Uh-Oh... Is this Serious?

As I hinted in my last post, when I picked up my car from Ninomiya-san after he had installed the rebuilt Öhlins DFVs, he had some disconcerting news: the NEW transfer case was LEAKING OIL!  Since this is a brand new BNR34 transfer, part of the NISMO GETRAG Transmission Conversion Kit for the R32/R33 which I had had installed just last August, I was not happy to say the least, hoping that it would be just a matter of tightening a few bolts or sealing it up.

So I took the car back to Nissan Prince Tokyo Motorsports at the Nissan Prince dealership in Sakura-Shinmachi, about a 30 minute drive from my house.

Indulge me, still learning how to use the camera...

The technicians immediately rolled the car onto the lift, and found this:

Otherwise, was really, REALLY clean underneath!

A clear leak. They admitted they had never seen this before, and were just as puzzled as me as to what the cause could be. Maybe not bolted up tight enough? Maybe a gasket? Maybe the transfer is bad? In any case, they took a whole bunch of photos of the area and the car, so they could email them to NISMO. Unfortunately, because it was a Sunday, no immediate response would be coming.  While they had the car up, I asked about the main driveshaft, whether it was the same as the BNR34's... the answer is no, apparently it's a bespoke NISMO piece. Oh well, so much for getting that carbon fiber driveshaft...

Also, while they had the car up, I remembered that a few months back Dino had mentioned something about a slight shimmy in the steering wheel.  Turns out he was right!

Luckily it was only on this side...

Their initial diagnosis was either a bad tie rod bearing, or the bolts attaching the Do-Luck roll center adjuster needed to be tightened, but only on the left side.

In any case, as I don't need my car this week, I decided to leave the car with them for a few days so they can discuss with NISMO what to do about that transfer case leak.

So I watched them lower the car and pull up in front of their car elevator:

Before watching the door come down, and saying goodbye.

Hopefully, the phone call I get, won't be an expensive one...

The Smallest, Quickest Mod Ever?

So of the 3 parts I got (as I mentioned in my last post), 2 require some disassembly of my car, so I will deal with them later; but one is a 15 second affair.

Just this one little piece...

If you recall I now have a brand new cowl piece, for some reason this part was missing.

A while back, I had replaced the cowl on my car, with a brand new part. Looks great, but I noticed one part that seemed to be missing. You can see in the photo above that it looked like there is supposed to be a square plug?

Anyway, took what - exactly 1 second to push it in...excuse the dirt there...

So I am guessing that, this might prevent some water from getting in there, but remind me to go back and ask the guys at Nissan if it's supposed to be round like this. Little things like this bother me.

Although from a far, you really can't tell anyway...

You may have noticed that these photos seem a bit different than those I usually post here. That's because these were taken not with my usual iPhone, but this time with my Nikon D90 DSLR, and with a fixed, non-zoom 35 mm Nikkor lens (can you tell I have very little experience with photography?...)

Anyway, with my car now being featured on Speedhunters, I've been told that I need to use a proper camera and also learn about "bokeh" and such to take the photos in a way that I focus on the subject. So was told to fool around with the camera, set it on Aperture mode, etc.  And so this is what I've been doing. Any tips?

By the way - it turned out the Ohlins had been done for a few weeks, and have already been sent back to BeAmbitious for reinstallation. However both myself and Ninomiya-san have been too busy to deal with this, but we finally did last week. My next post WILL be about the Ohlins, and very soon...