AK Racing 2010

Today was awesome. Forsberg picked me up (thanks again buddy!)and we headed off to Car Studio Inc aka DMax USA. My type 3 kit, d1 front and rear fenders and roof wing all came in. Koji was still breaking apart wood containers with all of the new stuff in it so we gave him a helping hand and dug through both of them. Awesome guy, really glad to be working with them. My hood will be here at the end of the month.

Then we grabbed lunch @ my favorite ramen place Hakata Ramen Shin-Sen-Gumi. After that Kevin asked us to stop by the shop before we headed home to check out the simulator they’ve been working on. I can’t wait to play it, it looks amazing. I also saw he was getting to work on my engine harness. Should be getting that back tomorrow!

After that we headed back to the house where I found out my silvia non-projector headlights came in! Perfect timing. I was so antsy to put the new DMax Aero (4 piece kit + over fenders + roof wing), DMax corner lights, DMax blinker lights, DMax tail lights and silvia headlights on that I got to work right away. Didnt stop til 2:30am. AZNdoc Jack stopped by for a little while, while we ate dinner but other than that I worked almost 10 hours straight on this stuff.

Fitment on the DMax stuff was amazing, even for how bent up the core support and all the other misc problems. I am really impressed on the quality of all of the pieces. The car looks hard as nails and it was exactly what I wanted.

Still need to:
Make a bracket to hold up the middle of the front bumper to close the gap.
A lot of body work on the car itself especially around the drivers side tail light.
Fit rear bumper as soon as Teddy drops off the tail light garnish.
Fix Exhaust/switch canister.
Alignment/Corner Balance.
Dyno pulls to tune boost controller/see how much power I’m making.
Paint/Powder Coat.
Drift til my heart explodes.

Pictures:

Havent updated in a while. A lot has been happening and been done since the last post. I’ll try and make this as short as possible. Over the course of the last 3 or 4 days here’s what I’ve done, where I’ve been, etc.:

Picked up a bunch of parts from Ray over @ West Covina Nissan (thanks man!)
Picked up the T-Bolts I was missing from Road Race Engineering in Whitter, CA.
Kevin came over 2 nights in a row from about 9-3am.
Painless is 99% done.
Kevin and I decided to put the AVC-R in the engine bay so I cant touch it when I dont think the car is fast enough. (yes i am that retarded.)
We started the car, ran like crap for a few seconds then it smoothed out. Ran it for about 5 minutes.
Pulled the engine harness back off and Kevin took it so he can re-do the whole thing.
Relocated the battery to under the dash on transmission tunnel. Made a bracket for that.
Relocated the kill switch.
Kevin made a sweet bracket for the kill switch.
Made a bracket/mount for ECU under the dash…away from people’s feet.
Rinsed off my Takata Harnesses and let them hang out to dry.
Put in my seats.
Put in the harnesses
Tie rod drama. Ended up with: Tein Spacers, RX8 cut and shortened inner tie rods and Z33 Outter tie rod ends. Interesting to say the least.

Coming within the next week:

Body kit/Fenders – MONDAY! (today…in a few hours.)
Fitting above mentioned pieces.
Body work.

Within the next 2 weeks:

Alignment and Corner Balance @ Forsbergs shop.
Fix my exhaust @ Forsbergs shop.
Dyno…somewhere.

By the end of the month:

Paint
Powdercoat
Test day @ Balcony.
Drive until my heart explodes.

Also this month on October 17th is the last round of Formula D @ Irwindale. Go and scream your face off. I will be there doing just that.

Pictures:

Pair of Takata 4 point harnesses that Forsberg hooked me up with. They were super dirty so me and the wife sat there scrubing for about an hour with colorx 2 and now they are soaking over night.

Soak!

Cold Side IC piping complete. Still need to pick up 3 more t-bolts…but atleast I can start the car like this.

Damn it fits good.

Silcone.

ZOMBIE! Water Pump pulley from the B Dubb’s zombie mobile. I wrote zombie on it.

AVC-R Vacumm line’s routed and wire’s hidden.

Wednesday Agenda:
West Covina Nissan to pick up – Oil Filter, Spark Plugs, Z33 outter tie ride end, inner tie rod cv boots.
Install all of it plus my tein s14 inner tie rod ends.

Next Monday:
Pick up Full Kit, Fenders, Roof wing from DMax! Super Exicted.

Inbetween all of that ;
Sanding Roof.
Hopefully have kevin come over and finsh up the wiring.
Reassemble interior. Dash, Seats, Harnesses, Etc…

Hopefully my headlights come in soon…

-Alex

Front end is slowly coming together! IC/Rad/Oil Cooler mounted for good.

1 T-Bolt clamp away from being done with the hotside. Hoses ran for the PS resivour up in the top right, just need to tie them down to the strut tower some how. And “intake” made, it’s temporary for now just to get it going, definetly something I need to fix and put a real filter on.

Does this thing run yet? Are my non projector silvia headlights here yet? Did panda garage send me 2 passenger side silvia brackets? Did micheal jackson die? Who knows. Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow.

Light/Easy day.

Silvia headlight brackets and center bracket painted. Check.

Front end including rad supprt, part of the wheel wells, TC rod bracket’s and some other little things touched up/repainted. Check.

Made mounting tabs for my mishimoto fan’s to bolt onto my S14 Koyo. Check.

Dremeled out the backside of an S14 powersteering resviour and expoxied a bolt in there so I could relocate it. Check.

Relocated powersteering resviour next to clutch master cylinder. Check.

Bought all my body work supplies. Bondo Gold, Rustolem primer/filler, 3m sand paper 120-400 and 3m sanding blocks. I’ll get started on that this week.

Not a HUGE update but I did get a couple things accomplished today. First thing I decided to tackle was the wastegate, I figured I could just clean it up and put it back in the car. WRONG. The diaphragm shaft was completely seized inside the wastegate. So I had to disassemble the wastegate and fix all of it. I couldnt even get the diaphragm to move with a hammer. (so screw your variable boost Forsberg, this is unlimited infinity boost!) I spent a good 2 hours fixing it, a lot of cursing, light sanding, wd40 and bouncing souls it’s all finshed and back together. Definetly not what I expected to be doing tonight.

Before all of this, the fuel pump went out in our daily driver so I had to swap a new pump in it. That was fun too. Werid night, but I cant complain, everything worked out awesome.

Wastegate Disassembled.

Wastegate Diassembled close up.

Tial 38mm…they welded the damn dump tube on it..so its there…forever. This is the base where the diaphragm moves up and down in. It was completely seized up by rust.

Rust SUCKS. Finally got it loose and then I lightly sanded down the diaphragm shaft to make it as smooth as possible. It took me about 2 hours to make it work safely and properly.

Reinstalled. Check.

Bracket w/ AVC-R pressure sensor and MAP sensor for my boost gauge.

New List. Getting so much shorter.

Parts are coming in, Kevin is coming back to finsh the wiring and I just need to make a few more little brackets here and there and this thing is pretty much ready for all the body work!

Work in a few hours.

-Alex

Kevin and Sergio stopped by tonight so Kevin could help me “fix” my painless chassis harness. He ended up looking at it and said forget trying to fix it. So we took the dash out and he completely took it all out and started to re-do it. While he was doing that I was mounting my oil cooler core, shortening one of the stainless lines for it, switching my water pump pulley to a larger one and finshing up a small bracket.

It ended up being about 2am before Kevin and Sergio left, about 60% done with the painless they called it a night and I finshed cleaning up what mess I made and came in since I have work in the AM @ 1030…

Big thanks to those guys, really glad they could spare like 10 hours to help me get this stuff done!

Pictures!

List…it’s finally getting shorter and shorter…

Painless relay/fuse box mounted.

Wire/car explosion.

Oil cooler mounted and lines shortened.

Lines shortened big time, one line was atleast 6 inches longer, it was werid. FIXED!

My buddy Brian W. over @ MA-Motorsports hooked me up with a good price on his old larger diameter water pump pulley. Should help dramatically with water temps in the upper RPM’s.

Fresh Salsa, Fresh Tortilla Chips and Fresh donuts. Wife made all of it! We couldnt stop eating even though we were all super full. So good.

Tomorrow…errr today after work ill be right back in the garage, exicted to get this car DONE!

-Alex @ 3:14AM.

So last night I didnt get to start working on the car til about 11:30pm last night. Didnt finsh last til almost 1:45, came inside and was editing pictures to post up here and fell asleep at the keyboard…woke up at 4am and didnt know what happened.

I need to get an outter Z33 tie rod and an inner tie rod/cv boot to complete my setup. I realized last night that my car already has s14 inner’s and 1 Z33 outter so I just need to replace 1.

Today I need to finsh cleaning up my IC piping since it has the weld residue all along the inside of it and mount my oil cooler. If I can get the oil cooler mounted I can get the radiator put in place.

Getting so much closer!!

-Aex

Today felt like Christmas.

In the morning I went over to meet Bernard at DMax USA/Car Studio USA, awesome guys and I’m really happy to be working with them for the 2010 season. Today I picked up my coilovers, tail lights, corner lights and blinkers. At the end of the month when their container comes in I’ll go back and pick up: S13 Type III Silvia Kit (front/sides/rear), 40mm S13 Silvia Front Fenders, 50mm S13 Coupe Rear Fenders and S13 Coupe Roof Wing. My hood wont be in til the end of October unfortunately.

Then later on in the day Dousan came over and dropped off the knuckles, lower control arms, and intercooler piping that flybro’s dad welded up for me. Everything looks amazing, the Knuckles look insane I cant want to measure and drive these things to see how much angle they actually give me.

Forsberg also hooked me up with a pair of old Takata 4 point harnesses that he had laying around. No pictures, but they just need some TLC aka colorox 2 and they’ll be good as new!

Thanks to everyone who has helped me this far, it has been most appreciated.

I’m going to install the coilovers, knuckles and lca’s tomorrow.

Enough talk, time for pictures.

DMax!

Coilover box.

Catalog and Hood Sticker.

1 Front and 1 Rear Coilover, 8k/6k super nice stuff, cant wait to drive it.

D1 Spec.

Camber Plate.

Inverted Monotube.

These things are cool, they have plates to allow the use of s13 or s14 knuckles due to the different bolt sizes.

Soft. Hard. Twist. Adjustment is on the bottom side of the coilover.

Rear Coilover. They are super light, I was impressed. What I forgot to get a picture of was the long slit/hole on the along the bottom perch so you can see how much you’re adjusting for easier adjustments.

Soft. Hard. Upper pillow ball mount.

Adjustment tools and the sticker measuring lines for the rear coilover.

Hmmmm?

Clear Corner Lamp and Blinker Light for my silvia face!

Clear Silvia Corner Lamp. Really nice and the mounting tabs look more durable than the OEM ones which is cool because I’ve broken more than one of those.

Clear Blinker light.

Box. It’s brown.

Crystal Tail Lamp to replace my busted one’s.

Side View.

Boxed lower control arms and Flybro Mendoza Spec Modified Steering Knuckles!

Mendoza Spec! His dad is amazing, such quality work.

Boxed LCA’s Mendoza Spec, he even left me a nice cut out so I could still put my tension rod bolt’s back in.

Another view.

And another.

1 Piece intercooler piping, Mendoza spec welded. Cold Side. Made from like 3 different IC piping kits that I had laying around.

1 Piece intercooler piping, Mendoza spec welded. Hot Side.

That’s pretty much it for today. Tomorrow (well…technically today but anyways..) I’m going to put all this stuff in!

More updates, more consistently from here on out. Ball has been rolled.

-Alex