Crunch time

Alright, well the first drift event of the year is coming up in just 3 days. I’ve cracked down on this car quite a bit to get the car ready, but unfortunately it won’t be ready to slide. But if I can at least get it ready to look pretty on the sidelines…that will be good enough for me! 

My buddy Derrick came on by before dropping his car off at a body shop. He’s getting all body work done and a new pearl paint thrown on, should be awesome!

I finally got around to installing my outer tie rod ends and ES bushings. I apologize about the dirty fender wells, it’s a mixture of overspray, caked on junk etc.

Bushings – Old vs new

 

And everything installed, including the tie rod ends.

Eventually I’ll get rid of those nasty stock arms..

My next project was to get the BRW03’s ready before the event. This was tough, because the barrels still needed to be separated from the outer lips in order to slap the new ones on. Rather than sending them off and possibly waiting weeks, I decided to do some research and see if I could do this myself. From the help of some other 03 lovers, I got enough tips/tricks to get to it. Basically the main point to keep in mind was: Stay in the middle! I cut a little bit towards the lip just in case, I’d rather do damage to the existing crappy lips than the barrels which I need to reuse.

Here’s the outcome! This was after being separated, and I flattened the existing weld and shined it up a bit to have a clean mating surface.

 

For those of you looking to do this yourself, here’s a pic of the cut weld afterwards, to give you an idea how thick it is. All I used was a 3″ cutoff tool & lots of patience.

 

Before/after shot

I did the same to the other front wheel as well, put them all back together, sealed them up with silicone and went to get some tires mounted. Now the rears look all crappy…haha. After some events I’ll be sending the rears along with the front faces back to Wheelflip to get polished and wider outer lips for the rears.

 

After getting them all assembled, I got the wheels on. Unfortunately since I have low disc faces, they didn’t clear my Z32 calipers so I’m running a 8mm slip-on spacer. Too bad it wasn’t enough to clear the coils, so I’m not sure what I want to do about that. Any readers have an idea? 

Here’s the outcome:

Looks pretty good! I got the wheels to sit in between the coil spring, but on a large bump that’s not going to end well..took it for a drive and here’s my next issue:

Literally no clearance! I definitely made some neighbors mad when I drove around scraping almost 100% of the ride. 

So, that’s my next issue I need to address. Only a few more days to crack down on this!