Dat73z

Finally just for my own personal peace of mind I paint marked the bolt to the washer to the damper. Every time I inspect the car I'll take a look at the witness marks to see if anything has moved.

I figured this weekend will be fairly packed so I went ahead and torqued on the crank pulley bolt. I ensured the new bolt did not bottom out in the snout. It had about 3mm or 2 threads of headroom with the washer before bottoming out. I cleaned out the crank snout and the new bolt with lots of brake clean, dried it, then primed them both in with loctite primer N 7649 and allowed to flash off for 15 minutes or so. Then I liberally applied loctite 243 (exp date 2024) to the crank bolt and worked it in and out of the threads as I turned it in. Finally I torqued it all down to 150ftlbs with my wife stepping on the brake in the car. I'm going to let this cure out for the next week or so as I reassemble the car. Hopefully I didn't do anything wrong.

And a better view of how shallow my crank snout actually is. I think if I ever have the engine apart again, I'd like to have the blind hole depth increased if it possible and a timesert or something inset to get to at least 1.5d on a 16mm bolt or 24mm with some headroom to ensure no bottoming out.

Today I did some final checks for bolt depth and thread engagement. My snout is fully threaded to the bottom but is shallow which I believe is common with some cranks. I get around 18mm of thread engagement on a 16mm bolt with a thread or two to spare in the snout/not bottoming so around 1D. Ideally I'd get 1.5D, but without having the crank machined I don't believe this is possible. Later today or tomorrow I'll torque it in to 150ftlbs with some loctite primer N and 243.

Keeping at one thing per day until we're back on the road. Tonight I finished uprating the boost control lines from 4mm to 6mm.

Had a few minutes this evening so I adjusted the ride height roughly back to where it was before and test fit a 245 again in the front. I think I need to find a better way to jack the lca in the front to get true ride height but it looks like the 245 will clear everything in the front as well, steering lock to lock.

I got the fronts back together over lunch. I set them to add maybe 0.75 deg of neg camber and some positive caster. The front camber hats also lowered the car by maybe half and inch so I'll need to raise it back up. I think my short rear springs will be in later this week so once I get those in then I can take the final measurements for the custom wheels. So far as I can tell I need something like +12-20 offset in the rear. The fronts are tricky, because likely I'll need to run a spacer to clear my brakes.

Trying to keep at it for the sake of more traction. Tonight after dinner I had about 15 mins so I fully disassembled the front sus and tom AM before work I plan to degrease and regrease everything to prepare for reassembly over lunch or after work. The nice thing is my wife is up every morning at 4 or 5 AM and I don't start work until 6 or 7 so I have an hour or so every AM to do something.

This morning my t3 top hats came in so I started to install them. These will enable me to run 245 or wider tires with a bit more camber and caster adjustment from the top. With the added turbo power and trq, I'm sure they will tighten things up a bit as well. It seems I may be missing a couple of parts so I'll call t3 next week to confirm.

Tonight I fixed my hot side charge pipe. Bead rolled the ends and reapplied a brushed finish to the pipe by hand, which was a massive pita.

Waiting on parts again, so this AM I started test fitting the new tire size. I'm hoping running 245s or wider rcomps will help with traction. Likely I'll need to run shorter springs in the rear to move the perch up, but the first step is to get all the measurements specific to my setup for the wheel builder.

Over lunch I drew on the crank damper using the old bolt. The fit of this damper is definitely tighter than the last. I gave the inside end of the damper a light skim of hondabond and ensured the key was aligned in the keyway as the damper bottomed out. I'm going to take some final measurements and see if I can get the new bolt torqued on there over this next few days and retime the ignition. After that it's all minor reassembly from there.

@Zetsaz full spool around 3k is also where my engine makes peak torque. For a "livable" street car you start running into traction issues as well. Punching it in 2nd on onramps I was lighting up 225 rcomps at 60mph lol

Livable is subjective, with a modern properly sized single on the L paired with modern compression and tuning you're already spooling off idle with good drivability. Nowadays I think it comes down more to the novelty aspect, as the packaging gets pretty crazy in the s30 chassis.

I had ordered an OE KA crank bolt a while back and they were backordered all over the US. Somehow mine was shipped directly from JP, so I figured I'd wait for it to come in. At this point I just need a solid few hrs window to reassemble and get back on the road, it's been hard to find time. Hopefully over this next week.

Measuring a bit more I think I may be able to get away with doing a tight turn or series of pie cuts off the rear of the muffler. Initially I was thinking to shorten the muffler an inch or two, repack and reweld it. Not sure yet, but I'd like to find the option which gives me the most headroom for the least amount of refabrication work. Inboard I'll likely need to run shorter springs on my coilovers to clear the additional backspace to go up to 275s, will need to get the tires on there to measure later

Another busy weekend but had a couple mins this AM so picked up 245 45 16 rcomps. I realize that every time I touch this car it turns into some epic fabrication project. So this time I am going to fabricate the exhaust such that I can fit 275 slicks or wider in the back if I want, but the plan is to run 245 square rcomps for now and go from there.

To help with traction issues I'm having a custom set of wheels barreled with the option to stay 15 or upsize the barrels to 16. Initially I wanted to run 245 45 16 R comps which I know will fit the chassis, but I fabricated the exhaust around 225 50 15 R comps. It seems with 245s I'd have less than 1/2" clearance to the exhaust which seems close. I'm thinking of picking up some 245 tires tomorrow to start measuring. I really want to run 245s or wider on the stock body but I'm not sure if I want to cut and reweld that section of the exhaust to do it.

Sounds like you've got this 👍. I've heard mixed feedback from multiple builders on knife edging as well. You definitely feel a difference in response with it, but I can understand the longevity concerns.

Some sidebar projects have been going on in the background. For the turbo setup, I've been upsizing everything boost control related from 4mm to 6mm.

Still waiting on some parts from Japan so I installed the woodruff key for the damper, along with the crank seal. Super basic but I may as well document, light dab of loctite super glue for the key, and a skim of hondabond for the seal pressed flush to the timing cover.

@AydinZ71 I went through something similar, the dims my crank was done to from one builder ended up being NLA so the entire crank had to be welded and reground which cost maybe 1k overall so fairly reasonable. The knife edging and a bunch of other work was already done, and I got the crank in a deal so it made sense to keep it. Depending on how far you want to go with it, choosing your bearing types are still on the table if you're willing to do that.

Ime the loctite didn't help at 120ftlbs, but I was also shifting 7k+ at 10-15psi of boost on a larger stroker. I'd go with Dave's suggestion of 150ftlbs

Tonight I did a mid project clean up around the car. It's hard to stay organized with multiple projects going on. I think I've have this shell for almost a decade now. The original plan with the first rebuild was to spray it in quick and have a clean driver. When I got the car it looked like a chalkboard but I gave it a quick buff maybe 7 years ago and kept it in survivor patina since. Every time I was going to work the body and paint it, I ended up stripping it back down to a shell and rebuilding it or something else came up in life where I just needed to daily it. I've been thinking over the weekend, to maybe strip it back down to a shell again and spray it all in glass out. But that would be a 3-6 month project at a minimum.

On the tstat install, as is typical I had to make some light modification, grinding the housing ribs to fit the modified Robertshaw unit. No big deal, but maybe someone can find this helpful.