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Thread: S13 - Saving a Drift Missile

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    S13 - Rocket Bunny RB25

    Hi All,
    Thought I would start a thread on here so I can keep tabs on the progress of work on my S13. I will start by saying I am an IT Technician will a basic understanding of cars, by no means a mechanic!
    Starting from the pictures on facebook, I could see it was a drift missile and had been built for just that. The spec I received was:
    1993 200sx
    Manual
    93xxx miles
    Rocket bunny front bumper, spoiler and skirts
    Welded diff
    Stripped interior
    Sleepy eyes
    Possible headgasket failure

    From the pictures on facebook it looked okay, so I asked him for a price and more pictures. The pics I got from him showed it was a little rougher than I had imagined, but not too far gone. It has been painted in the baby blue matte finish you will see later, and it was a bit hacked together. No disrespect to the previous owner at all, it was built for purpose, not a show car.

    Times and a price was agreed and a friend of mine when and collected it whilst I was away for a week. Longest week wait ever! Once I got back, I went to see it as soon as I could and took these pictures:











    My plan all along has been to pull the motor in favour something a little more special. Original plans have since changed but all that much. I managed to move the car into a workshop where I could work on it out of the elements. First job on the list was a compression test… didn’t go well!





    Not the worst news in the world as I wanted to pull it anyway but I wanted to keep it moving under its own steam ideally. The car had a real issue with starting too (which I posted about) so decided that the engine is coming out regardless! Current plans are:

    RB25DET Swap – switchable maps. End power 350/450 maps
    Full strip down and respray
    Chase Rust remove/repair
    Full rocketbunny kit
    Half cage
    Replace welded diff

    First job was to start stripping the car. I wanted everything off it. The kit, wings, engine, loom etc so started as I meant to go on!





    [/url]



    The loom has been hacked about to make the lights work, and the side repeaters seem to have their own special section of the loom made. All the wiring hasn’t been done well if I am honest so I am left to either chase it and repair or replace the loom



    At this point I have assessed the car a bit further and other than surface rust in the bay and on the top strut it looks fairly solid! The sills need some work (quell surprise!) but I don’t know if that is surface at the moment or deeper within. The car has been undersealed in its life which is handy, unless its to hide something!



    I have stripped pretty much everything I can body wise for now, so it was time to get the engine out! For someone of my mechanical skill (I can service cars and change brakes but not much further than that) this was a bit of a learning curve! I had some assistance which made it easier, but after an hour or so it was out!



    So far, I am very pleased with the car, it will be a fair amount of work but there isn’t really much of a deadline other than I have said I would like it done inside two years! I have already had some challenges but nothing major in my eyes. Something that has made me laugh so far is some of the workmanship in its previous life, and the wing mirror cover shows the mentality!



    Updates will be fairly frequent I hope, but depends how much time I get to work on it. Next up is to get it in the air and strip all the underseal off and see how the car looks under it. Then subframes and tank are coming down to be refurbed and refitted!

    Cheers!
    Last edited by klone; 20-06-2018 at 10:33.

  2. #2
    Guest ianlea73's Avatar
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    Great project & good plans for it.
    I've got an rb neo lump with loom, topmount manifold & turbo if you're looking.

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    Good luck with it !

    That's one of the cleanest bootlids I've ever seen.

    Strut tops look a bit horrid and sills are ALWAYS worse than they look.

    Don't dismiss the CA engine, its a good unit and has been tuned by more than one person to 700 bhp.

    I no longer have an S13 but I do still have some bits and I'm in Essex, same as you.

    Come along to the monthly meets (we seem to have fallen back to the Halfway House near Basildon on the A127 recently) on the 3rd Thursday of the month.

    I'm happy for you to come round to mine and see what bits I've got and take what you want for beer tokens. I just want to see it all gone now as I have no use for it.

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    Quote Originally Posted by klone View Post
    Mint!

    Is it roller painted? I think it's been on here quite a bit.

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    Quote Originally Posted by skyshack View Post
    Mint!

    Is it roller painted? I think it's been on here quite a bit.
    Its got extra holes but at least it looks like they have been put there with a drill not a tin worm ! Lol

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    Thanks all.

    Ianlea - I would love the engine but at the moment I don't have space for it or the money! Thanks though!

    Johnny - hopefully the rust on the top mount is only the strengthening plate and not further but when I start engine bay prep I will find out!

    I might well pop to a meet at some point, Chelmsford is about an hour and 20 from me but would be good to look round some 13s in the mean time! Thanks for the offer for parts, but I'm not actually sure what I need yet! Hahaha.

    I couldn't believe the boot either but there is at least 8 layers of paint on it after red!

    Skyshack - it is rollers, the chap I got it from has a brother with one as well so I don't know if it was mine or its twin haha

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    I like what you're doing with this. The shell looks good really. Keep up the good work.

  8. #8
    Dorset & Hants Rep pointz's Avatar
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    Awesome stuff another s13 being saved how much did you pay if you dont mind me asking?

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    paid 1700 for it. Some might think its a bit much for what it is, but i think considering it is mostly rust free, i am more than happy with it.

    i will recoup some of that selling the manual setup etc.

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    As Jonny said don't dismiss the ca, it's a very strong engine. Get some forged pistons and some arp goodies and it will be plenty strong enough.

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    I don't have a dislike for the ca at all, being 100% honest I have never driven an s13! but when I originally fell in love with the s13 years ago, I always said I would have with the a 2jz in it. fast forward 10 years and a decent manual gearbox for a 2j is more than what the car cost me so I set about a new plan for the rb25det because i love the noise of the rb engine.

    i figured if i am almost doing a bare shell restoration, i might as well go with a strong standard engine/box which will meet my power targets rather than rebuilding one.

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    Not managed to update for a while, progress has been slow and tedious so I haven’t thought to update until something was worth updating really!

    Last update took me up to the point where the engine was out and I wanted to start on getting all the underseal off the car. I stripped as much underneath from the engine bay back to the rear beam. Other than the brake/fuel lines this is all bare of parts now.

    I started by taking a paint scraper and scraping around 6-15mm of thick,black underseal which had all manner of disgusting things in it from oil to metal shavings etc! beautiful. After that was off I started attacking it with a wire wheel in a grinder. Literally THE worst job I have ever done on a car in my life! It goes everywhere! After about 5 minutes I regretted starting until I uncovered a bit of rust hiding under all that gunk:



    Whilst it doesn’t look too bad there, in time it probably would have got worse etc etc so I will look to repair that once all the underside has been done, and fix them all in one go. With that treasure being found I found emphasis to carry on so I have been stealing and hour here or there carrying on. I cant face doing it for too long, its so boring! Hah.

    After a few trips over to the car I have now done the passenger side from engine bay back to the rear beam. It needs wiping down with thinners/petrol to get rid of the splatter and a smaller wire wheel on a drill for the harder to reach areas but I am happy with the progress. I haven’t found anything too dodgy along the way really just the odd spot.





    In the bottom picture, you can just about make out my chassis rails. They have clearly been jacked on time and time again so are very bent so im left with two choices to make me happy:

    • Cut and straighten them
    • Box them in (leaving holes for drainage)

    At the moment im leaning towards the cut and straighten them and reweld them back on, but im unsure if it will just weaken them and be a pointless exercise but I figured if im doing a proper job I cant just leave it as it is.

    Next up I wanted to get the fuel tank out because I wanted to know the condition and also to look at the boot floor. This was relatively easy other than the filler neck bolt being rusted in place. I had to sacrifice the bracket in the end, so I will make another one when the time comes. The tank looks pretty good to me, no signs of any corrosion other than the top of the fuel sender which you can see below:

    [/url]
    The straps aren’t too bad, one is worse than the other so I might buy new ones or just make some… they look pretty simple!

    Then I got a bit of a shock. I had been lucky to this point, but I found some rust. IN my eyes nothing major, but enough to make me wince. The pics below make it look worse that it is because of the flash but the drivers side is 100% missing some metal as I knocked out a chunk of filler but I could get a screw driver through bits as you can see. The passenger side looks largely surface but at this point I imagine it will get worse once I hit it with the wire wheel:

    [/url]

    [/url]

    Looking at the pics again does make me wince a bit but on a car where other than a little bit on the strut mount in the bay and the standard sill rot it is largely solid. I will need some assistance in fixing it as it’s a little out of my comfort zone already before I have even touched it!

    That pretty much brings me up to date, this weekend I will be taking the fuel and brake lines off and starting the grinding that side back to the rear subframe and then I will look at dropping the subframe ready to attack the mess of the rear end!

    Any input, advice or anything is appreciated, I don’t know if this is even worth reading!

  13. #13
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    If you remove the strut strengthening plates you will find a mess underneath. They all do it as its a salt and dirt trap with holes into the wheelarch.
    The chassis rails rot from the outside in as they are made with two layers of thin metal instead of one thick one and it has holes in so, you guessed it, it forms a salt and dirt trap.
    The usual place for the tank to leak is due to corrosion in the inner segments of the concertinas of the filler neck. Filler necks are hard/expensive to find. The other place, if you get a smell of petrol is from the tank lid because the seal swells when exposed to petrol and once the lid is removed you either need to replace with a new seal or cut an inch out of it so it fits properly.
    The exhaust bracket that looks crusty in your picture is removable with a bit of fiddling. If you take it off, you can clean it up and respray it and get all all the fiddly rust hiding behind the bracket in the rear quarter.
    The rear quarters do tend to get a little rusty but one side of yours seems quite bad.
    Other than that, it looks like a pretty good shell but you are going to have to weld it....or get someone else to which is expensive.
    The chassis rails are always battered on S13s because its the safest place to jack it. The sills are always rotten lol.

    Whereabouts in Essex are you ? We're meeting up at the Halfway House on the A127 on the 14th I think Paul said. Don't worry about turning up in a non-200, few people do.

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    Cheers for the reply

    I have access to a fair amount of people that can weld and such like. The person storing it is an agricultural engineer so that's pretty handy he can do all the nitty gritty that I can't and gives me a chance to learn too!,

    The filler neck looks good on the tank if I am honest just the rear quarter look the worst I've seen on the car.

    I'm down in Clacton
    Last edited by klone; 07-09-2017 at 08:43.

  15. #15
    No, the other one. Pete C's Avatar
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    Great to see someone taking a drift car and trying to make a nice one as opposed to the opposite which is all you usually see

    1993 [L] RS13 200SX
    2003 [53] MX-5 Angels
    2004 [04] E63 645i
    SXOC Member #199

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    Shell looks good , great to see another s13 being saved.

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    thanks guys.

    just been looking around for looms, rb25det parts and kouki rear lights... bit early but ouch!! I will stick to looking into the shell repairs for now haha

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    Klone, your rear end is in grate shape compared to mine! I need to weld in an almost complete boot floor and my left hand rear frame rail is almost totally gone!

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    Quote Originally Posted by kubaa View Post
    Klone, your rear end is in grate shape compared to mine! I need to weld in an almost complete boot floor and my left hand rear frame rail is almost totally gone!
    thanks buddy, appreciate it. i dont think its the end of the world by any stretch but i was just shocked to see that it was almost perfect elsewhere then its dodgy at the back! think it was just a shock. hopefully you get to fix yours quite quickly!

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    picked up a rocket bunny v1 kit the other day from a lovely guy down in Kent. The kit is in superb condition, only been offered to the car! he gave me a pair of wings that had been cut for the over arches so i might go with them and keep the wings that came with mine.

    Whilst i was there i saw he had a tubular crash bar too, and mine didnt come with one (drift life) and it was too cheap to turn down. I nearly bought the whole shell from him too! was in very good condition, albeit not much left of it!

    hoping to get the underseal off this weekend, i have enlisted the help of the girlfriend for that!
    Last edited by klone; 17-10-2017 at 12:51.

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