scathing

Is that because more P platers died after they were brought out? As someone who doesn't disagree with the core principles of VHEMT, the idea of wiping out humans of breeding age doesn't bother me as much as it does the hysterically illogical Mothers Against etc movement.

I meant mismatched front to rear. While generally not the cause of a vibration problem, putting two different kinds of shitty tyres on the car just points to cutting costs. If the wheels were similarly cheap, it may be because they were damaged and repaired previously...which may make them unbalanceable. Try another shop out, and tell them of the issue you're currently having. If the other shop fixes it then at least you know to never visit the original tyre shop first, and you can be assured that your problems are not with your rims but the workmanship of that place. If two independent professionals are unable to fix it, then it's looking more and more likely that it's not fixable. If you still have your old wheels, you might want to pop them on both now and after that alignment from another shop to see if the issue is replicated.

Wheel bearing on its way out? Mine was ticking for a good half a year or so before it started wobbling. Same symptoms. It was perfectly fine unless I turned in a certain direction. At first it was just ticking, with no other feedback. I just assumed it was the low-material warning tab on the brake pad at first. As the bearing deteriorated further straight-ahead started to tick but about 5 degrees of steering in the non-ticking side would stop it. Soon after that, the ticking was accompanied by vibration through the steering wheel whenever it ticked.

Pro Tech or Pro Concept? At any rate if I'd known the engine is pinging I wouldn't have suggested them. They don't have tuning facilities to check that kind of thing. Your OP says you wanted a mechanic and not a tuner, and it's to get the car serviced rather than fixing a fault. If you need someone to do log book servicing, or removing/fitting physical parts, then I'd recommend them. That's about normal for most mechanics I've found. For tuning issues, the only other place I can think of off the top of my head is CRD. I had my car tuned there, as have a few other people. I'm not sure how familiar they are with the VQ. I don't have any experience or knowledge of SAS.

And you thought that a forum dedicated to a specific Japanese model of car was the best place to shill?

Any half decent smashie should be able to clean it up and smooth it out for you. I went from this: to taking that black POS the f**k off my car, which lead to these nostrils: to after damaging my front bar and needing it repaired / repainted, which is where I am now: As you can see, I had the horribly large indented Nissan badge taken off and the hole filled in as well.

I don't think 20 year olds are any brighter than 18 year olds. They're still full of youthful vim. If you want to wait until people get over being excitable and doing retarded things, you'd have to raise the minimum driving age to somewhere in the 40's. When people get access to a new thing, they tend to go nuts with it. Familiarity breeds ambivalence. Knowledge leads to competence. In my opinion all that will happen if you increase the driving age to 20 is you'll get more 20 year olds crashing.

Or if they are shit. You can do 130km/hr on the Stuart Highway in NT. I'd rather find out about potential issues near a metropolitan area than in the middle of the desert. Just because the OP isn't going now doesn't mean he might not go in the future either. I wouldn't specifically go ask for a "130km/hr alignment" if I were to go again, because I'd (mistakenly) assume that the shop did their job properly in the first place. If I had some workshop tell me that they'd only work on my car up to the posted speed limit I'd assume they were either incompetent or negligent, and trying to deflect attention away from the fact. If it isn't physically possible to do it then fine (and the tyres he's named are both shithouse and mis-matched, so I'd be inclined to believe it was a hardware issue), but if the mechanical components are capable of doing something with the right setup and the workshop didn't then its a fault with their workmanship or attitude. If people can't "legally do more than 110km/hr", why would the government bother to explicitly state in the ADR relating to tyre fitment that its speed rating must be higher than the car's possible top speed? Surely you should be able to legally drive any car with tyres rated to 110km/hr if that's your only concern. If an organisation as dense, and willing to hide behind legal technicalities, as the government understands that you need to ensure all your support components are in place and capable of exceeding the legal speed limit if the vehicle can then so should people who apparently have an interest in cars.

The problem with Drift Rs is that they have "cheater dish" - where the end of the spoke curves in before contacting the barrel. It's the only way high offset wheels can get any lip at all.

Where do you live? My two suggestions are Pro Concept in West Ryde, or IS Motorsport in Rockdale. Both places have good experience with the platform, and both are pretty anal-retentive about the quality of their work. Pro Concept has prepped 350Z race cars as well as quite a few customer cars. Alternatively, there's Autotech in Granville. As the approved APS installers for their 350Z TT kit they know the platform well, and they've also done a few rebuilds so if you need the engine opened they won't be learning about it on yours. I've heard variable things about their customer service, but I'd rather have a rude person who knows what they're doing taking a long time to get it right rather than someone quickly and politely telling me they've got NFI.

My catback a HiTech one. 2.5" piping all the way through. It has a Y pipe that joins into a single mid muffler. That mid muffler has a single exit, which then curves into the rear muffler. 2 exits from that, with OEM-sized tips. So it goes from a pair of 2.5" pipes into a single one. Then 2 tips at the end. All the pieces in the exhaust are visible in this pic. Most people in Australia and the US I've talked to agree that 2.5" with a single midpipe is the best exhaust design for a stock engined NA FM platform car. A 2.5" true dual loses a noticeable amount of midrange for about a 1-2rwkW peak power gain (i.e. dyno measurement error), which not even a cross pipe completely fixes. 3" is a bit too big - the APS TT with a true dual 2.5" catback that provides a very good power curve while still being ADR legal....and making 280rwkW.

It appears that Haltech is pretty lucky to get a replacement engine: Source

I honestly don't see what the massive fuss is about on here, every time someone mentions this as a possibility. It's not going to be an GT-R sedan / SUV. It's going to be a sedan based on the same platform (i.e. basic design) as the R35. The Audi R8 and the Lamborghini Gallardo share the same platform, but they're two very distinctly different cars. Same with the Porsche Cayenne and the Volkswagen Touareg. Or, closer to home, the Ford Falcon and the Ford Territory. The 350Z and the V35 Skyline aren't particularly similar to look at either, even though they're both FM platform cars. Exterior wise they're as chalk-and-cheese as two cars with the same "design language" can be. In the interior trim the only shared component is the shifter. Under the skin they're pretty close, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for either car and not something a customer experiences. In terms of the planned PM platform sedan and SUV, they're not going to use the VR38DETT and it's going to be a much longer car to accomodate 4 doors. What they will share are things like suspension and drivetrain design, but with customisations. So it'll be AWD and dual-clutched with active suspension, but you can be sure they'll be less aggressive than the GT-R's. You can guarantee that Nissan, who spun the GT-R out of the Skyline models to have it as a standalone supercar, isn't going to slap GT-R badges on either of these models and dilute the nameplate. The only people doing that are the wankers who buy the badges and put them on themselves. To be quite blunt, there are enough wankers owning GTS-ts doing that already yet no-one here thinks those cars should never have been made. Nissan has already stated that the GT-R is not a profitable model. Anyone who remembers how Nissan Australia reacted to the last non-profitable GT-R they sold isn't going to want to see that result repeated by HQ in Japan. Especially since the world economy is still going down the toilet and Ghosn is reknown as a cost-cutter. If Nissan can get a profitable return on investment from the platform, it keeps the car viable. That's good for all of us.

People in the background just tend to get in the way, I find.

The first GT-R was a 2.0L inline 6 with normal aspiration. And RWD. Allowing for the natural displacement creep that comes with any newer model, that would make the R32 GTS closer to the "heritage" of the GT-R nameplate than the ATTESSA equipped twin turbo car we actually got. So who'd prefer the R32 that came from Nissan with the RB25DE over the one with the RB26DETT? The GT-R's "heritage" is to be technologically advanced and f**king fast. That is all.

Sunday is preferable for me, normally. Feb 14 is also Valentine's Day.

Chances are the cops won't notice. It's hard to spot visually. Chances are the sticker on the barrel is covered with brake pad dust, and unless they pop a wheel off they're not going to see what's embossed on the back of the hub. As long as your wheels aren't sticking out of the guard, you'd have to be very unlucky to get called on it. I'd be more worried about a pod filter

Your track increase = (stock offset - current offset)x2 So (30mm-12mm)x2 = 36mm.

McMahon's Point is also good, if you go before the sun comes over the horizon. You can get the Bridge dead on, but you have to get there before it fills with people or the morning sun shines into the camera. By mid morning, forget about it. Way too crowded.

Have a look at the RTA's Vehicle Standards Index 09 - Guilelines for alternative wheels and tyres http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/registration/dow.../vsi09_rev4.pdf The wheel track is measured from centre line to centre line. It's not the outer edges or inner edges that matter. Emphasis added by me.

Hey dude. The link you provided to 1010tires doesn't calculate the track increase. Only how much less room you have between the suspension, or the guard lip. I can't find a quick definition of track for you and my laptop is about to run out of batteries. I'll post one up later.

A decent catback and ECU tune is the best, in my opinion. The ECU tune increases power across pretty much the entire rev range, so even though it doesn't make that much outright power it still makes the car feel a lot better. I found the stock, mild steel manifolds and cats, with a stainless catback gave the best exhaust note as well.

Unfortunately not. Considering you pull around 15rwkW with just a catback and no software mods, I was expecting a bit more. It's also really surprising considering how badly designed the stock manifolds are. I was expecting to hit 200rwkW with the mods and the tune. For the record I went from around 183rwkW to around 195rwkW. As a note, most 350Zs baseline at 155rwkW where V35s seem to run 170rwkW in stock form. With all the bolt-ons, you guys may crack 200rwkW. I have both. I read that the MREV2 was meant to get some gains on the 206kW engine, but just not as great as the 221kW engine. It wasn't until I read a bit more closely that I realised it might not be the greatest mod in the world. But since I was ordering a bunch of other stuff from the US, I figured I'd make the most of my shipping costs.

Which is probably true. If they come into money, investment Bankers end up in Porsche 911 Turbos, geeks end up in GT-Rs, and limp wrists drive TT convertibles.

I used to struggle with it as well, until someone pointed out a really simple fact to me. The width of your wheel has absolutely nothing to do with your track. Only offset matters. The definition of track is the distance between the centre of your left wheel and the centre of the right. That means the width is irrelevant for determining track. Offset is the distance between the centre of the wheel barrel, and where the back of the wheel hub is (the part that you push against your brake hub when you're fitting the wheel to the car), usually measured in mm. As this then defines the centre of the wheel relative to where it attaches to your suspension, it does affect your track. So on the same car, a higher offset reduces the track and a lower offset increases it. So if you can only increase your track by 25mm (which is the law in every state, I believe), that means the centre of each wheel can only shift outwards by 12.5mm. That means if you have a stock +30 offset, the minimum new offset you can have is technically +17.5. Unless you've got custom made wheels, the chances are you're not going to get an offset with a decimal place so you'll have to settle for +18.