scathing

EDIT: Misread post.

The rear arches on that Aston Martin One-77 look like they were designed by Veilside...

On a far more serious note, if you're only in it for the chicks the best thing you can install in a car is a puppy. This: pulled more chicks than this: And a DB9 Volante pulls off the Aston Martin grille far better than this: which looks like something a Chinese manufacturer would try and sell. If a real Aston Martin can't beat a small dog, your Jap-crap wannabe with an ill-fitting bodykit won't stand a chance.

No it doesn't, unless you've got a persecution complex. I'm driving a 350Z posting a lot on a Skylines forum, when I could have bought a GT-R at the time. I've stayed NA even though I could have afforded a turbo kit with the amount of money I've spent on it. I run 18" wheels when the standard for an aftermarket wheel is 19". I had people question my choices, but not frown on them. Yeah OK, bro. You keep telling yourself that. A mate of mine had the DAMD kit on his Z a few years ago, and I could easily have sold my car and bought it when he traded up. I didn't because I didn't want it, because it looks stupid. The distinctive Aston grille is not particularly attractive; it only works on that brand's cars because of the rest of its lines and the history behind the shape. On the V35 its even worse; the nose is so bluff that the long DAMD front bar looks like its been taken off another car and shoehorned to fit. And Lambo doors for the Z cost around USD$1.5K the last time I checked. I just dropped way more than twice that on a new set of TE37s to replace my existing set of TE37s. The reason I don't have these things is because I don't want them, I could have had them all years ago. The reason I don't have them is because they look stupid. Something we can agree on. Bilstein PSS: http://www.z1auto.com/prodmore.asp?model=350z&cat=handling&prodid=1180 Koni Yellow dampers: http://www.z1auto.com/prodmore.asp?model=350z&cat=handling&prodid=1117 Eibach Sport-Line Springs: http://www.z1auto.com/prodmore.asp?model=350z&cat=handling&prodid=3311 Eibach Pro-Kit Springs' http://www.gripmotorsports.com/pi~pn~eibach_springs_pro_kit_lowering_springs-3877.html I noticed on Z1's site that Eibach do a coilover kit. I'm not sure what the attributes are though. N.B. Buyer beware with Z1-Auto. I know a few Aussies that have had issues with them, but with the forum rules I won't get into detail. I can PM later if people are really curious. Their prices seem better than some other US retailers I've landed on, but the headaches some of us Z owners have experienced with them has put them out of contention for me. Also ask around on whether there's any fitment issues. I am pretty sure that LHD front struts are different to RHD ones, but please confirm. It might be worth contacting a Bilstein retailer in Aus to see how much they want for them. If I had a choice between BC Racing coilovers from JustJap at AUD$1149 (for the V1s), or Bilstein PSS at USD$1299 + shipping, I think I'd pay the extra for the Bilsteins. Fair enough the Bilsteins don't come with damper adjustment where the BC ones do, but I'm never going to pull my rear struts out to actually adjust them so the functionality is irrelevant. And on reputation I'd trust Bilstein over BC Racing on quality, and getting the spring/damper ratios matched to each other and the car. The spring rates are much softer in the Bilsteins. This should equate to a better ride, and on bumpy road it'll mean better handling too. Which on a street-only cruiser would be more of a concern to me. Also, it's worth noting that the OEM springs in the V35 are stiffer in the rear. The BC Racing coilovers run a stiffer front spring. This change in the spring rate bias is going to make your V35 more understeery at the limit, all else being equal. If you're going FI and so you need more rear end grip bias then that's a good thing. For NA drivers finding their car understeery already, it's just going to exacerbate the problem unless you get different swaybars or mess about with the damper settings. The Bilsteins have a progressive rate rear spring so it'll want to squat onto the rear a bit more eagerly initially anyway, but as you push harder it'll stop lifting the nose as quickly. That I can't answer. I had Koni Yellows with OEM springs in the Z for a few years. The fronts started leaking, but after discussing it with people in the US it seemed I was the only one. They're both famous European companies so I imagine their quality should be good though. Certainly better than D2/G4 junk that have already left a puddle of fluid in the box when you open it. You need additional parts. The car only has a little rear adjustment stock. The V35 doesn't run Macpherson struts so it can't use camber plates. On the front you'll need upper A arms. On the rear there are camber kits to extend the range.With your offsets you're not going to need camber even if you lower it. They're going to tuck, a lot.

There's no link to the coilovers you found on eBay. If you're rolling on 20's I'm going to assume you're not tracking the car. Aim for something streetable then. My vote is for the Bilstein PSS kit. It's adjustable height but not adjustable damper rate (the PSS9 and PSS10 are adjustable rate), which I doubt you're going to use anyway. Adjusting the rear dampers on the Z/V involves either pulling the strut out or drilling holes in the boot, which most people are not going to do. I like European suspension, since the Euros actually understand what "ride/handling compromise" actually means on a less-than-perfectly-smooth road. If you didn't want height adjustment and you could just live with lowering springs, I'd consider using Koni Yellow dampers combined with Eibach springs. The Eibach springs for the V35 give a 1" drop, but if you put the Eibach springs for a 350Z then you'll see a bigger drop (which give a 1.2" drop over the standard 350Z springs, which give a 0.5" drop compared to stock V35 springs). The Koni dampers' rear adjustment is with an allen key on the side of the strut body. It means you just need to jack the car up to get your hand to fit between the tyre and the guard, rather than having to pull the whole thing out.

A mate of mine was in a similar bind. He didn't have an engineer's cert for his mods, and cops tried to defect him on ACT plates. He just said that his car was registered in the ACT so 1. he only had to comply with ACT rules, which didn't require an engineer's cert for his mods. Therefore his car complied with its registration requirements, the basis of a defect. 2. the cop didn't have jurisdiction to enforce ACT rules, so even if his car didn't comply with ACT rules a NSW cop couldn't ping him for it He didn't get done. Yep, but if you live in a state for more than a certain number of months (I forget how many) you have to reregister the car, or they'll do you for that instead. It's not as common, but someone I knew got done a while back. It didn't help that he was in a country town driving a 350Z about a year after they came out, rocking WA plates in Qld. It kind of stands out.

Power:weight ratio determines low-speed acceleration (for a certain set of gear ratios). Power:drag determines high speed acceleration/top speed (for a certain set of gear ratios). At a certain point wind resistance becomes so high that it relegates inertia due to mass to a relatively negligible amount when determining the maximums. Speed is a factor of engine speed and gear ratio (in the gearbox and final drive) so the amount of power you're making does not have a direct relationship. As others have said, if you're hitting the rev limiter in top gear with your existing power, all that adding more power is going to do is mean you will get to that speed in a shorter time. However, if with your existing power you're not able to rev out top gear (which will be due to drag) then adding more power will increase your top speed. Of course, if adding more power meant increasing drag (say if you needed to open up the front of the car to get more air onto your heat exchangers) then your gains might not be as high as you'd first think. Shorter gears may give you faster acceleration. It depends on the situation. Shorter gearing will give you better acceleration in a certain gear, but note that your ground speed in that gear at a certain RPM will be lower. Whether its worth it or not is up to the conditions. As an example, with the stock 3.5 FD in my car I'd be able to hold 3rd gear all the way around Wakefield after the main straight. With my new 3.9 I keep having to grab 4th and use about half its rev band (and then back into 3rd for some corners). Every time you change gear you decelerate while your engine is disconnected from your wheels, as drag and parasitic loss still act upon your car. Those extra gearchanges have actually cost me laptimes (both in terms of outright time and consistency) at Wakefield Park. By the same token, at Eastern Creek where I was constantly making 3rd-4th interchanges. I should be able to avoid using 3rd so much now, and getting rid of those gearchanges should mean that I'm quicker at EC (I can't wait to get out there and find out, my Wakefield experiences have gotten me a bit annoyed at this FD). My car also used to top out 4th gear at the end of the quarter. I'd pretty much hit the cutout just after crossing the line. With the shorter FD I'd now have to grab 5th. It's hard to say whether the extra in-gear acceleration is worth the trade-off on having to make the extra shift (and being more likely to wheelspin out the hole) but I'm suspecting I'm now a fraction slower. Note that I've got a pretty close ratio box stock. On a car with long ratios, like Falcodores, shortening the FD is probably a good thing for acceleration in most circumstances.

It would also be unique to smear faeces all over the car. People really need to learn that "unique" doesn't necessarily mean "good". How would you know that if it's so unique? It means it hasn't happened before. And it's not like all the "tolls" who bagged out the Weber Sports/DAMD kit for being ugly before they installed it are suddenly going to turn around and say how awesome it was after it was fitted. Unless the person is doing some custom modification to the kit, its still going to look exactly like the kit that breaks the overall lines of the car (as per Ben-88) and makes you look like a tryhard (lack of GT-R badges notwithstanding). WTF? Practically everyone on this forum is into modified cars but there's plenty of accusations of ricerism when people fit stupid things to make their car look quicker than it really is. Look at any car culture. Whether it be street machiners/rodders, motorsport competitors, JDM, sex-spec, etc, they're all into modified cars and dislke stock cars. The only people you're describing are guys into Concours d'Elegance, which is a small subset of car enthusiasts and I doubt you'll find more than a handful here. Well no duh. People have opinions. Things they like, and things they don't. If the OP didn't want other peoples' opinions on the kit, they wouldn't have asked on the forum. So why be suprised that people express their honest opinion with a colourful metaphor? Or do you think that people should just lie to others and let them do things they personally believe is a mistake?

Lowering it would be a good step on the way to figuring out how big a wheel spacer you can go to get those rims sitting properly.

Power's only useful if you can put it down. I see sinking a buttload of cash into a reliable 500rwkW street car to be just as much of a WOFTAM, considering it's going to light up 4th if you're a little too rushed on the gearchange. The way I see it, the money you're spending is there to realise the full potential of your engine and driveline setup. I've driven Z33s with the APS TT, HKS ST and HKS SC and the 260-280rwkW it makes is more than enough for something you're not doing motorsports in. You can floor it in any gear with S-Comps and it'll have perfect traction, and while you still need to use a bit of sense when applying the throttle out of a corner it's not a razor-edge line between getting it around the bend and leaving half your tyres smeared on the road. With the high compression they also get better fuel economy than stock, and its still very responsive off-boost. If you want to drop a buttload of cash on a car that is maximising its turbo set, buy a R34 GT-R so you can at least convert it all to forward momentum rather than heat, smoke, and smell. I wouldn't. I can't remember if V35s run open or VLSDs (I think it depends on the model), but the Z33s all run VLSDs stock and TT owners inevitably go looking for a new diff.

But that's user error more than anything else. Any FI motor will shit itself through neglect or overboosting. I know a few guys in Aus who daily drove their TT Z33s with stock motors without issue for years. They didn't need to baby them like they were rotaries, and they'd take them out on the track on a regular basis. They are NA internals, so they're engineered for lightness so the engine will rev freely rather than strong to handle big cylinder pressures. As long as you keep the boost down it'll last. On the V35 I'd also consider an aftermarket front bar - compared to the Z33 there's not as much airflow to the radiator and so heat is more of a concern. But to do FI properly will cost you a reasonable wedge. Aside from the blower kit itself, you'll need at least a new clutch and new diff. I'd also be looking at wider tyres and bigger brakes, especially if I didn't have Brembos.

Sold pending payment.

Probably the crank angle sensor. I've heard of a couple of people having this issue after doing the flywheel, and its inevitably the CAS.

Sold pending payment.

Sold pending payment.

That depends on whether you want to be covered in case of an accident. As per the policy the insurer may void your claim if you have unlisted mods. Especially those that could cause you to have a higher risk of accident, either because of mechanical failure or making the car more powerful (and theoretically harder to handle or more likely to be driving faster). Or make your car more of a theft target since thieves will want those parts. Which is all of them, really. At any rate, if you don't declare accessories (i.e. non-mechanical stuff) then even if you get paid out they won't factor their value into the payout figure. Because, as far as they're concerned, you never had them.

Note that the US doesn't use RON to measure their ignition resistance. They use AKI instead. Which means their 91 and 93 AKI numbers that their gas stations quote can't be directly compared with our 91, 95, and 98 RON figures. 91 AKI is basically equivalent to 95 RON, and 93 AKI is close enough to 98 RON. Theoretically you'd be safe based on the American experience with those kits with the equivalent fuel, but I would assume that any forced induction kit will be paired with a programmable ECU. At that point it's up to your tuner to make the software tune safe for local conditions. Everything else is just dumb pipes, and its irrelevant where you sourced those tubes from in terms of engine safety.

At that price, they're talking about fully programmable aftermarket computers. Possibly with tuning, at some of those prices. Which means some tuner will sit there and custom-make an engine tune that maximises the gains for your particular car. This unit is none of those things. It connects to one of the sensors the engine computer uses (typically the sensor that tells the engine computer how much air is going into the engine so it knows how much fuel to inject), and modifies its signal by a fixed amount. It's a one-size-fits-all product, and you have no idea what was done to the car they tested it on. Thanks to manufacturing tolerances every engine is slightly different. Which means they all put down slightly different power when leaving the factory. Good manufacturers will keep this variance to a minimum, but its luck if you get 2 different engines that perform in exactly the same way. Which means the factory, one-size-fits-all, tune on every ECU they make has to allow for these tolerances so they don't blow up too many engines. Only a niche manufacturer is going to be able to custom tune every engine that leaves their factory, since its way too cost and time consuming to do it on a volume seller. It's in those tolerances that an aftermarket computer can find some gains on a stock car (along with a bit of gain from tuning the car outside of its legal emissions requirements). These one-size-fits-all tunes have no idea what your specific engine's tolerances are, so they either tune just as conservatively which means you don't get the maximum gain possible, or if they push it close to the limits you run the risk of tuning outside the tolerances of your particular engine and you eventually break something. The gains they've quoted are straight-out bullshit. Notice that the gains are "up to x"? A gain of 1hp is still a gain of "up to 35hp" so they're not technically lying, but if you think you're going to see those gains you're dreaming. And even when I did my intake and exhaust and then had my engine custom-tuned with a programmable computer, I don't think I saw those kinds of gains. And that was tuning both the air/fuel mixture and the ignition timing, not just the former. Steer well clear of these things.

I have 2 sets of 18s where I only need 1 for the track, so I'm also putting up my Nismo LM GT4s. Only one of the two sets will be sold, so whichever attracts the highest offer will be the ones to go. The link to the sale thread for the LM GT4s is here: http://www.skylinesaustralia.com/forums/topic/362194-fs-genuine-nismo-lm-gt4s-18x90-22/

I have 2 sets of 18s where I only need 1 for the track, so I'm also putting up my Nismo LM GT4s. Only one of the two sets will be sold, so whichever attracts the highest offer will be the ones to go. The link to the sale thread for the LM GT4s is here: http://www.skylinesaustralia.com/forums/topic/362194-fs-genuine-nismo-lm-gt4s-18x90-22/

I have 2 sets of 18s where I only need 1 for the track, so aside from my TE37s I'm also putting up my Nismo LM GT4s. Only one of the two sets will be sold, so whichever attracts the highest offer will be the ones to go. The specs on the LM GT4s are: 18x9.0 ET22 5x114.3 The colour is RAYS bronze. The finish is an anodise rather than a paint/powdercoat, which is stronger and corrosion resistant. Photos: More photos, including photos of the gutter rash, can be found here: http://www.au-z.org/gallery/v/forsale/18inchlmgt4/ The tyres are bald Bridgestone RE55S semi-slicks. You could probably use them for a track day before binning them, but if you get pulled over on the street you will undoubtedly get fined. N.B. These wheels came off Justin Fox's R32 GT-R. This is what they looked like on his car, if you're interested in seeing the fitment: Also posting them up at $2500 ONO.

PMs have been replied to. As for the flat spot, I'm pretty sure it's there. I have no idea if its just the flange that's bent or the whole barrel. I had the tyres fitted at the end of last year, and the guys at Tyrepower didn't mention anything about the balancing being out.

I'm not sure if they clear Akebonos. The offset is 8mm lower than the OEM Z33 18" wheels, which do clear Akebonos, but the TE37s also have pretty good brake clearance.

For an idea on how they sit without aftermarket alignment/spacers:

I'll have a squiz this afternoon to confirm. I had someone else notice too. For an idea on how they sit without aftermarket alignment/spacers: