This is a Red Car
 

Happy Monday everybody - I've owned this car for a little over 10 years now and had a zilvia account for almost as long. I remember spending hours on end procrastinating in high school and college, digging through builds and other threads on here for inspiration. Now that I'm stuck working from home and the car's got the motor ripped out for the bazillionth time I figured what better occasion to start my own thread.

I'll preface by saying I'm not the greatest writer or storyteller, and I'm not sure how much detail I'll go into of the car's history (depends on how many pictures I can dig up), but the last 3-4 year's worth of content should be pretty well covered and I'll try to keep this updated as best I can moving forward.

Here's a quick photo dump of day (somewhere close to) 1, and the major phases of the car til now:

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Stay tuned for updates while I fight flickr and my iphone uploading hundreds of pictures, cheers!

Oooooo sub!

I dig it. I should have just kept my OG black hatch and then I could have a cool story like this thing does. Looking forward to the updates.

What are the odds I was just on a thread you posted from 9 years ago about an oil pump and now you have a new thread haha. Anyway, car looks absolutely sick

High School (2008-2011)
 

Reserved for future update

College (2011-2015)
 

Reserved for future update

Edwards AFB (2015-2018)
 

Reserved for future update

Travis AFB (2018-2020)
 

Reserved for future update

Let's Drive Final Bout (Winter 2019-Spring 2020)
 

Mods will probably hate me for this, but I'm going to set aside some space for the last 9 years of this car and go ahead with skipping to the current chapter. It is what I have the most pictures of after all.

So in January of 2019 I PCS'd from Edwards AFB in socal to Travis AFB in norcal. I moved up here with the red car not running-having a catastrophically blown motor (will be covered in a previous post). I cobbled together a setup that was horribly inefficient, lost that motor over a spark plug and decided to take a step back from the car for a bit - I actually almost decided to sell it. After realizing I'm hopelessly upside down on how much I've invested in the car, and that S15s still cost a fortune to get to the states, I decided to keep the car. Shortly after Final Bout announced that they were going to have regional events. This is where we pick up the story...

I decided that I was going to go full retard, rip the whole car apart, do everything I ever wanted to do, and go drive South with my old friends I made while in college. And so it began.

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After ripping the head off of the motor, a terrible attempt at fixing my old kit, and weeding through the chassis harness to clean up the shit wire tuck I did years ago I quickly lost motivation, called myself an idiot for thinking this was a good idea and pushed the car back into the garage where it sat untouched for about two months.

I had been toying around with the idea of GT-1 and Car Modify Wonder on the car for a long while and eventually I pulled the trigger, ordered the GT-1 from Kyle at pro shop noble, and ordered Wonder fenders from Jesse Streeter.

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Picking up the kit from Kyle

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New kit stuck on the car for the first time

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And rolled out of the garage for the first time in months.

Needless to say I had some much needed motivation back. A few days later more motivation was delivered to my neighbors house, and after a panic attack frantically looking for where UPS left my package, those too made their way onto the car.

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With my second wind I slowly started piecing the interior back together. One of my friends helped me spec out a decent stereo system, another helped me out with sound deadening and carpet.

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Double dins are the best things to happen to 90s nissan interiors

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I also picked up a new bride zieg 3 to replace my 8 year old fake zeta 2

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Gotta have slap

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Shortly after getting the interior back together I got a call from my machine shop saying my bottom end was together, so I went down the street, picked it up and got to work putting the engine back together. I meant for this motor to be extremely responsive, relatively simple, and capable of 400 wheel - I think I ended up achieving all of those goals. Re-used CP 9:1 pistons, eagle rods, HKS step 1 cams and a GTX2860 gen 2. It ended up making 360 on a dynapak with plenty of headroom left in the turbo and injectors.

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Got the car running well enough to move in and out of the driveway then my friend Chad came by to work his magic on my quarterpanels that I hacked up years ago.

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After a day of work the body panels all fit better than I ever could've hoped and the car was ready to send off to paint.

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Having painted the car myself twice before I knew I didn't have the patience or attention to detail to put the cherry on top that all the work leading to this point needed. I made a new friend, a friend of a friend, he agreed to paint the car and while I was gone 2 weeks for a business trip he laid down the ice.

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Towed the car back down to socal for a tune and ended up visiting my parents while I was down there

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And at long last, got the car back home and put the rest of the kit back on for the first time.

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That doesn't get us all the way til today, or through the Final Bout trek, but hopefully it gives everyone something to read while I dig up more pictures. Another update soon, til then I'll leave you guys with this

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Excited to see the full story. Well done sir!

Thanks! It's a miracle I haven't seriously crashed the thing yet haha.

LOL! A lots changed in 9 years. Current theme is: car runs for 5 months, blows up, motor spends 6 months at the machine shop. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Stay tuned!

Reserved for future sr rebuild

6month time frame gives me 0 hope for mine... im going on a month and not happy....guess im inpatient lol

Perfect mismatch of aero, love the build, nothing better than full interior and a decent sound system.

Click the picture and it'll play, don't mind the high idle there's no water in it so the IACV won't settle down.

https://live.staticflickr.com/31337/...30f85a86_b.jpgUntitled by pacotaco345, on Flickr

SR20 #5 or 6? I lost count... is in and running as of last Wednesday. Will go to the dyno on Saturday and if you don't see an update shortly after well, it probably means it blew up and I'm depressed.

Cheers

crossing my fingers we'll get to do some d's together this year lol

Can I just say that it's not just the red car that looks nice but so as the truck?

Nice work, fella.
Looks real good. Love that bridge pic.

Thanks lol I need it... Shooting to drive sometime in October-November. I've been trying to learn to save money lately, all while dealing with COVID and rebuilding this stupid thing for the zillionth time so it all depends on what's in the budget now.

Hahaha blue truck has since been traded in for a bigger, bluer truck. While it was fun and I loved it, Toyota put the wrong motor in the thing and geared it like shit from the factory. Making it a pretty sub-par tow rig.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...6112c375_b.jpgUntitled by pacotaco345, on Flickr

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Thanks! Hopefully more cool pictures to come now that it runs again haha.

Man, this is so nice!

Absolutely love how GT-1 looks in USDM/ onevia form.

Ooh she sounds healthy.

nice build man! it's mad clean.

https://live.staticflickr.com/31337/...f8e2278e_b.jpgUntitled by pacotaco345, on Flickr

Another video, 398whp, 396wtq

Nice numbers!

In for updates!

nice! what turbo is that?

such high tq numbers with a ebay/greddy intake manifold

I must say that your truck looks nice also. Is it lifted? My '12 Tacoma is currently stock although I'm planning to get a suspension lift from 4wheelonline.

Let's Drive Final Bout (Winter 2019-Spring 2020) Part 2
 

It's been a while! haha

This post still wont get us caught up til today but I wanted to get the next couple months of the journey and the trip out to Texas on a post...

Once the car was tuned/sorted/driving I started doing longer and longer trips in the car to build confidence in it.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...8c6ab831_b.jpgIMG_9527 by pacotaco345, on Flickr

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Never found any major issues so I signed up for a local/smaller drift event to shake down the car and get a few laps in (sorry no action pictures).

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I did about 15 laps that day with no issues before my friend's transmission got stuck in gear. Decided to make the smart choice and called it quits early, loaded his car up on my trailer and street drove the red car about 120 miles home. Over the course of the next week I did some general maintenance, bolt checks, etc. then loaded the car up again for the trek from norcal out to Texas.

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Two days later I made it to North Texas, a few days ahead of final bout beginning so I could spend some time catching up with old friends. In the meantime I got a new windshield installed, mounted a couple tires, and just enjoyed the first couple days I'd had off from work since January of the previous year.

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Loaded the car up again and made the trip from Fort Worth down to our Air b&b in Houston.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...48fe6732_b.jpgIMG_9938 by pacotaco345, on Flickr

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That day and the next I probably put another 200 miles on the car driving around Houston, again with no issues. Racing scat packs on the freeway, drifting corners here and there, just having a good time. The group left SpeedSportz after tech inspection to go to the pre meet in downtown and I noticed a small puddle of water under the car. It was still running cool so I paid no mind to it and drove downtown, then back to the air b&b, and the next morning back to the track with no issues.. Can you guess where this is going?

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...a2bda23f_b.jpgUntitled by pacotaco345, on Flickr

My water pump shit the bed third lap. Pissed like half the coolant out of the weep hole. ON THE THIRD LAP. I was pissed, hauled my car halfway across the country, dumped who knows how much money, worked countless hours for the car to shit the bed. No one likes to say it out loud but I'm sure people can relate, between trying to fake a smile for the next hour, people stopping by and saying "oh sucks man I'm really sorry car looks awesome wish you were out there", and running through the pits like a man possessed trying to look for a spare water pump, I was in a shit mood.

A friend of a friend of a friend ended up having a used water pump, awesome guy was halfway to the track when he turned around to go back home and pick it up and hand deliver it to me. I jammed the next half hour throwing the car back together, didn't even give the RTV 5 minutes to dry before I filled it up with water and went back out on track. I missed all of practice and the parade lap and drove straight into the "competition" with no time on track but I just wanted to drive. The first laps before the water pump died I had been taking it easy, but this time I immediately started driving in anger.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...7d231a8f_b.jpgUntitled by pacotaco345, on Flickr

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Got about 15 laps in and then . . . my transmission broke. The first corner at speedsportz is a pretty tight hairpin, the track works awesome for low power, low grip cars, or even cars with a higher rear end ratio, but stubborn me wanted to run 265s in the back for no reason, and with stock gearing it just put me in a weird part of the RPM range if I didn't get the line and my timing just right. The lap I broke the trans I distinctly remember throwing the car in and being slightly off line, let the clutch out and the car bogged. On one shoulder I had the angel telling me "just drive out, you aren't in the powerband, SR transmissions are glass", on the other shoulder the devil was telling me "rev it to the moon, dump the clutch, let 'er eat" - you can guess what I did. That ended my day for good. We loaded the car back up, hung out a little longer, had dinner and the next day I called it a weekend and headed back home.

That's where I'll leave off for now but here's a spoiler for my next post in 2 months:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...3a68f22c_b.jpgIMG_1260 by pacotaco345, on Flickr

Hint, I didn't pull the whole motor out just to replace the transmission

Thanks! It's a greddy GTX2560 gen 2.

Little turbos, higher compression and 100 octane help out a lot haha

Thanks! The tacoma had a 2" strut spacer in the front, the chevy is stock but I think my trim package comes with a slight lift from the factory.. need to get some 34s for it haha.