shaft. Like piston engines, you can only go so far inline before you break it. Hence why you can't string a dozen chambers together. Overladen trucks are heavy and scary. It doesn't make them good. Mazda's should have an all alloy housing and direct injection but I suspect they'll still be playing catch-up in practically every respect compared to piston engines.

I've used both in my Z33. It was a stopgap solution when the stock head unit's CD player died, before I got a new deck. The audio quality is shit (although that shouldn't bother you if you're still using the supplied iPod headphones) in either option. Through the tape deck you get massive amounts of hiss. Output via the FM adapter sounds muted, and since the signal power is so weak any little thing interferes with the signal. Also, fiddling around changing the tracks will probably get you accused of using a mobile phone while driving if you're spotted, and the cops will probably book you despite any protestations.

But we've already established that customers are no-good cheats. And, as a technical person, I've learnt that the golden rule is that if you ever give customers an option they'll always choose the wrong one. The answer seems quite clear. We seem to be a bit chicken-and-egg there. However, the way I see it, if shops only stocked Aussie made stuff then they'd only be able to buy Aussie-made stuff. Actually, if we just shut our borders to all imports (parallel or authorised distribution) then people would have to buy Australian. Which means our local economy would be even stronger since there's no external source sapping our currency. f**k people's freedom of choice and the market forces of global competition, we know what's better for them in the long term and we need to save them from themselves. I suspect that this same motivation is what drives customers to privately import goods from overseas.

Also, with the housings being cast iron, they're also not particularly light by modern standards. My understanding is that due to the inefficient shape of the combustion chamber and its larger internal area, a lot more energy is absorbed by the engine as heat rather than generating pressure to spin the moving parts around (compared to a piston engine). Hence why the fuel efficiency isn't as good, it needs such a "serious" radiator, and why Mazda haven't been able to use an alloy housing. A drove a friend's stockish FD and I absolutely adored the way it does everything, and I still think its the best looking Japanese car made in the modern era, but I don't think I could live with that engine. That engine has got just over 100,000km on the clock and is starting to make horrible noises. Well, horrible-er (I don't like the rotary brap either). SK, do you know why they don't work too well in a FWD configuration? I'd have thought such a short block size would lend itself well to a transverse mounting position. They could have gone the Audi route and mounted the engine longtitudinally in front of the struts or, given its compact dimensions, mounted it "backwards" (longtitudinally with the transaxle in front of the engine).

I found my Popcharger only made my Z33 louder past like 3000RPM. Around town, you shouldn't even notice it. Up in the rev range it gives the engine one hell of a nice note. I got compliments from everyone I drove past at WOT.

The R35 is 1800kg. The Evo X is around 1500kg.

Surely since all retailers are such upstanding folk who are the only ones with the long-term vision to look after the local economy (and the entire country as a result), that they would all band together and support said economy by all only stocking locally made goods. I figured that, for the good of the nation, none of you would stoop to selling imported goods and destroying a sector of the Australian economy because you want to maximise the currency in your coffers. I thought that it's only scum-sucking customers, out to save a quick buck at the expense of the economy and the Aussie battlers out there, that have the selfishness to think only about keeping as much money to themselves at the long-term expense of everyone else.

GoT Rice?

I'm pretty sure my dyno runs (with a cat-back and Popcharger) pre-ECU and post-ECU netted me around 10rwkW on the Z33. Note that was with the stock 6600RPM cutout, since I use a Unichip and hadn't reflashed my ECU yet. I might have found a bit more if I could have revved the engine up to 7000RPM back then since the power curve didn't really fall away that much at the end of the graph.

The solution is right there. Don't stock the cheap, overseas, stuff at all if they care so much about the local economy. Don't give customers a choice, and if they want/need something they'll buy what's available. My point was that retailers make the cheapo imported stuff available, since they can either pump more volume or pad more margin on the cheaper goods. If they honestly, deep-down, gave that much of a shit about the local economy over their own profit they wouldn't import out of principle. But, as Shiraz200SX so eloquently put it, businesses are there to run a business. Friends, principles, etc are only applicable as marketing tools to convince people to buy stuff from them.

It's not unhealthy for the car from a mechanical perspective. It's just that your TCS/VDC will behave strangely, which is only really unhealthy for the car if you need those electronics to keep your vehicle out of other objects.

How expensive do you want to go? If you want to go cheap, Jaycar sells sound deadening mats. In the upper end of the price scale, Dynamat is the ICE industry standard and available from most decent retailers/installers.

Wouldn't that also apply to the manufacturing industry? Shouldn't all those bleeding heart retailers who are "doing it for the local economy" also buy Australian-made goods, instead of bringing in goods from overseas? It sounds a bit hypocritical to have a whinge that you (not you specifically mad082, but "you" as in a general reference to retailers claiming that "buying from overseas" is bad for our economy) can't compete on price due to overheads compared to overseas retailers, when you're basically sinking the local manufacturing industry because you're bringing in cheaper parts en masse in from another country. All that's happening, thanks to the availability of cheap global communications, is that customers are doing to entities further up the consumer chain what retailers have been doing for years. A quarry is not the best place to build a greenhouse.

I just watched the video. Wow. That is disgustingly bad design. How can Nissan make a car that's that hard to service? Especially considering the Z33's airbox is nothing like that? In the Z33 there's no need to remove the airbox from the car. I can't find any photos of the stock Z33 airbox to illustrate, but here's an exploded part diagram: Part (2) (the holder) keeps the filter in place, and has 2 clips on the top. You leave the airbox in the car, undo the clips, grab the handle between the two clips, and pull the holder out of the box. For people looking at retaining stock airboxes in their V35 and retaining a drop-in panel filter, I'd look and see if Z33 ones fit. It'll make the job of servicing it easier, if nothiing else.

Most people would couple up getting bigger wheels by going to a smaller profile tyre.

I've got a pod filter on the car now. To pull out the stock panel filter element was a case of undoing those 2 lips, and yanking the holder out.

Seriously? On a 350Z you just unclip the holder and pull the panel filter out with it. Having to pull the entire airbox out is some seriously bad design. Just having a look at this pic: Is the Infiniti setup the same as the Nissan one? Aren't those 2 clips on the middle of the airbox (between the "Power Duct" and the lowest arrow) all you need to pull open to replace a panel filter? I'll have to watch the vid later - no access to YouTube from here.

Doing the headers is very labour intensive, and to be honest I'm not sure the bang-for-buck is there.

With that philosophy, how can you get so upset at the flipside of the same coin? If we're to "bear in mind" that some people who run businesses want to charge a fat margin why don't you "bear in mind" that some customers will buy the product they want at the lowest possible price? They want to reduce their expenditure, not make friends. That's the customer's choice. Their monetary saving is at the expense of post-sales support. Caveat emptor. That's specious. A lot of customers import a product directly at a cheap price because that's all they can afford, and its the best item available in their budget. As a hypothetical example, lets say I was to privately import a Rolls Royce Phantom for $10,000 on the road. You'd be drawing a long bow to say that my grey importation took money away from Rolls Royce Australia. I bought the $10K Phantom because its the best car I could afford - had that option not been available I wouldn't have magically discovered the $1 million required to order one from the local retailer. I would have bought some other $10,000 car instead. Same with parts. Lets I wanted a brand new intercooler. If I couldn't afford a Australian delivered RRP JDM one and couldn't find a warrantyless one from Nengun, I would have bought a much-cheaper Hybrid instead. For those people who could afford a RRP JDM intercooler but decided to buy one privately, chances are they spent the difference on some other part they wanted. Since both parts were "needed" for their goals, they still couldn't afford paying that much for a single part. If I remember correctly, it's also the customer's responsibility to ensure all duties and taxes are paid (and the ATO/Customs can chase me for up to 7 years after the purchase to obtain it). I'm still on the hook for the money, but if the organisation fails to chase after it then that's their choice. Just like the ATO doesn't go out of their way chasing me with my tax refund cheque in hand when I don't submit a request (i.e. a tax return form) after being overtaxed in my PAYE, I don't see why I should bend over backwards giving the government their money if they don't ask me for it when my goods pass through Customs. Any duties/taxes levied also goes straight to the government, so that money not paid by the privately importing customer has nothing to do with the retailer. I fail to see how the first part is the customer's problem (we're not here to make friends, as you put it), and the second part means people are even less likely to shop there. When did we go back to talking about shit copies? I thought you were talking about genuine products being privately imported, since you "never accused Nengun of selling fake parts" and that's all I've been replying to. You were missing my point that you quoted, since you keep muddying the waters between parallel import parts and fake parts. Try to stick to one or the other. A'PEXi/Trust make products that get sold to wholesalers/retailers. Who that wholesaler/retailer is, and their physical location, is irrelevant. If Nengun sells a genuine A'PEXi/Trust product to someone, the manufacturing company makes money. It doesn't matter to A'PEXi/Trust where that someone is, they made a sale. Its the retailer in the middle that has to worry. One retailer selling a part means another retailer doesn't. That's you vs Nengun. If A'PEXi/Trust shifts x number of units out of the factory, what do they care who shifts a greater percentage of x than the other? Unless A'PEXi/Trust have a local subsidiary that they've invested their own money into, which to my knowledge they haven't, they lose nothing if a local retailer fails to make a sale...as long as the foreign retailer is selling their products to the same customerbase. The only way A'PEXi/Trust would lose out is if they stopped shifting x number of units, which means neither Nengun nor yourself managed to sell parts to customers. So yes, it was a very poor example. Since its irrelevant. Firstly, it didn't sound condescending. It just sounded like the facts of life. If you can't handle the way the market behaves, don't get into it. No-one's forcing you to be there. Secondly, as a "wage slave" I'm only a bitch to 1 person, my direct line manager. As a small business owner, you're every idiot customer's bitch. As a small cog in a big machine, I'm also a lot more insulated against economic issues like the exchange rate, whereas I noticed a lot of parts retailers were copping a spanking when the arse fell out of the Aussie dollar against the USD and JPY last year. For someone who's "choosing not to be a bitch for their whole life" you are doing a lot of whining about the "unfairness" of market forces in a global economy.

Wouldn't selling knock-off parts be a more plausible reason for R&D-costly companies going under than a foreign retailer selling parts to the same market as a local retailer? now re-read, and you may take your foot from your mouth The only person with foot-in-mouth disease here is you. I added the emphasis for you. You said that people who don't way to pay for the real thing are buying from Nengun instead. That implies that Nengun is selling fakes. Yes, that's the same thing the rest of us noticed when you posted it. If you meant something else, then say something else. We're not mind readers. At any rate, its a bit two-faced of you to say that customers buying directly from overseas is "shafting" you when you're importing Japanese designed, Japanese/Chinese made goods and putting Australian performance part manufacturers out of business.

I can read actually. Can't you? The OP specifically says he wants an exhaust. So his 2 aims are: 1. loud 2. have an exhaust Hence why I suggested one to him that doesn't make the car too much quieter than his current un-loud setup. Telling him to leave the car without an exhaust doesn't meet his "I want an exhaust" requirement. I'd also suggest removing the cat, which will provide even more noise, and hopefully sick flames to boot. The extra bang from flames popping out the exhaust will not only give him "some" sound, but also an "extra" sound to boot. Its a 2-for-1 deal that's only a broom handle away! It helps counter-act the dumb.