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Are you talking about modifying the current lights on your car to have LED's or is it just swapping out the stock lights for an aftermarket product? I was thinking about doing this to my car after seeing some for sale on Nengun. I wanted to learn more about what would be needed to install them myself, so I went outside to poke around a bit in the boot, see what I could learn. Turns out it's a walk in the park: (I apologize in advance for the crappy camera quality, I did this on my iPhone 3GS) Step 1: Remove the plastic studs (don't know the proper name for them) indicated in the picture. Can't remember how many there are, just make sure you don't lose them. The photo is actually of the boot-lid, but it's the same deal behind the tail-lights. Step 2: Remove the plastic shroud (again don't know the exact name). Should look like this now (without the crappy lens-flare). Just move the boot-lining out of the way. Step 3: You should have access to the metalwork now. At the time I neglected to take a photo, but there are holes leading to the nuts holding the tail-lights on. As you can see in the pic I've got here however, there should be about 4 of them. Once they're undone (don't let them fall into the gaps!) it's a simple matter to gently pull the tail-light free. Step 4: Only thing left is to disconnect the cable. I didn't notice it at first, but the grommet holding it in place on my car was loose enough to slide right out with almost no effort when I was inspecting the tail-light. From here it should be easy to just reverse the process with your aftermarket lights. Removing the stock ones took me about ten minutes (five if I didn't waste time fiddling with my ipod while I worked). Just make sure you have a mate nearby to test that they work when everything is plugged back in. Hope it helped.

Just have to convince Activision that two cars towing a bank-vault around the Favela map could be a new Killstreak in an upcoming patch.

For anyone to be in the state of mind where they would find over 4k a reasonable price, they'd need to be buying it for their Z-Tune or something. For a N/A Auto 25GT, err no. Yeah the $695 on UAS for a replica is more in my price range. Seems a bit of a moot point now, as all I'm likely to do to the car is just source the Nismo rear bar to complete the bodykit set (the one that people call either Nismo or Altia). That way when I sell it I can say it's got the full kit. Plans are to just enjoy this car for a year or two, maybe more and then go looking for something like a nice GTT... But I've also got buddies trying to sell the idea of me getting a 33 GTR.

Finally got my reply back from Blackburn Nissan and had a bit of a giggle when I saw his pricetag: $4589.39 Yeah... I think I'll pass on that. Cheers for the all the different sources, a lot of them are already looking a lot more viable than carmate.

UWISSH: Cheers for that bro, I emailed importmonster.com.au There was one on their list, but as things are going right now I won't actually be purchasing the wing at this moment but in a month or two, but I wanted to get my research started. GTRPowa: I did consider trying the VIN of someone else's car. Before I could go looking for one, my dad pretty much put his foot down: "No, no f#%king way you're using someone else's VIN number! You'd be an idiot to do that!" Wouldn't elaborate, wouldn't give any kind of explanation. I haven't the faintest idea why he got so agitated, is there any security risk of using someone else's VIN?

Unfortunately the car it's going on is a 25GT, so the vin from that probably won't help. The alternative to getting a genuine one from nissan is the "GTR-Medium" style of rear wing on Carmate (NSGTR99GTRMEDIUMRW). But I've heard of people complaining about the service at Carmate, something to do with damaged or poorly made goods.

I'll keep this short: I'm looking to source a genuine R34 GT-R rear wing and I had Blackburn Nissan in Melbourne recommended to me by Japcar in Fawkner. I've emailed them asking how much they would cost and I've just gotten "give me chassis and model number, otherwise we can't help". Said it before and I'll say it again: I've got very little experience in GT-R's, only the obvious stuff on how they are different to the normal GT/GTT's, not anything specific on numbers... Now this person at Blackburn has replied, "I am sorry but our parts system works of vin number and when you try and select the one you require it will bring them all and it has to be Japanese translated which we cannot do so with details it is impossible". I only have a vague idea of what a vin number is, my dad pointed it out to me when we had the bonnet up the other day and he pointed out the little blue plate in the engine bay with the paint code and other info. Yes, I'd say it's a very reasonable request on their part but at the moment it just feels like another obstacle I've run into. I'm sure the genuine wing would probably cost an arm and a leg, but I'd rather take my time and get the real thing over some $300 knock-off on ebay or a fibreglass replica from Carmate. Any thoughts?

Hahaha! Good man! TBH I had a bit of work to do trying to get the family to not whine about me getting my 2-door, they wanted something with the ability to carry the whole lot of us (me, parents + dog, a german shepard). My dad and me are both fairly tall, so when he's in the passenger seat, both seats are all the way back so there's no chance of having people in the back unless they're amputee's or something. My decision to get a coupe over a sedan was a selfish one, but everyone else in the family has a car they can use (newer generation Honda Civic Hybrid + Holden Storm) so I just used that as my excuse, flimsy as it was. And having finally got my car back to Perth after driving it across Australia, I couldn't find myself ever wanting to let the dog in the car, even with seat covers the amount of dog-hair in the old '92 Civic was just a disaster. But refreshing to see that you're aiming for the 4-door, that way you can help the parents with grocery-shopping and look awesome while you're at it. The 4-door GT I test-drove before finding my coupe felt like a properly large car, but then again I could only compare it to my gen.5 Civic sedan. I'd be interested to see how heavier the 4-door is on the fuel costs, I don't know how it'd differ with insurance. My first thought is that a coupe is sportier, qualifying for more money on the insurance, but a 4-door is bigger and heavier... So I don't know. When you get your learners are you going to try and go for some quiet practice sessions in someone's old bomb? My dad tried to get a colleague to let me try and take his old 'Rolla for a spin in a paddock near his property but it ended up being my mum's Honda CRV Sport in an empty carpark late on sunday afternoons.

Carpoint/Carsales: Skylines - Victoria Passing time before afternoon shifts starts and decided to chuck this into the search on www.carpoint.com.au, enjoy Some of these look great and being Victoria, loads to choose from. I decided to not specify R34's, in case you wanted to try checking out some nice R33's as well. I know absolutely nothing about 33's and I really like the way they look, but I happened to enjoy the way my '34 looked just that little bit more. On the amount of money that you can end up spending on maintaining a decent R34, is it a similiar situation with the 33? Cheaper? More expensive due to them being slightly older? I'm definetly interested as we're thinking about getting a nice 33 for when my dad comes out of retirement (he calls it 'taking a break', I call it retirement).

Let us know how your search goes. Should be reasonable enough to find a nice and tidy GT or 25GT for 10 to 15k. I'm curious to see how things turn out when you've got the vehicle, as I guess insurance may be a tad steep. tm_r33: I was thinking the exact same thing. But then again for all we know his family could be loaded. And scrounging up 5 to 7.5k to make his half of buying the car shouldn't be too hard if he's been planning this for a while. It's maintaining fuel costs, stamp duty, licensing and general maintenance that might be a bit of a challenge if he's balancing a casual job, flipping burgers or something (dunno, that's just what I did at that age), with his studies. Not too long ago I was pretty concerned about the kid of a colleague of my mother. Both him and his dad have approached the whole first car situation with a blatant attitude of "Yeah we iz fully sik mate, let's buy a godzilla and shove a big turbo V8 in there... Let's go ram some cop cars off the road and play chicken on the train tracks, because we're better than the law!" So long as Josh understands that for his age, an R34 25GT will more than adequately meet the power and handling requirements for his driving needs (I'm assuming driving to/from work/school?), I don't see any problem.

Hey Josh, My 25GT was from Japcar in Fawkner. Like you I'm not an expert on mechanical stuff, but I love my new R34 and I'm pretty sure you'll have a blast when you fire up your first 'line. Have fun buddy.

Just one more little gripe I have about the first film. I also found it peculiar that the director thinks that the underside of a Mitsubishi Eclipse features a 1' x 1' square of diamond-plate steel. That conveniently sheared off all its bolts when the MANIFOLD started to overheat. So the heat from an overly-stressed manifold, as indicated by the Atari-style graphics on the laptop shouting "WARNING! DANGER TO MANIFOLD!", is enough to melt the dozen-or-so bolts holding a diamond-plate panel onto the bottom of a car, which is almost in the middle of the underbody. Cheers Hollywood, your sense of logic is charming but... bleh.

2F2F also killed off the silver R34 with that fictional cannon, shooting that great big limpet EMP hook or whatever it was. Interesting theory they came up with, that you can overload the electrics of a car and shut down the engine by hitting the DOOR PANEL..

Let's look at the track-record of Skylines in the films: The Fast and the Furious - Leon drove a Skyline, can't remember if it was a 33 or not, although it wasn't featured enough. - Canary-yellow, 'nuff said. 2-Fast-2-Furious - Aside from the idiotic vinyls, the silver R34 didn't look too bad apart from the peacock driving it. - "OMGWTFBRIDGE?!" - Also marked the day that hollywood introduced thousands of street-racing fanboys to the absurd array of nos-purging nozzles as he rolled the '34 up to the start line. This was then carried over into NFS Underground 2. Tokyo Drift - Almost nil. There was the back-end of a 34 for a split second as DK confronted Shaun for the first time. - Also, there was another brief glimpse of a skyline in the middle of the conga-line drift sequence. Fast and Furious - Can I just ask you all something first? In the scene where he picks out the three cars from the impound registry, near as I can tell he picks out two r34's and a r35, rips the white one to shreds and drops the engine into the blue one... So why for the love of all that's holy does he settle for the blue r34? I mean don't get me wrong, I didn't quite understand Nissan's decision to push the Skyline series into the luxury car market and not bother to call the new GT-R's either Skylines or R35's. We've already seen an R34 in a overly-drawn-out racing sequence in 2f2f, so why not go for the newer model and showcase that one? - In the DVD commentary, Justin Lin states quite clearly that he's not a car guy. So if that's the case, who is to blame for the RPM gauge/screen thing? That thing looks like it's fallen out of Tony Stark's Iron Man helmet or something. - "Sorry car." Yes, you f#*king heretic, you should be. You're just lucky that Justin Lin made all those picnic tables and benches out of balsa wood. - "When you blew up your car back there you blew up mine too." "Yeah?" "So now you owe me a ten second car." God help me, I hated those lines more than any other part of the film. If I had to change any part of the film, I'd have Paul Walker take that hatchback to the garage where he'd tuned the blue R34 and get the R35 GT-R that he clearly did nothing to. Then I'd have him dump the hatchback in the river or something because against Fenix's Torino it was useless. Didn't mean to rant so much, I just couldn't help myself. I don't hate the films, I'm definetly looking forward to the fifth one, I just hope they put another Skyline in there and not just blow it up for fun 5 minutes into the film.

I have fond memories of being the victim of this particular rule for several years before my first car. The drivers who ran the route from my old house in Willetton to the Carlisle Tafe (98/99 I think it was, if memory serves) were nothing short of complete sociopaths. There was one dude who actually managed to make me feel somehow both depressed and amused as the doors to the bus swung open. I just had to see his face and I knew it right away, "Yep, this guy again. This poor bus is going to suffer another afternoon with a brand new set of scuff marks as he clobbers parked hatchbacks along the front of the Willetton Basketball Stadium."

Ah I see. Yeah I'd agree with that on opening them up. The bloke in the shop who sold the iMac to me stressed several times that unless I had a fair bit of experience dealing with Apple's hardware, it would be much simpler if I just got AppleCare for it. Glad I did, but I've not had any hardware issues so far, aside from the device emitting a shocking amount of heat.

running games on the imac is a bit peculiar sometimes, bootcamp does the job of doing windows no problem but I've just felt that games that are compatibile with Mac OS just work smoother. Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition is my favourite. Just got it the other week and now I'm waiting for the second one. Can't comment on the laptops hardware. Never used a Macbook before, not one of the modern ones with the aluminum unibody anyway. My uncle has one of the older series and he's never had any trouble with it.

Hello, can I get my username changed to Telcontar Long-standing username of mine when I used to play WoW and from before that, during high-school.

Apple iMac - Mac OS X 10.6.4 with Windows via Bootcamp (for gaming). 2.66GHz Intel Core i5 / 4GB DDR3 27" Widescreen Apple Wireless Keyboard/Mouse Meh, I just got fed up with customised PC setups developing faults and/or quirks that I just went to NextByte and haven't looked back.

Another idle question: Is the Altia kit just side skirts and front bar? If there is a rear bar, I'll be keen to track one down to complete the set. I phoned Instyle-Customs and they pointed me in the direction of another group called CarMate.com.au, but I couldn't find much kit options that I liked on their website. On the driving habits of my dad; I wouldn't say irresponsible, just sloppy. The whole journey from VIC to WA, when he took his turn driving (we'd do 200-400km shifts each) he'd manage a straight line for about 3 minutes before the car started to stray slowly into the far-left or far-right of the lane. I'd be sitting in the passenger seat and constantly complaining, "Get out of the gutter!" or "Next road-train coming our way is going to collect the right wing-mirror." That and he has a very silly equation regarding long road journeys and high-speed limit open country roads. I'd be going, "Just because the sign says 110km/hr doesn't mean you can push it to 150." His answer: "We want to get home on time." My reply: "On time for what? This isn't mad max, there's nothing in front of us to overtake and the last time I checked there's no gang of yobs on motorbikes chasing us; why the fck are you still accelerating?" His comeback as he slows down: "When there's nothing about, it's safe enough." "NOT IN FCKING GREENMOUNT HILLS IT ISN'T!" So I'd say yeah, there is a slight touch of irresponsibility, but with a very heavy mix of brash overconfidence and idiotic desire to beat the crap out of my accelerator pedal. He does this with anything that has a volume control knob on it as well. Speaker systems in the car and on computers are his favourites, he cranks the knob as high as it goes until the audio quality is completely trashed and blown out, then he sits there with the excuse of, "Oh, just testing it." Yeah... really needed it.

Dude, I am so torn about that. I assume you're talking about the black R34 in your sig pic? One half of me is saying "Fck yes, it'd be awesome if he bought that." He's a proper rev-head, but more of the Holden/Ford persuasion but he's amazed at how smooth my 25GT is running. But the other half is thinking "Err, he's spent the last few years driving a Holden Storm." There's nothing special about it, it's just a bog-standard Holden Storm with a nice big heavy and complicated-to-use boot-lid he bought later on. If he upgraded to a GT-T from his knackered old Storm which he struggles to park in our driveway as it's so bloody long, he won't be used to the handling+massive power. It'd end up wrapped around a tree or up the ass of a road-train. He's the kind of person that likes to point and shout "DATSUN!" every time he sees a Nissan badge, yet he likes Hondas, convincing my mother to drive a fairly new Civic Hybrid. On another note, that bear kit on your car: Are they hard to find? And what's the typical price range for the front/side/rear set?

What I enjoy is the fact that the styling of the R34 I've got has impressed my dad so much, when he wasn't familiar at all with Skylines let alone how they looked, that he's gone off his plan to buy a Mercedes Kompressor and he's now on the hunt for an R33 or R34 (he can't decide which one he likes better, as I've shown him photos of both). The place I asked was just a typical auto-supply shop like Repco or SuperCheapAuto. However they did give me a card of a place that specialises in customising the style of the car. They're called In-Style Customs and in Bibra Lake. I think it's fairly obvious at this point, so I'll just up and confess: I know next to nothing about the technicalities of Skylines, other than the fact that my mom used to have a Pintara Executive Station Wagon, which I've since learned is somewhat of an old relative to the R31. I think if I were going to do anything at all to the kit on my car, I'd try and see if it's possible to replace the little red 'S' badge on the front with a chrome one.

Sides and rear pics below. I wouldn't say that I dislike the kit itself, but now that you've explained the Altia bit, it does make more sense. I was asking at the AutoPro in Canning Vale and without them coming out to look at the car, they speculated that it could be bolt-on which I guess in their terms means a simple enough mechanical design. Uploaded with ImageShack.us Uploaded with ImageShack.us *Hope ImageShack is ok to use, as my uploads using the forum's interface isn't working right.

WGMG - Idiotic soccer-moms living in my area. There is one in particular that drives an enormous 4wd. Yesterday I was going back from the shops in my new R34 25GT, following closely behind (but not tailgating, as we were driving through an estate area with a very slow speed limit). Sitting quite nicely at about one and a half car lengths behind as we went along, suddenly the stupid cow slams on the brakes. I slam on my brakes, wind my window down to yell at the moron for managing to create a hazard on such a slow road and my jaw drops when I see whats going on. On the opposite side of the street, there's another woman standing in her yard watering the plants. But as soon as she had seen her friend in the 4wd, she comes up to the verge and starts chatting away happily while the 4wd is completely stationary in the road. FFS. To her credit, the woman doing the gardening was cool, she actually noticed me behind her friends stupid 4wd old barge. Once or twice she tried to motion to her friend that there was someone behind her that wanted to get past. Amazingly it took her three goes before the feeble-minded goober worked out what was going on. I was in no mood to wait, I just pulled out into the right and took off before she could waste any more of my time.

Wasn't sure where to put this thread exactly, but here I go: I've recently driven this R34 25GT all the way from Japcar in Fawkner VIC, to Perth in WA. One question I kept coming up with as I went along was about the bodykit. The blokes at Japcar reckon the bodykit on it isn't anything crazy, just the standard kit. The conversation went on for a while over the phone on other aspects of the car, but I did hear the word Nismo thrown about a bit, although my research into what Nismo actually is kind of didn't get anywhere beyond knowing that they're Nissan Motorsport. First question: If you look at the photo's of my 25GT in my garage screen, the front of the car appears to be slightly different; when/why did Nissan deviate away from that 'classic' R34 front nose with the two open spaces in the middle towards all those strange angles and curves. Second question: The bonnet. I noticed that in all the '98 R34 skylines I saw for sale, all the photos showed that the bodykit met the edge of the bonnet the same way, yet with the '2000 R34 the bonnet actually curves down at the very end. Third question: WTF is up with the little black splitter thing with the word 'skyline' stamped into it along the bottom of the front bumper? I don't consider it ugly or annoying or anything, I just have no idea why it was added. All the other questions: Regardless of the first three questions: Is it at all possible to get an old set of front/rear/side stock bodykit components from a '98 R34 Skyline and install them on a '2000 model? If yes, what details are involved in finding out the compatibility between the two kits, does the car body itself or the kits need any adjusting/trimming, is it a practical mod or a bloody nightmare to get done? Should it get done professionally in a workshop or is it a mod I can do at home with simple tools? To anyone else who has a 2000 R34 25GT with the same kit, I don't consider it a terrible look for the front, I'm just not sure why it was changed so much when Nissan has gone with the straight rectangles for the R34 and similar look for R33's and R32's.