BUILDING My Girlfriend Her DREAM Car DIDN T Go To Plan

I've got some exciting news guys before we start this episode. I started a new business by accident actually. Ricky seats baby. I've been working on these for over 18 months. I accidentally and I'm not going to bore you with too much information but I essentially went over to Canton Fair which is the largest manufacturing fair in the world for some products we've built not bought actually like completely unrelated and I was super exhausted walking around this event for like four days and I just randomly sat down in seats made by these guys and I was like these are insane like the quality, the feel, the shape, the comfort, everything. I ended up getting contact with them and here we are. I found a bit of a gap in the market there. A lot of you guys that have built or even me building patrols, cruises, all sorts of stuff. You kind of just end up going for like the XR6 seats or maybe some VE seats and those are starting to get really ----, really bad, smelly, torn up and people are asking like a thousand bucks for them. So I thought why not bring out a seat that is brand new design for you guys to put in your four-wheel drive or even your street car. We've got a bunch of drift seats as well for the drifting guys or JDM guys but these have been designed. They've got a flat bottom so that's been made specifically for my seat. Easier to get in and out of when you've got a lifted four-wheel drive. Gives you the side lumbar which is more support than your factory bench seat. We've gone for a suede Alcantara insert which means it won't burn you in summer and you won't freeze your butt off when you jump in the car in winter but still a nice leather side. They're reclinable which is sweet for those guys that have utes if you want to get stuff behind your seat and we'll be coming out with a bunch of adapters as well. So jumping into the Instagram Ricky Seats, there's a bunch of info there. We're going to be real transparent with this business too. We haven't had an order yet but when they come through we'll be showing you the orders, the sales, do some live packing and the process of how to fund something like this. Like the process for ADR approval. There's a massive long thing for that. It takes you know 9 to 12 months to get that done. It's super expensive so what sales we need to look at getting to be able to afford to get the ADR done. Any changes and testing for the specific seats themselves. So all got to go through all that kind of stuff but yeah just thought I'd let you guys know. Something I've been working on in the background. I really appreciate the support that you guys have had for everything that I've done with build and I've bought and this is just a new exciting thing for me and I hope a lot of you guys would be welcome to have a new pair of seats in your build, in your four-wheel drive. They're super comfy. I spent literally half the year last year when the Hilux was over in New Zealand with this exact seat. Banger set in the Patrol as well and yeah they're amazing. No changes. I'm happy with how they are. So want to check them out. There'll be a link below to Ricky Seats website or check out their Instagram. Let's get into the episode. Alrighty guys. You know how you get those cowboys and they have a bit of straw in their mouth? You know you're a mechanic when you have a cable tie in your mouth. This is my little thing I chew on all day. Anyway so we spoke about the R32. Now this is an exciting episode because I'm pretty much going to build a whole car in one video which is crazy. Normally we drag these things out for a few but we're going to smash straight into it. So real quick overview. This car, I bought it. It's good bones. I mean it's like any drift car. It's pretty beat up but good bones. No rust and I pretty much bought it because of the cage. So that's a CAMS approved cage. It's all seamless tube and TIG welded so that's a big tick. I'll let's go front, inside the car and back. I'm going to give you a quick rundown of what it's going to be and we'll rip into building this thing and driving it in this one episode. Starting at the front. We've done a full front cut already so I've ripped all that off and there's going to be a couple little support bars and then obviously a bash bar. Rear radiator set up in this car. I'll talk about that a bit later but that just opens up so much more room here. The motor has changed a lot a few times in this build. It was originally going to have the LS out of the patrol with the supercharger. Then I was going to sell the car completely and now my girlfriend who wants to learn to drift, I thought let's use this because it's super safe and we've gone with, this is actually pretty exciting. So Pro Flow have a complete block and they've got their own heads in everything with a forged rotating assembly and it's one of the first ones on the market. They should be available now if you're watching this. So we're going to be using their LSX block and a bunch of good internals. This is just a mock-up motor so I've made engine mounts, a transmission mount already, but we're going to basically leave this thing naturally aspirated 85 and try and get some decent power out of that. Maybe 5600 hopefully with a couple of different tunes for the missus to learn on as well. So real quickly before we move on, I forgot to mention another big part of buying this is the suspension and steering package. It is all Wisefab which is really, really good steering kit. It's like nearly 90 degrees so it's pretty cool to drive with a full Wisefab kit when we just run GK Tech stuff so this will hopefully give us a little bit more angle as well. All right let's go inside. All righty, real quick update from inside. I've ripped the dash out. Now the cage obviously is really good. We've gone for the Haltech Rebel. It's a Nexus system and it's completely wired and terminated for an LS engine. We used the same thing on the GQ Twin Turbo and it worked flawlessly. You can pretty much log into this thing on Wi-Fi and tune it from your laptop from like another room which is sick. Everything's plug and play. We didn't have to terminate a single wire. Everything's just got adapters and goes into the original harness. I've done the handbrake. So that's already actually been bled up just sitting there. So you've got your handbrake and then just got to work on the trans tunnel a bit with that new gearbox and not much else has really happened inside. It's pretty much just banging some seats in. We'll put some false floors and because a bunch of the water lines and that'll come through here because of the rear radiator setup. So it's the last thing to talk about. Let's look at that. Alrighty guys, the rear setup. This is something new that I haven't done on a drift car before and it is basically moving as much as you can to the rear end of the car. Now with my limited knowledge of drifting, I've only been doing it for a couple of years. Contrary to popular belief, you actually want grip in the rear. You don't want to pump your tires up to 60 psi and get as loose as possible so you can drift. I mean maybe if you've got like a BA Falcon or something like that that you just want to go smoke tires on, that's what you do. But when you come to more competitive drifting, you actually want grip because the faster you can enter a corner, the better it's going to be and by having more grip it kind of stops you from washing off the edge of the track. So you can keep a tighter turn while keeping your speed up. So to help with that, putting everything in the rear gets a bit of weight over the back and then the second good thing about that is your radiator increases its capacity probably double. So instead of like maybe 8 litres, you'll be getting 15 litres of actual water because the lines are so long and that helps tremendously with cooling as well so that car doesn't overheat being obviously a drift car that's pretty much unlimited most of the time. Fuel Cell is back here, obviously ProFlow, massive partner with this build. So we've got their fuel tank, their surge tank, their lift pumps, all of their AN lines. Look at the size of this dog, this is a massive dash 20 hose so all the radiator and cooling lines will be AN fittings as well. That's a little bit of where we're at. I think what we're doing now is pretty much I made the transmission crossmember so I can pull that mock-up motor out. We've got engine mounts done, transmission mounts done, so the engine can come out. I think what we're going to do is get the underneath cleaned up and a lick of paint just to make it a bit nicer while nothing's there and then we can start running all the lines and pretty much assembling this thing. The next day. You know when you burn wet cardboard? Look, turn around, look at that, you've made a smoke show. Anyway, adds to the effect, it's a little smoke machine in the corner. So I'm just going to quickly, I thought like there was one hose installed and I was looking around there was nothing under there and I thought let's just fix the underside. Like it looked a bit grubby but I ran my finger along it and it's like this little little layer of like dirt and grease. I reckon I was going to ice blast it but I reckon a good pressure wash will get most of that off, give it a quick lick of black and then we can reassemble the car and it's all brand new under here because the top side is pretty good, engine bay is sweet but underneath has probably just never been done since new. So I got the old trusty SP Tools pressure washer. This old girl she's probably had it five years, 4,000 psi of water pressure. So if that ain't going to rip your uncle off your auntie, I don't know what is. So we're going to give it a clean, use some polyurethane 400 black, maybe a little bit of clear coat, she'll look brand new under there. First pull of the old cold start on, don't check for oil, don't worry about that. So I let all the body dry overnight and it was time to lay some paint. I waited for a nice warm day so it should lay pretty good. Now this is the same stuff that I sprayed the GU Patrol chassis in a couple of years back and it's holding up great. So it's great for under carriages, easy to spray and long lasting. Alright guys the paint is laid underneath, it did tidy up nicely. So it's a polyurethane 400, I think it's a wattle paint or something. Something I've used before, I actually painted the chassis of the GU Patrol and the same stuff. So what I'm going to do now, reinstall the stuff in the back for good. We've got the fuel cell, the radiator, a bunch of brackets and then we've also got the thermo fan shroud which I'm getting bent up at Ryan's at the moment. Lick some black paint on that and then start hooking all these hoses back up and run the ones under the car, properly P-clamping them and getting everything tucked up under the chassis away from any danger. Motor should be here soon as well, let's get into it. Alright, just while I'm doing up these AN lines, I've got these little billet hose separators from Proflow. That means I only have to P-clamp one of the hoses to the chassis rail and then basically mount the second line to this one. It keeps them separated but also keeps it mounted up to the rail only using one P-clamp instead of two for each one. So pretty nifty little thing. And the anodized red too which matches the rest of the stuff on the car, so that's pretty sick. Alrighty guys, it was today that I took delivery of this gorgeous LSX Warlord motor from Proflow. Now this is a brand new block from the guys at Proflow and they've gone through and done the bottom end for me. So I've got a forged crank, forged rods, forged pistons, ARP bolts and studs throughout. This thing is ready to handle some power. So in this episode we're going to be assembling this engine and dropping it in the R32 Skyline that I'm building for my partner to learn to drift in, believe it or not. But don't you worry, I'll be ripping around in this thing on the big tune. So we're going to be staying with NA for now, maybe boost it down the track but there will definitely be a big tune for me and we'll put a smaller tune on for her to learn to drive in. The cool thing about this and what Proflow does, they offer so many parts for these engines that you can essentially get everything new. Every nut and bolt on this engine is brand new so there's no more of that going on marketplace trying to find those over-expensive LS motors that you don't know the history of. Go ahead and buy their brand new block, they're honestly worth the money and they're honestly not that expensive either. We've got a ton of the stuff off the Proflow catalogue, this is their heads as well. We'll go into some details of their heads later in the episode but we've got valves, push rods, covers, alternators, brackets, gaskets, everything. They've got so much stuff for these engines so let's rip straight into it. We'll get a sump banged on this thing and we'll start putting the top end together. Just before we ripped into that, we wanted to put a lick of paint on because it's cast iron block so it will rust. We used some VHT primer and then just their black on top. And then we did do the heads to match. I know it's all aluminium but we wanted it to look the same. Alrighty guys, so before we rip into getting this motor built, we've got to do a little bit of setup first and that is the crank and cam alignment. So I'm going to be degreeing the cam. So we've got a cam here from Crow Cams, we've also got a Rollmaster timing chain. Now this timing chain set allows you to move that bottom gear to adjust the timing between the crank and cam. So I've got a degree wheel here, I've done this a couple of times on the channel before. The early LS build got it done and then I did it again when I rebuilt another engine, I forget what it was for. So I won't go too into detail, a little bit of a voiceover of it but essentially you just find your top dead center of the piston which is essentially the crank and then again for your cam, you can either go off your center line or your 50 thou lift and it'll be all written down in your cam card that you get supplied with your cam. So quickly run through that and once it's all set up we can start assembling. Alright cam timing is pretty simple but important now. First thing I want to do is just clean up the cam, you want to get rid of all of the shipping goo that they put on there to stop it rusting. Make sure that's clean with some brake cleaner, then put some assembly lube on. The more lube the better boys. Get that right in there and then we can start setting up the cam. So timing chain and gears go on and then you put your degree wheel on. From here you want to find your top dead center so you basically set it up one side first using a feeler gauge then you spin it around to the opposite side and mark it there and then you can basically halve that number and you'll know exactly where zero is. Adjust your degree wheel to the new top dead center and then you can start that as your starting point. Moving on from there you want to do the same thing with the cam and you find the top dead center point of that and then you can verify it with your cam card. You can see here we've got pretty damn close. I'm going to verify it with a different measurement which is finding the intake center line and that will also verify the number on your cam card to confirm your timing is correct. Alrighty guys so we did end up getting some good numbers now. One was out by like kind of a degree or half like any changes you make on the timing chain sets usually in two degree increments so we were that close on the 50 thou lift alignment number which was 10 degrees before top dead center but I just wanted to do another check which was finding that intake center line so the same as finding your top dead center you go just over the peak and then just before the peak and you can find the center line of that and it came out at 110 degrees and that's what it says on the spec as well so that just confirms that we're all timed up. Now you can go ahead and change that. I forget which way it is. If you slightly advance it it may give you more power on the top end and then if you retard it you will get more torque. I think we're leaving it as is because obviously without a turbo or a supercharger we kind of want to keep that torque but obviously being a drift car it's going to be revving a lot as well so you want to keep the power as good as we can and not sacrifice any in those areas so continue with the engine build happy with the timing we can go ahead and put all the heads and stuff on now. Alright so I don't actually have the heads with me but we're going to start by putting the sump on so this was just mocked up for now banged on the windage tray and then it was time for the oil pickup as well and then torqued it down to spec but I did run into a bit of an issue. Oh it is a must to listen to rock music when building engines that's for sure. Righto before I just go ahead and put the sump on a couple of things I want to mention uh trap for young players a couple of things this is a windage tray you do not want to forget that thing and just bang your sump on without it that's there to stop the oil sloshing around and keep it up where the crank and it needs to basically be lubricating things and not interrupt the flow of the sump itself causing your engine to starve of oil so it does play a role it does do a job so make sure you put that on another thing we've got arp lower main studs on this so the torque spec for the windage tray bolts will be different make sure you get them off arp they are slightly short I think they're about 40 newton meters whereas the ls ones are normally like 25 or something so they're a different torque spec the other thing with the oil pickup this one's important with your mellings pump a lot of people just use the mellings oil pumps but there are two different types of pickups the factory ones are like tapered or they can have a step in it the jam ones and then you use the green o-ring or a lot of aftermarket ones like this one they actually have a straight inlet and you use the black o-ring they are different sizes so make sure you don't mess that up or you'll lose oil pressure probably and blow your engine so that's important as well so everything's torqued up now pretty much marked it all make sure it's all sweet and then we can bang the sump on and then I pretty much flip it over I'll probably take it off this stand actually to start putting firewheel and bits and pieces on because I ordered the wrong valves well maybe I didn't order the wrong valves but they're definitely wrong maybe they sent the wrong ones but my heads are at caloundria engine center because it's a bit involved with setting them up I'll talk you through that when I get them back but we may not have valves for this episode which is really going to suck because I want to get the motor in and running pretty much do a whole build in one video but we're kind of just waiting on parts so anyway even if there's no heads I'm still going to put this in the car bugger it we'll get something done all right so I went ahead and got the goo and basically set up all my gasket ready to put it on and this is where we found the drama the sump didn't fit it was hitting the windage tray I don't know if it was the same kit or whatever I've had this sitting in the shed for so long did some measurements and it definitely had to be trimmed down so Albert the grinder just nicked a little bit off to make sure that clearance was good so we still run the windage tray assembled the thing back together after that then it was all set to tighten down and torque up oh that was a little bit unexpected but we got it on there in the end had a little bit of trimming I don't know whether the windage tray was from this sump or not but we got it on there in the end now it's some fun flash exciting bits now pro flow do a ton of awesome billet covers and bits and pieces for these ls motors it's actually their two-piece billet timing cover um now that's it's pretty sick because that top piece can come off and allows you to kind of change your cam and do any maintenance there without ripping off your balancer which is always a pain in the ass with a puller take your radiator out all that good stuff so we're going to bang this on just going to use a factory gasket a little bit of goo in these corners helps too we have the same setup on the um twin turbo gq we just found a little bit of goo in the corner just to be safe in case you get a leak or anything did the same with the sump that's just a standard thing whatever there's a joint but there is a little rubber seal there so the way to put this on I'll put the bottom piece on first and pull it up towards the sump to get this seal good and I'll put a bit of goo in there as well and this bottom bit we'll put that on push that up as well while we tighten it to give a good join here so make sure we get no leaks or anything right the dogs are running around today just ignore them okay now the motor is half assembled I've wrapped it up try and keep all the ---- out of it and we are on to clutch so shout out to uni clutch they've jumped on board for this build and I'll quickly tell you what uni clutch is and why they're pretty sick so essentially what they've done is developed one universal clutch and then for every different car that they have I was in New Zealand there for a bit for every for every different car they have there's an adapter so what that means is they can spend all their time resources and money in developing the best clutch they can build still keeping the price competitive and then just having the adapters to go onto it so it's an awesome clutch for the money this is their track series all right so it's a twin plate and it has an awesome pedal feel as well they do ones designed for four wheel drives and also street ones as well like your sport series now what we've also got is their lightened flywheel so being a track car high revving drift car I went for a lightened one like look at that that looks like a flex plate but it is your flywheel for a manual clutch now the reason it doesn't have a face plate is because that is built into the uni clutch itself so that's an all built-in pre-assembled unit you can't muck that up you can't get that wrong so if you want to go check them out I'll track a link down below uni clutch have a ton of different adapters and they will fit their universal clutch you get a little spigot bearing inside as well an adapter for your spline for your input shaft on your gearbox go check out the listings of what they've got available and I dare say they have one for your car as well all right let's get into installing this clutch I made a little bit easier for myself by putting the motor up on the bench here now if you go on the instruction manual for uni clutch you scan the QR code and it gives you an instruction set it tells you the correct torque specs and how to install it for your specific vehicle so pretty awesome setup and this clutch is actually rated to 2000 newton meters of torque which is plenty enough for a little skyline drift car like this but I found out a problem pretty quickly yeah look this one's on me I pretty much had to pull the whole thing apart because of this little spacer plate that has to go in I couldn't get the original spigot bearing out I was having to use a slide having to get it out reassembled the whole thing again flywheel torqued it up clutch torqued that up and we're finally back to where we were at the beginning all right clutch install is nearly done the last little piece oh actually hell was a pain in the ass having to pull everything apart put this adapter plate on I'm glad I remembered that though so that is a left-hand starter conversion so it's not in the way of your steering rack then this little guy spigot bearing adapter so we have the spigot bearing extension had to bang that out put the new one in this is the adapter for the spline and input shaft I checked that on the actual gearbox it fits bang it in here and there's a circlip that you just clip it on with that guy don't lose it and then it's pretty much job done we can put the gearbox on drop it in the car that is so happening today I'm telling you right now all right marriage the only marriage going on in my life is between this motor and this gearbox that's right we are getting it in there's a one-man band here so a bit of a struggle it took two of us to get the mock motor in which was alley this one's cast iron it's way heavier but I managed to get it in with a little bit of creativity oh not the way I wanted to end this episode I obviously wanted to get it running at least and then slap the rest of the car together and pretty much go driving in one episode but motors here with no heads we still went on those last few parts so we're gonna have to push it out till next week where we get this motor running and then start basically putting everything else together there's really not much to do just getting all the guards back on throw some seats in I've pretty much got everything else ready to go on this car so we'll see you guys next week make sure to check out ricky seats my new brand will be chucking ricky seats in this build in the gq in the gu ton of adapters coming as well so go grab yourself a set anyway we'll see you guys next week