GTSBoy

That's totally safe. If the piston is down the bore a bit and the head is set up very close to where it should be for TDC, then there's no chance of hitting anything further down the row of cylinders. You can eyeball the protrusion of the valves and the height of their pistons before you drop the head on, and you should be able to feel them make contact if you have managed to get it wrong, long before you try to bolt it down. You just have to remember that you wound the engine backwards before putting the head on, so that when you try to put the chain on, you know that you have to wind it forwards. The TDC marks on the pulley can help, even though it won't be fully fitted up before you've got the timing cover on. Just fit it temporarily and make yourself a pointer that will help you mark TDC. If the head is fully assembled and off the engine, then you can just turn either cam by hand to put it wherever you want. No need to back off cam bearings, and in fact, that wouldn't make it any easier anyway.

OK, so, I downloaded the R32 GTR manual that's up on NicoClub's site. On the 3rd page of wiring diagrams (the last pages of the PDF), which I show here zoomed out for identification purposes Right in the middle is the reverse lamps and the reverse switch (for MT vehicles)) is shown right there, just above it. I've zoomed it in and circled the area of interest, here The wire that runs along the bottom of the reverse light is earth. If you follow it to the left across the pages of the pdf you will find it ends at the -ve symbol. On the way, it passes both the vehicle speed sensor and and the neutral switch too (as you scan along the diagram). I don't know if this means that there is a buss wire or if it the body earth, but it doesn't matter. This will become relevant later, when I describe probing. It shows the wire colours, but sadly, this pdf is too low a resolution to be able to decipher them. I have at least 2x pdfs at home, plus the paper copy that I photocopied myself from a manual I borrrowed from Nissan Australia last century. I'm sure that at least one of the pdfs I have (and my photocopy) have legible wire numbers everywhere. So what I'm telling you is, find a pdf upload that has better quality (if the one you already have isn't good enough), and have a look at that section. The wire colours are shown each side of the switch. But, there are still things you can do even without a legible drawing. You can use manual methods to probe the wires. Start with a meter connected to the appropriate side of the reverse lamp wiring in the boot (the side that goes back to the switch, not the earth side that I described above) and probe around the gearbox loom under the car until you find continuity. That should be one of the wires. Then, the other wire is known to go to IGN relay 2, shown on the next page of the pdf, with the interesting parts circled n the below image. That wire code circled is the lower wire of the pair that comes in from the left, which is the same wire that leaves the previous page on the right, having come through the reverse switch. You go find IGN relay 2 and you can identify the wire coming out the relay that delivers 12v to these circuits, and probe looking for continuity to wires in the gearbox loom. As a further plus, the neutral switch should be 2 of the other wires in the gearbox loom. One of them will be earth and the other one will go back to the appropriate terminal on the ECU, which I think is 44, but you should double check with the ECU pinout.

If your sparky can't fix that with a depinning tool, a spray can of CO contact cleaner, a toothbrush, and at worst a handful of replacement crimp terminals, then sack him and find someone who actually knows what they are doing.

And you ultimately have to ask.....what difference would it make. It's not as if there's a single thing special about the Nismo dash other than the logo and the calibration. So a fake one offers exactly the same as the real one. I'm off to buy an MCM purity T-shirt.

Not grubbier. But they all smoke like f**kwits and the cars are not considered "special" by as many people there as here, so they get treated like your typical Aussie bogan's Sigma station wagon. 2 minute noodle juice and ball sweat deeply ingrained into the seats then seared in with dropped cigarettes. So just use a grey velour. There's nothing old school about the Nissan fabric except the pattern. There's plenty of seat velour available with equally vague patterns on them.

The fact that the car drives better on the GKTechs is enough or me. Having gone through the teething/learning stage, I'm never going back. Poly bushes have cost me much more sanity over the years than the last couple of years of experimenting with different swivelling arms has.

You can just drill the different holes into factory mounts. There's a thread on this site with the required dimensions. I haven't done it yet, because it's not really required with the GKTech arms, as it is largely about improving the arc that the arms swing through and the GKTechs banish that issue. And Duncan is correct. When you add caster you make the situation for the upper bushes worse. So you can only add a very little amount of caster over stock without causing binding. You can actually feel it if you swing the suspension by hand (with spring & damper unit removed, so you can swing it by hand). The realigned arm inner bolt holes in the Nismo bracket design alleviate that a bit and allow a little more caster. But the only real solution is the articulated arm. The GKTech arm is based on the Group A design (I think that was the Gibson cars, not the Jap Group A). The UAS arms are a reasonable alternative idea, but my experience with them is that they get thrashed in a worse way even that other arms. It's sad, because they are otherwise a good idea.

Well, neither of those are any good because they are not adjustable length. It's almost essential to be able to set the length on the droplinks to prevent the bar or the links fouling on other stuff when you have adjustable bars where you move from hole to hole to change the bar. I have (or perhaps, had) these on the rear https://www.whiteline.com.au/product_detail4.php?part_number=KLC109&sq=30367 Balls at both ends. I suspect that they might have been changed out last time my bro-in-law had the car up on the hoist because I think I'd managed to damage one (through stupidity). It's a fine detail either way. He might not have put the same ones back on. I think I have these on these on the front. https://au.gktech.com/s13-180sx-s14-s15-front-swaybar-end-links I don't think it is possible to do something similar to the Whiteline rears on the front. What you need to use depends on the orientation of the holes in the bars. Not all the aftermarket bars have the same orientation as the stockers.

Well, neither of those are any good because they are not adjustable length. It's almost essential to be able to set the length on the droplinks to prevent the bar or the links fouling on other stuff when you have adjustable bars where you move from hole to hole to change the bar. I have (or perhaps, had) these on the rear https://www.whiteline.com.au/product_detail4.php?part_number=KLC109&sq=30367 Balls at both ends. I suspect that they might have been changed out last time my bro-in-law had the car up on the hoist because I think I'd managed to damage one (through stupidity). It's a fine detail either way. He might not have put the same ones back on. I think I have these on these on the front. https://au.gktech.com/s13-180sx-s14-s15-front-swaybar-end-links I don't think it is possible to do something similar to the Whiteline rears on the front. What you need to use depends on the orientation of the holes in the bars. Not all the aftermarket bars have the same orientation as the stockers.

Yeah right! As if. But besides, surely this would be an opportunity to use a vastly better material than the not-very-good material that was stock? Even more yeah right, as if! Every R32 was imported with at least 1 cigarette burn in the seats. Mine had 2 and it was only in Japan for 6 years. Imagine what a car that has been in Japan for nearly 30 years will look (and smell!) like. Not for me.

Keep in mind that with R32 upper arms, bushes of any sort are AIDS. Anal AIDS. Festering, dripping anal AIDS. With extra herpes. You do not want them. Bearings are more than 9000% better. There's nothing wrong with the bearings that are in the ends of any of the adjustable length arms (the ones with sliding centre sections). What is wrong is that the design of the suspension puts stupidly large loads into those bearings as the arm swings up and down, because of the twist that occurs. This is why the OEM arms have the big hydro-squishy bushes in them, and why poly bushes cop a hiding when retrofitted. If the bearings are multi-element (like ball bearings or roller bearings), they don't love the abuse. That's probably 90+% of all adjustable arm options. The big sphericals in the GK-Tech arms would probably take the abuse, but they don't need to, because the flexible design takes that load out of them.

I'll have to download a copy of it when I am at the hotel tonight. Wouldn't be a good idea to do it on the borrowed 4G connection I'm using at site.

This is the Type M material. I'm not sure about the other dark grey/charcoal material that doesn't appear to have the same pattern in the centre sections. The brown berber material on yours is definitely the pov pack material. The seats aren't appreciably different, just different trim. I wouldn't expect that you'd have a lot of luck finding good stuff. There's not very many of them in wreckers any more. My original 1993 seats are showing their age (moreso the fronts than the backs that never get used!), and they are likely some of the best ones still out in the wild. You might have to consider paying for retrimming.

The GK-Tech guys will tell you that the teflon lined joints are manna from heaven, and they will tell you not to put any grease on them. But my experience with grease has been much much better than my experience without grease. See this thread which was a general thread about the arms and sort of became my diary thread. I have since made some PVC sheet nappies to go around them to keep the water and dirt away and this seems to have been a very worthwhile effort. The entire upper arms is wrapped up in plastic. I'd take some photos, but they're 2000km away.

Not that there's any difference. It's all the same parts up the top. I had many sets of these in my car over a 15 year period. They flog out, especially at the front. Not really suitable for long term use on the road either. I had the first available type (from Whiteline) at the turn of the century. My experience, and that of everyone else with them led to Whiteline redesigning with a solid metal outer insert to reduce the amount of urethane, because the thick section of the original design collapsed in only a few thousand kms. But even the new design and all the copies (ie Superpro) do exactly the same thing. I was probably the first person to put grease nipples on them, before they even came in the kits - that's how beige their performance was.

I'm not assuming you're a numpty. I'm not (a numpty), and I freely admit to having set mine up incorrectly, despite trying very hard to set them up properly. This is simply because they are an absolute bear to keep perfectly set up while you tighten everything up. More to the point, having learnt my lesson the first time, I have had them apart many times since (as detailed in my own diary thread on the topic) and have managed to not get it right more times. Filling the boots with grease (which I highly recommend!) doesn't help with setting them up in the least. Makes it 10x harder. Sounds like me.... So I skipped these bits. But....I would not expect that the nuances of exactly how fiddly these arms are to get all 3 of the joints centred would necessarily register on any of those people in that list. Including and especially the engineer and the DOT. The suspension shop, maybe, probably, hopefully. But again - they are outside the experience of most such, so it's not unexpected for them to miss something. Even with this. Yes, I know. No, see that's the nature of it. If you set them up so that they only hit at a particularly large deflection, and you only bump them occasionally, then you could stress them a few times and eventually start a crack. And then, in the middle of just driving along with normal road undulation being the only input to the suspension, the crack makes it all the way through and they let go. Happens all the time with such things. Similar to how I shattered a CV joint just backing out of the driveway. Was fine driving the day before, was not thrashed backing out of the driveway - but that motion was the last straw in the ball cage, which had obviously had a long and hard life before that moment. Oh, absolutely. I know I'm "doing the wrong thing" by using them on the road. I went through a phase of inspecting them extensively and spent a lot of time developing sufficient confidence in them that I don't dismantle them every few months now, like I used to. But I still check every year (it's been a year, so I'm technically telling a lie about that, but I'm not driving the car, given that I'm 2000km away most of the time lately). Also possible. But the rod ends they use are not weak. They're pretty beefy. So it would have to be a batch/random problem more likely than a systematic product problem. Absolutely. It's another reason why I didn't want to load up my rear suspension with spherical joints. I don't need to add more inspection/maintenance load to my daily.

Yes. The ones that really matter. Not ones that are adjustable for camber. There are a number of designs. Some look a bit like the stock arms but have lots of locking screws on a sliding section in the middle, allowing you to change the length. These invariably have bearings in the ends, rather than bushes, and I am fine with that. There is no need for bushes in the FUCAs to make the NVH situation "nicer". Bushes up there are the enemy of good suspension location, because the narrow base of the FUCA mount in particular. Stupid design by Nissan that was fixed in the 33s. Some look like a capital I (with the cross serifs at top and bottom, not this non-serif bullshit that I'm typing with). Steer clear of all of these. They are all shit. Even the best ones (the UAS ones) have unavoidable weakness in the design. All the fixed length ones might as well be stock from my point of view. Doesn't matter if they are a different length to stock and correct a camber issue that results from lowering. If they're not adjustable, they're not worth paying for. That's Nismo, Cusco, etc. The GK-Tech ones are a lot of work to set up and they make your wheel aligner cry. But they are the only ones that I've found that do what they say on the box (which is to allow for a swivel articulation to remove the loading that the stock design forces into the bushes as the arm goes up and down. Again, stupid design by Nissan). I'm sure that there are others from the various brands sold in the UK and US (Driftworks as a potential example). The bushed Hardrace arms are not particularly different to ones with spherical joints. I'd be reasonably sure that you could actually swap back and forth between a bushed outer end and a spherical outer end on the rear arms if you had the parts. As much as Hardrace stuff looks likes any of the hooflungdung Taiwanese/Chinese/eBay brands, they have established themselves and seem to have earned a decent rep. So I am happy to use them and don't shy from recommending them.

At the front I have Tein spherical front caster arms, plus the GK-Tech FUCAs. Plus a Whiteline adjustable bar with balljoint droplinks. At the rear I have Hardrace (hard) rubber bushed adjustable camber and radius arms. Plus a Whiteline adjustable bar with balljoint drops. The rear is also a non-HICAS subframe (so, equivalent to a HICAS delete kit, but, better). So the toe arms are different to stock. I chose the hard rubber bushed rear arms for the logical reason. It's a streeter and it's already noisy and harsh enough, plus I didn't want to add to my maintenance load by adding even more spherical joints. All I was really after was the ability to set the camber exactly where I wanted it and dial out bump steer, which is a factor that most people just flat out don't understand and ignore. Anyway, the rubber in the Hardrace bushes is very stiff, so they are at least as good as poly, without the eventual creaks and groans that come from poly bushes, which I have also had in the rear (and the front) in the past. Lower arms and bushes are stock, for the purposes of not making the NVH situation hugely worse for a small/medium gain in arm control. I am prepared to go poly on all of those ifnwhen they age out.

Cam position is easy. #1 firing is simply set up with both intake and exhaust lobes on #1 pointing away from the lifter. They are independently rotatable. They don't have to be exact - just pointing as close to directly away as you can eyeball them. Then all the other valves will be open (or closed) to safe positions wrt their pistons. The other thing you can do is put #1 piston at TDC then back it down by, say, 10mm before putting the head on. This just gets the pistons well away from TDC on all cylinders as you put the head on, so that even if you have your valve angles a bit wrong, you shouldn't be able to hurt anything. Then, when it comes time to set up the timing, you just roll the crank that bit to bring the piston back to TDC and keep them cams as close to the right spot as you can and then throw the chain on it. The main thing with this just to work slowly and carefully enough with as much double checking as you feel is necessary at each step to make sure you're not leaning on it wrongly. Experienced assemblers of engines rapidly get past even having to think about it. Novices just need to know and apply the commonsense rules.

There was really only 1 interior in almost all the R32s imported into Australia, because only the ones worth importing (Type M, or whatever you want to call it) were imported. It's the same thing as the GTR, just different seats. So most of us haven't seen any of the other pov spec interiors. The 4 doors had slightly different seats because they didn't need to be tiltable. There was a lot more variety in the R33 space, because so many more pov spec 33s were brought in.

You always assemble any engine with #1 at TDC firing. Anything else is just asking for trouble. If the head is going back n with cams installed (where that is possible) then you also need to set the head up to match the engine angle. Or, when you're putting cams back into the head with the head on the block, then you need to install the cams at a compatible position to the engine position. Otherwise you're likely to drive valves into the pistons somewhere. In this case, you were turning the motor by hand and cannot see any places where the valves have scraped metal off the pistons, etc etc. That means that you simply haven't done the damage (created the swarf) that you see. So stop worrying about that. But.......Now you have to wonder why there is swarf in the head, when there absolutely shouldn't be. Whoever worked on it has not done a good job of cleaning up after themselves. I would not put it back together without a surgical inspection.

Front caster rods are THE first and most important place to consider spherical joints. They hardly have any impact on NVH but they have a massive positive effect on reducing fore-aft movement of the front suspension. This is massively required with the stupidly narrow mounting base of the R32 FUCA. I also maintain that any poly bush at all (or worse, rubber) in the FUCA is a bad thing. The GK-Tech arms are the only thing have tried that have been a workable solution to the problems in the R32 FUCAs, short of cutting the car up and fitting R33 style wide base FUCAs, which is simply not an option for most people.

Or, the engineer's approach to the problem? Close it up behind the inlet pipe and stop worrying about it? Or, the engineer's who cares about aesthetics approach to the problem? Put it in the lathe and adjust that part of the inlet a little bit. Then close it up behind thee inlet pipe and stop worrying about it. Function. Then form. Unless masturbate.

Well, you've done more than most OPs in these sorts of posts have done, so kudos for that. I would suggest probing the driver's side mirror's wiring while it is being driven in and out to work our what gets voltage when, then do the same over on the passenger's side to see if the power is getting as far as the mirror or not. Depending on what you find, you can blame either the mirror or the wiring. Then you just work either forwards or backwards from there until you find the fault. FWIW, this stuff is not always easy. The control boxes for the windows and mirrors are opaque black boxes (literally and figuratively) that are hard to understand what's going on inside. But with a known working example on the RHS, you might stand a chance. The other thing to keep in mind is that it was caused by the person who disassembled and reassembled the door for paint and you should have gone right back to them immediately to get it seen to.

No. It will not.