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.
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