The last couple of days went pretty well at DSG.  We had an STi in for an upgraded engine after the original suffered a spun rod bearing.  The new engine consisted of a new factory shortblock with upgraded CP forged pistons.  In our opinion, this is the best option for upgrading either a 2.0 or 2.5 liter street engine up to 400 hp.  In addition to the shortblock upgrade, we installed equal length headers and deleted the factory Tumble Generation Valves (TGVs).  Matt retuned the engine with the new setup and the car runs awesome.

The early part of this week was spent working on an 09 Nissan Skyline GTR. 

We have done work in the past on this car but not to this extent.  As far as modifications go, the car has intakes, downpipes, midpipe, wastegate actuators and an HKS EVC-R.  This time it was brought in for a Tanabe cat-back exhaust install and flame throwers installed in the exhaust.  This customer has brought all his cars in for flame throwers, but the electronics on the GTR are an unknown quantity to us and the only knowledge we had of them was that they were extremely complicated.  There isn’t much information available publicly so after failing to find any detailed wiring diagrams we were forced to go through a good amount of the engine and chassis harness. 

Factory engine harness pulled out

Being an avid Nissan finatic, it was great to see the GTR engine somewhat exposed. There are many details on this car that are amazing.

The harness and electronics ended up being very similar to most other modern Nissans.  The intake manifold had to be removed to access parts of the harness.  Our goal in doing this was to minimize the modification to the factory harness which ended up working out very well. 

The GTR features a full flat bottom underside mostly made out of carbon reinforced plastic with a diffuser that is made of carbon fiber. The new Tanabe Exhaust looks great as well.

After installing 7 sets of flames on various cars, I have to say the GTR Flames with supplied kit from Hotlicks Exhaust are the best yet.  They actually look and sound like a B1 Lancer taking off on full afterburners.  They also look and sound like the original Godzilla and his blue fire lazer beam.

We have been working a few too many hours to keep up on the blog lately. Sorry for the two of you who are reading it! We will, however make good on our return to posting daily with a lot of great project pictures.

This will be short since I cut my finger last week and can’t type well without it. Today we had a great day. I measure greatness by lack of frustration combined with productivity. Others will probably agree. Bill finished working on the red R35 GTR. I’ll leave that post to him. He did a few cool modifications to the car including an exhaust. We’ll have it on the dyno later this week.

I finished up fresh heads on a 2001 Forester after it suffered two blown head gaskets.  The whole cooling system was compromised by healthy doses of stop-leak and we had to replace the radiator after we were finished because it was heavily coated with a copper-rubbery solution and couldn’t keep the temperature from running away. This conclusion was reached by a lot of  late evening Sunday work and some head banging.

With the Forester done, Nick and I reinstalled the motor in the E30 M3. Piston failure in the original motor forced us to send the crate motor back to it’s builder marking the first and last time we buy from the out of state BMW supplier. Hopefully the second time is a charm for them.

The only photos I have to share today are from the Civic which has become a long, short term project. We all agree that this is the nicest overall Civic we’ve worked on. A real pleasure and we hope that our efforts translate into low lap times at Lime Rock for it’s owner. When the car is all done we’ll post photos. Some of the work we did includes:

• Tein SRC coilovers

• Corner weighting and alignment

• Tune using Hondata (D series turbo)

• Mocal 13 Row oil cooler and AN hose kit (DSG fabricated)

• Wilwood 12.19″ 4 piston brake kit

• Billet rear lower arms and poly bushings

Photos of all this stuff will be published soon. For now I leave the reader with this.