Shakotan G35!!

Remember that solution to my axle problems i previously mentioned? Hopefully this is it!

Happy to share this fabrication marvel Ryan Downey (@nismoboy67) cooked up for me,

I originally had Ryan weld in the gktech subframe bushings and we soon realized it wouldn’t be enough to solve my axle issues. I assumed we’d need to do the traditional cut and raise.

But Ryan had a brilliant idea of using an offset diff bushing to maximize the tip top space in the bushing hole. He even went as far as lathing the new diff bolt down to get the utmost height out of the opening.

He cut and welded the rear and kept the stock dowels for the bolts, machined brand new rear bushings to tilt the rear of the diff up as high as we could up against the dowels and got new counter-sunk bolts for the back. The 25mm raise with these mods + 10mm from the subframe bushings = 35mm of CV angle correction!!!

The best part is this setup is 90% transferable aside from the cutting of the subframe. Both F/R diff bushings are removable and can be transferred to another subframe should need be.

I’ll have to wait til after FinalBout SSE to mock it up in the car but my excitement is through the roof. Hugest shoutout to Ryan for entertaining these drift low antics and cooking up this magic🖤

March 30th 2024,

Jack Rancorn & Tyler Shelow’s Shenandoah Soukoukai event!

Man this was one of those de-motivating drift days. This picture below basically describes most of the day:

Car broke many times, my tie rod backed out the rack and I had to be escorted off the track, my lug nuts obliterated my Z stock wheels since they’ve been missing the “cone” section for a while and finally did their damage, then the ebrake assembly imploded on itself. All in all, a very not fun drift day, but i got some laps at the end and was able to test the Big lip 03’s in the back to see if it’s a driftable setup for final bout. So that’s a plus! Although i believe they might’ve taken my axles out cause there was some extra clunking on the drive home 😖

Took the kit to Josh Le’s for some paint! I def didn’t spend enough time on prep and the finish didn’t come out that great, but we’re in a time crunch for SSE, so after some touch up, it’ll have to do.

Good from far, far from good! 🥂

Nifty taillight covers from SFP Aero for that real early 00’s feel

Scuffed up with scotchbrite, and layed the same duplicator hypersilver over top the black faces and on the car they go!

Long overdue completion of the 03 set 🥹

Found these on partsfromjapan’s story on IG, and got them for a “reasonable” price in today’s market, and got them straight from the motherland!!

Specs are 18x10j +45 (lo disk)

I appreciate your dedication to the low and all the custom bits! When I had a z33 my subframe brace looked exactly like that lol

Everything mounted on the car, and it looks sick!!

Had to go with a BN style kit to stick true to Mitsuru’s car.

I was worried initially when shortening the kit that it’d quickly lose that BN sports feeling. Typically happens when you shorten aero as things start to look less aggressive.

But Nick had cut everything in the right places and they still feel very BN. The skirts had so much clearance, I had to lower the rear back down from where I raised it thinking I’d need to compensate for the kit. The skirts have more clearance than my stock skirts LOL

Dropped it off at Josh’s and I’ll be heading back down there when a warm weekend arises and we’ll get to spraying the kit!

Skirts gone so I decided to got with another idea for aero I had in mind. JPF came up with their own BN style kit for the G. It is a one off kit as nobody makes anything similar of the sort when it comes to bell bottom style kits so I knew I’d be taking a risk given that knowledge and their “great” reputation.

Out the box fitment is pretty decent. But one problem, no way was that going to fit under the car, so it had to be shortened.

I hit up Nick @mspecautoglass to see if he’d be willing to take on the project if shortening the kit for me. Open to try, I brought the kit down to him and we started cutting immediately!

1 inch cut out the rear bumper, & over 1.5 inches out of the skirt.

If you’re wondering why I have no skirts in the pictures, I ended up losing them on the freeway. I mounted them with quick release buttons thinking that’d hold up when I should’ve just hard bolted them up since they were KBD anyways. The skirts were constantly dragging and the KBD floppy material provided more leverage to pull the skirts off their mounting points. 2 hrs on the freeway and they were gone. Also right after I finally scraped through the heads of the subframe brace bolts and it fell on one side 15 minutes from home. Limped it home dragging it along the pavement and cut the brace out completely the next morning. Unfortunately that was the only thing between the ground and my gas tank, so now I’m trying to come up with a skid plate solution for that for peace of mind.

Excite Justin had just moved to Texas in the midst of all this, but he was gonna be back in town for a drift event that Roadstar was driving. While he was here, he printed, scaled and plotted the livery for each car, packed it up in his suitcase, and flew in and installed it for us! We went with a chrome back layer and a black retroflective vinyl over top to create a cool “disappearing” effect you see in the renders.

Also drifting photos of black cars suck at night so having that reflective hit will help them stand out.

With little information on this car, he ordered the Doriten issue off YAJ and translated the issue as best as he could, so we could pick Mitsu’s brain and know the intention behind the design.

We stuck with the one sided livery idea as that seems to the the entire purpose behind the design. He intended to make one sided liveries a thing, and while it didn’t necessarily catch on, we will live that vision on for you Mitsu!!

Plus with how good the paint came out, we did not mind having a clean side to show that glass off 🥹

Brainstormed some more ideas to make the livery personal to us and brought the ideas up to Mr. Excite.jp himself! Justin from Roadstar, knowing that he was just starting his livery design business. He was keen to take the task on and came up with the render below:

Loss for words:

Now, the livery.

Everyone knows Haraguchi’s legendary FC3S:

but the unsung hero is his blue s13:

Justin had the idea of doing a team tribute livery to this car and came up w the quick mock up below:

Fully assembled:

And just like that, all the grueling hard work, blood soaked into my durablocks, all paid off. Josh sprayed while we mixed the next paint cup read to go after he was out. It was a hot weekend, and got real hot in the booth, little too hot for our reducer ideally but, Josh made it work!

We went with KH3 Nissan Super Black, single stage for simplicity in drift repairs, and man I was only expecting 60% of the results we got. Josh even said our cars are the best job he’s done yet. Aside from one little run on the passenger QP, came out literally perfect. I can wet sand the run later on.

All our extra aero lol:

Now with all the grueling prep work done, it was time to bring the cars down to Josh’s for a weekend and spray all the them!

Booth set up:

let’s get to spraying !!

Got some new fenders, hammer and dolly them flat, and then added some resin to some bondo glass to thin out the consistency and skim coated the edge, blocked it flat.

With limited space/access to water in our tiny 1bd 1ba apartment, had to scuff the KBD material in the shower lol.

INGS style skirts came in.

Finally taking the time to repair the obliterated front bumper. Lots of hours put on this while I worked from home lol

Now this was a dreadful time. Days and days of block sanding and reapplying filler bc of sanding too far, and primering the night of, and then sanding the primer off to work the filler again.

All in the comfort of my apartment complex’s parking lot.

Another night at Riley’s:

Some plastic wrap to keep the moisture out rather than having to prime every day

Sadly enough this wasn’t enough to protect the panel, even with a car cover over, as after a rainstorm, i checked the repair area on the driver’s side and saw surface rust around the filler.

Had to sand all the soaked filler off and start all over again. Thankfully the passenger side was okay, as repair area was higher up.

2nd attempt. I believe the 1st attempt was a straighter fix before water got to it. But I laid some gloss black vinyl over top to check how the surface would look w paint and had to call it good enough. It is a drift car after all.

Laid some etch over the filler area’s and some sealer primer over the panel.

Yes masking was ass, don’t judge lol

Needed to address the Quarter Panels on the car. Driver and passenger sides were dinged up and creased. I hit up Riley and he was more than willing to provide guidance and supervise as we tried to address the damage. He helped me with the fancy weld on slide hammer they have at their shop and helped me hammer and dolly the rest to straight as we can before a skim of filler on top.