The owner of this Silvia wanted better brake performance for track days and supersprints.

He bought a set of Endless pads, ProConcept two piece slotted front rotors, and RDA standard replacement rear rotors.

All these parts are a fairly straightforward bolt on job, except that the two piece rotors’ alloy hat is larger in diameter than the standard ones and will foul on most brake pads without modification.

I trimmed down the brake pad backing plates with an angle grinder, and it all went together nicely.

After that it was just a matter of changing the brake fluid and bleeding any air out of the system- ready for the track!

This car had a bit of a history of overheating.

It was taken to a workshop and had the head gasket replaced, but it continued to overheat. The workshop kept fixing the symptoms (blown hoses, etc) but not the cause!

By the time I saw it the head gasket was leaking badly and it was most likely that the head was damaged - making another head gasket replacement unlikely to be successful.

I sourced a replacement engine with half the k’s on it and swapped it over.

After a service, a bit of a tune and a general checkup the new engine was running nicely - and no more overheating!

One of the many random things I do is make prototype electronic circuit boards, using a CNC circuit board router.

It takes blank boards with a full copper coating, and mills out a channel to leave the conductive tracks where they’re needed. It also drills all the necessary holes, cuts the finished board to size, and can do double sided boards.

There’s a bit of a process to convert the files and set it up, but essentially you can design a PCB using various software packages, and quite quickly have an accurate prototype made for testing.

It’s not a cheap way to do any large quantities - but compared to sending a design away to be made using normal production processes it’s quick and effective.

This air compressor was frequently failing to shut off when it reached full pressure - causing it to blow the safety relief valve.

Upon inspection it was working properly, but I noticed that it was cycling on and off faster than it should.

Turning on the air valve caused a lot of water to blow out, so I suspected the tank hadn’t had the condensation drained for a long time!

The compressor also had a lot of oil on it, probably caused by spillage or over filling.

Moving the compressor made it obvious that the tank was quite full of water!

After draining several buckets of very nasty looking water, a thick oil sludge started coming out. Obviously this had built up over some time, after leaking through the compressor due to wear or over filling.

Hopefully draining the tank will stop the problem with the cutoff switch, and at least give the compressor a lot more air capacity!

S15 Silvias (200SX) come with a six speed gearbox, which is very nice to drive with - but is not as strong as the previous model’s five speed.

In racing use with engine performance modifications the six speed is prone to breakage, so sometimes it’s best to change to a five speed box for reliability.

The gearbox, clutch, flywheel, tailshaft, gearbox mount, gearbox bolts, and even the exhaust bracket are different - but they can all be sourced from the previous model Silvias.

In this case we also installed a twin plate clutch, and the new gearbox has been rebuilt and strengthened.

Many Japanese import cars are hard to find with a manual gearbox, so often it’s best to buy an automatic car and convert it to manual.

This one is an S13 Silvia with a CA18DET engine.

The auto to manual swap is fairly straightforward as long as you have all the bits and everything comes apart easily.

Of course this time things didn’t want to come apart easily, and some of the parts were missing!

The conversion requires the removal of the automatic’s pilot bushing from the engine’s crankshaft, and its replacement with the manual version.

No matter what I tried, even using a newly purchased tool for the job, the pilot bushing wouldn’t come out of the crank.

In the end I had to weld a plate onto it to allow the puller tool to get a better grip!

Eventually it was all done, the car now manual, and there was a big pile of leftover bits!

This place has been a bit quiet lately, after I’ve been busy moving house and having no internet access for a while!

There are a few updates to come, and some interesting projects in the pipeline

Trailers are notorious for electrical problems.

They’re not used very often, sit in a weather most of the time, and are usually wired up pretty badly!
This one had a problem where everything tested out ok, but it would keep blowing the tail light fuse on the tow car.

The lights had mostly been changed to LED so they don’t use much current, and several workshops had tested it and found no fault - but it still kept blowing fuses!

I checked that all the pins were wired to the correct circuits, and that none of them were shorted together.

I then plugged the trailer into the car, and found that everything worked fine!

It was then that I checked for voltage between the car’s ground and the trailer chassis - and found 12v!

So, when the trailer is tested it’s fine, but if you connect it to the car’s tow bar it then shorts out to the car’s ground!

It was the tail light circuit that was connected to ground on the trailer, so I started with the number plate light (the only non sealed LED light left on the trailer) - figuring it might have a damaged wire or bulb holder.

What I found was that one of its terminals connects to the trailer chassis (so you can just have one power wire and use chassis ground) and that terminal had the power wire on it instead of the ground.

It was just a matter of swapping the wires over and now there’s no more blown fuses!

It’s actually sitting on a trailer now!

The roof is mostly done, so I just need to finish the front canopy, cut the carpet to size, install the wiring, sort out the steering, bolt the engine on, and fix up various bits of damage I’ve found on the hull. Easy

LEDs have gradually been getting brighter and more efficient - but they haven’t really been good enough to replace normal halogen or HID lights for high power torches or vehicle headlights.

I hadn’t thought much about using LEDs for serious lighting applications until I saw one of these in action: http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=ST3371&CATID=21&form=CAT&SUBCATID=649

It’s not cheap, but has enough light output to be used as a headlight on a motorcycle. LEDs use much less power than normal halogen lights, which is a real advantage on an electric vehicle.

After doing a bit of research I found some massive LEDs complete with reflectors and driver circuitry, so I bought four to test out.

Even powered by a half dead 9v battery, one of these is easily brighter than a Dolphin torch, with a much wider light output.

I mounted all four on a piece of polycarbonate sheet and took them out to compare against the car’s headlights.

This is the car headlights on high beam:

And this is the LEDs (same exposure settings on the camera):

The aim is slightly different, and the LEDs are only on the right hand side, but you can see that they are bright enough to realistically use as headlights.  Note the house in the distance is similarly illuminated by both lights.

I will be doing some more testing and comparisons, and will hopefully be able to run an LED headlight on the next electric motorcycle!