AngryRB

Ive learnt that most chicks that drive imports drive them cause they want to be cool like on "fast n furious" and generally drive pretty unco.. hehe a loud exhaust isn't an indicator of power, usually related to "wank" factor the same as the whoosh and zututututu noises , lol No matter how good you think you are, there's someone better than you just around the corner...

id also check for shaft play, maybe the turbo is damaged or out of balance, its possible.

Nice build mate, the fabrication of the intake manifold and the FMIC size and pipe routing looks top notch!

Yeah, the thick rubber gasket, i have the stock manifold and now im going to try a cosmetic gasket It was fine with the small highflow at 18psi but the GTX3076 with 18psi and it leaked, then with a new OEM gasket it leaked again.

I'm a bit confused as to how this goes together, does the plate get pressed onto the sprocket by the harmonic balancer or is it supposed to sit on this little half moon?

My experience with the OEM plenum gasket is that it leaks when you start running over a bar of boost, like a whining fart.

Moving on, i picked up the 6boost low mount off Kyle and began trial fitting it and the turbo which created some issues of its own. The main issue was the wastegate placement, looking at Kyles manifold and reading a few threads i became concerned about the angle of the gate pipe and also the difficulty of actually fitting it in the engine bay and how close it would be to the A/C lines. So i payed a visit to my tuner who advised me that the gate pipe being on a 90degree angle had little chance of working and that it needs modified. I also pm's some of the experienced guys on here who added some insight, Scotty had suggested a split gate pipe off the housing before and this seemed like the best idea as there was room underneath the housing and as a bonus would make it more stealth. So i had the manifold sealed up and the gate pipe welded onto the housing and then ceramic coated which turned out nice. The fabricator did a really nice job of this, you can hardly notice there was a gate pipe on it, anyone in Brisbane if your wondering who was doing the fabricating, i used Daniel from Extreme custom engineering at Archerfield. He came highly recommended by MTQ and i was impressed with his welding quality and price. Only thing was some of the aluminium pipes still had some shavings left inside which i cleaned up myself. This is much better than the last ceramic coating job, the finish looks so good that im half wondering wether it was just painted black and given back to me, but the inside is notably different, im no expert here though. Apparently there can be issues with the quality of TS ATP housings, the two scrolls do look slightly different but im not sure if that's significant enough to effect anything so hopefully this ATP housing is of a decent quality. It wont be experiencing any extreme prolonged boosting that was mentioned as a cause of some failures during one thread i was reading, so should be fine im thinking. I think its safe to say that there will be no problem bleeding some boost off , its like an open plug hole . lol

cheers man, plenty of work to do to make it a complete setup but will get there.

So even though I was fairly content with how the car was going.... yep, I just cant leave the thing alone and wondered if I could have a better setup and searched to answer my Question of " what is the best street setup I can have and still make 320kw at the top end?" So reading thru all the threads regarding GT30's and the 300kw club and the dyno results section I noticed OwenLiberts result really stood out from the pack as far as area under the curve. So I read the TS threads and decided a TS GT3037 with external 0.82 would be interesting, originally I was going to use the stock manifold but decided that would not do it justice so I bought a low mount TS 6boost manifold. So I sold the GTX and ordered the Garrett from Street to track, which came within a week from ATP. It was time to celebrate the delivery with a Johnny, lol, always goes down smooth

wow, that's a bit of bad luck, I don't really like going more than an hour from home cause i'm a penny pincher and don't have RACQ , ive never broken down in the skyline yet, touch wood, its amazing how well the stock gear can hold on.

I was lucky cause it lasted the dyno sessions and didn't leave me stranded somewhere, it was parked in the garage and just dropped its guts for me to see the next day.. lol

So, with the car running really well and pumping out the numbers I drove it for about 6months, in that time the stock radiator decided to pack it in and was replaced with a unit from Autobarn. Its suprising how thin the stock radiator is, it was probably the original so its done well to survive, the extra power has just pushed it to breaking point I think. Also added a GTR dash during the build, which was a huge improvement on the gtst dash, the rev meter is heaps better. This is also the dump pipe that ERD made for me for the GTX , its a 3 1/2inch stainless steel, pretty nice job.. And a pic with the FMIC, the bottem lip got damaged when I was trying to get it onto a car trailer, didn't realise how low the car was going up the ramps.

Ok, so with the injectors in I took the car back to Gavin and had him fit a 400lph E85 pump and check my work over and then we drained the fuel out of the tank, id purposely ran the car on the empty line all the way there, 45min drive, I thought I must of been getting close to having just vapours left but still managed to siphon 8L out. So filled up with the Caltex Eflex I brought in containers and with a few adjustments, the tuner fired it up and she purred, had a different sound and smell off it and I was excited to hear this thing on the dyno again. Car sounded nice and deep with some lumpiness as it got some basic adjustments, then came the first pull and it made 315kw's with 16psi, I was blown away after seeing 280kw's the previous time. The second pull with some adjustments to timing again pulled off a better graph and 320kw's which is where we left it. The decision to not push more was my thinking that the motor has 170k's on it and didn't want to push too much incase the motor blows and me being on a budget here and don't want to be rebuilding engines.... So the drive back to the tuners this time was very different, first gear was fried, second fried, third was pulling VERY hard and gave the lol's. I found third gear on a dry good road could actually break free and tail way if you WOT at 70-80k's, scared crap out of me the first time that happened. The car felt strong and smooth even off boost, and started pulling around 3700rpm and hit hard from 4000rpm.

Ok, so I drove the car this way for a few weeks and was happy with the power but the lateness of the delivery became annoying to me and before long I was reading threads and comparing dyno graphs of other builds and noting that my GTX looked lazy comparted to the normal GT3076. The GTX was a bit of a gamble that I took as reading all the info on paper with its 10% extra flow, forged wheels and supposed to be the latest technology suggested to me that it should be a better turbo. So with the thirst for some more out of this turbo, which likes more boost I decided to run some Eflex and see if it would help it come on boost earlier and make it feel less doughy on lower revs. This required some larger injectors and reading some threads, I saw "ARTS" had done a top feed fuel rail with some Xspurt 850's , so after some good advice I took another gamble and managed to get some 1000cc xspurts on a top feed rail . This really isn't that hard but it takes a lot of time and patience to do, taking the manifold off for some shaving, pipe re-routing and trying the get a spanner on the bolts can bring you too tears , lol.. that's where a few beers and taking a slower approach is the best way.. It doesn't help when the dam intake gasket leaks and you have to take the manifold off again... grrrr For a average DIY person like me , this can take a whole day..

cheers mate Good to see your RB smoking the tyres

So moving on to the better bits, I eventually got the car together with the GTX3076 on stock manifold and the dump, injectors and pipes to make it work and booked the car in with Gavin Woods. The first dyno was missed cause there was wastegate fittings missing and the restrictive muffler ( fujitsubo) was identified as a restriction, so with a dyno booked at 1pm I raced to the nearest workshop at 12:40 and asked "whats the chances of getting a muffler fitted , like quickly?" which I was answered by the old guy eating his sandwich, "erm, id say F#$k you mate!!" ( hmm, alrightly then!!!! lol) Being desperate and in a rush, I rephrased my question to, sorry didn't mean to be rude its just I have a dyno booked and it will get cancelled if this isn't fitted asap, and they reluctantly finished the sandwich and got onto it... Ended up missing the dyno anyway cause they took too long. So I came back a couple of weeks later and was in luck, all went to plan and was in the dyno room watching the action unfold. The springs in the wastegate were unknown, they ended up being not enough to push as much boost as I wanted, I think it was like a 8psi spring and the car was too hot to change the spring during the dyno session. It was a big improvement over the highflow but the car sounded like it was on half throttle, the GTX hadn't really woken up yet on 18-16psi. On the drive back with the tuner, it was late coming on but once it hit 4000rpm it was quite angry, spinning the tyres up in second and hard pulling in third gear, but it felt like a little too late for street driving.

This highflow hadn't really impressed me much, it pulled well from 2500rpm to about 4000rpm but from there it felt pretty flat so I began reading the forums and started a plan to reach the 300kw that seems to be the bench mark. With the idea of using 98ULP only, I took a punt on the GTX3076 and an external 0.82rear which required a new 3.5inch dump, 555cc nismo injectors, 44tial off the housing, 4inch intake pipe and a retune, I also added some tomei 256 cams to ensure I would hit the 300kw's. Some where in between I added some Tein coilovers and some Rota wheels (18*9.5,30offset) to improve the ride and looks. I didn't realise till the teins went on but there a bloody firm ride, I ended up with a reasonable ride by deflating them to 28psi and having them on fully soft ( fully soft is like fully hard on other coilovers probably). With the coilover set to med or hard, im bouncing out of my seat and almost hiding my head on the roof lol... I experimented with the ride height and got some Fibre glass front guards but decided they looked cheap and didn't fit well enough, the stock guards have been rolled, and the action of steering has naturally reshaped them.. lol.. could be mistaken for GTR front guards by some..

So I drove the car like this for a while, then decided to do some upgrades which created some headaches , I purchased a split dump pipe from Option1 Garage here in Brisbane which I fitted with there gasket they supplied which turnt into a PITA as this was a cheap dump pipe which created my overboosting issues along with there cooling pro intercooler which they fitted for a good price but kind of butchered my bumper in the process. I was now boosting upto 14psi in 3rd gear and obviously hitting some major RnR, which brought me to another business, "motsons" which suggested a ported out turbo exhaust housing which didn't work and going back to them, they then said it was my dump pipe, $500 later, thanks for that.... Ok, so at this point I decided to go an open mouth 3inch bellmouth which fixed the overboosting...at this point I also bought a Power FC and booked the car in for tune and a new clutch, Motsons asked me for a manual for the Power FC which I replied " erm, if I did have one im sure it would be in Japanese?? they wanted a manual that was translated.. so obviously that was the last of my business to them.. So, after seeing big page ad's for Mercury Motorsport in the Zoom Magazine with pictures of GTR35's with fire out there exhaust and massive power numbers being quoted I thought, wow, this mob must know what there doing , so I booked the car in for a tune and after speaking to trent decided on a 5puck ceramic clutch too. Big mistake, this clutch was terrible, I just couldn't drive it and it was shaking the crap out of my whole driveline and gearbox, so long story short I just pulled it out myself and fitted an exedy HD which was nicer to drive. There were other issues which I wont go into , but here was the outcome of a tune with the new Power FC, highflow on 18psi, FMIC and 3inch dump..

After reading a lot of peoples build threads and being on the forums for a while now I thought id include a write up of my cars progression from a stockish car upto a reasonably modified state. My car's not a show pony, but a budget build ( if that's possible) and mostly aimed at street driving with occasional drags, but I have worked more on function over the whole show pony side of things. As with most builds its been slow at times and the car seems to be off the road more than it is on the road, and as ive found out , its best to do things once not twice. I first started being interested in skylines after driving my brothers VL Turbo around the time I got my license and this set the bar as far as what was quick and what was not. I progressed from a Cordia Turbo to a r31 GT Passage and now to my R33. My brother beat me too it a few months before I got mine and got a awesome burgundy series 1 with some good mods that had been done in japan, stuff like nismo wheels, garrett 2876( I know there shit) Greedy intercooler, etc... He reeled off a flat 13second quarter in this which I still tell him that the machine must of been broken or he got the slip mixed up, but I cant deny that thing is pretty mental and its always been a mystery as to why it goes so good. Anyway, a few months later I found what I thought was a fairly good R33 with a highflow turbo, AVCR, coilovers and 140k's so I snatched that up as I fell in love with it after the test drive. that's it for now

no disrespect here, but GTSboy knows what he's on about !! If you don't know what your talking about you need to pull your head in and not look like a goose

You say the ticking noise went away once the car warmed up, I think that would suggest noisey lifters, detonation would get worse with temperature and with hard driving. The auto would have higher gear ratio's and possibly bring on the R&R earlier than a manual? GTSboy might confirm this?

that's a relief, had me confused for a while there, thanks for clearing it up for me

I just removed the cap and there wasn't much 'woosh' from it, hope I havnt asked a stupid question here but is this actually a the bottem of the fuel tank or am I looking at where the spare tyre sits?

can anyone confirm if the picture shows a normal tank or is there an issue?

the fuel cap hasn't been taken off for about 4months, yeah caving in like if you pushed the side in on a half empty mild bottle, when it was last filled the temps would of been warmer than they are now, do you think that's the issue and that the lid needs to be taken off every few weeks to relieve pressure?