R33_Dude

You can get bosch and walbro fuel pumps from any Super Cheap Auto (may have to be ordered in) or Bursons (will have in stock but be pricey). Alternatives are ordering online, a GTR pump, or finding another R33 pump. I believe thats all your options. Try any local japanese import wrecker.

STOP! Opinion time! There is no reason a supercharged RB25DE stroker won't make decent power levels running a vortech style blower. The only thing i would be concerned about is the amount of crank energy required to turn that supercharger. This is keeping in mind that at a similar output the supercharged mercedes SLK V10 (I think) needs well over three hundred horsepower just to turn the supercharger to produce six hundred ish. The hotrod sitting in my fathers shed with a roots style blower has a 440 big block and has been built by a mechanical engineer and a bloke that builds race engines (who happens to also be the cars owner - go figure). Its streetable (just) and is often taken on cruises. That makes about 660 HP (perhaps more now it has been rebuilt a bit stronger) and more torque than you could imagine. To bring things into perspective the best CAPA supercharging kit for a L-98 or LS3 produces around 500kW (670HP) and thats with a massive cubic capacity advantage. In terms of dollars per HP I can't imagine its a wise investment. 30,000 + purchase cost of N/A R34 (I assume around 15,000) / 750 = $60 per HP. With half that money you could build a killer RB30/25 at around $30 per HP while retaining the same peak power and most likely similar power/torque curves. Fair enough do something different and pave the way for others. I agree its an exciting concept. I want to see the pictures when its done, perhaps even come along to an autosalon event and see it in person. However there are a multitude of problems to overcome in theory let alone in practice. Supercharging can net the same result as turbocharging, but turbocharging is cheaper and better established because most skylines were turbo'd from stock. Thats the end of the story. Back to the dude wanting an SC14 on that RB25DE - don't bother a) its too much hassle for too little gain b) you will be caught and fined. No you can't hide a supercharger, not even if you were McGuyver. *nicks some popcorn and takes a seat*

Okay I believe I have a fairly concise list of fun p plate legal cars that I have owned here here: - 1994 N14 SR20DE Pulsar Ti about $4/5k quicker than a SSS because its abought 100 kilos lighter, and looks like a normal pulsar. I love these things (just bought another one) and are so easily modified - not that you can do that. - 1988 - 1992 Honda Civic Twin Cam Twin Carb about $2/4k fun, noisy, handles well, slooooow though. Not a bad thing, the most fun cars are often not that quick i.e. the original mini. - 1988+ Honda CRX VTEC D16 about $4k+ same car as above but actually with a decent amount of poke. - 1990+ 4AGE Corolla Seca about $2/4k easy to modify, great noise, quick for a front wheel drive, handles well. - Suzuki Swift GTi about $3k+ one of the most fun cars you can own, sweet little engine, fun package. Downside is its girly. Downside for me is I overturned mine in a ditch. Good times. - Golf GTi can pick these up cheap now - about $5k for a mark 2, about $10k for a mark 4. The original hot hatch. Not that quick really, handles beautifully, quite reliable. - Golf VR6 about $5/8k. A golf GTi with bigger balls and a 2.6 litre V6. - Honda Prelude 3rd/4th gen up to $10k. Honda reliability with a decent engine. Get the Si-R version for VTECs and a real ballsy cruiser. - Mitsubishi FTO 2.0 V6 manual. about too expensive. It handles. It accellerates. Its waaaaay overpriced. - Any rear wheel drive datsun. Their all fun, impossible to break and easy to fix if you do. - R31 Skyline. about $1k to $10k model dependant. Hard to kill, fun as to drive, a stock manual one will drift, the HR31 coupes are the pick though. Parts are getting hard to find. Ahh if I think of anything else I'll post it up.

Oh yeah I agree with you in almost every way - a turd is a turd and some cars are just made bad to begin with which I believe is every falcon from EA through to AU and commodore from about 1994 - 1999 before the LS1's came out. The five litre V8's were pretty pathetic stock and the ford V8 is nigh on useless. However with a bit of modification (new intake manifold, sorted exhaust, better cams, slight head upgrades) can be made quite quick and due to their design extraordinarily torquey. Thats on a fairly modest budget too. Give a bit more and theres stroker kits, supercharger kits and all sorts of goodies available quite cheap and straight off the shelf. The holden V8 is actually underrated - it was detuned just so that it didn't exceed Ford's power outputs. If we had the same budget I would take you up on the domestic versus imported modification thing i.e. same gross budget for purchase, modification, and labour. I admit it probably wouldn't have quite the same uh... chassis quality... as an import (I stand by what I have said all along, imports are so much nicer to drive) but in any test you care to throw at the pair it would be a pretty fair fight and I daresay in the 1/4 mile run the car I would build would probably have the advantage. I have never had a problem with small blocks and cold starts apart from once on a 0 degree morning and my friends brand new liberty at the time didn't like starting either. Its all in the tune. Likewise with fuel economy, small blocks that are not performance orientated (because lets face it theres slow V8's out there just as there is slow imports) can be tuned to be quite fuel efficient. Tuning those old engines is half the fun of owning one. I digress though, no particular group of enthusiasts doesn't have its problems with the cars they own. I would dare say a lot of thrashed exotics break as much as thrashed imports. As a matter of fact i know this - one of my mates is a porsche/ferrari mechanic they have an unbelievable amount of problems all the time and it seems its mostly to do with having to keep a bucket under them to catch all the oil. Holden and Ford Australia tend to survive on handouts and their own profits. Lets face it two cars produced solely for a low population country aren't going to be as good as a centrally designed car that will be sold around the world. However in every test the cars made on handouts seem to shine as well and they have their own characters that are totally different to imports. Its just a case of what you want at the end of the day.

There have been several points raised in this thread and I intend to address them all. Firstly the unfair comparison of local cars to imports, secondly the dismissal of local performance, and thirdly the punches being thrown at the classic car community i.e. that carburetted lot. Finally there is the issue of reliability. I have never truly understood the hatred that a lot of import owners have for locally produced cars. Essentially every overseas test of australian cars (for instance in a Jeremy Clarkson DVD he got his hands on an early HSV Clubsport) results in praise of a) handling and b) an incredibly cheap price for the package you receive. It has always been my belief that you can't compare locally produced cars to many imports. For instance in 1998 a VT clubsport cost $55,000. A toyota soarer with a 1UZ-FE and leather interior cost at the same time well into $150,000 (and remember now the V8 auto models are the least sought after). Now they are both similarly priced. Are they comparable? Well not really - I would have the Soarer over the clubbie. It is a far better car. Why? I think the original price tag has something to do with it. A similar story goes for any other import you care to name. There are exceptions in terms of value for money with new cars though a period WRX or Evo outguns the clubsport easily and I believe (the WRX at least) was cheaper. Likewise there are those of the import fraternity that dismiss the performance of local cars. I give a personal guarantee that if we were given an equal budget to build an equally priced performance car there would be very little difference between the performance extracted from an import or from a local. Whether the agreed challenge be circuit, drift, drag or purely streetability. Now there is the challenge by some that classic cars are overpriced due to nostalgia. Well yes, that is called demand. The same demand that makes an R32 be worth more than an R33. However the price of older cars is also due to rarity. How many (and these are common by old car standards) XB GT four doors have you personally seen driving on the public roads near your house (disclaimer without a car show being in town anyway, or owning one yourself)? Not bloody often I would imagine. GT-HO's fetch up to the $1 million mark. Monaros (HK's in particular) are reaching $60,000 and every time one is smashed up the owners of the remaining ones smile and rack another couple of thousand onto the prices. You pay for saffron because its rare - if it was as easy to grow as potatoes it would be cheap. Again classic car performance is easy. The V8 in my XB GT produced 527 HP on the engine dyno and a ridiculous amount of torque from a stroker 351. I have the dyno graph somewhere but no scanner so your just going to have to trust me on that one. Now onto reliability. Time is neither kind or forgiving to automotive engineering and a lot of reliability depends on maintenence. Japanese cars are well engineered. Australian built cars are less well engineered. The cars most often compared to Australian cars cost far more (i.e. skyline versus clubsport/XR6 etc). Who has a bigger budget and what product is more expensive? Better engineering equals higher price. True innovation is better engineering at a lower price. That said I prefer to work on imports - traditionally it is much easier for to get better numbers from a turbocharged engine (exhaust, intake, boost). One more thing, it has been said that holdens for instance are not australian i.e. parts manufactured over 50% of the world. Every car manufacturer nowadays and I mean EVERY car manufacturer from alfa romeo to (I don't know, what begins with a Z... ummm) Zagato (yes!) build their cars from parts manufactured all around the world. Carbon fibre from the Isle of Wight, engines from Germany, steel and aluminium from china and performance parts from the USA make a Pagani Zonda - I don't see any of you picking on Pagani and I wouldn't if I was you. The exact location of a cars parts does not make the nationality of the car. This is all a bollocks argument anyway - Ford Australia is owned by Ford (American) and Holden is owned by GM (American), no major car company in Australia is Australian owned. The true enthusiast likes all cars. I like imports, muscle, turbos, superchargers, hot rods, top speed runs, 0-100 acelleration, drag racing, circuit, drift and pure engineering. Hell I even like hyundai excels - their not a good car but thrashing the tits off one is so satisfying. To hate a particuular segment of automotive culture is just to admit your limited in your focus. Sure say you prefer Ford over Holden, or prefer Imports over Domestics but there is still a lot to be appreciated on both sides. I could continue but i believe it would be mostly rant and minimum content. Essentially this can all be boiled down to: don't be a dick and get on with it the other guy is probably just as right as you are. Engineering isn't right and wrong - theres more than one way to make a 500 horsepower streeter and run over a cat with it. Or something like that.

Mate with a description like that your going to need some pictures up plus a location of some kind.

Come to think of it I don't mind powerful Would honestly like to find a celsior or an australian delivered LS400 (for cheap insurance).

I have owned both. Bought the prelude with body damage just to tear out the engine and had an integra for a while as well. Dynamically the integra is the far more sportsy car to drive - for a front wheel drive anyhow. Even the non-vtec engines in these things feel fairly strong even if they do tend to suffer from the traditional honda lack of torque. However this just makes it more fun to drive as you thrash away through the gears - quite amusing. The prelude on the other hand (which has either a 2.3 litre or 2.2 VTEC) had the 2.2 VTEC. Totally different animal to the integra. It felt more like a comfy cruiser, the larger capacity made for quite the torquey engine and again it was fun to drive quickly but (mainly due to a more lazy engine I believe) felt like a big heavy cruiser. In terms of mechanical problems the integra was traditional honda i.e. pretty reliable. It needed a new water pump however it had travelled 200,000 kilometres. Apart from that it was just a case of regular services. Air con was a bit meh - never seemed to work properly and I couldn't be bothered fixing it. The prelude was only driven for a month or so due to the body damage. In that time nothing really went wrong though. Again though the air con never worked. Not that I cared - I bought it dirt cheap with low kilometres for that engine. Not sure if any of that helps you.

It appears tassiecars.com.au is down. That would be why the link doesn't work. I assume it will be up again tomorrow. For those that haven't seen it, the car is a bright orange R32 4 door sedan. Black bonnet. Most interesting thing seems to be the custom roof lining.

Not quite what I'm after (I only really like the GTi and VR6 models) - but damn that looks nice! Looks quite similar to one kicking around south hobart/sandy bay/university. Its driven by one hell of a babe - apologies if thats your girlfriend/wife/sister/mum.

There is much talk of the Subaru's engine note. Honestly I think they sound like a honda postie bike with no exhaust aka terrible.

Fairly sure I spotted the top gear australia guys the other day (about two weeks ago). Audi R8, Porsche 911 and something that was moving too quick for me to pick (lamborghini gallardo perhaps?).

I suppose the reason I got so much attention was that I had to drive from work to home every day through bad neighbourhoods and through town which maximised my chance of being pulled over every day. That said though my car was pure stock, I never knowingly speed and the points I have lost for speeding were of the not knowing the speedlimit in a new town kind. Every police officer I pass would pull me over. Once when a friend was in the car and we drove from (those that know Hobart) Glenorchy mall through to Sandy Bay. Around 30 kilometres I believe. In that distance we were pulled over three times, the third time by the same officers as the first time. It was just ridiculous. Of course I believe this was during that week where they were cracking down on hoons but this was during the middle of the day on a calm saturday drive. Maybe they thought I was a drug dealer or something - wanted to search the boot and everything. However when I spent my time in Sandy Bay and its surrounds I would never get pulled over - ever. Nevertheless it was still a downside of owning the car. Dynamically there have been few cars nicer to drive than the R33 I had though.

I have always wanted to take an ED (1990) Civic - kerb weight of 900 kilos. Preferably in white. Take out the twin cam twin carb and replace it with a H22A (formerly from a Prelude) and spank it up to about 250 odd horsepower (by all rights reasonably easy). I actually have the H22A sitting in the shed... Its actually hard to find a good ED or any Ed at all in Tasmania

Found this on tassiecars.com. Not quite my thing (I'm not keen on colours that belong on fruit) but my cousin is. Thought I better ask around, I have seen it near my house before - sandy bay and surrounds. http://www.tassiecars.com.au/detail.jsp?id...c=2&ti=true

Well I am just putting the feelers out for anything up to/around the $8000 mark. Currently I am located in Hobart but I travel to and from Burnie/Launceston as work and uni demands plus I have a few blokes in Melbourne and its surrounds who can ship anything they find to me. Will consider just about anything in pretty good condition that has a bit of grunt but doesn't have an obnoxious appearance. I am getting to the stage where I will be forced to buy a Commonhore - not good. Will also consider cars with body damage - I have the support of a panel beater. Basically I am after something thats a bit fun but not powerful enough or showy enough to get me in trouble again... again... Contact me via PM or call on 0400 796 308, PM preferred.

While I have had a few interestin cars come up that I will be looking at hopefully shortly in the past couple of weeks my budget has increased due to a variety of reasons. I am now looking around the $8000 mark and for something possibly a bit more interesting than the humble corolla.

Plus get a new bigger intercooler and spray it black then take off all the turbo badges.

That right there is hilarious.

I suppose it depends on how you classify a sleeper. For me a sleeper is a car that has unexpected performance from generally an unexpeected package. Sure a twin turbo LS1 powered VT executive on steelies is a sleeper in my book, hell flick off the v8 badges and no-one would know.

Thing is none of these are sleepers. Everyone knows what a chaser is now, the same goes for a stagea, V35's are incredibly flashy, KE70's are modified for drift all the time, an AE86 is the opposite of a sleeper in every way - its only (arguably) the most famous import OF ALL TIME, and the Z series of cars are incredibly recognisable. Modified they manage to be even more un-sleeperish.

True volvos are heavy but thats nothing an angle grinder couldn't fix I have always wanted to do a Cressida - I have been carefully planning a swap for years. I wouldn't use a 2JZ for a couple of reasons. Firstly the swap is more difficult, you need to use a front sump which isn't (to my knowlege) on a 2JZ, the extra torque wouldn't be too healthy on a cressidas chassis and I think the engine mounts are different. That said the incentive to use one is high - easily modified huge stock power potential. Crans: the R31 has kind of been ruined for a sleeper platform. A hell of a lot of them are getting modified nowadays. That said keep the exterior stock and sort an RB30/25 and you would have a cool car.

Times have changed in the modified car community - even in Tasmania which has to have the most lax laws regarding modification and P plater restrictions in Australia. Generally (in other states anyway) if what you own hasn't been engineer approved its defect bait and even if you keep it stock the local constabulary lean hard on the skyline owner. Not to mention driving a Skyline is bogan bait - like trying to get to work when every HSV/FPV Falcodore owner with two brain cells tries to race you between the lights (not that I have anything against Ford or Holden, merely I have something against some of their owners). So I have been giving some serious thought to building a sleeper - a car that looks totally inconspicuous on the outside, but the engine, drivetrain and suspension are the main focus. I have two cars that I fancy as a base: A 1991 Toyota Cressida. Yes its not pretty, but those seats are comfy and its fairly well equiped inside for a car of this age. The exterior is more bland than a similar year Camry - if thats possible. Bonus points go to this car because all the badges on them aare badly chromed from factory, leaving nice dull plastic badging on the exterior. An engine swap to a VVTi 1JZ-GTE is relatively simple all things considered and while its being done a high flow, low decibel exhaust would be made up along with high flow panel filter (to keep things quiet). Whether its mated to an auto or manual would be totally dependant on cost - autos are much cheaper and as all Cressidas are auto an automatic would probably be easiest. Note that a 2JZ could be used or even a 1UZ but for all intents and purposes the 1JZ is easiest and certainly more than gets the job done. The diff will probably need to be changed to cope with this upgrade - and there are plenty of options available from TRD, to Supra diffs. Electronically adjustable coilovers would find their way onto the car (eighteen year old soft suspension wouldn't be fun...), because lets face it who wants things rock hard all the time and its just plain convenient to have things adjustable in cabin. With the extra power its would be wise to upgrade the brakes as well, for instance to a set of DBA Gold slotted and vented rotors front and rear. Another bonus is that the factory alloys or steelies won't let prying eyes spot your brake upgrades. Mags would stay stock, whether that means factory 15" alloys or steelies, but stretch some good rubber over them first - like say Bridgestone Adrenalines, theres no kind of kill quite like overkill. So you would end up with a family car that should be capable of running 12's. The other is a (brace yourself) Volvo 740 Diesel Wagon. Why you may ask? Well firstly it looks like a block of cheese. I know. Thats the purpose. Its diesel and theres a point to that. A) it will have diesel badges and B) the diesel front suspension is much harder than the petrol model to handle the weight of the pig iron block. This one is simple in comparison to the Cressida and can be summarised in five simple steps. 1) Remove engine 2) Get one 350 Chev plus one 388 eagle stroker kit plus get an awesome exhaust sorted plus sort a powerglide to suit with a B and M shift kit and high stall 3) Make up engine mounts and bolt in 4) May have to upgrade fuel pumps etc plus fit better rubber on all the wheels 5) Terrorise traffic There may be a step 6) Have a horrible, horrible accident. Honestly though the Volvo would only be built for the hilarity factor, and the Cressida could be used every day. My question is how would you go about building a sleeper?

*cough* Are you trying to honestly tell me that a VY SS, which has nearly 500NM of torque dead stock available around 4000rpm, had less torque than a WRX (which by the power of my google machine has 280/90ish Nm stock at about the same RPM)? Then on top of that the commodore was obviously modified to get to 300kW which would net similar torque gains. I am not attacking here I just want to point out the obvious. Perhaps the ute just suffered because it was fat and heavy with tall gearing like all commodores.

Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer Well can you put your hands in your head, oh no! I said dreamer, you're nothing but a dreamer, Well can you put your hands in your head, oh no! I said "Far out, - What a day, a year, a life it is!" You know, - Well you know you had it comin' to you, Now there's not a lot I can do Dreamer, you stupid little dreamer; So now you put your head in your hands, oh no! I said "Far out, - What a day, a year, a life it is!" You know, - Well you know you had it comin' to you, No there's not a lot I can do. *Ahem* For $5k you can expect either a damaged car or a lifeless shell. N/A Skylines tend to hold their value too so for that budget your looking at an R31 or something commodore/falcon/corolla shaped