Cams AE85 build from NZ

[slacker.cam]

Around this time I bought a set of brake calipers and rotors from a S14 Nissan Sivia K's. 280mm rotors up front with 4 pot calipers should do well on this little car. My road car is a S14 and with good pads I have never had brake fade on the track so I figured they would be a good choice here. One of the drawbacks of the S14 calipers is that they are cast iron - so they are relatively heavy. I plan to swap to Z32 calipers when the car is running. The difficult part of this conversion is building the mounting brakets for the calipers and making the system work with the front rotors mounting over the hub, rather than behind it like the original setup. The rear caliper brakets weren't too bad will be machined from a flat plate and machined to the correct thickness (12mm). I designed the brackets on Solidworks ready to be laser cut along with the front ones. No pics sorry of the brackets but here is the front rotor comparison (note that these are AE85 rotors, not AE86 ones):




I also machined the front hubs down to fit inside of the S14 rotor. These need a steel ring machined to locate the rotor on the hub correctly. As of yet (July 2010) I have not yet done this.

Somehow an entire year went by and it's now the start of 2008. Next on the list was front suspension and brakes. I finally got a chance to modify the front struts for the D2 adjustable setup. The strut inserts did not fit correctly so i had to modify the big nut that holds them in to place. I turned it down in the lathe so it was shorter and had less wall thickness. This sorted the problem and the front spring/shock assembly was complete.






Now that the car was effectively rolling again I set about doing some panel work. The original bootlid was fairly well rusted out and I loved the look of the TRD ducktails so I killed two birds with one stone and bought a
fibreglass bootlid with the ducktail molded in. This was manufactued by a local company here in NZ. This saves me some weight and I never have to worry about rust issues again! This is how the car looked in June 2008:




I repaired, filled and primered 2 guards ready for final paint and started on some rust repairs over the next couple of months. I found a significant amount of rust in the right rear wheel arch and in the area behind the bumper. A lot of this had been repaired badly in the past and had been covered with bog/bondo. Pics: