El Andrew

Trades here mate... Elderly, immobile Vietnam vet next door goes to the local mechanic because of scraping noise under his Mazda 3. Tray under front bumper is farked. Gets quoted $500 for the part plus $350 for labour!! Pricks. Mazda dealer charged $250 for part and no labour cos 2 mins.

Snowys cruise FTW! @redlightandy I'm wrecking my BA. You can have the bootlid for free if you want. If you are painting anyway you may as well start with this one which is perfectly straight.

I remember something similar when I got rid of the old bath and shower base earlier in the year - wasn't worth my time to take it to the scrap place. Apparently there's a bit of a scam here with these places too - when the prices were a bit higher (so it was worth them picking up) they would collect the car, take your bank details and never make a transfer. Felt a bit sad tonight when I was stripping the last bits and pieces off and chucking them in the trailer. But then I looked over at my shiny, red, tuned FG with 19s and new Nittos and felt happy again!

Rang a few places today whose websites say they pick up scrap or wrecked cars and pay cash for the metal. All of them told me where to go - they won't even do it for free because scrap steel is apparently down to 4c per kilo so it's not worth it. Will be a few hundred bucks to get it removed, so might invest that into a recipro saw instead and take the shell to the free metal recycling at the tip.

Thanks! I'm already running more boost than factory and will go more eventually, so seems like a no-brainer to do the pipes now.

What's the car? I might be able to help with transmission, cooler lines, ECU, shifter, etc depending on where you are. I'm assuming being a 5 speed that you have a BA.

I'll be doing rear rotors soon, so learned lots from this thread. Might give it all an overnight treatment with a few litres of wd40 first!

Morning everyone. About to pull the trigger on an Intune Motorsports piping kit. Figure if I'm pulling the front bar off for the trans cooler and intercooler, I might as well do piping rather than waiting for it to split. Digging around here it seems like a good option for quality and price, but most threads are pretty old. Any horror stories or alternatives people have tried that I should look at?

It's complex, but effectively amounts to being taxed at your marginal tax rate (rate for the bracket you are in) assuming you don't have any leave accrued prior to 1993. Gets treated as if paid over 12 months so less likely to push you into the next bracket. https://www.ato.gov.au/Forms/Withholding-from-unused-leave-payments-on-termination-of-employment/?page=7#Leaving_employment_for_other_reasons Is taxed differently if it is part of a redundancy package etc.

I had to beat the living sh!t out of the front rotors on the Kluger recently. When I dropped my BA cradle the other week, the rears were the same. I think what you are experiencing is pretty normal!

These guys are telling you two things: Firstly, our cars have full electronic boost control, managed by the ECU. A manual boost controller will trick the wastegate into allowing more boost, but the ECU will still see that boost via the car's boost pressure sensor. If the ECU sees more boost than what the ECU is commanding ("overboost") by a certain threshold, the ECU will shut the fun down. This is what is happening to you. In these cars, a manual boost controller is of zero benefit. You need to have the tune in the ECU edited to command more boost, which it will do with the existing hardware (ie without a manual boost controller). Also 10 psi is getting very marginal for the factory fuel pump and injectors and if your ECU had allowed that boost and not shut you down, you might be shopping for a new engine now as you would have been dangerously lean. Secondly the plugs in and of themselves do not make more power. At higher boost levels, the boost blows out the spark with a large gap, which causes a misfire. Closing the gap sorts this out, as the spark has a smaller gap to cross and is therefore stronger and more resistant to blowing out. The smaller gap allows you to run more boost without blowing out, and therefore make more power. If the spark isn't blowing out, then smaller gaps won't make any more power. Hope what we are saying is helpful. You basically need to decide whether you want to do some more mods and tune all at once, or just tune now on the factory hardware. I tuned my BA for about 9 PSI with a cat upgrade and bigger fuel pump. That was noticeably better than stock but nothing mind blowing.

Was a bit bemused the other week to find a couple of the nuts holding the BA rear cradle to the body were finger tight. Just removed the steering wheel. Bolts holding the airbag in were just flopping around. The bolt holding the wheel to the steering column was finger tight and didn't need any tools at all to remove. The wheel almost fell off once the bolt was off - just a couple of wriggles. Some people shouldn't work on cars...

Absolutely!

By brother lives there - nice part of the world

Lol Arron you must have that link as a keyboard shortcut by now! I've got a set ready to go in [emoji3]

Looks awesome! Are you in Mt Gambier? I think I remember reading you Fairlane taxi write up on AFF a while back.

Haha I had a guy message me on Facebook just to tell me he thought the price was ridiculous for my engine and turbo, and then offered me $200 for my turbo because "you can get a new one on eBay for like $350 champ".

Ooh that's been my favourite over the past few months

Haha must have been a fun thread at the time! Reminds me though, my BA won't start. Here's a pic of the engine bay. Any ideas?

Haha that illustrates the point well!

I had KYB Excels with King lows (which is standard XR height) on my BA. Felt like a nice upgrade for corner stability and bump control, but not noticeably firmer for ride. As above, you can buy that stuff cheap as chips if you are fitting yourself. My FG already had Koni Reds, Lovell springs and pretty big looking Whiteline sway bars on it when I bought it. Is reasonably firm ride and a bit low at the front but is fantastically flat through a bend.

Thanks guys - that is all very interesting info. @Puffwagon - Thanks for that. I think that was just cell formatting which I've now fixed. Thanks @DarrylC for the offer, however given the BA is dead I probably won't use those injectors now as probably not a decent enough jump over the factory FG injectors. I'm a bit confused as although the supplied data is for 39 PSI, don't the multipliers then operate to scale for various fuel pressures? I've done that using a graph as the relationships aren't linear. When I grab injectors for the FG I might still give injector tuning a go as a learning exercise, but will make sure I've got access to good data to fall back on if I need it.

The bloke who bought my BA seats for his 4WD last week said he'd been done over a couple of times with "sorry man they got stolen" story on Gumtree. In one case, he was talking to a mate the next day who had just bought seats from the same suburb and what he had paid was slightly higher than what the first guy had offered and agreed...

If anyone has the time or interest, I'd be keen to know whether I'm on the right track here. I had been planning to use Bosch 968 injectors in the BA and wanted to tune myself rather than copying someone else's work and going "hey, I tuned my own car". I took the data sheet from the TI Performance page, which gives data for these injectors across a range of fuel pressures. I then graphed these, and inserted estimated values for XR6T fuel pressure to make the graphs looks reasonable. The supplied data doesn't result in a linear graph for most parameters, so I couldn't see how I could directly calculate scaled values (not with my maths skills anyway). So I plugged stuff in until the graphs looked sensible. Does this approach work and do the values I've come up with match what others have used for these injectors? I'm not planning to use these injectors anymore since the BA is dead and I'll use something else on the FG. But I'd still like to learn if I'm on the right track. Obviously I would have then refined these numbers a bit using the wideband once I had flashed them into the car. https://1drv.ms/x/s!Ajh2OpnhQjEpgsJ2cm-90Fdw82RNVA