This blog post is kind of inaccurately named. Whilst it is the first stage of this project build as far as referring to this actual vehicle, it is actually more like Stage 1.5 with stage one being the acquiring and the stripping of the R33 Skyline we did several months back. Some believed that this exercise was a money making ploy for GDL but the truth of the matter was it was never our car.
Hayden landed himself that smashed Skyline with the intention of transferring almost all of the running gear into this car. Parts that were not needed that could fetch a pretty penny were offered to Facebook websites that specialise in broke teenage children and the low ballers committee of modified cars. The rest of the gear taken from that Skyline is intended to be swapped into Haydens tidy 180SX.
So before we got stuck into this little project Hayden was cruising around in a banged up white 180SX that he sold a few days after landing himself a full licence. The few months before that Hayden was forced to just look at the clean black 180 as he was still on his P plates and the car was obviously turbo charged. One late evening a crew of guys and respective partners found themselves at a local RSL club for a late feed and the conversation rolled around to “what was intended for this 180SX”. Our previous 180SX project was nearing completion and the whole RB transplant into other cars was becoming very second nature to us. We talked him into an RB transplant and got onto the beloved Drift sales Facebook page. Hayden found himself a smashed R33 Skyline with all the gear we needed to do the job, we contacted the owner who was surprised to be offered actual money instead of the usual “will you swap my 1989 Mitsubishi Magna and a packet of Winfield Blues” that come off that Facebook page.
There is a whole other story surrounding the retrieval of the car and the complete stripping down of the Skyline. If you search our blog history you will find some time lapse footage of that exercise happening.
Now with the skyline stripped and gone. We got started, a massive list was handed to Hayden of what parts he needed and he damn near shat himself. It was a big list that exceeded $10k in value. Coil packs, plazma man Plenium, timing belt kit, Haltech ECU and so on. There were some firm words said from time to time as Hayden (who is part time employed and part time student) suggested taking short cuts and cutting costs here and there. He was not so much talked out of this as he was just handed invoices for parts we ordered on his behalf, we refused to cut corners on the job and the payoff in the end will be well worth it.
So the first thing to get attention was the RB25DET. The turbo was removed and sent to Melbourne for Hi Flow treatment. Whilst it was away the parts started to flow in. Exceedy heavy duty clutch, nylon mounts, coil packs, spark plugs, oil filter relocation kit and the list goes on.
We started with the timing belt kit and water pump, from there we removed the inlet manifold and replaced the stock injectors with Nismo racing red ones (I’m sure they have some fancy boy racer name but they were red) the fuel pressure regulator spark plugs and ignition coils all got replaced while we were at it.
Then the real fun stuff began with the Plazma man inlet with forward facing throttle went on. This was relatively easy to do with the engine on the stand but to do it with the engine still in a car would suck. At this stage this is as far as we have gotten. There will be more progress in the future but we do have another 180SX build and a Toyota Supra build in the line ahead of this one.
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