R33 GTS-T 5 Speed - Update 4

well some good news and some bad news today. It's amazing that even though you are so busy at work you can always find the time to organise something for the car. If it was someone wanting a meeting or having to go and pay bills you could not find the time but today i sneaked out to SW motorsport for an update.

I had received a call from Stewart that was not a great one, the assurances that the gear lever will be in the stock position has not worked out exactly to plan. Kind of a fair way off plan actually but unfortunately i am to far into it to pull out so we are going to have the bend the shifter a little and cut/modify the section where the lever comes through the floor.

The good thing is that the gearbox is in good nick (thanks Kim), it had been in the back of my mind for so long now it was a relief that everything was ok. The clearances around the bell housing were also great and meant no modifying the transmission tunnel so another bonus but the shifter location.....

A picture speaks a 1000words so here is a couple of photos from my phone.

The transmission tunnel clearence is great but need to crack the engine cross member with the extra thickness of the twin plate clutch when pulling it out or putting it in.

Here is the shifter location, a fair whack out and some work needs to be done.

We just sat it in there to get an idea of how far off and as you can see it is a fair bit,

R33 GTS-T 5 Speed - Update 3

Wanted to get down the breakdown of costs, spoke with Stewart today and covered them off. The main issue with the clutch is that the pressure plate is warped, so far it still is working and i can purchase a new pressure plate for $365 but the thought process is that i can probably get another 6months life left and then run a rebuild kit through it now i know what the condition of the clutch is in.

Breakdown

• Bell housing - $700
• Front Gearbox gasket - $20 (when you crack the case need to replace)
• Oil Synthetic - $50 
• Tail shaft - $650

             Falcon single piece shaft shortened to length
             New Front Splicer Yoke
             New Rear Splicer Flange

• Thrust Bearing - $25
• Labour - $600

Total $2045

Couple of things i picked up
SR20DET has a 20mm bearing carrier, RB25 has 16mm
Clutch is TS2BD – 205mm
Current disc thickness is 3.65mm, std is 4.2mm
Main issue is with pressure plate warped and will fail before thickness of clutch plate becomes an issue

R33 GTS-T 5 Speed - Update 2

snuck out of work today and having already put the bell housing in the boot this morning i ducked out to SW to check out the car and see what the clutch looked like.

Unfortunately when i arrived about 2pm they were having lunch so i felt kind of bad but Stewart said hello and after finishing off his sandwich showed me over the car. Whilst i was waiting i snapped some shots of the modified bell housing before it had been cleaned up and ground back.
Bit rough looking i must admit but all the edges and fins get ground down to blend in apparently - famous last words?

We went over to the car and looked at the drive shaft to see if the uni joints were ok and unfortunately they were cactus as i suspected, the drive line noise i had been hearing was in some part to do with this along with also finding out a new thrust bearing is in order as well.
Going to go with option 2 as per previous post as can't use the standard tail shaft and simply cut off the end as the uni's are worn.

We took the pressure plate off the clutch to inspect the discs and intermediate plate, you can see some heat marks on both plates along with the flywheel. There is some meat left on the clutch but not much so Stewart is going to measure the material left and see if we can get away without replacing.
Not sure if i should just replace as the pressure plate is not flat now so i think i might have further issues

Miss Fire - Update (Hopefully Fixed Now)

Yesterday before dropping off the car we went for a little drive where I was able to use some full throttle applications and change through the gears a bit. I didn’t get to go full on through the corners mainly because of the gearbox in the boot but it was enough to get a feel for the car and  the car felt strong again and thankfully didn’t seem to miss fire. As with my last post I am a little hesitant but it seems like it has been fixed.

What we did was to raise the fuel pressure via the Sard regulator and then retune the car, the reason we raised the fuel pressure was because the injector duty cycle on the ID1000’s were sometimes peaking at 97% on the track.

When you get above about 85% it meant the injectors were not linear in their control and the thought was it was dumping to much fuel into the car causing the miss fire. This was particularly the case on gear changes hence the reluctance for it to do it on the dyno.

It is the same with all injectors and you can see on this graph what I mean, right at the end of the graph you can see the curve change from a linear rising amount and it flattens out.

What happens is when the car is tuned if you can imagine you have a linear base for the fuel as you tune and then right when the engine is at peak power or rev’s that linear base changes and you have trouble picking where and when it is changing. This is the reason people always say that you should not run your injectors over a certain percentage duty cycle as it can cause leaning out or in my case cause over fuelling (probably the better of the two)

Voltage also has a big effect on the injectors so it is critical that you get a good amount of power to them.

R33 GTS-T 5 Speed - Update

Today I dropped off the car at Stewart Wilkins after a nice little drive with James on the way. Strapped in the R33 gearbox in the boot of the Nissan with an old sleeping bag and heavy cardboard box to make sure it didn’t move. It was quiet solidly strapped in J

We ducked out and to the workshop and spoke with Stewart. He is an unassuming guy, very quietly spoken and it was interesting talking with him. You got the impression he had been around for a while and didn't come across as cocky or full of himself, kind of reminded me a bit of my grand father who was a motor mechanic with his own service station. James was asking lots of questions and looking around the place and i was kind of just sitting back trying to take it all in and see what was going on. We had a little look around the workshop at the varying cars predominantly rally based. A nice DR30 was in the front with some fairly nice work done to it which is apparently for sale as well.

Thought Rob and Alister would like this one - very nice indeed.

He had a bell housing already half complete sitting on the floor as he does a lot of them but mostly on an exchange basis not doing the whole conversion. This worries me a little just thinking about it but I take solace in the fact that he has been doing work with Nissans for a large number of years and is well respected and has a very good rep.

Hopefully everything will work out but there is a lot to go wrong and i think it is playing on my mind a bit

I have to decide what route I will take with the tail shaft, there are 3 options it seems but it depends on the condition of the standard tail shaft.

1. 1.       Keep the standard tail shaft and cut the end of it off and weld on a R33 end - $300
2. 2.       Use a common tail shaft from a ford and splice in the two ends - $650
3. 3.       Custom tail shaft - $850

It will depend on the condition of the current tail shaft and hopefully I will find out more on Monday once they pull the gearbox out.

R33 GTS-T 5 Speed

Well I have had an r33 gtst gearbox in the shed for a while now which I picked up for a fair price from a good friend and with the tax return money I received recently I thought I might splurge a little and get it installed. I have held off because of the extra expense but with the power the car is making I am worried about blowing up a perfectly good gear box that I could sell and get money back on.

There seems to be a lot of options with the Nissan Z32 or R33 box with spacer plates etc or alternatively you can go the cut and shut approach where you get an sr20 bell housing and cut the end of the r33 bell housing and weld the sr20 and r33 bell housings together.

Sounds quiet simple but it is quiet difficult to do and I have herd stories of workshops that have done the same conversion not welding the bell housing on 100% straight. Doesn’t sound that bad but it causes issues with the input shaft and thrust bearings wearing out and then you have to keep pulling the box out to fix.

A lot of people steer away from this type of conversion because of this specific reason but a while back I looked into different places that do the conversion and Stewart Wilkins in Mulgrave NSW has done a large number of these and has a specific jig that he uses to make sure it is 100%.

Hopefully this will end up the right choice but Stewart originally started SSS wreckers in Sydney with a partner (Gary, you might have seen him on the news as the auto parts importer from Sydney?) and later split amicably and Stewart started Stewart Wilkins motor sport focusing a lot on Datsun’s and rally. In hind sight he would have been better off with a half share in SSS but I guess hind sight is a beautiful thing.

The plan is to drop off the car on Saturday morning and leave it with Stewart to perform the conversion. I am a bit worried about overall costs as it was originally $600 to do the conversion but now I need to throw in a tail shaft and labour to pull out and fit the gear box as well as gearbox oil/thrust bearing. Also if the existing clutch has enough meat left on it which when the engine came out a little while ago the feedback was that it was on its way out.

Bit worried if i have done enough research on the subject and if i come out of this with a limp and a lighter wallet as this could end up blowing the budget again which won’t be good considering we just had to pay for the house air conditioner, my trip to Melbourne, 18 tonnes of retaining wall soil and a fair few other things that all came on the credit card at once.

wish me luck.

Miss Fire - Update

Have been chasing an update from Unigroup from about Thursday last week but was not to worried as I have nothing planned with the car this order last week but justed wanted to know if the issue was fixed.

Thought I would drop around on Saturday about 11am to see how things were going and rocked up only to find the roller door down and no one home. Called and left a message that I had dropped by and got a text back on Saturday night that he will be back on Monday.

Working away on Monday and about lunch time I was thinking I should call Unigroup when to my surprise the phone rang with Unigroup on the other end. (Pretty freaky stuff).

Unigroup were very apologetic saying that they had been quiet busy last week and even Thursday night had slept at the workshop after trying to get the RX7 sorted for the race day on Friday. It must have been satisfying as the RX6 won it’s class and came third outright so seems like it was worth it. I was not to worried as they had fitted me in at short notice but I just wanted to find this darn issue with the miss fire.

He had found a couple of issues

First was putting the injector duty back into the linear range which is what we had been talking about and he had re-tunned the car after bumping up the fuel pressure.

Second issue was a small leak from the T piece near the throttle body which needs to be replaced, will sort this out soon.

Third was the EGR valve has stuck open and was leaking, they suggested that I remove the piping to the manifold but must have not looked to hard as it was already removed to which they were surprised. I might remove the intake side as well over the coming days as it really doesn’t do anything anymore and can be a cause for leaking.

Dropped round on Monday after ducking away from work for “lunch” and we went for a drive, car felt strong and didn’t seem to miss fire. We had the laptop hooked up and got the car up to temp before trying to make it knock again and it didn't.

There was some hesitation a little so i am not 100% that everything is ok and i want to go for another drive but at least i have the car back now.

Rocker Cover Bolt Kit - Looks OK?

Was looking around and found these - $31 which is cheap considering what Nissan want for them.

http://www.probolt-australia.com/Products/11040001000200060004

Miss Fire - Update

Organised to drop over to unigroup today and take the car for a spin with the AFR meter hooked up. The aim was to find the miss fire problem and with everything hooked up after going for a short drive we got some miss fire but the AFR's were fine.
We ran it then taking 10% fuel out and it fixed the issue, the mixtures were OK with the 10% fuel but apparently a little to lean for a car that sees the track.
Back to the suggestion that the injectors were running at over 90% and are not linear in there curve and harder to control,we decided to look at bumping up the fuel pressure.
Check the fuel pressure base it was running 50psi which was higher then expected and with the bosch 044 we could run a bit higher so bumped it up to 60psi.
We then chucked the computer in as well and went for a drive to adjust the maps and unfortunately it made things worse, will have to run it on the dyno and have a think about what else it could be.

I still think it is something to do with gear changes and the BOV returning but we are not sure and i think it will take some time to fix.

Talking to unigroup the new surge tank might need some modifications as suggestions it won't be the best thing as it is mounted length ways. Will have to have another look at things and talk to andrew.

Miss Fire - Update

Called Unigroup on Monday and spoke with them about the miss fire issue, suggestion was to change spark plugs but keeping the same gap.

Changed over the plugs yesterday and whilst i was at it added some extra earthing to the coil packs as suggested by the sutton brothers.

Went for a drive tonight and sure enough it still happened, as it comes onto boost it miss fires kind of splutters then gets going.
I went for a bit of a drive and was thinking about a few things when nearly home i thought i might try taking 10% fuel out, just a little stab of the throttle to see if anything happens.

Sure enough BINGO!!!! no miss fire, quickly check the knock levels which are low and give it a big bit of stick. Sweet still no miss fire.

Will try and give unigroup a call in the morning but it looks as though the tune is a little to rich and dumping to much fuel in as the boost comes on.