Conor's Night Blue 350z 'Build Thread'

[Richie94gts]

Looks good. Very thorough. Well done.

[GMballistic]

Good job Conor.

 

I'm the same when it comes to missing clips, ...good thing they're cheap and easy to fit. Helps keep the OCD in check.

[dann2010]

Where did u get the clips from

 

L9oking good mate i need to take a leaf from your book and my engine bay iys very dirty. Need to.find a decent something to clean it with.

 

 

 

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk

 

 

[GMballistic]

Where did u get the clips from

You can get them from eBay Dan: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NISSAN-MICRA-PRIMERA-X-TRAIL-ALMERA-BUMPER-SPLASHGUARD-CLIPS-8mm-INNER-LINING-20-/400344954501?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&fits=Model%3A350+Z&hash=item5d366b3685

 

[CPhillips93]

Looks good. Very thorough. Well done.

 

Thanks mate

 

Good job Conor.

 

I'm the same when it comes to missing clips, ...good thing they're cheap and easy to fit. Helps keep the OCD in check.

 

Thanks

 

Exactly, when it's simple and cheap there is no reason not to... and of course the OCD is a motivating factor

[CPhillips93]

This weekend was the zed's first service of my ownership and unfortunately it had to be the big one - a P3!

 

As I have probably mentioned in here somewhere I really struggled to find somewhere to get it serviced; West End Motors in Bodmin wanted far too much money and we don't really have many independent specialist in Cornwall. As a last ditch attempt I thought I would give Town and Country Nissan in Truro a call and was very impressed. I spoke with Mat (for anyone reading this in Cornwall in need of a service!) who advised that if I provided all my own fluids they would charge £195, which I thought was very reasonable! In actual fact, it only took them 2 hours in the end which meant that I was only charged £156, even better

.

 

Unfortunately however it wasn't all good news. On their 'Visual Healthcheck' of the car they have noted that both the nearside front lower suspension tie arm is de-bonded and the rear exhaust joint is blowing. Happily the latter of those two is not too worrying, my 182 always used to be leaking

. However the suspension part is a bit of a worry, especially seeing as the service guys advised me that this bush was so bad that it was effectively resting on the subframe. I have posted this in the suspension section of the forum hopefully to get some advice as to what part(s) I may need and the difficulty of the job, as Town and Country have quoted me £385.42! I am going to try and get the car up to take a look myself either Thursday or next weekend just to size up what's going on.

 

Regardless, I am very happy with the service Town and Country provided, would definitely recommend them to anyone round here! Just a shame that they had to find broken parts, but at least it gives me an excuse to get a nice new exhaust

 

I have also managed to find time to spray my interior handles and panel just in front of the satnav that had suffered some damage... watch this space

 

Comments and suggestions welcome.

 

Conor.

Edited March 1, 2016 by CPhillips93

[CPhillips93]

So today I finally round to getting my freshly painted interior door handles/satnav insert.

 

As you may have realised by now I am very thorough and although most of you probably know how to remove these I thought I would post the step by step (give or take a few steps!) guide of how to get the buggers off

 

First I started with the passenger side handle, which requires some interior plastic removal tools like these -

http://www.ebay.co.u...=item4871b99ec0 - these are so handy especially seeing how easy the interiors are to attract scratches, a 10mm socket, an extension and a ratchet socket wrench.

 

Firstly remove the silver insert on the upright handle revealing the two 10mm bolts here:-

 

 

And here:-

 

 

Which leaves you with this:-

 

 

Where you can use the plastic tool or whatever weapon of choice to lever the handle/armrest off. I didn't take any pictures of the removal of the driver's side handle or the satnav insert, as the drivers handle is literally a repeat of the above (mentioned in my very first post of this thread) and the satnav insert is removed by prising out with a credit card (mentioned in my aux hack post)!

 

I was then left with the two scratched handles and insert:-

 

 

 

 

 

 

To remove the window switches etc, there are several tabs attaching them to the handle like so:-

 

 

The easiest way I find to remove these are to use an old credit card to prise them off one by way, just take it easy as the tabs attached to the handle are often prone to snapping if you bend them too far open!

This then leaves you with some empty handles and your insert ready to be sanded (I used some 240 grit to start with) like so:-

 

 

To get the best possible finish I took the handles and insert all the way back to plastic as I probably would have found it difficult to get a good finish bearing in mind how deep the gouges are on the drivers handle. It will take a while but unfortunately prep is key with painting stuff like this, especially with plastic. Regardless of what colour you go for you must use plastic primer otherwise the paint will simply react and cause a bad finish.

 

The plastics back to plastic!

 

 

In the 'booth' getting the first few coats of primer:-

 

 

Ideally once you have finished with the primer stage you should give the primer at least 24 hours (probably longer) to harden and cure before you start sanding ready for your chosen paint colour. I left my plastics 'baking' overnight in the shed

 

I went to work with some 1500 grit sandpaper, wet sanding the primer coat and applied an initial coat of satin black in my make shift booth:-

 

 

 

And after a couple coats they were looking like this:-

 

 

 

Again, you should leave the paint at least 24 hours if not more before you start sanding the final coat. I bought from Halfords satin black paint, but in hindsight I probably should have bought the matt finish as the satin came out a little more glossy than I was expecting. I thought I might be able to take a bit of the edge off so I wet sanded the plastics with some 2500 grit to take the edge off them a little and also to get a more smooth finish:-

 

 

Which as you can tell worked a bit:-

 

 

And did this to all of the plastics finishing off with a bit of rubbing compound leaving the painted plastics like so:-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm not 100% happy with the finish but the handles particularly are miles better than they were before, the scratches definitely cheapened the look of the interior. The handles will do for now until the OCD kicks in and I attempt them again, but they will do for now.

 

I have also managed to find the route out the cause of the suspension advisory on my service healthcheck and will be ordering the parts soon to cure that problem, shout out to ZMANALEX for his help

 

I am keeping an eye out on eBay and on the sales section on here for any exhausts that are going to rectify the leak. Ideally I would love to have a brand new Invidia system but unfortunately the budget doesn't permit that sort of spending

.

 

Anyway, I hope that you find this helpful/informative!

 

Comments and suggestions welcome.

 

Conor.

[CPhillips93]

Whiteline lower compression arm bush fitting

 

So those of you that have been following this thread or who have read it recently may know that the zed's recent P3 service flagged up two issues to be rectified with the car; passenger side compression arm bush had 'debonded' and the exhaust was leaking. Now the latter is not something that needs to be done immediately but it was always something that I wanted to change anyway so if anything it was a good excuse

.

 

However the compression arm bush definitely needed my immediate attention as for the last couple weeks the knocking was becoming unbearable, I really don't know how I didn't notice it before... must have been me listening to my music too loud

.

 

So after some discussions with Zmanalex and Ewen at Clark Motorsport I decided it was probably best to go for some aftermarket polyurethane bushes. If I am going to change something may as well change it for something better! I went for the Whiteline bushes from Ewen (great service by the way!) as opposed to Superpro in the end as the Whiteline ones seemed to be an easier option as they are a 'push in' fit.

 

I got some time to fit them this weekend and basically followed the instructions in this guide -

http://my350z.com/fo...ng-install.html

 

This package arrived:-

 

 

Which included 2 bushes (in halfs), 2 small washers, 2 large washers, 2 seating cones, 2 ball joint nuts and a sticker! I also purchased a set of split pins as it's also advised that you change the split pins on the ball joint (picked up a set of 150 from Toolstation for around £2.50).

 

First things first get the car up in the air and on stands. Once I had the car up the first thing to be removed is this plastic cover:-

 

 

Which is held on by 10mm bolts and two plastic pins. Once this is off the next item to be removed is the front underbrace. As mentioned in the above guide it's good practice to be liberal with the penetrant spray as I found the bushes were corroded to the stud/chassis. So after leaving the nuts soaking for a while I broke out the air impact wrench for the big 19mm nuts and the Makita impact driver for the smaller 14mm bolts on the frame.

 

Weapons of choice

 

 

 

and voila:-

 

 

Really heavy frame, make sure you avoid being underneath it when you remove the last nut/bolt!

 

Next step was to remove the split pin from the ball joint nut before removing the nut. Rather mucky nut:-

 

 

 

With that remove it was really just a matter of removing the 19mm nut. To stop the ball joint spinning in place I used a g clamp to push the ball joint into the seating cone like so:-

 

 

Genius idea right

? Again I used the air wrench for this one. So with this nut off and the frame off, both arms were able to be pryed off with the drivers side bush intact... the passengers side bush required a little motivation with some mole grips :-

 

 

and the passenger side looking... well, worse for wear to say the least

 

 

Unbeknown to me this had caused some damage on both the arm and the frame:-

 

 

 

So regardless of the damage with the passenger side arm out first I cracked on with removing what was left of the bush which was the metal sleeve. After sawing carefully through the sleeve I punched it out:-

 

 

Leaving...

 

 

a nice gap for some nice new bushes

. The next bit was the easy bit, 'pressing' the new bushes in. My cousin has a fairly solid vice on his bench which we used as the ghetto press:-

 

 

Once the bush element of the kit was pressed in all that was left to do on the arm was to insert the metal sleeve through the middle of the bush. Plenty of copper grease was used on all of these parts as I didn't want anything to be squeaky or rubbing at all. Side by side of the OEM and Whiteline:-

 

 

The driver's side was a little more difficult due to the fact that the OEM bush was still intact but a drill and patience soon made short work of it! With both arms ready to be re-fit I took off the original seating cones that were still attached to both ball joints. These were quite hard to remove and unfortunately I didn't take a picture of the method but I used one of these pullers to remove it which can be picked up for about 20 quid:-

 

So the reassembly is just a reverse order of the removal. I followed the image below for all the torque settings of the nuts and bolts on the frame and also as a precaution used some thread lock. I also enlisted the help of my cousin to get the frame back on as it's such a pita for just one person.

 

Also, don't forget to replace the split pins after torquing up the new nut on the ball joint!

 

Some nice pictures of my nice new bushes!

 

 

 

No more knocking

! And surprisingly no noticeable difference in comfort/noise which I thought may have been affected by the difference in stiffness of the bushes. I now just need to get the car tracked just to ensure that the tracking isn't massively out of whack from having no bush to having a nice new one . Would definitely recommend the polyurethane option to anyone out there with dodgy compression arms, very impressed so far!

 

So anyway, thank you for reading, comments and suggestions welcome!

 

Conor.

Edited March 1, 2016 by CPhillips93

[veilside z]

Wow, you really have gone all out there. Well done and interesting reading. Looking great buddy.

[CPhillips93]

Wow, you really have gone all out there. Well done and interesting reading. Looking great buddy.

 

Thanks mate, I am glad it's interesting, never sure if I am being to meticulous with the posts thanks glad you like it

 

Will be ordering an Invidia exhaust hopefully very shortly as my exhaust is leaking and is making the car sound like a wet fart !

[grumpyoldjanner]

 

Will be ordering an Invidia exhaust hopefully very shortly as my exhaust is leaking and is making the car sound like a wet fart !

 

There's a lot of chavs in their not very hot hatches in Plymouth who spend good money making their cars sound like that! Don't know why you complaining!

[CPhillips93]

Look what arrived today

 

 

 

 

Cannot wait to get it fitted this weekend!

[CPhillips93]

Invidia Gemini exhaust fitting

 

As some of you may know the OEM exhaust on my zed was rather worse for wear; it had started to rattle and was just outrageously loud... not in a good way!

 

So courtesy of Adrian at Torqen I got hold of a Invidia Gemini. I went for this because of what I had heard from both countless viewings of exhaust clips on YouTube and opinions on here. As the car is a daily driver it was important that whatever I got needed to be bearable day to day as well as for any long trips that I will inevitably end up doing!

 

I also thought that seeing as the y-pipe was probably shagged from driving onto my girlfriend's drive, the Invidia would be a perfect replacement straight out of the box.

 

First things first, being an OCD sufferer I wanted to coat the tips in some Gtechniq C5, so wiped them down with some eraser:-

 

 

Even the girlfriend was excited to help

 

 

And the finished article coated in C5:-

 

 

 

Ready to be fitted

 

I got cracking on Saturday morning bright and early (couldn't wait any longer to fit it!) at the usual place of my cousins garage. However I shortly realised after jacking the car up and getting her on stands that this was not going to be as straightforward as I had first hoped.

 

This was one of the four bolts that needed to be un-done...

 

 

As you can see the bugger was so rusty it was essentially welded on there... so I took a trip down to my local mechanic that I use for my MOTs

 

So I let him attack the old exhaust with a grinder!

 

 

First came the y-pipe to centre section joint which came off with ease. The harder part was grinding off the y pipe/cat leaving the bolt intact which Roger did very well! After this the rest was simple... just popping the exhaust off the hangers and removing it. At this point I was so fed up of the old thing that I forgot to take pictures of how bad it really was. Essentially it was leaking from the centre pipe to backbox joint... because the centre pipe had completely rusted away from the joint

. You can just about make it out in this picture:-

 

 

Whilst we were under the car Roger noticed a bit of surface rust over the back half of the car, which he kindly offered to coat in Waxoil so I got cracking with the wire brush:-

 

 

So to the fun part

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But I am very pleased with the exhaust, great noise... very close to OEM - perfect for me! I am also very impressed with the build quality, certainly getting what you pay for... a lot better than the Scorpion that I had on the 182. I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for an exhaust, I know it may seem quite a bit of money at £800 but by time you buy a Scorpion or Cobra and a y-pipe to match your talking similar money anyway!

 

So next on the list is the zed's first MOT in my ownership... wish me luck

 

Comments and suggestions welcome.

 

Conor.

Edited March 1, 2016 by CPhillips93

[veilside z]

Excellent to see you have taken great care, with all the jobs you have undertaken.

[ilogikal1]

First things first, being an OCD sufferer I wanted to coat the tips in some Gtechniq C5, so wiped them down with some eraser:-

 

This pleases me greatly.

 

[CPhillips93]

Excellent to see you have taken great care, with all the jobs you have undertaken.

 

Thanks mate Nothing more rewarding than doing a job yourself IMO

 

First things first, being an OCD sufferer I wanted to coat the tips in some Gtechniq C5, so wiped them down with some eraser:-

 

This pleases me greatly.

 

 

Believe it or not, I was very tempted to do the whole thing !

[CPhillips93]

Long time since I have lasted posted...

 

So what's happened in the mean time

 

The Zed had it's first MOT in my ownership... passed with the only advisory being the rear tyres on the legal limited - should last another 1000 miles or so.

 

I have also somehow managed to gain some 'kerb rash' on my passenger side front wheel. I say rash, but it is so light that it has only just gone through to the black undercoat...

The damage

:-

 

 

 

 

Taped up ready to wet sand and polish:-

 

 

 

 

 

So its not soooo bad, but it's just so annoying as I didn't even realise I had done it. May have to go for another colour next summer

 

The car also passed a big MILEstone (get it

)!

 

 

As a result , I think I may change the spark plugs, gearbox oil, diff oil, brake discs and pads as well as look into getting braided lines... just to treat the old girl!

 

I have also enquired about purchasing one of these:-

 

 

Nardi aluminium handbrake cover with black leather which I found after a little bit of a peruse on the internet, particularly Nardi's website, and when I found this I thought it would look great instead of the tat handbrake that I have currently. Just need to find a gear knob now to match... anyone have any suggestions? Really struggling to find something that would match the handbrake cover.

 

Anyway, comments and suggestions welcome as always

 

Conor

[CPhillips93]

So not much has happened with the zed since the last post, money has been tight this past month - girlfriend's birthday unfortunately comes before car parts

.

 

But I did pass a milestone with the car this month, having owned it now for over a year! Still puts a smile on my face everyday just like the first drive

.

 

So I decided that seeing as it was our anniversary, and more importantly it was an advisory on the MOT I ordered some Michelin Pilot Super Sports for the rear

 

 

 

Which will be fitted shortly

 

Hopefully will soon have some fresh new brake discs and pads, just patiently saving away

 

Comments and suggestions welcome.

 

Conor.

Edited May 2, 2016 by CPhillips93

[davey_83]

Kid your a legend, LOVE the ocd detailing you know your stuff. Fair crack to the Mrs too, defo a keeper.

[CPhillips93]

Kid your a legend, LOVE the ocd detailing you know your stuff. Fair crack to the Mrs too, defo a keeper.

 

Thanks mate

haha I like to think I do anyways! Yea I am very lucky, definitely patient with me and the car!

Edited March 1, 2016 by CPhillips93

[CPhillips93]

So the car hasn't really had a good couple of weeks...

 

So went through the usual routine of checking the fuses etc (which is the biggest hassle ever on the Zed!), which revealed it wasn't the fuse.

 

Unfortunately, this meant that it was either the bulb or the ballast; neither of which are cheap - ballast at around £50 and bulbs at around £40 for a pair. My old man winced at the price when I told him, couldn't believe the price difference in comparison to the halogens on his 'Z' (Zafira

).

 

To be sensible, I decided to swap the bulbs around on each side to determine whether it was in fact the ballast or the bulb, which again is a complete hassle on the Zed. Turns out it was the bulb and £40 later I had a pair! I have previously bought LED sidelights and Silvatec bulbs a while back, so perfect time to fit them.

 

So the dodgy headlight currently looked like this:-

 

 

No dipped/full beam, dull sidelight and 'fried egg' style indicator.

 

Another picture of the working headlight highlights the dullness of the sidelight:-

 

 

So one side at a time I got the car up, took the wheels off and removed the arch liner by removing the five 10mm bolts on the bottom, the two screws and the three plastic pins. I would have taken a photo to show these various fittings but I am sure there is a guide on here on how to remove an arch liner.

 

Once the arch liner was out it's a simple process, we have all changed bulbs before I hope

.

 

They were subtle changes with the sidelight and the indicator bulbs, but it does make a big difference!

 

 

 

I also did the rear indicators at the same time, which are reachable by removing the rear headlights (remove the three plastic covers on the top and undo the three 10mm bolts leaving the headlight free to be removed - make sure you slide it off first otherwise you will break the tabs).

 

Before and after (excuse the awful photos!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments and suggestions welcome!

 

Conor.

Edited March 1, 2016 by CPhillips93

[monkeybrain1234]

Love how you embrace being OCD. Great thread, keep up the good work

[james6583]

So it was you that I spotted in St austell coming down past lidl, with only one headlight working last week? Love the colour of your Z

[CPhillips93]

Love how you embrace being OCD. :lol:Great thread, keep up the good work

 

No point doing a job if your not going to do it properly Thank you

 

So it was you that I spotted in St austell coming down past lidl, with only one headlight working last week? Love the colour of your Z

 

Yes that was me, I did wonder if you were on here!! Thanks, I originally wanted black or white, but so happy that I settled for this colour . Whereabouts are you from then?

[james6583]

Yeah I wasn't in my Z at the time when I spotted you I was driving the other half's car. I have a white 350z and I live in penwithick but I'm in St austell alot. Got a feeling that you live out in St blazey?