Post by
Ajax »
https://forums.nicoclub.com/ajax-u5731.html
Mon Oct 24, 2022 7:35 pm
Hello NICO,
Its been a very long time since I was last on here. I thought it might be nice to visit and chat for a bit.
in 2013 I bought a house, and with so many expenses, a full-time job and trying to find my niche in my local theatre world, my s13 was placed in storage. For a while. As in it did not see the light of day until last year.
With the pandemic shutting down theatre and pushing my job hours to lots of OT, I suddenly had some time and money. So I found a shop to work on resurrecting my car.
First off was making sure things were working right. New injectors, lines everywhere, make sure the suspension was all installed correctly (I swapped in some springs and dampers myself, but I only know a bit about what I'm doing on cars). I was very concerned that I had let it sit too long and that it might have been a complete loss.
Luckily, the motor turned over nicely, and things generally worked okay.
After a bit of back and forth finding various problem spots, I did finally drive it around (maybe 300 miles?). The tune following the work showed just shy of 190hp- I had swapped in stage 2 cams for more civility. Startup was still troublesome (turned out to need a higher wattage starter), but it drove pretty well.
And then I took it out for one last drive before storing. Either I did not close the hood fully, or the latch failed (or a mix of both) and the hood flung up once I hit 55 or so. Stupidly unlucky thing to happen, but it was a dang miracle I didn't suffer anything worse. Somehow I worked my way back across 3 lanes of busy weekend traffic and stopped before I ran out of pull-over lane. After calling insurance and trying to get through the shock, I assessed the damage- busted windshield, mangled hood hinges, crunched hood, and some paint scratches. In the epic battle between steel chassis and fiberglass hood; steel wins.
So I went about searching how I wanted to rebuild. New hood on the way, but I also wanted to update my intake so that we wouldn't need to chop into the underside of the hood to fit. Its currently at the body shop and then it will go back into storage for the winter. But in the spring, my plan is to swap cams back to BC Stage 3, do some tuning to see if I can get a bit better idle quality without sacrificing too much hp, and then enjoying it during summers.
I'm looking at options for new image hosting. I'll share some pics when I'm able.