Project Silvia’s Girlfirend Part 2: Making it Handle

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The parking brake fulcrum framusmajig thingy originally bolted through the hub, the backing plate, and the rear upright. Since the new hubs didn't have the framus tab with the necessary framus hole, we simply bolted it through the backing plate and upright. To maintain proper alignment with the parking brake shoes, we made up for the missing framus tab thickness with some carefully selected washers. If I were to do this again, I would probably just cut the framus tab off the old hub and use it as a spacer. 

 

 

Here you can see the new hub and framus successfully divorced. Unfortunately, I can't remember which lake we found this hub in the bottom of, but clearly it had been down there a while…

 

 

The Z32 rear uprights have one more curveball for us. The turbos had HICAS rear wheel steering, which used a little ball joint on the rear upright's toe control arm. Cars without the HICAS (non-turbo Z32s and most S13s) used a conventional rubber bushing here.

 

 

Luckily the aluminum part is the same with our without HICAS, so we were able to press out the ball joint and replace it with a NISMO rubber bushing we got from Jim Wolf Technology.

 

 

Those rear hubs were 5-lugs, so we had to switch the fronts to 5 lug too. There are two ways to do this. The first is to switch the front uprights to S14, then use hubs from the 5-lug SE model S14. That's what we did on Project Silvia, but this time around we took a simpler path and used these Attain 5-lug conversion hubs. These hubs fit the smaller S13 spindle, making this a quick, easy conversion. At least at first…

A few years after getting the car on the road, a horrendous GRONK-GRONK-GRONK noise would occasionally appear in hard right turns. It was a terrifyingly loud, something's gonna break noise. At the same time, a hellaciously loud KERPOP noise would occasionally appear while pulling into driveways or even just turning the wheel while stationary. I spent months thinking they were the same noise and taking everything apart looking for them.

1 comment

  1. Trying to do this same GC coilover setup on my S13 with rear z32 knuckles for that OEM+ type ride all these years later. I have already had to step up from the original 7” 250lbs rear springs to 8” 250lbs which are still at the top of the threaded collar on the yellow KONI with not enough clearance between fender & tire. Currently about 1.8” of clearance between the rear fender & tire which still doesn’t seem close to the early pics of this project car. Do you recall if you had to use longer springs on the rear like I am (about to move up to the 9” 280lbs spring next in order to hopefully have a better range on the threaded collar)?

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