Friday, March 26, 2021

Good Bye! It Was Fun While It Lasted...

So not to worry, this is not about my car... but about a part that I had on my car.  And frankly this part was something I actually enjoyed having and which I think is engineered very well... the only problem is it runs afoul of Japan's shaken (biannual compulsory inspection) rules.

I am talking about the Do-Luck Roll Center Adjusters.  I did a post on this before, where I was one of the first customers to install this.




In fact it was an easy install, but it turns out their one piece design is what would cause a car to fail the shaken inspection. As a result, each time I took the car in, I would have to pay for someone to remove them and then do a 4 wheel alignment, and then reinstall once the car passed shaken.

To review - most roll center adjusters work by restoring the angle of the lower arm in lowered cars.  This one however ALSO, and simultaneously, also restores the angle of the tie rods by replacing the tie rod portion on the wheel hub by its elongated design. This means steering feel is also restored to OEM lightness, making for a car that feels OEM in steering resistance but while lowered.

However, the reason it fails on the shaken side, is because this one piece design leaves the tie rod connector on the wheel side, disconnected from the tie rod:



So I found a small box, and packed both pieces away to be sent EMS.



Off to a good friend and thus a good home in a country where those shaken rules don't apply! Mr. V, enjoy and let me know how they work out for you.

Monday, March 1, 2021

It's Always the Details that Count!

 In my last post, I showed you how I changed out the ceiling lights - both front and middle - to OEM S15 pieces which came in black, versus the light grey for the R33 parts, in order to match the new Alcantara headliner I had first modified at Robson Leather and then installed at Nismo Omori Factory back in July of last year as part of a lot of extra work I had them take care of.

However, there was one small detail that had been bothering me ever since I got the headliner installed, which I had actually forgotten about, but then in the course of swapping out the lights this little problem made itself apparent, which forced me to find and then have this sent to me.


What is it? Well, take a close look. Yep, another pair of S15 sunvisors. And in this case, the only difference being the printed lettering on the warning label:
Blue arrow pointing to the mount - note it is DIFFERENT than how the current visors were mounted at Nismo Omori Factory.

Can you tell that the ones installed in the car already (top) have smeared lettering? At the time I found them on Yahoo Auctions, they were the cleanest sample I could find. Luckily this time around, I found an even CLEANER pair.  You can see clearly how bad it was in this next photo, after I removed it and lined it up with the one I had newly bought.  
After I unbolted the one installed on my car, laid it out with the one I just got.

The one on the passenger side, however, did not require replacement as it was super clean to begin with:

In fact the one that was already installed seemed to have slightly more vivid colors...

The better condition driver's side visor wasn't perfect:


Can you see how there seems to be a scratch on the mirror cover, as well as a small indent on the right as indicated by the arrows? Nothing I can't polish out and also apply a heat gun to (which is what I did to eliminate the indent).

The bigger problem was, as I indicated above, the mounts on both of these were different. Here is what the one one on the newly purchased ones looked like:

And as you can see here, the ones on the Nismo installed ones looked like this.


Took a bit of heat and some muscle, but finally loosened the teeth on wider mounts:


Then all I had to do was to undo the cover, held in place by two small indents on each side (as shown by the blue arrows):

Which then revealed two screws:

And then the sunvisor simply came off and left this hole:

The final step was to swap out the mounts, and then reinstall the cleaner sunvisor. Hard to tell how good it looks as I took the next two photos at night, under artificial light, but I think you get the idea!

Was tough getting the right lighting...

So again yes small details like this really add to making the car even more perfect! Ok nothing is perfect, but if a small issue can be fixed, then why not fix it? Maybe this year is where I do nothing major but just keep making small upgrades like this? Then again, we are already done with 2 months of 2021, better save up some more soon for some interesting projects in the back of my mind...