S14: Forever Simone

Whats up dudes and dudettes. I can't really access this site from my job which is kind of a bummer. But I was very active on almost all of the nissan forums, even zeroyon.

I decided to park my car as of August of 2022 and do quite a few upgrades before refreshing the paint, lets talk about it.

here is a picture of my perfectly running car before sending it off to the jackstand gulag.

I'm not going to copy and paste my prior stuff for this build here because too, long, didn't read.

Most of it is on and archived at https://om1kron.blogspot.com/ if you care to gander there, and some stuff is on youtube. https://youtube.com/om1kron

So, lets start off with my favorite addition to the car, ditching an authentic Garage-S hood for my grail hood, the Masa Motorsports hood. I mentioned to a good friend, that I ran into a guy in so-cal who had the hood i've been trying to buy for 8 years on his car. And when I asked him how he got it, he wasn't very cool about it, but its all good. I get it. Anyway, my friend tells me our buddy Yasu in Japan has a shop called Exceed and its right by Masa Motorsports and he could get the hood and ship it for me. Boom no questions asked, take my money.

This was december 2019, before life got really shitty for a lot of us... I was given almost weekly updates on its arrival and then boom, pandemic... fast forward to the middle of 2022 the hood finally shipped. Made the most of that dickheaded year and drove the car out to Arizona to hang with some friends. Cool!

Next item on the list, I've been looking at getting air cups for quite some time. I drive my car fairly low and it doesn't bother me too much, but honestly I'm just sick of repainting the bumper every few years. Driftworks had a killer deal on the stanceparts aircup kit along with their c2 coilovers and the pillowball on my jic's left the chat sometime back in 2015.

I apologize in advance, build threads normally suck without any building involved and most people use them as a glorified self written superstreet piece.

This is where I ended up mocking the pump in the back, the air tank, and I guess the gray things are solinoids or what have you. The front and the rear of the car can raise about 2 and a half inches which is more than enough for me not to scoot my high flow cat on speedbumps. I'm more excited honestly about having new pillowballs on top of my struts tbh. Below is the setup for reference, I think I got like 8k springs out back and 10ks up front.

Also I don't have any of these photos organized on my computer so apologies again if I forget to post some shit, most of it is on my instagram at the time of install. As far as the buttons to raise the car up and down, I had the coin holders for my center console and replaced them with blanks and put the buttons inside of them. So two of these buttons now reside in this spot. And damn I'm salty I deleted the original photo but have my doctored up ig photo.

Moving along, I'm a little in over my head. TBH when I was buying all of the shit I didn't think it was going to be this much work, then I remembered I'm a dad, the car is 70 miles away from me, and I have pretty much a window of 10 hours to get any significant work done to it... I digress!!!

The car came with a wilwood big brake kit when I bought it, I hated the dinky ass brakes in the rear so I did the thing and fully functioning ebrake, new cables, dope rotors, etc,etc. And went through a nightmare of getting said parts powercoated by Bulletproof Automotive powedercoating, which I highly recommend NOT getting your shit done by them.

Rotor top hats came out chefs kiss, rear calipers came out chefs kiss, front calipers... well they had to strip them and re-do them and they don't match the rest of my shit. And it took 6 months for them to get it done while having multiple same day jobs come in and go. I had to drive down there and ask why the fuck they were taking so long.

Oh yeah peek a boo, that is not an oil cooler. It's a porsche 911 air condenser, I'm doing side mount ac... Funny thing is I was supposed to have A/C in this car 15 years ago, as it had working a/c in it. I just misplaced all of my low pressure shit when I swapped the motor back in 2009. I just bought a brushless fan for it tonight, and then I have to trace back all of the wiring in the car to ditch the relay because brushless fans don't need them. They have a solid state relay built into them, so they just need power, ground, and signal... Sadly it was almost 500 dollars for a 10inch fan and the wiring for it. 😅

If you're not familiar with my car I have a fully functioning digital climate control unit in the car, and no godamn a/c. I wrote a very elaborate how to if you're ever interested in giving it a shot yourself. Although the parts are all impossible to get now. Thanks nissan, assholes. https://om1kron.blogspot.com/2022/03/s14-digital-climate-control-2022-redux.html

Hrmn... Moving on, what other dumb shit did I decide to do...

Oh yeah, this is on the list. Need to cut these and offset them.

rep your set...

The homie Jimmy bought one of these, put some time serts into it, and a remove breather, since my diff is covered in coagulated diff fluid because I vowed to change as a person before I'd change that diff fluid again... My hand is forced since I don't want to destroy the Kaaz 2 way thats been in there for the last 15 years.

Got a splitter, did some super awesome racing carbon fiber supports (not pictured) and tire spats.

definitely got cussed out for buying this... I don't even know what year i'm gonna have money to build this. I'll probably be Mike Kojima's age by then.

bought a jank ass s15 steering wheel off of a dismantler page, they sent me the whole fucking steering column lmao...

I got this little wheel cover jawn and sewed it on.

Finaly product is pretty dope. Reminds me of a civic type r steering wheel now...

This one was quite an undertaking, I grafted a piece of a RHD cluster surround into my usdm cluster surround for the in cabin ambient temp sensor for the digital climate control only to find out some company break beat goods made a fucking press in vent lmao. fuck!

I dunno I think it came out pretty cool. I also refreshed the dcc itself and put led lights in it to match my lil radio screen situation. I tried to do the same for the cluster, but the fucking lights would not turn off so back to the oem shit there...

Oh yeah, my car is no longer a wingless virgin, found a kouki wing for 389 AU, my conversion was a smidge off it cost my 653 dollars USD shipped... but way better than the 2 grand in drift tax assholes were charging. I also nut-certed it where the clips go and its secured with m6 bolts. Not sure if I have a good shot of that, nope... dont. Also got this carbon fiber gurney flap that needs some work, but thats mainly why I put nut certs in the wing. I ended up making the hole to big for one of them so I had to re-fiberglass the hole where the clip thingies go. Take my word for it a lot of shit was done to get this dumb ass wing on my car.

I've also been toying with the idea of replacing my power steering with electrical power steering, this kind of stemmed from originally wanting to conver the car to electric air conditioning. I was going to get a compressor and mount it in the trunk, run the condenser opposite of the exhaust under the car, dryer and triple pressure switch back there but when I realized I had all the oem shit installed, I segwayed on to what else could I make non-belt driven.

My rack looks like dogshit, and the power steering pump has seen better days, I think at this point yeah. Just going to replace it with a chevy equinox steering column. If you know who taylor ray is, he's probably got the best video on the internet how to do this. Another zilvia member did this on his car and I was fascinated by it and he said the hardest part really was the fabrication and he'd never go back...

So my dumb ass is doing it too. You can watch the explination for it if you wish - https://www.instagram.com/p/Cz14z4OSu3k/

good thing I have that spare steering column... Also a company actually provides this service but it's like 1600 bucks for the ESC conversion and to de-power your steering rack. https://www.vergoauto.com/nissan-manual-steering-rack

I was a little bummed when I saw it had to be oem racks only and no aftermarket shit after I bought a replacement s13 steering rack which has been on my balcony for a year now lol.

So re-wiring quite a few things, surprise my fusebox is where my passenger side airbag resided, ran the wiring for the eps straight off the power line for the car. Re did the fusible link and ran those to the back of the car instead of having 70 amps worth of power hitting that hobby shop fuse box (which has worked great since 2009). Gotta find out where the fuck the a/c fan wiring lives these days since I had it wired up to a ford taurus fan for a while (highly do not recommend) and fix that to get the ecu and a/c to do its thing once I wire up the new fancy fan.

You may have noticed I have dancing lights or leds for turn signals and corner lights now, rad. 700 dollars, totally worth.. I also converted my headlights using rx330 projectors and a bunch of ebay shit. I'll see how it pans out and hopefully I wont have to buy new bulbs and power boxes anytime soon.

And while all of this really started because I just wanted to do some maintenance, it snowballed as it usually does into a whole lot of other shit.

I spent almost 2 months trying to figure out why my reverse lights have never worked (turns out the wire going to the tail lights in the super multiple junction was just not there at all)

I re-wired the digital climate control because none of the doors opened in the correct order.

My driver side window switch died and I ended up finding someone who 3d printed some new inserts and generic switches. And that was the main reason I stopped driving the car since 2016 was because no a/c I can deal... driving this shit without the windows down in california heat. fuck no, fuuuuuuuuuuuck no.

anyway. I think i've dogshit enough stuff in here to keep you up to speed. I'll make it a point to post updates in here as well as my instagram. I've contemplating picking up where I left off on my build thread on zilvia but, nah fuck that place.

peace out!