I see your SR and raise you a 1J

The beginning -

Hardly perfect and definately a case of good from far but far from good but this thing will be brought back its former glory. 50mm read over fenders and fairly smooth body are bonuses so Wednesday we commenced surgery.

The start - Day 1 (Wednesday)

Side by side, SR v 1J, Stock body v Wide Body, Stock two tone v Glittery gayness

SR being pulled down, skipped the pics of the SR pull, figured everyone has seen it before.....definately the easy part.

Day 2 (Thursday) - 1J out and shell stripping began, at this stage we stoked because we were hammering through it, the finish line was coming up much faster than we thought......went to bed knowing something major would go down eventually.......and it did..

I rubbed the bay of the green one down ready for a respray, dude came and picked the sr up for pocket money even with the dodgey head will probably end up being the bargain of the century for that dude. Bay gets sprayed and sits to dry while we pull the 1J out.

1J+R154, rad, side mounted bonnet, top mounted ECU (fuck your top mount turbo) and seat - i tried doing a skid in it........unfortunately she didn't get the two step quite right.

Day 3 (Friday) - We were both feeling good about the whole thing at this stage, shit was going knarly so we started by pulling what we needed out of two tone's bay and connecting everything up that we needed for the J to just drop straight in.

Pretty impressed with how the paint came out, especially considering it was cleaned, rubbed back, undercoated black and sprayed in less than 4hrs....much better than the shit effort i did on the two tone one. Top struts, top of firewall and front clip are all that is left to spray. Will cover the glass, motor and pull plates off and finish the rest off in the next couple of days/next weekend.

1 x Aerron powaa

90% done in the bay........this is where shit went bad, hit the fan and the fan fell out of the ceiling and killed the cat. From here on it was a battle and hours got wasted on the silliest things.

The left engine mount was a real bitch to get to with the pwr steering lines being where they were. We didn't want to drop the crossmember and replace it with two tone's as they are near identical and there was no need......unfortunately with an overly stubborn, and by this stage rounded (underneath) nut we had no choice but to unbolt the pwr steering lines, control arms and castor arms to pull the green crossmember out and replace it.

Thankfully two tone had lost its 5 stud and brakes to Jon the night before (who owns a very tidy X-Type 180) so it was much less of a whore trying to pull the crossmember out of it to swap over.

By the time the dust had settled we had lost over 3hrs for one fucking nut, i wasn't particularly impressed so we called it and went for lunch. When we got back our (my) luck didn't improve.

Before we dropped the 1J we refitted the engine mounts to find that one thread was already on its way out, i will rewind a little to explain why.

When we pulled the SR i was pretty surprised to find how loose the engine mount nuts were, the 1J surprised me even more and given that i had taken it for multiple test runs its a scary thought to find that the only things holding the motor into the bay were only finger tight.

We then found that the shop that had originally fitted the 1J had fitted metric nuts on imperial bolts and fucked the thread, thankfully three of the four are probably workable but the fourth will require some work/reordering of mounts to fix. We tried the only joint open at 7.30pm on a friday night and to no avail.........needless to say i was fucking gutted.

Aerron ended up snapping me out of my silly funk and we went home to check the difference between the old sr mounts and the new 'custom' 1J mounts. The bolt locations were identical and the surrounding mount, although a different shape was that dissimilar from the thing it was replacing, so finding multiple replacements should be easy. Needless to say my frustration with the shop who had fitted the 1J was beyond boiling point and i was glad that i had ended up buying a new shell, because as Aerron mentioned i would have never of known otherwise until my motor tried to fly to the moon........so again pulling some fairly major positives from a poo situation.

Anywho we dropped the 1j anyway, even with the motor having to be jacked up again to remove the mounts to fix/replace and the hopes of a turn key switch in less than half a week quickly faded away.

Needless to say it was definately an experience and i have learnt so much from it, its an ever nicer feeling being able to say "we did that" instead of giving credit to a shop that doesn't even deserve the old brown paper bag, full of dog shit, set on fire and doorbell rung trick pulled of them.

3 1/2 months in a shop to pull off a job that we just knocked over (biggest job) in 3 days with 2 dudes at anyone time and i gave them two-tone with an empty bay. If you do ever read this and want to do a 1J swap into an S13 do yourself a favour. Learn from my mistakes, buy the conversion kit from 2JZswap (all my shit is that anyways just with large amounts of $$$ added to the side) and track down a dude who has done it with a stock ecu and get it replugged/buy a 1J ecu with digital dash and fix all your electrics like that. You will save yourself so many thousands of dollars, have the satisfaction of pulling it off yourself and have a better quality job at the end of it.

Later