Nate's R32 Gt-R Build (And A Bit Of Personal Car History)

[Natemarian]

Hi Guys! Figured it was about time to put together a build thread since the list of parts keeps growing by the day (GT-R ownership 101 lol). So lets start at the beginning shall we?

So my first car was an N14 Pulsar. It had an SR20 Transplant and the previous owner had taken every bit of sound deadening and anything that was extra weight out. It was rough, beat up, had numourous problems and I loved every square inch of that car lol.

I eventually sold the car when i lost my licence and after a while in a strange turn of events it ended up back in my possession although it looked rather different.

So after having multiple Japanese cars on my P's (i had a few others but CBF mentioning them) and itching to one day own something with boost after being brainwashed by all the Best Motoring videos and Gran Turismo video games from very early on. I somehow thought it was a great idea to buy an FG xr6 Turbo 6 speed manual once I got my fulls.

And ill be honest it was a great car. I bought it with 20xxxks completely stock still with factory warranty and by the time i sold it it had 40xxxks on it with some basic upgrades and 330rwkw. It may have been that all my previous cars were small japanese cars or maybe just the fact that i love Time Attack and track racing but every time i went for a spirited drive through the hills (my favorite place to drive) i found my self coming home a little disapointed. I think thats what led me to start looking at getting back into an import after only owning the car for a year.

I started off looking at S14 S2's and Evo 6's (two of my favourite cars) but after having a long chat with a mate i realised that i couldn't go back to a 4 cylinder after having the torque of a Barra. Being a Nissan junkie from birth that left only one real option.....a GT-R.

After a bit of searching/negotiating/harrassing i managed to pick up this 1990 R32 GT-R in black. Funnily enough it was built about 2 weeks before i was born.

It had its fair share of mods when i got it:

JE Forged Pistons
Nitto H-Beam Con Rods
N1 Oil Pump
Garrett 2860-5's
Genuine Nissan Crankshaft
Tomei dump pipes
Big end and main bearings - ACL Race Bearings
New Water pump
Block crack tested, decked, bore and honed, hot washed
Extensive balancing
Tomei oil restrictor
Tomei drop in cams
Cam gears
1000cc X-spurt Injectors
New Engine mounts
HKS boost controller
Apexi Stainless Front Pipe
Nismo Air flow meter
Power FC with hand controller

Twin plate clutch.

After engine break in car was retuned making 348kw's at the wheels.

[RenderedUnsafe]

I look forward to seeing your future plans.

[Natemarian]

Heaps more to come I was just waiting for this to be allowed by the admins next instalment will be tomorrow

[Natemarian]

Ok so i had the car and brought it back without any issues. It was in great shape but as you can see the wheels themselves are not the best looking thing in the world (in my honest opinion).

Ozzy tyres were having a sale at the time and i didnt want to splash on expensive wheels until i knew what direction/look i was going to follow with the car so i picked these up.

XXR 527's. 18" diam 8.75" wide (for whatever reason) +25 offset. People always talk shit about 'fake' wheels but i am yet to have a problem with these wheels.

So we fitted these to the car and although the center caps wouldnt fit everything else was perfect.

[Natemarian]

Just found some pictures of the interior so thought i would throw them up as well. I was really impressed by the condition of the car for something as old as myself lol.

[shaunus]

Looks like a decent solid base to work with. The wheels, despite being fakes made a big improvement!

I would only change the knob and lose those pedals

[Natemarian]

I actually like the standard knob myself. But in saying that I'm saving for a 6 speed getrag conversion atm so it will have a 34 knob.

Next part of the build will be on this arvo

[Natemarian]

So once the wheels were on i had some free time and some bordom so i decided to give plati-dip a bit of a play with (worst case it looks shit and i'd peel it off). First up was the Apexi Pods.

This is how it looked when i picked the car up.

And After (i apologize for the below average quality of the picture haha)

I also picked up some bolts to put the coil cover back on. The previous owner had it off to keep the coils cool but i really do love the look of the RB26 so it had to go back on.

Next up was the windshield wipers. I dont have a before pic but they were faded to the point where you could see the metal underneath. I was actually impressed how OEM looking they came up.

Edited November 17, 2014 by Natemarian

[Natemarian]

So of course when you have a new car and it has its share of modifications you want to research them all and see that the parts used were good right? Well now this is when things start to get a bit more interesting. After a quick google search I found that the MAJORITY (not all) of people had problems with/know of problems with the N1 oil pumps. This made me dig deeper as people mentioned more and more about oil issues in the rb26. After reading countless threads and articles my head was spinning but it was determined I would either need to go dry sump or a gated sump. I was prepared to spend money on the car though as I honestly bought it expecting it to blow up on the way home. I was warned by Andrew Hawkins before I bought it not to get a GT-R unless I can afford to buy two, very wise words haha.

I would like to take a moment to give a shout out to Andrew as well as without him I probably would have gone dry sump and been out of pocket much more than I am.

After many random inboxes/questions/etc. with Andrew it was decided that instead of dry sump (as the car is staying a street car.....for now) I would upgrade the oil pump and also run an Accusump setup. This setup is a bit above my head when it comes to the technical stuff so the way I describe it to people is it’s like a surge tank but for engine oil. The main feature I liked about it though is that with the electric valve you can set it to pre-oil the engine before start up and save on wear and tear.

The next question was who to get to do the work??!!

I contacted a number of big name workshops that I had heard of from all over the country. I am not about to name drop but most of them I found their service was quite poor and some not even getting back to me at all. I was beginning to lose hope until the Motive WTAC 2013 DVD arrived on my door. As I was laying there watching, a grey and red R32 GT-R popped up on the screen. It was the BC Automotive GT-R.

I had never heard of the company before so I was surprised to hear they had won open class, especially in a time where evo's were dominating time attack in almost every division.

Figuring these guys must know what they're doing with GT-R's and figuring I had nothing to lose I decided to contact them. To my surprise I got a reply that night from Brett off his phone saying he would do me up a quote in the morning. Once again I was surprised to see I had received the quote by the time I sat down for lunch the very next day......however this is where I started to tumble down the 'while the motor is out, may as well' rabbit hole lol.

Edited November 17, 2014 by Natemarian

[Natemarian]

So as I said. I fell folly to the ol 'while the motor is out' curse lol. What started as a simple 'pull the motor out, install billet oil pump gears, custom sump, install accusump' job has now turned into a bunch of bolt ons since I figured if I’m going to pay the labor to yank the engine I may as well get something out of it!

During my reading I found the factory harmonic balancers were only good for around 350kw. Considering my final aim for the car (still years away) is 450-500kw the factory balancer had to go. I umm'd and ahh'd for quite a while between Ross and ATI but the decision was made quite simple when I found out Ross balancers were manufactured about 10 minutes from my house, so off I went.

And returned with two boxes?!

This obvious one is Ross' top of the line 'race gold' harmonic balancer.

And the other is.......

A Ross crank trigger kit!

I will be honest, the main thing that won me over was because it looks much better than the factory CAS but also the fact that I really want this car to be as reliable as possible (remembering it is a 24 year old car) and I had heard of a fair few people having problems with the CAS so I figured why not.

So now about the same time I bought those I found a site from another build up page on here called perfectrun. Man did that open up many more options for aftermarket parts than i had ever dreamed of!

So I put together a shopping list and was getting ready to purchase when I read a post on the SAU FB page. It mentioned a guy by the name of Jesse Streeter. Everyone on the post was raving about how good and cheap he was so I shot him an email.......and they were right. He was even cheaper than perfectrun which were already quite cheap. He was easy to deal with and very flexible. I sent him the parts and part numbers, I received the quote within 24 hours. Can't recommend him more!

[Shoota_77]

The old "while the engine is out" scenario..... I said that about 2 years ago! Mine went along the lines of "while the engine is out I may as well build an RB30...." what a mistake that was!

Keen to see how it all progresses, well written too! A little bit of grammar and story goes a long way to making a build thread a good read!

Best of luck.

[Natemarian]

While I was organizing the parts from Japan, exchanging emails between Brett and Jesse like crazy to figure out what I needed. A friend and I decided I needed to make a new intake since he is a boiler maker and I couldn’t justify dishing out $1500 for a greddy suction intake. So we started pulling the intake off, however when I pulled the twin turbo pipe off I was concerned to find this!

Uh Oh! Oil in the intake! :$

Naturally I was a bit concerned so I made a few calls to a few mates who are no stranger to RB's with much more power than mine. They all reassured me that this is common in cars running a fair bit of boost and if I wanted to avoid it, run a catch can.......I ordered a hi-octane catch can that afternoon lol (The car is currently at BC Auto and Brett was going to check the compression before commencing work, haven’t had a call so I’m assuming all is good).

Figuring there would be oil elsewhere I decided I should take all the piping off and give it a proper clean out.

This was when the real issue surfaced.

One of the previous owners has obviously had a fair hit with a ripple strip/speed bump/Sasquatch. I checked the rest of the car, from what I could see it was all straight and there is no rust or ripples anywhere so that was a relief.

I was lucky enough to see on a buy/swap/sell page an r33 GTR being wrecked locally (this is rare, I live in a small town between Sydney and Melbourne) and just my luck, it had a Just Jap Racing 100mm intercooler. I wasn't sure if it would fit and neither was the guy who was wrecking it, but when he offered it to me for $120 I figured it was worth the gamble.

People on forums had said the JJR coolers didn’t fit very well. To those people I say this. Don't be lazy, take the front reo off and they fit perfectly.

It was while the front bar/reo was off I noticed how poor the reo was.

That was after a fairly long night with the dremel tool, it was very haggard before this. Whoever put the n1 vents in obviously didn’t bother opting for an n1 front reo

I also noticed some very minor rust on a small part of it, let the paranoia begin (credit to Antz R32 build for being as pedantic as myself about rust). I spent the next few days (in my spare time) sanding it back to bare metal.....by hand.....yep.

Rust treated and rattle can sprayed black.

While I was at it decided to break out the nightshade and tint the indicators......first time.....maybe a couple too many coats? lol

Before:

After:

Believe it or not they actually still light up exactly the same, maybe because of the two globes in the indicators instead of one??

[Natemarian]

The old "while the engine is out" scenario..... I said that about 2 years ago! Mine went along the lines of "while the engine is out I may as well build an RB30...." what a mistake that was!

Keen to see how it all progresses, well written too! A little bit of grammar and story goes a long way to making a build thread a good read!

Best of luck.

Thanks mate! I think anyone who has had the motor out has been down a similar path haha. I wouldn’t mind a 2.8 down the track, don’t think I’ll ever go a 3.0

I read a fair few build threads myself and always find I enjoy the ones with a bit more story and character so I figured I would try and make mine a little interesting

[Tyranus]

Congrats with the buy and nice progress, welcome to the BNR32 family.

[Natemarian]

So now I had the intercooler fitted, I figured I really should get a hard piping kit. I managed to pick one up from a Facebook page (where half my parts for this build come from lol) I can’t quite remember how much but I remember it is Just Jap Racing and it was over $100 less than retail and still brand new as the owner had changed to an ARC twin entry intercooler.

The piping itself was a good fit but I will admit it was a bit tight and the pipe joining to the plenum needed the silicon cut down to have any hope of fitting. After many a swear word the piping kit was on!!

(I double clamped all the joins to make sure I never had to do this again lol)

Next to do was to start reassembling the front end.

Grill back in, new look indicators in. All looks pretty good I think, better than the silver mesh that was originally there haha P.S. please excuse the level of dirt on the car. It had sat for quite a while by this point.

[Natemarian]

Congrats with the buy and nice progress, welcome to the BNR32 family.

Thanks mate. I have had the car about a year now.....still barley had any seat time. It must be a GT-R haha.

[Natemarian]

Ok so now on to the proper mods. A lot of them I didn't get a chance to take a photo of because a build thread wasn't even entering my mind to be honest, hopefully I have enough to keep it interesting.

First thing to be added to the 'while the motor is out' list was a new front differential. I was originally going to go a Quaife as recommended by Trent Whyte but Brett was pretty adamant on using a Cusco LSD, after having a chat it turns out that’s what they used on their WTAC car so that stopped any objection from me

The next thing was an oil cooler and filter relocation. Due to my wanting to do a fair bit of track work I was highly recommended to get some form of oil cooler. Luckily for me, one day later on SAU Classifieds a Blitz oil cooler with thermostat and filter relocation popped up.

Obviously I didn’t unwrap the cooler itself but you get the idea. I managed to pick it up for $350 posted which I thought was a good deal.

Next I managed to pick up a new Nitto clear timing cover (to match my rods lol) so with that I realized I have no idea what the current timing gears look like. On that note I decided to order a set of HKS cam gears and timing belt to match.

I've heard the older HKS timing gears tend to wear very quickly but from what I’ve been told they have fixed this issue. Only one way to find out I guess!

After that, while I was chatting with Brett and mentioning how much track work I want to do/this cars possibility of becoming a dedicated WTAC car in the future, he recommended if I could stretch the budget that I should get a Full-Race ETS-Pro AWD controller. He said it was the best thing they found to get rid of the notorious R32 understeer and also gives you a lot of flexibility in different conditions.

Unlike a conventional piggy back AWD controller the ETS-Pro is a full replacement system including g-sensor. It reacts faster than the factory set-up (.023 of a second from memory but don't quote me on that) and has a gain knob to adjust the sensitivity of the set-up. On top of this it has completely customizable maps so you can change things like how much power the front wheels get in individual gears, how fast and hard the transfer case engages and so on and so forth.

(Obviously some images I am now pinching from Google just to keep the posts interesting and break up the writing)

Also I had a chance to chat to Ant (check out his build) and he recommended while the motor is out I switch to NISMO engine mounts....so I did lol.

Ant also said (as he has the same turbos) that the actuators that come on them start to lose efficiency at around 20psi. Since I was already on 20psi and was hoping for a bit more power I decided on HKS actuator upgrades as well.

So remember how earlier I said I couldn't justify $1400+ for the greddy intake? Wellllll I maybe, sorta of, kinda got one lol. They look awesome and after chatting to Jesse Streeter i found I could get one for under $900 which is how I justified it to myself when I agreed to it haha!

While I was at it I picked up a NISMO oil cap.....just cause.

I think that will do for this post. There's a few more parts to get put up and ill post up a full list of the current mods getting done in case I missed anything.

[Tyranus]

I had greddy piping aswell it looks great in the engine bay.

[Natemarian]

In every Nissan I have ever owned as well as almost all of the ones my friends have had they have all had over heating issues. I decided if I'm going to track it an aftermarket radiator was definitely on the cards. I eventually decided on Trust just because I like Trust/Greddy.

Now I don't know what the standard blow off valves on GT-R's are like since there is two (there is a surprising lack of information) but I know on most cars the factory blow off valves tend to lose efficiency once the boost goes even a few PSI above stock. Considering I am running more than double stock boost and looking at the dyno print out that came with the car you can see a drop in boost pressure up high which indicates that the BOV's are probably losing spring pressure slightly, I decided something aftermarket was necessary.

Now with any Japanese car if you search blow off valve you’ll probably be reading your option list for days. I was pretty confident I was going to go GFB just because they are local and they do good quality stuff. I have a liking for the new and shiny stuff so when I saw that they just released a new BOV I emailed them for the details (it was still not on the site). It was the deceptor pro 2. Very cool bit of gear with an electronic valve to change it anywhere between atmo and plumb back..............it was also very expensive since the GT-R has two BOV's the electronics had to be custom made to work off one controller and in sync with each other.

They claim it will take more boost than a car will ever run. I plan to test that one day

Now these next couple were impulse buys from FB pages that I saw ridiculously cheap and could not pass up lol.

First up was an A.I. surge tank with twin outlets and brackets. I always wanted an A.I. setup just because they do amazing quality work.

Pictured don’t do this thing justice as to how well manufactured they are. However it was unknown at the time of purchase but I know now it has a bosch 023 fuel pump (biggest in-tank they make) so it is currently not necessary, it will be once I go to e85 though ;P

Next (and the one I am most excited about) is a haltech platinum pro ecu. I was planning to run one anyway but when this bad boy popped up for half retail and was in perfect working order I had to snatch it.

Another add on I was excited about (I get excited about the little things) is I managed to pick up a GENUINE HKS oil filler cap. I'm sure you are aware of how rare these things are, especially new and in box.

(I keep the box and instructions safely in the closet lol)

AND WE ARE DONE!! (Well sort of) this is the stage where the car was ready to be sent off to BC Auto.

All loaded up with boxes/testing out the new Sony action cam before I head off for WTAC VIP style

(^^^ note to self, don't move until the red light turns off or it goes blurry ^^^)

[GTR_JOEY]

Hey mate, good to see your using quality parts all round

I noticed your running the standard "twin turbo" pipe

Would you be interested in purchasing a modified pipe that helps increase response and power and prevents turbo shuffle?