I think she is looking sexy. Finally. Exterior done…… besides new wheels.

I would just like to start off by saying next year this ride height will be the norm for this car. The body is far from perfect, it will never be perfect. I’m not that kind of person and neither is my car. May as well get something right. You’ve heard of BH low, well here comes SRS low.

RAWR!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway back to the work that was at hand. I finished more sanding today. God that VIS fiberglass is shit. Cracks everywhere. I got fed up and left a few. FUCK IT. It adds character right.

Primed and ready. Look at how smooth it is almost cant tell there was ever an exhaust port there. Now that its on the car you can slightly tell but only when the car is not moving and your standing 3 feet away staring at the spot.

Can you see the spot? Really the only way you can see it here is by looking at the bottom edge of the lip on top of the picture. Now compare that to what the other side looks like.

And now a little teaser shot for a bit. Ignore the fact the car is disgustingly dirt. Its been raining on and off lately or i havent had time to get to the wash. I might butter up the girlfriend tomorrow for a little bikini car wash. I was really suprised at how aggressive it is. Just as aggressive as say the BN sports type 2 kit which i really want just it fits like shit unlike the BN sports kit.

The car also needs to settle back down again after having the entire rear off the ground for an hour or so today. I need coilover and bigger wheels 19’s would do the trick.

Well, I really don’t know what to say so here are the pics:

The begining:

The end:

Not much of a difference I suppose… As of now I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing with the car etc. Battery shorted out and caught fire to a car cover in my trunk which I noticed while driving. Luckily I was able to get out of the car in time. The fire melted my gas tube that goes from the gas tank to the gas door, so then the gas tank was just feeding the fire. Burnt everything practically. The funniest thing of all is that my first 510 was burnt as well when my garage caught on fire. Coincidence?

R.I.P.

The price on them was ridiculous, about 30$ cheaper per arm than comparable Megan Racing arms. Of course, for that price you can’t expect arms made out of a mermaid’s vagina, or welded by god’s own hand, but I’ve had a lot of sucesses with cheap parts in my past. 80% of the shit on my last car was knockoff, cheap, used, defective or straight broken so I have no qualms with trying out the latest, cheapest suspension package out there.

The arms arrived in solid packaging from Enjuku. Each arm was individually wrapped in “High Performance” plastic ^_^

The bumble bee yellow color was a nice touch, the powdercoat seems very very soft though so you have to handle the arms carefully during install to keep from scratching.

Unwrapped, they look like most low-price range tension rods. Which isn’t a bad thing. Tension rods are simple arms, there’s not a whole lot of magic and flash in them.

The end-links seemed pretty stout, moved very smoothly. They come with what appears to be a brass bushing. These are self-lubricating end-links.

The adjustment bolts spun easily and tighten strong. Again care must be  taken when using wrenches not to scratch the powder coat.

The arms came with no additional hardware (new nuts/bolts/adjustment wrenches), but at about 100$ per arm, do you really expect them to? Stock nuts and hardware work just fine. Used crescent wrenches for adjustment without a single issue.

Tension rod next to stock piece.

Installation was a non-issue on the passenger side. Luckily my tension rod brackets weren’t bent like everything else in this car. Stock nuts threaded with ease, stock bolts slid through without binding.

The driver’s side however, what a fucking nightmare.My control arm had apparently been hit with a Russian SK-429 Silo Rocket in it’s lifetime, and wrapped the lip around the top of my stock tenstion rod bolt. This metal is extremely thick and stout. It took some serious work with the sledgehammer/vice grips/crowbar and retard strength to get this to a point where I could remove the nut.

But, brute force always prevails. Once the metal was bent away, install was once again easy.

That took care of the front end components. So far I’m happy with them, only downsides are they are not as thick as the Kazamas I had before (150$) and the powdercoat isn’t as sturdy. I have some pretty gnarkill caster up front on the right side from what I assume is a previous drift accident with a K-Rail. Dialing some of that out is going to be key, and the true test will be to see steering response improvement I get from these. Next up I installed the components my car needed the most, rear toe arms.

Solid toe arms. I’ve used the SPL parts toe arms in the past, with the bend for low cars. These are certainly not the same arms, more on par with the Megan Racing parts toe arms. But for a lot less money.

The welds don’t appear to have any issue, no stacked dimes but no dirty or uneven welds either. I imagine I could get a better judge on the welds if the powder coat wasn’t so thick on them. All the hardware and adjustments moved with ease, with a center adjustment point on the arm making it a breeze.

I know I sound like a broken record here, but installation was once again simple. I do not like working on stuff other than my wheels and aero. So it’s nice to me when a part goes in quick and easy. I’ve installed arms that had trouble threading, had trouble fitting through stock mount points, or had a bunch of adaptors I had to switch out depending on what car I was using.

Unfortunately on this arm I did leave a scratch with my cheapo, chewed up socket.

Unfortunately, I had to stop there. Stupid work!

Next step, install the ISIS RUCA, ISIS tension rods and get a damn alignment! Then my car should be ready for some track use. I could care less what an arm looks like, what welds it has or what end links it uses, what matters to me is how it performs, and that is what I really look forward to finding out on these ISIS arms. Can a 100$ arm perform like a 200$ arm? Stay tuned!

Smoke break!

So a few short weeks ago, I finished building a fantastically fun Honda Zoomer. It was great to do. However, it was strangely unsatisfying to me. I looked at it, and saw that every single part was new/modified except the front frame, and steering stem. But I was still wanting more. Wanting to make it MORE rediculous, MORE of an attention grabber. Everyone likes the feeling of driving by, and people stopping, turning their heads, admiring the work you have accomplished. I know I do, gives me that warm feeling inside. But, we all (well all the TRUE motorheads) are never satisfied, and must tinker. Why do you think people never keep their finished projects?  So in true fashion as I always do, I ushered out the old, and decided to bring a new, uncommon beast to the Violent Running Tribe garage.  I decided on a Maxi scoot. For you out there not familiar with this sort of thing, they are basically 250cc and up scooters, fully automatic might I add. Twist and go is the idea here. Super efficient for commuting, and due to Japan’s awesome inspection laws, do not require to be actually inspected by the government of Japan.

Does anyone know what that means?

It means you can do whatever you want. Super long, super low, super loud, whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  You always see the cars in the videos online of cars in Japan drifting, and they all have the janky looking slash plate.  Like you see here:

borrowed from the blog-http://86fighters.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/ebisu-drift-festival-day-1-amazement/

Well, they use that plate to be able to drive the car for 5 day periods at a time, masquerading as a legal car. So what does not worrying about inspection do for me?

This totally makes it a free pass to do WHATEVER you want, without having to worry about that pesky inspection every two years. Think how many super cool awesome cars you would see if they had that luxury.

I digress however to the topic at hand.  Progression in the world of things with wheels. I have built everything from a 180, which I still miss to this day, to a Nissan Cedric that was passed around online blogs and forums like the slut it was for wheel fitment, to the smallest thing, the Honda Zoomer. So Im sure by now, everyone is wondering….what is the next progression, no? Well, since I got to Japan a little over three years ago, I was fascinated by the Maxi Scooter scene. Huge, obnoxious, loud scooters barreling down the highway with their lights, strobes, and music blaring. Scraping over the smallest of bumps. I told myself that one day I would do that. Up until two weeks ago, I didn’t think I would ever do it. But the wife convinced me by saying she wanted to ride  scooter. So what better way to hide a perfectly good project, than to tell myself, “The wife wanted it, so its good!”  Well, that is what I did. So the start of Project VRT Royalty has begun.  The bike is a Yamaha Majesty 250cc scoot. A Cult classic in Japan. One of a few of outrageously popular scooters that roam the streets to include Maxams (morpheous in the US), Skywave (Burgman), Forza (I dunno the US version), Helix, and a host of others. Aftermarket is plentiful, and I plan to take full advantage of it. I have 8 months to turn this:

into something as awesome as this

Stay tuned

Yeeeeaahhhh……

So today I did some work to my car, but it was not much.  Kyle’s photography is probably more exciting than anything…

This monday rolled up with bird shit all up on his hood..

Tried to bang shit to make my wheels fit but I need a torch to heat the metal, so that has to wait until tomorrow..

Went to Vatozone to  buy some shit, well order it.

The Infamous Unicycle

Got bored so we decided to put stickars on!

Random picture goodness thanks to Kyle. Well, all photo credit goes to Kyle.

Decided to go ahead and wire up my new cheap-ass tach.

Red- 12v accessory power (so the tach is on when the key is in the ‘on’ position).

Black- ground.

Green- coil wire (green w/ black stripe wire on s14 harness with internal coil).

White- illumination (either running light wire or headlamp wire like I did because I wasn’t about to look in my 510 wiring schemantic).

Then presto, you have a working tach. You should probably solder the green wire to you coil wire as well as soldering you red wire to power.

Reinstalled my intake stuff because I had to disassemble them to get to my coil wire by the distributor.

Yes, shit's jank...

Washed her up. Not that you can tell, there’s almost no paint on this thing.

Needs a new rear bumper for sure.

Definitely has a little bit of “rake” in the stance, need to fix that. Unfortunately I’m already drooping 2″ of spring in the rear.

The front fitment, had to slice up the lips of the fenders.

The front end has definitely seen better days.

Not a bad interior for a 400$ car….

VIS is full of retarded people and managed to give me a 30mm and 50mm fender. The 30mm fender they gave me to replace the 50mm is black. Fantastic.

Looking rough as hell, and ready to drive. A canyon cruise told me that I need some toe arms, tie rods and RUCA fast.

That’s all! More to come soon.

So, I was real sad about buying 17’s after owning a sweet set of 18″ Viennas in the past, figured I’d take a few steps to make them at least presentable…

So I got a connection to VIS and bought some 20mm front and 30mm rear fenders for the poop-coupe. Also picked up some 38mm and 50mm spacers from Duffman. (thanks fellas!)

Lee doing some cutting on the rear metal in the driveway.

Karl being helpful. He has a weird hatred for cats.

On the stands…

Like always, the neighbor’s cat Hollywood showed up to nibble on us and meow.

One side sliced up. Check out that massive spacer. I suck

Work begins on side 2…

Uggh…

HALLOWEEN.

Side 2 getting about finished.

Fenders begin fitting…

I did almost no fitment calculations at all on this, but the wheels lined up god damn perfectly.

Front fitment is god damn amazing. 17×9 -18

Rear fitment is no slouch either. 17×9 -30. Ride height is about as low as you can go. Tein Flex maxxed out in front and drooping about 2″ in the rear. Frame rails clear about 1″ from the gound. By far the lowest I’ve ever been. At least 1/2″ lower than the last coupe.

Overall I’m happy, I have the same fitment I had on my 18″s before, but on 17s!

Again sorry for the crappy post I’m having a hell of at ime with this TV and wireless keyboard/mouse setup.

Kyle’s S13 was the first car we shot on this tree shrouded avenue.

The new paint looks great from this far away!

If you haven’t guessed by now none of the license plates you see on these photo shoots are real.

This car really needs some ‘Bricks’ (halogen headlamps). Would really make this picture about a thousand times better.

The rest of the Tribe waiting and shooting the shit.

It was a lazy Sunday.

Daniel’s 510 has tons of character. The bare metal, the tow hook ring, the 1932 rat rod paint.

The driver.

The exposed metal just glistens in the sun.

Mora trying to sell his camera to Kyle.

The sun was setting quickly, the shoot had to be quick.

Mora was getting impatient, or metal, or something…

Photographers hard at work…

He got a nice picture of my retina.

DK.

Danielcito.

I know, I’m a sucker for this car, and this angle.

Irish’s 510 with a couple gallons of gas in it, made it to the relocation of our photo shoot.

The Violent Running 510’s.

Irish’s front end is just super cool. No grill and the smooth new paint contrasted against the dark mechanical innards of his front end make for a very characterized look.

DK’s RX-7, finally, a photo shoot with it… and he didn’t put on his good rear wheels! Extreme disappointment.

His front fitment though, is beyond compare.