Out with the old, in with the NEW (Robson Leather Steering Wheel Re-Do)

One last post to close out 2018, and appropriately by swapping out the old with new. Or at least "re-newed."

Some of you may recall a few years ago when I first switched over from the OEM steering wheel to an aftermarket one, I found a nice and rare but very used Ital Volanti Imola R wheel.

Because it was worn, I decided to get the wheel re-done in a nice black leather, with perforations on the side grip areas, at the world famous Robson Leather in Tokyo.  I was generally happy with the quality of the leather and the new thickness of the wheel, and it matched the OEM interior very well.

However, once I had the interior completely redone by Cesar in high quality leather... well I noticed that the grain of the steering wheel leather now did not match the smooth finish of the rest of the leather interior (the OEM interior finish has this wrinkled simulated "leather" finish). This could not stand, and the cognitive dissonance generated by this mismatch was driving me nuts.

See how the leather appears wrinkly? This was the original grain of the leather I chose for the first re-wrap.
At the time it matched the OEM interior better.

Luckily for me, Robson Leather always has a tent up at the annual NISMO Festival, so I undid a few Allen bolts and took the wheel with me to this year's NISMO Festival on December 2. The plan of course was to save a few yen sending the wheel in, as well as to be able to inspect for myself the quality and grain of the leather that would be used on this redone.

Moments after I walked up to the Robson Leather tent, Robson's president, Masa Nakamura, greeted me like an old friend and listened to my request.  Lucky for me this Nakamura-san is miles removed from a certain other Nakamura....yes I am still pissed off. Anyway, moving on...

The sample of Robson's Nappa leather against my wheel

Masa knew immediately what I wanted, and showed me a sample of their "Nappa leather." Strangely, while the color and the feel was what I wanted, the leather sample itself looked almost like pleather in terms of how it had been tanned and processed, especially on the non-exposed side.  Nevertheless, because the wheel is a high use area, I was satisfied with the almost plastic feel of the leather, because even if it was a lower quality leather than the "Cardinal" automotive grade leather from Wildman & Bugby in the UK that Cesar used for the rest of the interior, durability (which is what I assumed from how this leather felt) would be key here.

So, I requested a re-wrap of my wheel from Robson with the "Nappa leather" option with side perforations, as before. I was thinking about adding a red 1cm wide swatch to the center top of the wheel (as often seen in some recent sports cars), but when the Robson factory called later and told me that they could not guarantee it would be perfectly centered, I cancelled. Having that center stripe not centered would be super annoying for me...

Meanwhile, my car had no steering wheel.  I was told the work on my Ital Volanti would be "finished before the end of the month" - but I had no idea how long that the re-leather work would actually take. So, I found a cheap 6000 yen steering wheel on Amazon Japan, to attach temporarily, just in case I needed to move my car in a hurry.

Superfast shipping! I had in in less than 2 days!

Nice white cardboard box. Wrapped up well for a cheap wheel...

Not bad for 6000 yen, right?

The temp steering wheel arrived very quickly. As you can see, the material is a fake Alcantara and the diameter is smaller than the Ital Volanti, at 320mm. It also has a deep cone of 70mm. So I knew driving with this on would be interesting...and in fact, when I took the car out to get some gas, it felt weird. The wheel is probably too small, as the car felt twitchy, almost like a (very heavy) racing cart.  And the seating position was now weird too...

It doesn't look bad, but not great either and the yellow center strip didn't line up perfectly.
I was glad I didn't insist on this option for my Ital Volanti

Amazingly, fast forward only 2 weeks from the NISMO festival, and I got a package from Robson and inside:

Wow! Looks OEM in quality!

See how nice and smooth the leather is? Granted, this might be more expensive than elsewhere but for the awesome service and the quality I am not going to complain. Also, it's always good to have connections with people like Masa...

Here it is, installed... See how the leather of the wheel matches (at least in look) the leather of the rest of the dashboard and interior (the leather on the doors)?

Ok I realized that wasn't the best photo. How about from this angle?

Yes folks, quite awesome is the result! Thank you Masa and Robson Leather for restoring my faith in the Japanese aftermarket.  In 2019... yes my journey will continue in order to fix the remaining interior issues and the topical rust, but I'm also itching to do some more improvements in the mechanical area...

Anyway, I hope everyone is having a great holiday season, and I wish everyone a Happy New Year! Thank you everyone for reading and enjoying this blog. As always, drop me any questions or comments below.

One Last LED Post for the Year

So while I ponder whether to keep those super bright LEDs for my rear license plate...

Sharp eyed readers may have noticed that I had another pair of LEDs (25) that I had ordered from Pika-Q, but which I did not discuss in my last post.

Although I was really tempted to replace the orange rear turn signals, the ones on the Pika-Q site all apparently seemed to require the use of resistors. And because I'm too lazy to figure out how it all works, never mind do the wiring, it's something I will have to research further and do at a later day.

Long time readers will instead know that I've been obsessed with trying to figure out how to improve my one back up lamp.  Since Series 3 (Kohki) cars only have a back up bulb on the left side, with the right side being a rear foglight, the back up lamp needs to be as bright as possible. Not only to let others know I'm backing up, but also so that I can see what I'm backing up into.

So when I found this bulb, I was pretty excited.

Oh yeah! 500 Lumens!!

I think there are other bulbs that are brighter, but for the S25 bulb, this was the brightest I could find.

I was happy with the claimed 500 lumens rating because as you know back in July I replaced the failed HID bulb with an LED from PIAA with a claimed 300 lumens brightness.

So here are pictures of the before and after - can you tell the difference?

With the PIAA bulb

With the PIKA-Q bulb

PIAA bulb

PIKA-Q bulb

Again, to the naked eye there is a notable difference, one that the iPhone camera does not pick up. Perhaps you can tell by how the back wall gets lit up?

PIAA bulb 

PIKA-Q bulb

You can tell that the area which is lit up is higher up on the wall with the PIKA-Q bulb.  Also the cardboard box is more uniformly and brightly lit up.

Here is a direct comparison of the difference in design

So, the next logical step would be to replace the turn signals with orange LEDs as well... so tempted but the resistors...

More LED Madness - Final Result of Rear Lamps Plus

So as I indicated in my last post, I decided to complete the rear tail lamp LED experiment by ordering 2 more so as to have the complete 4 bulb set.  That, and I also wanted to experiment on a couple of other areas. So I went ahead and ordered a few more things...

A few days later the box arrived. Last time I forgot to take a photo, but these guys do a good job with box marketing. Check it out:

Very slick. About the size of a medium sized book. Super light though of course.

 On opening, it contains the usual receipt, advert, and warranty (but in a nice translucent plastic sleeve), plus a set of black cloth gloves - perhaps to protect your hands from burns as you remove the old bulbs? Or maybe to prevent the transfer of oil from your hands onto the new bulbs? (I thought this was an issue only with xenon bulbs?).  And then of course the bulbs themselves.

I swear Japanese product packaging never ceases to amaze me.

So 3 types of bulbs (T10, S25 (aka 1156), and the red double S25 (aka 1157), for which I will go into more detail later.

Of course I had to wait a few days until I got off work early, but then fitted to the GT-R as soon as I could. But first to review:

OEM incandescent bulb on the left, the Pika-Q LED 30lm/200 lm bulbs on the right

Unfortunately, the iPhone camera simply does not do the new bulbs justice, which to the naked eye, "pop" in brightness compared to the old ones.

Also - last time I had noticed that the license plate bulbs (which are aftermarket LEDs too) seemed a bit dim. Might as well see what happens when I replace with Pika-Q brand T10 leds, right?

So here is a close up of how it looked before.

And here is what one of the old T10 LEDs look like. I can't even figure out their specs (such as brightness), having bought them several years ago.  I do remember thinking that the lighting looked much WHITER than the yellowish OEM bulbs. But maybe 20 lumens?

When I searched on the Pika-Q site, I simply went ahead and tried to find the brightest T10 bulbs I could find. This model, at a claimed 100 lumens, seemed to be the best ones.

Here is how it looks. Pretty plain packaging for all that hype.

Anyway, what's important is to see the difference. So I went ahead and unscrewed the clear plastic covers to access the old bulbs, and put in one of the new ones to check out the difference.

Old bulb on left, Pika-Q on the right. WOW.

Ok so the new one is brighter, but how about when it's all back assembled?

So the new LED is so bright the old one appears to barely illuminate.

Anyway, despite the now real danger of the police being able to read my license plate from a kilometer away at night, I went ahead and replaced the left side with the new LED as well.

Pretty incredible! 

I then took the following 3 photos so you can see the difference between the old red bulbs and the new ones.

Two on the left are not LED

Left outside one still not LED

All 4 LEDs

What's interesting is how bright the license plate now is - remember, those bulbs are a claimed 100 lumens while the red ones are only 30 lumens at rest (200 when braking).

What do you guys think? License bulbs too bright?  Oh, and the other 2 bulbs I received? That's for my next post...

More LED Madness - Rear Lamp LEDs, Part 3

OK OK so my OCD got to me...despite the Phillips LEDs being significantly brighter as well as instantaneous in lighting up, their design - with those wide fins - results in dark vertical shadows that of course bother me.

So, it was back to searching Rakuten for alternatives.  Unfortunately,  I could not find another well known brand name manufacturer that sold an LED of the right size and spec, and equal or greater brightness.  I did, however, find an online store called "Pika-Q" that specializes in automotive LEDs.

Despite the silly name, not only did they have an S25/1157 (P21/5W) product claiming 200 lumens of brightness, they offer an 18 month warranty as well.

Just in case someone at Nissan asks me for LED advice, I got these which fit the NV200 Nissan van.

As the design shows, not only are these fin-less, but also shoot a red beam directly backwards through a lens, using Chip on Board (COB) format, with the underlying circuit board white colored (thus Pika-Q calls them "White COB").


Here are the specs:

200 lumens when braking, 30 lumens tail light. Power consumption of 6.0W and 0.8W respectively. 

So I went ahead and ordered one pair to test out. My thinking was, while there might be other LED bulbs that claim to be even brighter, I would be happy if these worked out by being just as bright as the Phillips, so long as the dark spots were gone.

A few days later, they sent me a pair of these LEDs in a nice flat box with some other goodies (free black rubber work gloves... I'll post a photo later) and so I went out and immediately fitted them.

Immediately, I could see that the dreaded black vertical lines were gone (left lamp below):

Philips bulb on the right... and does it look slightly more orange?

And taking a close look, the colors seemed a bit different.  In order to confirm this, I took this next photo:

Pika-Q is definitely redder, whilst the Philips has a bit of an orangish tinge

I took some video too. This first one, I wanted to make sure both the Philips and the Pika-Q lit up at the same time.  Unfortunately it's not very well focused, but check out the two Philips LED bulbs on the left, and the Pika-Q LED bulbs on the right...

Actually, the fuzziness helps make the vertical lines on the left side stand out more...

This one is better:

And further, maybe you can tell the color is different?

Here are two photos to show the differences:

Philips:

Pika-Q.

Anyway, based on this result, I went ahead and ordered another pair of these red LEDs from Pika-Q, to complete the other side.  But, I took advantage of this timing and ordered a couple of extra items, which I will feature in my next post.

More LED Madness - Rear Lamp LEDs, Part 2

With my mind made up to order the Phillips red LED bulbs for the rear parking/brake lamps, I went ahead and placed my order with Rakuten, and then a few days later:

Because I wasn't sure if this was going to work, given the cost (around 6000 yen),
I only ordered one box containing one pair.  If this works, I will order another pair.

First thing I did was to measure the width to ensure it would fit.

Then it was off to the garage to install on the car.
So after installing, the increase in brightness was immediately apparent. I was definitely going to switch to these!

Right side has the LED bulb.

You can see that the left lamp, which is the standard incandescent, looks a bit dimmer, and a bit more reddish, than the the brighter LED on the right lamp. Although - is it my imagination - the LED side actually appears more orange than red??

Here are some videos to demonstrate the difference between the LED bulbs (on the left) vs the incandescent bulbs (on the right).

First, brake lights only - note how the LED on the left lights up a few milliseconds before the standard incandescent bulb on the right.

More interesting actually is how the right side lamp "fades out" - which I actually think is very cool! (Should I keep the standard incandescent bulb??)

But, with the brake lamps coming on a few milliseconds faster, that means a quicker reaction by the car behind me, thus resulting in a lowered chance of being rear ended, right?

At 100km/h, the car behind will react 0.3 seconds slower, for a 9 meter difference, if you brake with incandescent bulbs compared to the LED bulbs (because your car will have moved 9 meters between your stepping on the brake pedal and the rear lamps lighting up)

Second, the parking lights only. Again see how the LEDs light up faster.

Third, the parking lights on - then braking - so this is how it would look like running at night.

Putting aside the coolness factor of the standard bulb fading out, and of course the safety factor due to the LEDs coming on more quickly - I noticed upon close inspection that the "fins" of the LED bulbs were causing shadows.

With LEDs 

Without LEDs

As you can see above,  it looks like the standard incandescent bulb side also has some vertical lines but they are not as obvious as the LED side... what to do...love the brightness but not so sure about these lines... (and yeah the orangish color bothers me a bit too...)