Recently did a bunch of speaker swapping! Installed the 6.5" speaker adapter plates found on eBay(these and these), Pioneer TS-G650 6.5" speakers, and foam speaker baffles in each door. It's made a world of difference. Much better midrange audio quality, and not expensive at all.

Install was easy overall. Just a bunch of screws and plugging things in. I can upload some pics if anyone's interested.

 

Haven't done a ton on her lately, but painted the rear brake calipers/tophats last weekend so that they'd match the fronts (the rusty look wasn't my thing). Also threw on my rear SS lines I've had sitting around for a while. Any suggestions for preventing rust on the coilover threads?

Also, peep the Blitz drip pan my cousin had sitting in a corner of his shop. He had a few others as well. I love finding little nuggets like that from the early '00s tuning era.

 

Picked up a *perfect* condition trunk with spoiler for $200 (and 7 hours of driving) to replace my spoiler-less, dented, scratched trunk Absolutely love how it changed the look of the car. If anyone needs a silver trunk without spoiler, let me know. I want it out of my garage, but hate throwing things away. Now I just need to replace all the other body panels...

Oh, and as a note for anyone else that comes across this wanting to swap trunks. The spoiler-less wiring harness DOES have a connector for the new brake light in the wing. Install could not have been easier.



Also replaced my gas cap (the rubber gasket on it was pretty dry-rotted) and evap purge valve. Hoping these will clear up an intermittent CEL I've been getting.

 

Last evening was fun.....I'd been having some scraping sounds coming from the rear left since I painted my brakes. Thought it was a dust shield, as it got worse in right-hand turns, but with the dust shield bent back, I still couldn't find anything.

So last night I pulled everything apart. Nothing in the pads, calipers weren't contacting the rotor anywhere, ebrake wasn't dragging. Ended up finding 2 things.

1: The last owner had used an incorrect length brake shoe retaining spring pin (the thing that goes through the hub and shoe to keep the shoe in place) and, instead of just buying the correct one, had put a zip-tie over the end of one that was too long to effectively make it shorter. This was flopping around inside and the spring retaining washer on the end of it had a groove worn in it from scraping the lug studs. I found an ebrake hardware kit at Advance and freshened up everything in there.

2: I found a thread on here describing how there was sometimes a bit of a lip on the hub that would rub some rotors. Sure enough, there was a shiny area on my hub that the rotor had been rubbing. For whatever reason, one rotor rubbed, and the other didn't; and they had accidentally been swapped when I painted things. Swapped the rotors to their original sides, and all is now well........only took about 3 hours of poking around and a trip to the parts store to find a 30 second fix!

 

Refinished the grille yesterday - went with a flat black with a gloss clearcoat. Covered the chrome, as I'm planning to retrofit the headlights in the near future and will be painting the chrome bezels black. Managed to find another set of JDM xenon lights for the retrofit through Upgarage USA. $100 shipped to my door

 

Retrofit ordered! Went with an Acme D2S bixenon projector from TRS so that I can keep using the factory ballasts. Not the highest end projector, but should be lightyears better than the factory D2Rs. Picture is of the new (not-yet-retrofitted) lights.




ALSO (the big one - that silver box in the pic ) received my Quantum-auto tuned ECU (they partnered with Yury at All4swap) and got it installed. Ordering was simple - you select what options you want and if you want to send in your ECU to be tuned, or if you'd rather get one that they have in stock, then send yours in as a core. I chose the latter as I wanted to keep my car on the road and don't trust shipping at the moment. Ordering was, unfortunately, a bit too simple, and I didn't think to ask the right questions. Apparently a lot of 3UZ vehicles can relearn a new ECU by bridging OBD pins and leaving the car on for 30 minutes. Welll, this one can't. So after getting the ECU, I had to take it to a local locksmith to have the immobilizer data cloned onto it. Their site didn't mention any of this, but that's really my only complaint. When I emailed them for support about it, they helped me tons and got me pointed in the right direction.

As for the tune itself, I absolutely love it.
Throttle response is instant (let me get rid of the throttle controller. And I like the tune's throttle map way more). Upshifts/downshifts now don't feel like they have to be forced/exaggerated which makes the car a lot easier to drive quickly. Hard to describe exactly why, but it feels great.
Definitely a little more power/torque. I wasn't really expecting much in that regard, but this combined with the throttle response makes the car feel much, MUCH faster. Seems to pull easily above 90-100 now, when it definitely wasn't happy about it before.
I also chose to have the rear O2s deleted as I have a cat delete and kept getting codes for em, removed the speed limiter, and upped the rev limiter to 6700.
One of my favorite parts is that the tune could be tied to the Power/ECT switch. So when that's off, the car is normal. This'll be nice for when I let others drive it, as it definitely tries to kick the back end around more now.

I did find one quirk that I think may be related to a previous issue. The tune seems to sometimes kick in right at 4 or 5mph and it feels like the car suddenly jolts forward. After that it's fine while moving until you get below 5mph again. There's a pretty abrupt transition. Myy best guess is that this has to do with my speed sensor that was janked up by the last owner, replaced by me, and occasionally registers speed incorrectly while braking at very slow speeds, making the ABS kick in (was able to observe this using a mechanic's SnapOn scanner). I'm gonna pull the sensor out, clean it up, and see if I can make sure it's mounted perfectly. Fingers crossed that solves my issue.

 

It would be nice to see before and after dyno results for the 10% power increase they're alleging.

 

Being perfectly honest, I couldn't care less in that regard. No plans to dyno any time soon. The changes in throttle response and trans logic made enough of a difference to make the $350 (after taking it to the locksmith) worth every penny. Particularly considering my throttle controller cost $180 and didn't perform nearly as well.

That said, I can't see it being hard to get 10% out of a V8 that was likely neutered from the factory so that it didn't scare grandma. I've also always been told that 15-20% is where you'll actually notice a difference.

 

Doing a bunch of wheel/tire shuffling this week. Picked up another set of G35 wheels in great shape for suuuuuuper cheap and am gonna run the rears (19.8.5 +33) on the front so that I have a square setup. Moving everything up to 255/35R19.

Also picked up a TRD Sportivo rear sway bar. Haven't done the math, but seems like it was the more street-friendly option, so should be a needed subtle upgrade. Planning to install that with poly bushings this weekend, as well as poly front bushings and new endlinks all the way around.

Next Tail of the Dragon trip planned for late May Looking forward to seeing how the changes I've made affect things.

 

Sway bar, new endlinks all around, and poly bushings front/rear are in! Love how planted the car feels now, and the responsiveness when cornering has definitely improved. Thinking that moving the front up to 255s probably helped there as well.

 

Found that the front main is leaking. Not enough to be dangerous to engine health, but enough that it's making the front of my engine filthy. It was supposedly replaced at 200k (30k miles ago) with the timing belt, but judging by how the other repairs on this car were done, it was likely done incorrectly.

SO, planning to replace that, timing belt, tensioner, idlers, water pump (since Aisin parts are cheap and I'll be in there...and I don't trust his work), thermostat, harmonic balancer (it's dry rotting), crank bolt, and the oil filter adapter gasket this weekend. Doesn't seem like it'll be too hard of a job - it's just gonna take time and patience.

 

If you do that also replace the cam seals. You'll have everything off to do them when you remove the TB/WP and they're far more common to leak then the front main and can look like a main seal since they leak behind the TB cover where you can't see. Just did this and its an easy 4 hour job

 

I've been seeing mixed results as to how big of a job the cam seals are. Do I just need to remove the gears/VVTi bits and swap the seals out? Or do I have to go deeper than that to lock the cams, etc?

 

You don't need to lock the cams or remove the valve covers. Just remove the intake cam gear and exhaust gear with VVTi actuator. You can get Timken cam and crank seals from rock auto that are quality but when you remove the VVTi gear there is a small seal that I don't know where you can find. Its the small one in this kit from driftmotion. I'd recommend that you get this as well or you'll need to reuse your old one.

https://www.driftmotion.com/product-p/dm3057.htm

Also this youtube channel has some really good info on how to do this job.

 

Ah, wondering if this is gonna be different for my 3UZ. Didn't realize you were talking about the 2J