Right, I’m putting up this thread in preparation of my upcoming rebuild over the next 4 months.
Disclaimer!!!: The first post is covering the history of the car to date. If you’re already familiar with my car’s story, or just not arsed reading it all then scan through the pics and skip to post #2!!
Here’s my car’s story so far:
For those of you that don’t know, the car is a 1997 180SX Type-X. It’s a Japanese import with the non-VVT Blacktop SR20DET. I bought the car in Summer 2009 pretty much standard and just off the boat from Japan with just a HKS air filter and a set of 17” Gram Light 57Pro.
Here are the pics from the day I collected it:
This is where the trouble began.
After I put down my deposit on the car, the garage (Japcars, Dublin) contacted me to say that they thought the head gasket was on the way out, and as they were to guarantee the engine & ‘box for 6 months, they would replace it before I took delivery. Fine I thought. At least it’ll have a rock solid engine to start modifying from.
They told me they were sending the head to be skimmed and said I could pick up the car later that week. I collected it, and he advised me not to drive it hard for a while until the new gasket settled in. I agreed and behaved myself. On the way home I was accelerating in second and at about 3,500 rpm, heard a loud bang, lost all power and the revs shot up and started hopping of the limiter!
I quickly took it out of gear and knocked off the engine and pulled off the road to inspect the damage. Turns out the loud bang was the main boost pipe popping off, someone hadn’t tightened the jubilee clip properly. And the reason for the revs shooting up was that the throttle was stuck fully open! Unfortunately the garage was closed so I closed it by hand and carefully drove the car home to have a proper look.
It turned out that the round piece that the throttle cable sits on was slightly bent and was fouling on a nut causing it to stick, probably as a result of the same careless mechanic who didn’t tighten the boost hose leaning on it.
I fixed it myself and phoned the garage the next day to give the m a bollocking, and I asked them had they not test drove the car after rebuilding it. They claimed they had, and they hadn’t noticed any problem. He apologised so I left it at that.
Over the next week I noticed a serious oil leak under the car. I brought the car back to them where they discovered the leak to be coming from the back of the engine between the head and the block. They had used a spurious gasket as the genuine item from Nissan would have taken 5 weeks from Nissan, and it wasn’t sealing right. He ordered it and I brought the car home. Five weeks and a lot of getting lifts later, and the car went back to them to have the head gasket changed again. All went well and I had my car back in two days.
I quickly set about removing the kouki spoiler as I’m not really one for wings myself, so that left it looking like this:
I enjoyed driving the car as it was, and all was well until I had an accident in February 2010. My rear tyres weren’t great and I hit a patch of standing water on the carriageway, spun 360 degrees and ended up hitting the barrier on the hard shoulder. All pretty minor cosmetic damage thankfully.
Shortly after this, the car started to run very poorly. It would randomly bog down under load and not accelerate, sometimes misfiring, to the point where I nearly got rear-ended by a truck joining a motorway one day as the car would not accelerate. I decided at this point it had to come off the road.
After exhausting the knowledge of the SXOC, and trying every single suggested fix, I took it to Stiv. He discovered that the car was running massively lean, and that the timing was retarded 10 degrees! This had caused the head gasket to blow again. As this was the first turbo car I had owned, I hadn’t noticed anything wrong about how it was performing initially, but looking back, I do remember it having a slight misfire every now and then, which at the time I just put down to shitty petrol, as it only seemed to do it when I filled up from certain stations. Dumbass, right?
I have wanted to fix it ages ago but due to the premature arrival of my little boy last March I haven’t had time/money/energy to do it.
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I'll keep my eyes & ears open for an SR20 for you in the mean-time. 
Have you sourced a new wing, headlight surround & how is the bumper? Is the wing support underneath (chassis-wise) ok?
Originally Posted by Scottie
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