Back in the garage

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about the trials and tribulations of living with my beloved R32 Skyline. The main reason for this has been that the latter part of 2017 was chock-full of fun things going on in my personal life. Chief of which was that Lucy and I finally bought our first home together. It feels great to finally have somewhere we can make our own instead of pouring our hard earned cash into someone else’s pocket. Anyway, I’m getting off the point, but as you can imagine with something as huge as this going on in our lives it needed our full attention so rather than spending time with our beloved cars we had left them sitting on the driveway for a while.

Then at the start of this year I started getting the itch to get back to the track for more skids (and so has Lucy, but more on that later!) After a good friend of mine Steve messaged me asking if I wanted to do a drift day with him at Oulton Park in March, it would have been rude to turn it down. The chance to hit up another track, least of all this one. The reason being that I had actually been to a drift day at this track before with a couple of friends who I knew through work at the time.

We had attended one of these drift experience days where you get to do a specified number of laps in a drift car with an instructor sat in the passenger seat. It was a huge amount of fun even if it was over all too quickly, so the chance to go back there for a full day with my own car was not to be sniffed at.

There were a few small problems that needed addressing before the big day, chief of which was that since we moved house I had declared the car off the road as it needed an MOT and needed some work doing to make sure it was ready for it. Thankfully Steve offered up his garage to work in with it being the middle of winter and freezing cold outside. So the first job was to get the old girl loaded up on his trailer and transported to his house.

Next (after clearing a space in the garage and unloading the car) it was time to get her up in the air and start unbolting the exhaust, prop shaft and anything else that was going to get in the way of us removing the rear subframe (it’s a big help when your friend has a two post lift in their garage).

Once this was done, and the brakes etc. were removed and stowed away safely we loosened the subframe bolts and proceeded to lower the car down to a level where we could rest the subframe on axle stands, finally we lifted the car away from the frame.

Now it was time to pry the solid bushes out of the subframe. I’ve read mixed things about solid subframe bushes in the past most of which makes a lot of sense. However, having used the car as a daily and a drifter for more than two years I can say that solid bushes are not the way for me personally. They do help to stiffen the backend up, but in return, you end up with a lot more noise from the backend even the most minor of vibrations through the rear subframe turns into a pretty horrific sound and after a while starts to drive you round the bend.

So as I was removing the solid bushes I opted to go for a set of uprated polyurethane subframe bushes from Strongflex UK. I had bought bushes from Strongflex in the past for the Skyline and as well as being great value, I think they’re a great upgrade over stock rubber components.

While the subframe was off the car I also took the opportunity to swap out my welded diff for a viscous LSD I had spare, since I’m going to be putting the car through its MOT I needed to make sure there was no reason for the tester to fail it.

With all that bolted back together, we got the subframe bolted back onto the car and mounted everything back up, it was time to move onto the next issue, namely the knackered adjustable front upper control arms. I was promised some stock upper control arms but sadly they never came through. So I was forced to fork out for some more aftermarket ones and prior to fitting, I made sure they were all greased up to ensure that they wouldn’t seize up in the future. While I had the front wheels off it was also time to remove the 40mm wheel spacers I had on the front. While I was running the wider fibreglass front wings they worked pretty well but now that I’ve gone back to stock metal wings they were making me look like I was trying to go for that Formula D, wheels outside of your arch fitment so they had to go.

it felt like we were making good progress so I thought now was a good time to fit the bumpers, the only issue here was that I got rid of the big and by now battered BN Sports body kit some time ago, so they wouldn’t be going back on. But in their place, I had managed to source some OEM bumpers.

The front bumper is an OEM GTS bumper, I would have liked the GTR bumper but it seems they must be rare as poop from a rocking horse, so I went with what I could afford. It does sit pretty high on the front leaving a big gap but I have a plan for that, which I will talk about in a later post.

The rear bumper although needing some TLC looks great and its nice to see the iconic “Skyline” writing on the back again… even if someone has painted it pink! I was also a little worried about how the shotgun exhaust might look, but after taking a good look I still think it looks amazing.

The last job was a probably the biggest, or at least the one that needed the most thought, the battery relocation. Ever since I bought this car when it had just got off the boat from Japan ( and most likely for many years before that) the car had been running on a tiny Japanese battery. For a long time it had worked great but having left the car standing for a few months it quickly became clear that the battery was old, tired and in need of replacing.

I got myself a decent sized battery and Lucy bought me a battery box for my birthday. It might seem like a strange present to some but I asked her for it. The first step was to look at where, and how we were going to mount the battery box in the boot.

After a bit of discussion we decided it would be best to mount it on the passenger side of the boot floor as there was no fuel tank to get in the way,ad we also decided that we would build a cage to hold the battery in the box, the cage would also have threads that went through the bottom of the box and through the floor to hold everything securely in place.

Steve got to work measuring up for the battery cage while I started to strip the interior of the car ready to run some cable from the boot through to the engine bay.

For safety we put a 125amp megafuse on the postivite cable.

To save ourselves some time and work we reused the original battery strap from the engine bay.

The positive cable was routed across the back of the boot floor, then down the drivers side of the cockpit and out through a perfectly sized hole under the dash, then into the engine bay. The cable was kepy in place using P clamps that were screwed to the body at various points.

And to finish things off all the necessary wiring was connected to the new positive cable in the engine bay using one of these terminal blocks.

Rubber grommets were used where ever possible to ensure that he cable did not rub on any part of the bodywork. And with that it was time to put her back on the ground and test her for the first time.

There are still a couple of small things that need finishing up before I can put the car through it’s MOT, but I think I’m definitely on track to have her back on the road before my first drift day of the year in March.

To continue the story click here