350z Thunder Wagon (UK)

[Reeco]

So Progress started yesterday.... here's some generic "i did something" photos

Coilover


Up on the ramps with my old man and josh.


Everything was going sweeter than usual, life is so much easier with ramps or maybe i'm just to used to doing everything on the driveway? but then my rear toe adjust bolt decided to snap, with most of it still inside the rear lower wishbone bush we have to cut it out and replace it. This was at 3 yesterday so Nissan was closed and euro car parts don't do that shit. After a flick through the web josh found the bush but at £110 a pair. Turns out its cheaper (and easier) just to buy the whole wishbone second hand with the bush still in it. so ill be ordering that tonight.

We finished fitting the coilovers, and chucked the Rotifroms on the front without spacers for now. we left the bush in to get home. was dodgy enough driving it without a toe bolt already so i didnt want to tempt fate. Especially by adding spacers.

So now we have to wait until next weekend! Current to do list:
Replace offside rear wishbone (spring mount)
Adjust ride height to baller status height.
Get the spacers on.
Get the Rotiforms on the rear.
Give the rear arches a tickle with the roller.
Get damper settings right.
Do a full Geo.

Ride height is looking a tad better, even with "out of the box" ride height setting with the extreme drop kit, so heres a few pictures.
Sorry for the mobile quality pics, i'll get some better ones up when its all done.





Was a bit worried about moving away from the all black look, but i actually prefer the contrast, think it also matches my tails, indicators and Z side badges.

[Guy_Benoist_]

Ohh it's guna look so sick with those wheels... i want i want... what are the coilovers? i'm not sure i want to fully slam my daily but it'd look better with a small bit of stance for sure

[Reeco]

Ohh it's guna look so sick with those wheels... i want i want... what are the coilovers? i'm not sure i want to fully slam my daily but it'd look better with a small bit of stance for sure

Cheers dude, Have them on all 4 corners now and it's looking better
Coilovers are BC racing extreme drop kit colivers with 14kg and 12kg springs. but if your not going fully slammed, i'd suggest save yourself £150-200 and buy the normal BC racing ones or HSDs, as even the out of the box ride height is pretty damn low on these





Also update coming later, and hopefully the BIG fished one tomorrow evening if i can pull myself out of the car for 10 minutes

[hi its me alec]

Those tails are hideous!

[Reeco]

Those tails are hideous!

[Reeco]

Bare with me, these might not make much sense all being posted on the same day, but I've been updating my thread on the Z forums and not on here so i'm trying to get the posts from the last few days on here.
21/08/13
Decided to do things that didn't need the ramps or workshop.

So after struggling to get off my slightly inclined drive to swap places with Z number 2 (my dads) i got to work getting the wheels off the rear and test fitting the rotiforms with my spacers to see where and how much rolling i need, sorry no pics of this, I'm saving it for the finish, fingers crossed this weekend

Needless to say 40mm spacers add some serious beef on the back end, but strangely it looked like i didn't need to do much rolling. This is where the fun began, due to the now pretty small gap between the hub and arch it was a right pain in the arse to get the roller in position. But with help from my dad we got it in the right place, and nervously started rolling. Seemed to take a lot longer than i expected, but it did start to go. I didn't bother with pics of this as its such a minimal roll its not that noticeable on camera so have a picture of an arch roller instead.



After that was done, we bolted the spacer back on... its a beast!



I put the wheels back on, started to torque the nuts and quickly realised one of the studs was just spinning in the spacer so back off with the spacer and we tried to punch it back in but it made no difference. so after a quick trip down the road to an engineering company we were told they can take all the studs out and repress them with loctite. Aparantly this is a 30-45 minute job, but they still decided to "book it in" for tomorrow and said it was going to cost between 35 and 45 quid plus VAT!

Still optimistic, i thought i'd roll the other arch, but again we hit another hitch. This time actually my fault. We removed all the locking wheel nuts bar one at the workshop on saturday and replaced them all with normal wheel nuts, but down to laziness we put one back on and now i cant find my bloody locking wheel nut key! so as we speak tiger seal is (hopefully) fixing a socket that almost fits to the wheel nut ready to amaze everybody and undo the nut tomorrow!

22/08/13 MORNING
Quick update! Unsurprisingly the tiger seal locking wheel nut idea didn't work! Luckily I got a text this morning from my mate telling me he found the key in his workshop! So that was a massive ball ache saved, so got the last lenso off and rolled the other arch, went a lot easier and better than the last one, which I'm putting down to just having an idea what were doing this time.

Now I'm sat here waiting for the engineering company to call and ask me to come get my spacers. I also can't get into the workshop to fully finish it until Sunday now, the extra day of waiting is going to kill me, I'm itching to get it back on the road fully "lalalalalalala" .

Started thinking about other mods, at the moment I've decided I want to fit an INGS+1 style lip (I'm told genuine ones cost silly money) and might look for some side skirts, finished ride height dependant. Might look into prettying my engine bay up, I can't see the point of chasing performance figures now, all my mods have been "anti handling" mods.

AFTERNOON
Another quick update; The engineering company left a voice mail letting me know my spacers were ready to go, when i collected them (cost me 37 quid in the end) i was asked what i was torquing them to. i had been torquing them to 80ft/lb but when i told him this he gave me a concerned look and went to chat with some people out the back. according to them this was too high for what the spacers were made out of and he advised me to call superforma to see what they said.

I called their customer service number and the guy was really helpfull and said i should be torquing to the vehicles manufacturer's recommendations (70-90 ft/lb if im right?) So regardless i thought i'd play it safe, torque them to just 70ft/lb for now. Sounds like a bit of an old school wurzel mechanic thing to say but lets face it for years cars have just had their wheels tweaked up with the spider wheel braces you used to get and that's always done the job. I'm just going to be cautious, pull over at any sign of rumbling or wobbling. i wont be driving or cornering fast so I'm sure it will be fine. The spacer is still properly torqued to the hub anyway.

Now the back was fully "rotiformed" it was time to start up front. By now it's probably needless to say something else decided to cause a problem. See if you can guess what from this picture.



i was given 20mm spacers for the front, and until this point i totally forgot that the Z wheel studs exceed 20mm so you need either A) wheels with the slots in the back or B) massive testis to go balls out and slice off your wheels studs a bit. There's no way I'm doing anything to my studs, as you can see from the pics, the previous owner combated this by just tightening up to the studs...which in my opinion is just crazily dangerous, unless he didn't realize? so we came up with a slight bodge, but still a safer option than the previously stated of putting a 5mm slip on spacer behind the hub centric. which worked but then we realized the previous owner had given us the wrong nuts for the spacers so they don't actually sit in the spacer, which means the contact points would have been the spacer nuts, again it seemed dangerous, so the 20mm spacers came off.

Next option, knock the studs out of the 20mm spacers he gave me and press them into the 25mm spacers he gave me, this again turned out to be a disaster because the 25mm spacers don't match, ones a superforma, the other is unbranded and wont sit flat against the hub. we also weren't sure if the studs would just spin again like the last ones if we tampered with them to, so ditched this idea. so my ultra light spacers will be up for sale in a bit, relatively cheap without nuts for anybody who wants to buy them and some flush fitting nuts for them

So to fight against the front wheels looking pathetic compared to the rears we chucked some 5mm slip on spacers either side as a temp solution until i buy some new 25mm hubcentrics to beef the front right up!

So now back to the waiting game. Waiting to get into the workshop this weekend, replace the rear wishbone, drop the front some more and the rear... a little bit (check out the pic below for my current exhaust clearance) and do a full geo. Cant wait to post some pics of it done!

Exhaust clearance now!


02/09/2013
Okay! I've been slacking big time in terms of updating this, this was pretty much at finished stage on the 25th.
So I wont waffle on about what we did this time, I'll keep it brief.

We went back to the workshop that Sunday to finish up, and other than struggling to get it on the ramps everything went really smoothly, we fitted the rear damper adjust extenders that we forgot to fit last time, replaced the rear wishbone completely, dropped the ride height and did a full geo.

It was at one point fully decked to the stage you would have struggled to get a card between the tire and arch, but i was just getting silly amounts of tire rub under acceleration so it had to be raised about 4mm

It's all good at its current height, slight bit of rub under extreme cornering but nothing to stress about, 4 degrees of camber on all corners, although i want slightly more on the rears when i get adjustable arms.

So I'm going to pic whore now, the first few are with My mates S13 and my my old mans Z, the ones after are before and after shots (Lensos on out of the box coilover settings and Rotiforms with it wound down)





before and after shots:










Front wheels still need spacing out, I did order some 25mm spacers but they turned up and were for mazda hubs! so they're going back in exchange for Nissan ones. Also still waiting on my wheels to sell so i can get myself and INGS+1 lip!

[TheTynosaur]

It looks so much better with the nues

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