Project R314

So I thought it was about I made a project thread as I've had the car 2 years now and been a member almost as long. So from the beginning...

September 2017 I sold my Turbo MK1 mx5 in order to buy an S14 as i'd always wanted one and at the time there were plenty for sale and some very nice mint condition ones. However I love a pile of crap nugget, that way I don't feel bad when I tear the thing apart. I found said nugget up in Yorkshire and it was probably the cheapest S14 for sale on the internet at the time, for a few pounds over £2500 I bought this:

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an absolute nugget of a car with 220,000 miles on the clock.

The previous owner had decided to respray the whole car in a hideous baby blue colour and it looked like it was either a single stage paint job or he didn't to clear coat it. That wasn't the biggest problem with the car, it hadn't been used in over a year as it had started to overheat and the previous owner advised that the head gasket in likely gone. No problem, easy enough to fix. So money changed hands I trailed the thing back to my house in Sussex and the next day got to tearing it down and seeing what was wrong.

The first thing I noticed was that the clutch fan had removed and replaced with some sketchy ass looking electric fans which in closer inspection... were not connected! So I did some tidying up, rewired the fans and got everything working, guess what no more overheating and no blown head gasket. Now I knew when I bought the car it had some rust despite the previous owner assuring me that he had fixed the rust before he took it off the road. As such I took the car for an MOT and as expected it failed, so I took it to my friendly mechanic to get it patched up and back on the road. A few weeks and about £900 later the car was back on the road.

Almost straight away though the car developed a horrific misfire so I went through all the usual junk but no joy the misfire persisted. I compression tested the engine and I was getting about 90PSI across all cylinders so decided to rebuild it. So we pulled the engine, replaced the bearings, rings and all the gaskets and chucked it back in the car. This fixed the compression issues but not the misfire. After weeks of diagnosis I identified the issues to be partly with the main engine wiring harness so replaced that and almost all of the misfiring stopped but it still missed occasionally high in the rev range when on boost. I'd already changed plugs and coils so i Figured that it had to be the igniter and as there as rare as rocking horse s**t I did a VAG coil conversion and boom the car ran like a dream... for 2 weeks until the turbo died.

At this point I getting a little bit irritated, I'd spent more time fixing the damn thing than driving it. I wasn't really in the mood to throw down on a genuine garret turbo so I jumped on ebay and bought a cheap chinese turbo and chucked that on. This wasn't actually too bad, the car ran pretty much flawlessly for about 6 months until one day I went to fire the car up and it ran for a few seconds and then ate itself... the oil pump failed. To fair I wasn't really surprised, I didn't bother replacing it when I rebuilt the engine as it was a "quick n dirty" rebuild as I never planned on keeping the engine in the long run.

So at this point I decided it wouldn't be worth spending more money and time on an engine that I had no intention of keeping. I pulled the engine and gearbox out and sold it, I figured someone could make use of it for a project or whatever. So I went away and sourced a low mileage RB25DET, gearbox, loom and everything I needed to do the conversion. I was in no real rush to get this done as this wasn't my daily car so over the course of about 5 months I chucked the engine in, tubbed the front arches (this was due to rust, I had no intention of drifting the car) painted the bay and made it look all pretty. I also got a stack of goodies from driftworks: coilovers, full arms front and rear, subframe and diff bushings so got all of those fitted as well.

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Once it was all finished I took the car back to my friendly mechanic to get the sills done as they were looking a bit nasty. They were bad so I'm glad I got them done when I did.

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So after that I got it MOT'd again and all was good, ready for the next phase of the project...

So my original plan was to rocket bunny boss kit the car then rebuild the engine and shoot for some fairly decent power and that is what I started to do, I ordered the full kit (A rep kit from GRAMS) and started work getting everything fitted. I actually sent the car to my friendly mechanic again to get the rears fitted up as I was getting him to tub the rears so again a few weeks in his workshop and it was done. Unfortunately I don't really have any pictures of the car at this stage.

The next time I drove the car I noticed that one of the rear calipers were sticking and boiling the brake fluid so at this point I decided to stop driving it for a while as it was ludicrously unsafe. I looked into changing the calipers for something better and I'd considered changing to 350Z or 370Z calipers but as it was effectively going to be temporary I decided it wasn't worth it.

Now originally I had i planned on the car just being a mad street/track car but I'd started leaning more towards making it almost exclusively a track car so I took the car off the road and really started to tear into it. When I started this project I had really wanted an RB26 but couldn't afford one when I changed the engine so I settled on the RB25. However I found an RB26 for sale (most of one any way) and on a whim I decided to buy it off of a chap over in the isle of wight. The engine was missing its rods, pistons, cams and a few other bits but I figured I would have replaced those for forged parts anyway so for the low low price of £800 why not.

I think it was this little trip over to the isle of wight that started this spiral of insanity that got the car to where it is now. I can't remember where the idea came from but between my mate, myself and the guy I bought the engine from; someone said something that completely changed the end goal of the project. When I'd decided to buy and rebuild the RB26 I had planned on building it, mating it to my RB25 gearbox and running it like that, simple right. However after some time and this stupid idea nagging at me I decided that an all wheel drive RB26 Powered S14 would be even more awesome and that was now my end goal.

I know that this been done before, I know Fullrace made a kit to chuck R32 GTR running gear in an S14 but not only is that kit mad expensive they also don't seem to make it anymore. After some research and thinking I decided that I was gonna change the car to use R33 running gear on the front, with R33 GTR subframe and suspension. So I pulled the RB25 back out of the car and sold it and tore the car apart.

I should probably mention at this point that I work as a metal fabricator (mainly TIG welding but also MIG when there is need of it) and own/run my own fabrication company. So I started by taking copious amounts of measurements and then proceeded to cut the front end of the car off, quite literally.

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After test fitting the engine for the first time with the new chassis legs and subframe position I realised that the engine was about 40mm to far forward. So i needed to move the engine and subframe back, I also decided that at this point that having chassis legs made of 1 3/4" CDS tube probably isn't a good idea as not only where they really heavy I was concerned with what would happen in the event of an impact. So I redesigned the legs using steel plate/sheet cut, bent and welded together and moved the engine back 40mm.

I also procured the front wings and core support of an R33 GTR so that I could make a negative jig up to ensure that all of my suspension mounting points were exactly where they needed to be. all of that resulted in this:

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The eagle eyed among you may have noticed that that GTR subframe looks a bit odd, wells that's because I moved the suspension mounting points out on either side by 30mm. I also made the same changes to all of the upper mounts when I made the original jigs from the GTR. The reason for this is that the RB BOSS kit adds on 50mm each side of the car and I'll be damned If I'm gonna go to all this effort just to add spacers or low offset wheels and f**k the scrub radius of the front wheels. I wanted to keep as close as possible to the original offset on the front so I moved the entire suspension assemblies out by 30mm either side (my intended wheels will make up the rest.)

At this point the front frame was only tak welded together so I pulled the car into the workshop and fully tig welded the frame. I think I ended up staying late after work until about 1AM to get it all finished but I wanted to get it done all in one go. (And in case you were wondering the white subaru is mine)

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I figured at this point I may well chuck all of the panels on and get a look of what the front is going to look like when its done.

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As you can see the front is looking pretty mean at this point and the current wheels and tyres do sit out a fair way but at the back I still need to move the wheels out another 100mm each side! so I jumped onto Fusion360 and mocked up a new rear subframe that would move the mounting points out by a decent amount. I settled on moving the mount points out by 60mm each side as the rear wheels will be 11j so wheel make up the other 40mm. I whipped the OEM subframe off the car, replaced the bushings for ally ones and made another jig. This gave rise to this monstrosity:

https://i.imgur.com/yP79SgB.jpg?1
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This was mainly built as a prototype so has no bushings what so ever and no provision for them. When I actually test fitted things I also ended changing the rear diff mount a fair amount but for some reason I never took pictures of the final prototype before I threw it on the car. Once I'm happy I will probably make another version with some provision for bushings just so that I have the option in the future.

The next item on my list was to start chucking in the roll cage but before I could start that there was some rust bubbling on the rear strut tops that needed fixing. Well you might remember in my previous post I mentioned that the previous owner had assured me that he had "fixed the rust. Well his idea of fixing rust was just "welding" (in the loosest sense of the word. My grandmother could do a better job and she has parkinsons!) a patch over the top.

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Here is the chunk I had to cut out, there is also some more but no pictures of it. Here is whole it left:

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The other side was pretty much the same so I cut out, bent and welded in patches for all of that. Its not the prettiest work I've ever done but it's plenty strong so I'm happy.

this is pretty much where I am at the moment with the car. There are a few things I've missed but I might add them later.

Next on my list of things to do:

Roll cage,
Trans tunnel modifications (need to fit the RB26 Gearbox and transfer case)
Pedal Box placement
Firewall replacement (its a tad rusty so I figured I'm gonna replace it lock stock and barrel)
etc, etc

I also just ordered a rollover Jig/rotisserie so that I could do some welding work underneath the car. Hopefully I'll get some more work done shortly

You just won the internet. Love where this build is going. Well done.


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Wow! Haven't read it all yet, but looks awesome from the pics....

Would love to have the skills/ space/ tools to do something like this!