My Skyline, the story so far … (part five)
Now that I had my first drift day under my belt, and I had started to get to grips with clutch initiations. It was time to make some more upgrades and continue with ongoing work on the car. The first thing was to finally get rid of the 4 stud hubs on the rear and replace them with matching 5 stud hubs from an R33 GTST.
The process was slightly different to the fronts as I didn’t have a full hub setup to replace them with. So instead I had to take the hub assembly off of the rear of the car un fasten the bolts on the back of the hub and then with the whole thing suspended so that only the hub could move, hammer the hub free using a large socket on the back.
This also included upgrading the rear caliper brakes from the stock single pot to a much better twin pot set up. the process was relatively straight forward, however I did make one school boy error! I’d managed to put the calipers on the wrong sides (despite them having L and R stamped on them.) So while testing I found that the pedal would go soft while driving…. yup dangerous! If you’re ever not sure or your can’t see a stamp the bleed nipple always goes to the top of the caliper!
As a result of various discussions following the drift day I decided that since I didn’t know the history of it, I would replace the clutch with something that could stand up to more abuse. So I sourced myself a Stage 2 Competition clutch kit from Conceptua Tuning.
When I started to take everything apart I quickly realised that while there was a pretty good (but very old) Exedy clutch in there, since my car was a GTS it was running a smaller flywheel than a GTST would. Thankfully after speaking to Conceptua (who were extremely helpful, definitely recommend them!) I bought a stock RB25DET flywheel to bolt the new clutch to.
Next time I hit the track I wouldn’t have to worry about any clutch slip ruining my day.