The V8 Retired For a Rebuild.

[porkpie700]

With the Super S at last on the road I can finally take the V8 off the road for the long holiday it was promised, and boy-o-boy does she need it. Now that I have the luxury of a 2nd car I’m in a position where I can take my time and do everything top-notch instead of rushing to get things finished. It's gonna take a few years and many thousands of pounds but here's a little list of what I want to do.

Firstly the body work;
Restore to showroom condition.
She's been around since the 1980's and lived a hard life before i got my hands on her. There's no rust repair to be done which is a huge relief, but there is no shortage of dents, scratches and miss-matched paintwork to be corrected.

Fit Foha Bumpers
I've had them sitting in the house for long enough, it's time for them to get prepped and sprayed to go on the car. The Super S arch trims will have to be altered at the ends for the bumpers to fit as the Fohas’ wrap around the arches.

Full Re-spray
It's gonna stay the same 526 Red, but it's going to be all fresh paint, sprayed professionally and all new decals will be fitted.

Tint Windows in Light Smoke

Full Engine Rebuild + Slight Tuning (MA12)
Just off the top of my head I intend to have all the bearings, seals and gaskets replaced. The piston rings will be replaced, possibly the pistons and conrods too depending on how much they would actually be of benefit.
The valves, springs and valve seats would also be considered for replacement. A full engine balancing and head/port polish would be a must. I may consider having a wee wittle turbo too, depending on how I feel at the time, otherwise it would be NA tuning all the way because I want the engine to last.

Custom Stainless Exhaust & Manifold
Designed for easy flow and to keep her quiet (sorry kids, i just hate loud exhausts).

Full-on Alarm System with Immobiliser and Central Locking.
A must, if you have something nice, you can bet your left nut that some butt-head will try to take it from you.

Custom Interior
Nothing is set in stone, but I’ve been toying with the idea of painting all the plastics black like the Super S & having the door cards (and rear quarters) duplicated but with black vinyl and some kind of funky black & dark red patterned material in the place of the GS beige trim.
To top it all off, have the seats re-covered with leather and the same custom patterned material (to break up the leather a bit and make em interesting, and comfy lol). I'm also toying with the idea of making the seats heated seats and fitting the switches into the centre console in a way that looks stock, like the were always there. :grinning:

Of course this colour change means having to paint the headliner and pillar covers to match and having a custom black carpet made and fitted.
(Y)


The V8 When I First Got It (2006)

The V8 Now (2010);

Next? watch this space over the next few years :grinning:.

 

[sr20bud]

nice looks so clean(Y)

 

[porkpie700]

Thanks dude, yeah i can't stand dirty cars, i'm a bit of a clean freak when it comes to my cars. :laugh:
Anyways, since i've already done so much to this car i've got plenty of back-log to play with on the blogs lol. So i'll put up a few more pictures because i know i like to look at other cars when i'm on here :grinning:

The origional MA10 after painting the rocker cover and altinator, way back in the day.

The current MA12 a month after fitting; this is the engine that's gonna get rebuilt.

Unfortunately i'll probably have to paint it all over again after it's been rebuilt, but at least it gives me a chance to alter a few things that i wasn't happy with the first time round.
Below is an old nissan promotional picture but the bumpers on that car are what i have for mine, but they'll be blending in with the Super S sideskirts and arch trims so it'll look a wee bit different to the one in the picture but just to give you all an idea of what it should look like...

Does anybody out there know what those wheels are or where the hell i can get my hands on a set?

 

[superls]

no idea on the wheels

just a couple of thouhgts, ive seen the super s arches with foah bumpers and i didnt like it, i personally dont think it looked right.

and wouldnt you be better off ploughing all the money your planning into the super s, something a bit more rare?

 

[porkpie700]

wouldnt you be better off ploughing all the money your planning into the super s, something a bit more rare?

Well that's the wonderfull thing about the Super S, it doesn't need anything doing to it now. All the work is done, the welding, brakes, underseal, waxoyl. It's in fantastic shape for it's age, i really dropped lucky with that car. The alarm is being fitted tomorrow which is around the £200 mark so that's more than enough being spent i think lol. Alarm with immobiliser and remote central locking, so should be pretty secure. The only big plan for the Super S is a full respray sometime late next year to make it look totally mint. The Super S isn't going to be modded, as you say it's a rare car now, so all the more reason to keep it as origional as possible.

I know what you mean about the mixing of the foha and SS kits but the SS has this mixture on the front end (the origional bumper was replaced with a Foha at some point in the cars past), and it looks alright-ish, can't beat origionality though.
I'm going to mock it all up and cut things right, i'm going to shape the ends ever so slightly to make them blend in as if they were part of the same kit.

The mixed kit on the SS

Can you see how they've just chopped it off and not shaped the ends?
On the V8 I'm going to make a very small dip on the bumpers for the ends of the arches to sit into snuggly; fibreglass, filler & sand to shape and then add a little bit of rubber trimming where the arch end sits into the bumper.
It's gonna be a fair bit of fiddling around to get it just right, but i'll figure it out as i go along :grinning:

 

[gtsnissanb]

Thought it was a v8 Micra for a moment after reading the title lol
Very nice car

 

[porkpie700]

New Rear Axle With Anti-Roll Bar

My friend has kindly let me have the spare axle he had laying around. It's essentially a super s rear axle but it's from a standard spec auto (Many automatics' and 1.2 4-doors' were also fitted with anti-roll bar rear axles).

It's in good shape but here's what i'm going to do with it;

Clean it down to the bare metal and paint it all up.
Fit new wheel bearings.
Fit new brake pistons.
Fit new brake shoes and drums.
Have all new pollyurithane bushings fitted to the link-arms.

At the moment i'm just getting the parts together (in the limited free time i have these days) but when i start work on it i'll put up some pictures for y'all to take a peek at.
(Y)

 

[porkpie700]

Progress at last

Had a day off work at last and finally managed to make some much needed progress on the v8. The foha bumpers are now mocked up, evenly gapped and bolted firmly into place.

The next job is to start altering the arch trims to fit flush against the bumpers.

 

[gtsnissanb]

Nice thread got worried when I read the title thought someone had stolen my plan lol

 

[aLLeKs]

If you need covers for the holes where the foglights should be, I could have a look on the loca scrapyard. one week ago there was a micra with a foha bumper

 

[porkpie700]

If you need covers for the holes where the foglights should be, I could have a look on the loca scrapyard. one week ago there was a micra with a foha bumper

I have the foglights, i took them off so they don't get damaged.

Alex, if you see a micra in a scrapyard, don't leave it there, take all the parts and keep them safe for the future. Especially if they have rare parts like foha kits on them. You could always sell the parts very easily, the bumpers would sell quickly with international buyers like me around ;D

 

[aLLeKs]

Yeah i know, but i don't have the space to store them.

 

[karlj]

Yeah i know, but i don't have the space to store them.

Buy then sell cause I saw a complete super s interior and body kit on eBay Germany a month or so ago that I wanted (well apart from dash bloody lhd grr)

 

[dg_unit]

Does anybody out there know what those wheels are or where the hell i can get my hands on a set?

I saw a set of nissan ones on eBay in Dover a few days back. Shame I didn't get time to post it on here. You can pretty easily get ones from VW which are apparently pretty easy to modify the centre bore with a flapper wheel. They look very similar and would look pretty good with the micra logo grease cups I reckon:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190514506070&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT#ht_1422wt_61

 

[boyracergt]

I saw a set of nissan ones on eBay in Dover a few days back. Shame I didn't get time to post it on here. You can pretty easily get ones from VW which are apparently pretty easy to modify the centre bore with a flapper wheel. They look very similar and would look pretty good with the micra logo grease cups I reckon:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...T#ht_1422wt_61

the vw ones fit on the front fine but would need a 5mm spacer on the back to clear the centre bore..

 

[porkpie700]

Yeah i know, but i don't have the space to store them.

I'm sure you can find a place for them while you sell em on. Price it up dude, see how much the scrapyard want for the bumpers and find out how much it would cost to ship em to the uk, then drop me a pm and we'll talk business
I told you already dude, you could make a nice little income from exporting parts.

 

[karlj]

Make that two of us alex

 

[gtsnissanb]

Not a fan of them alloys but each to their own
I prefer these or at least I will when they are painted

 

[karlj]

They look very similar to a set I have

 

[gtsnissanb]

They look very similar to a set I have

E30 alloys not wide enough for me yet only 6.5j

 

[karlj]

Aww mine are of a jdm/usdm mx5.... I've only seen 1 other set and they were on the car :down:

 

[porkpie700]

Update 26/06/11

With the Suntop finished I’ve been able to take the good old v8 off “the back burner” and bump it up to be next in line for completion. After months of staring at the car, putting the Super S arches on and eye-balling it all, I’ve decided on a final design at long last.
The main problem with using the Super S body kit is that the arch covers stick out a lot wider than the Foha bumpers do. So to get everything to blend in would take a lot of careful shaping and I’m not convinced that it would suit the bumpers.

Then one day I was looking at shaf’s March Turbo and had an idea. The side skirts on the March Turbo look similar to the Super S kit except that they don’t wrap around the full arch, and they have more of a boxy shape which would suit the Foha bumpers a lot more than the slightly curvy Super S kit. So I’m going to modify the SS arch covers to resemble the Turbo kit.

So after freeing off the brakes I pulled the old girl out and continued the mock-up. The main job was to re-shape the front valance panel so that the front foggys would have enough clearance to sit where they’re supposed to. So I essentially had to re-align the front end afterwards because bending the valance pushes the wings out of shape. It was a little fiddly but I managed it easily enough.

I was going to make a start on the body kit until I looked for the fibreglass and realised the tin was empty, couldn’t be bothered going out for more at the time so I moved onto other jobs.
Like painting the anti roll bar which had been sitting in primer for over five months.

I was going to paint it yellow but then I thought, well the car’s red, the brake drums are red, why mess around buying a tin of yellow just to do the anti roll bar and nothing else.
So red it is, I think it’ll look good when it’s all fitted up along side glossy black link-arms.

I haven’t got round to taking the link-arms for new bushings yet, but they are going to have all new polyurethane bushing fitted before they get painted. The bushings on the secondary link arms will be replaced at some point too. That should firm her up a bit; everybody loves a nice firm rear end. (Y)

 

[porkpie700]

Little Update

Micra's got a new nose;

The "NISSAN" lettering will be painted silver when the reaspray is going on.
Well the arches have been chopped, they currently have about an inch of exccess on them which will be filed down and shaped when we fill in the groove and make it a bit more boxey.
You can just about see the front arch trim in this pic (thought i'd muck about with my mate's alloys while he was out lol)

Do they look better on the V8 or the Super S?

If only they made alloys in regular sizes, life would be so much easier...

 

[Daniel]

They look better on the Super S mate, the chrome looks really good against the black (Y). I want a set now :grinning:

 

[karlj]

Glad to see the grill settling in nicely (Y) put the wheels on the super s


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[porkpie700]

Yep i think they suit the black too, but they're not my wheels so i had to put em back on his car lol. Those rims are way over what i would spend on a set of wheels, silly money.
The super s is still undesided with regards to wheels, it's either gonna be totally origional and have steelies or it's gonna have one little indulgence and have a set of alloys that fit better than the current ones. I find that the sizes are limiting with alloys, they don't seem to make any of the rims i like in the right size. They're all 16"-18" cartwheels for the modern cars. I'll give it a bit more thought when it's totally finished.
I've had the steelies from the V8 shot-blasted and they've been sitting in primer for 6months or so, i was gonna do them silver, have the button centre caps on and fit lower profile, wider tires. My mate suggested spraying them black and just having the outer rim (or what would be the dish) silver. The only thing is that i've seen other people do that, and it looks good, but i don't wanna just copy someone else if you know what i mean.

 

[Daniel]

I don't think there's anything wrong with copying people, everyone does it all the time. Just goes to show that something one person does can actually become popular - I'm sure they'd take it as a compliment (Y)

 

[porkpie700]

For the moderators; Guys you can remove this thread if you like. I'm thinking of writing up this build in a new thread when the car is done.
Cheers.