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I thought it about time im started documenting something to show the hours of blood, sweat and tears that myself and my bessy mate Fil have put into my car since I bought it 4 or 5 years ago from Sterte Garage in Poole Sterte Garage Poole
Having owned an R34 GTT and the an R33 GTR, I decided to stop wasting time with cars that didnt come up to scratch and go for the one and only Skyline to own so Anthony, (at Sterte) kindly agreed to a swap for my beautiful Midnight Purple R33 GTR with my now owned Mitsibushi Fiji Blue R32 GTR.
(sorry no offensive its just my personal preference, they both really are fantastic cars! :thumbsup.

On my way down to swap the cars and only 2 miles form his garage, my R33 had a massive electrical fault and basically every ECU in the car was blown, (the alternater was later found to be charging at over 20 volts). Anthony honoured the agreement, (even though I turned up with my car on a flat bed recovery truck).uke: cheers Ant!!!:thumbsup:

So anyway I had to get the 33 fixed, which took forever as we had to go through every part of the car to see what was effected. But in the end the deal was done and I would be the proud owner of a very clean R32 GTR :clap:

So the plan was to get her to me in time to take to that years Le Mans but alas she wasnt ready to take and so ended up going in my Daewoo Nexia, that i hauled around in at the time. :nervous: contd........

 

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So anyways as you do with any GTR i started with the messing! :smokin: Its a thing that is essential to true GTR ownership, and this wasnt to be an exceptional case!

 

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The above pic is where my car spends every winter without fail. It doesnt get driven past the end of October. It gets tucked up in here and abused by me and Fil, we've both learnt so much about her in those very cold winter months, lying under her in minus degree's of winter snow, knuckles chocpped to bits, but boy oh boy has it been worth every single minute! (hope Fil's lovely wife and my ex agree!)


So the first thing we did in the long list of things was to drop the entire rear subframe with diff and hubs attached, everything as I had a noisy rear over pot holes. After stripping the subframe of everthing and having it shot blasted and then POR15 painted and fitted we then pressed in a set Nismo subframe bushes. A pleasant surprise was that written ontop of the diff housing in Japanese were some characters and the words Tomei, :clap: looks like the diff had been taken care of already!

So while we were down there we decided to remove the rear Hicas and fit a lockout bar from RB Motorsport, (really well made piece of kit).

 

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All the diff bushes were replaced too and while the subframe was out we completely POR15'd the are around and above it, (the condition was amazing, so i was chuffed to bits!). :clap:
Replaced the sus arm bushes too with Super Pro bushes

 

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So after a good winter of grabbing time here and there when we could we finally finsihed the rear end of my car and it looked sweet!!!!

Getting the rear subframe on and off with all attached it no mean feat believe me but we managed it thanks to a couple of trolley jacks and a really great double garage at my foolks place.

So we got it all back on and took it for a spin down the lane up to my folks place and errrrrr :nervous: the noise was still there!!!! ooopss, oh well we had replaced everthing and it would give me a great piece of mind anyways!


I parked it up in the garage and came ou the next day and there seemed to be a large puddle of coolant under the front of my car! :runaway:

I topped up the coolant, started the car, (carefully) and there was a fine jet of coolant coming front beneath the intake plenum! arse!!!!

 

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Now for anyone who has had to take the plenum off will know its an absolute pain in the bum job to do, and the problem was once the plenum was off there was no was of knowing which of the coolant pipes was leaking, so we decided to do the only thing we could and replace every single hose with new Samco replacements, there is a coolant hose kit by Samco but its only got about 4 pieces and there are plenty of other types of hoses below the plenum whcih we also did as whilst we were down there and all that!

 

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Next, again after realising how much of a headache it was to get below the plenum, never mind getting it off, i decide to fit a remote oil filter relocation kit, got one of the early Driftworks ones

Bolted it all up and hoped for the best.

The cooler that came with it was pretty substancial but an ARC one came on the market about the same time so, after allot of new dash 10 hoses and fittings got that fitted too :clap:

:smokin:

 

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Anyway on my first outing Bath to where i live I popped in to see a lady friend who was interested in my GTR, and took her out for a spin, we stopped at a Shell garage to fill up and under the forecourt flood light i noticed oil on my front bumper, what seemed to have happened was a small stone had flicked up off the road from a car in front and of all places hit one of the fins on my brand new, (to me) ARC oil cooler, it was knackered!!!!

 

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Next thing to come whilst I was in the engine bay was a Greddy alloy rad from the lovely Matty32

And Greddy oil filter relocation kit and cooler again from Matty, to replace the broken ARC one. Turns out when i took the Driftworks one off there wasnt a very good seal with the block anyway and there was a slight oil leak so im sure it was fate that the stone hit the cooler! This time though we managed to ge the new sandwich plate on without the plenum comming off! Phew!

 

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Also whilst i was in there i replaced the old R32 GTR powersteering pump with a nice lighter R33 GTR one, and fitted a 350Z power steering resevoir too to get it out of the way up front.

R32

R33

The brackets look look similar but arent so you need to make sure you have that too!

 

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I did have this dash dodger roll cage fitted to my car

You can just see it here in this pic of my car in Arnage high street

 

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But it wouldnt fit with my new Recaro SPG XL's so it had to go, (making way for a bespoke weld in on in the future).

they wouldnt go back far enough for me to get behind the steering wheel!

 

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About the same time I removed all of my dash and instrument surround and had it all flocked, here Thomas & Vines Ltd - UK's premier electrostatic flock coating company
In my mind it helps update the look of the old R32 GTR interior and also has obvious benefit of not reflecting in the windscreen when youre driving along.

it is black but because of its surface properties its not the easiest thing to photograph!

without carpets, and at the start of the interior strip!

I also painted my dash vents with Plasti-kote matt black to help them fit with the rest of the dash.

 

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OK so with the interior and engine bay work mostly done for the year i started thinking about brakes. Mine was luckily fitted with R33 GTR Brembo's from when I bought it from Sterte but I never really felt that they were 100 % up to the job.

 

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Anyway these Brembo F50's came up for sale on the forum with brakets and 343 discs with seperate bells.

Being a bit of a tart, and being a lover of restoring things I wasnt going to put them on my car as they were! :blahblah:

First I stripped them back to the anodised surface that is below the original Brembo paint

Then luckily found some plastic caps, (think theyre off scaffolding or somthing) wich were the exact size of the piston seal holes on the calipers!

So no need for awkward masking around the piston bores. I then sprayed the caliper first with a gold high temp paint and then stuck them on gas mark 5 in my oven! (was electric actually!)

just to cure the paint before the top clear coat. Applied the high temp Brembo stickers and then applied the clear coat and popped them back i the oven! (be really careful doing this, im not recommending anyone else do it if your not sure, I take no responsibility for your safety either from oven miss use or your wife/better half when she finds out what you been upto!).

The final thing, not bad seeing how nasty they were when i got them after all those countless miles and track days!

 

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In the end after trying them up next to my Gold/Bronze wheels i just thought the gold looked too similar to the wheels so stripped them again and painted them silver with red brembo stickers this time, (i will prob do them again when i get new wheels too). :clap:

I then replaced all of the inner and outer seals with STOPTECH seals from Zecckhausen https://store.zeckhausen.com/catalog/index.php, they were really great to deal with and the parts came nice and fast and well packaged too!

 

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So with nice shiny brake calipers i went to fit them, too the old R33 Brembo's off and was faced with this!

Having adressed the rear suspension last winter i couldnt just bolt on and go! no way!
So i didnt a bit of a clean up on the whole lot! :thumbsup: And removed the backplates.

Thats much better!!! You can see here also im starting to trial fit the brake likes. I was lucky enough to have a spare set of F50's off an Jaguar XKR which i could use for test spacing etc and not scratch my newly painted calipers.

Oh I also got some brackets from my mate Al, (Lightspeed) to fit 355 rotors and managed to get some GTC ones fairly cheap! so decided to ditch the 343mm ones. (my mate Fil has bagged the spare F50's and the 343's for his Sil80 project).

 

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So now with the F50's up front im fairly happy with the way she stops!

I have some Aston Martin rear 4 pot Brembo's which will be mated to the larger N1 R34 rear disc's (cheers Al) this year sometime. Al has done a few calculations and the brake balance with the F50's should be pretty much spot on!

 

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The next thing, now i had a nice set of brakes and the engine bay supension felt pretty good and solid was to tidy up my rather messy interior. I had already stripped the carpet and sound proofing tar from the floor, (with a heat gun and white spirits, maybe not the safest or most recommended way to do it but it came out nice and clean, never again though!!!!) :chuckle:
(im pretty sure i used up one of my lives there!)
So i stripped everything out of the inside of the car and carfully masked off all of the windows, which took agaes, and i mean AGES!!!! the angels and all that from the inside are really trickey especially the rear one!

The following day i rolled it outside to find it had started to rain, only lightly but enough to make it awkward to spray the interior effectively! so......

My folks gazebo came in handy as an umbrella for my spraying antics! (actually looking at the pics i must have pushed it into the garage and then out agin the following day). Actually actually i remember now sitting on a car cover in its bag, instead of a seat and driving it back into the garage, what a hick!!!!