Fair, although I live in the DC area. Cars here spend much of their time in traffic, be it in the city or on the highway, so we don’t get as much freeway cruising as you would in say the midwest. Half of my commute is sitting in traffic.
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As per the last post, everything was meant to be in working order.
However,
So back to the garage to find out what that is.
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It’s a warning light. You’re welcome.
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Just checked the engine and it’s still there 
Having had the intake pipes replaced, the code that was being thrown for that should be fixed, there’s definetly no air bypassing the sensor, so I am interested to see if that’s still the issue or it’s now another thing going on.
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It’s still there, but did you check that it’s still an engine?
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So things are much the same as they were, I still have a check engine light, I still don’t know what the original problem was. However it’s now defintely the hole in my exhaust before the cat, I scraped in a turn around spot and I think it pulled the exhaust a little. It’s very rusty, and I was going to get a new one anyway.
I got the car up on a lift this week so I could get a good look underneath and so I could know how much money I was getting into for undersealing the car.
Turns out, that’ll be precisely nothing. The factory underseal is perfect, and the rest of the rust can either be wire brushed or just taken out in the case of the W brace.
The same day I went for a drive around some nice roads and encountered a not very nice issue, when accelerating hard in second gear up a hill the engine seemed like it would choke. It did do this twice at basically the same rpm. I have been smelling fuel a little when I’m driving hard, but only with the windows open. I’m not a mechanic but my first guess is maybe fuel pump, or if the car has some kind of overfill tank its just spewing out of that. It wasn’t ESC as that was off, just hoping it’s nothing major.
More good news though to counteract the bad, I finally got around to “restoring” my headlights with an autoglym kit, and honestly 10/10.
Before
After
It’s also getting on in the milage department, I’ve put over 4000 miles on it since I got it. Averaging 24mpg from that point. I have reset the mpg calculator recently on some motorway based drives and it’s been around 30mpg so it does well there. Motorway muncher for sure.
Need to look for a good daily though because I can’t keep it up for long, something like a BMW 1 series.
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Good news and bad news? part two
Some good news, we have a small family car for mpg and other trips, a little Vauxhall Adam. As you can imagine, it sucks in every way compared to the Swift.
Rant about the Adam
Theres too much electronic interferance, electric steering that wanders all over the road, im sure it’s flybywire pedals as well, the clutch is just a rubber bump stop and the mpg isn’t even that great at 40mpg avg, doesn’t have a satnav, weighs 1250kgs on 225 tyres with 40 profile and is somehow more uncomfortable than the Z.
You can see it in the background here, along with some pictures of when we just got it.
Good news about the Z though is that I’ve bought some stuff for it, some long tube intakes, and a full exhaust system including cats. Well, sort of.
The intakes got here pretty quickly, they’re a bit of a pain to install, bumper off and relocating the horn but it will be worth it once I do it.
The exhaust was a bit more problematic, I agonised for months over which combination of stuff I should get to make it not sound like a fart cannon or a trumpet, and when I finally ordered it they didn’t have the cats in stock. No ETA from the US either, so I opted to swap them for some test pipes instead.
So, I have a titanium single exit with a fully straight through exhaust. I do wonder how much I will get pulled over. Still, should be fun until the cats that I did want appear back in stock.
The cars MOT is due in around march next year, so I don’t have all that much time, but it’ll be an experience nonetheless. The cats I want will pass emmissions just fine, test pipes obviously wont, and i’d rather have the cats anyway for sound.
I’m hoping that I can install all these things myself, should be fun and save a bit of money, learn some things.
I might be able to recoup some costs on the stock cats, as long as I can get someone to weld them up, because at the moment both brackets are gone and one has a large tear in somewhere. Everything else is too rusty to be worth too much really as detailed in the previous post.
I would be buying spacers and slightly lower springs as well, these weren’t even too expensive to buy, however they seem to be adding about £2500 onto the insurance for spacers alone which is some bs, I’ll have to call up the company I’m with and do it that way and hopefully I get something sensible. Exhaust, intakes, engine map is basically +£50 which is funny.
I’m not trying to make silly power with it either the car has too many miles for that, I want some good sound and an exhaust that doesn’t leak. The intakes quote +20hp (with a tune maybe???) and the exhaust is probably similar. Obviously the car won’t be running the 313hp it came with, most remap places say +20-30hp for just a map, bit more with some other stuff, so we’ll see. It’ll probably be around 330hp, as I’ll want to be safe with it. 350hp is near the top end of what you can get N/A without taking the engine completely apart.
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Lol, truly absurd tyres on the Adam. Why do those cats seem triple-ended?
The Adam actually runs VXR wheels, theyre the same size as my fronts on the Z. combined with a shitty suspension and awful driving position it’s very uncomfortable and actually cuts bloodflow to my legs/ankles.
The Ark cats have a resonator in them, it might be more common that you see something like this on modern cars or as an aftermarket thing, you have the resonators back there, but since im going single exit there’s not really an option for that. I could have an inline resonator in the Y pipe area, but that was more expensive than just getting those cats.
Ark Grip system on 370z
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That’s quite interesting, because this was one of the cars that I considered to buy in the near future… This made me definitely change my mind. I’ve driven an electric steering car and that was terrible, so indirect, and it’s a shame that this kind of cars, which are mostly made for young car enthusiasts, are ruined by these bloody electronic controls.
Maybe the Suzuki Swift Sport is better, talking about low-priced hot hatches…
otherwise I would have to consider the sports cars of the late 90s-early 2000s.
Definitely a useful consumer advice
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Some companies do electric steering better than others. My GK5 Honda Fit has electric steering which actually works pretty well (The Fit/Jazz only ever came with electric steering if memory serves me correct). Of course being American, I have no experience with Vauxhalls. That being said, I’ve driven plenty of other General Motors built cars, and their steering is just far more sloppy in general barring sports cars like the Corvette or Camaro. Outside of that, their sports packages are more appearance packs than anything else in my experience for the most part.
It’s not all bad, but it’s also something that not everyone gets right. Honda just does the connected feeling really well IMO. Mazda does (or did) in my experience too, but most of my Mazda experience is with older models with hydraulic steering.
As for the exhausts, that is becoming more common with factory exhausts. The outgoing Honda Civics had all sorts of weird looking resonator designs for the turbocharged engines depending on whether you had the sport package or whatever. And of course there’s the Type R’s exhaust. Most of the ones we see have aftermarkets installed, but they all do something to that effect as well, something to keep it quiet at low speeds, but make it loud at full throttle.
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All the parts I’ve got are now on the car.
I did the intakes myself with a friend, it was a large pain to get the bumper off and working out what needed undoing or not.
Once everything was out it was pretty easy to get the new intakes in. One thing that was a bit weird was the clip thing that was clearly meant to hold the front of the intakes up so they don’t move around didn’t actually fit anywhere the instructions had specified, so we ended up connecting it to the bumper supports at the top instead of on the front of it. (see the rusted orangey bars across the front rad support
This is what it looks like with the bumper on and the intakes in, relocating the horns was also a pain in the ass and I still actually need to reconnect it.
The next day I planned to install this monster, however we didn’t get very far, everything was rusted to hell and I didn’t have the tools to reach the top of the cats from the engine bay side. Drove it around for a couple days and took it to the garage which rightfully said it was a ballache and took them about 6 hours to get it all done
Pretty dirty and not in great nick either, cats had holes in which is part of the reason why I am replacing everything. my actual cats just aren’t in stock at the moment
With just intakes
With intakes and exhaust
So yeah. It’s dumb stupid and loud but it makes me smile because it’s those things, so mission accomplished. When I get my cats it should take away a lot of the drone lower down I’m hoping.
Interestingly after fitting both of these the CEL I had for a long time disappeared for about 50 miles which was nice, far longer than the half a mile out of the garage last time they tried to clear it. Clearly getting closer to whatever it is. I’ve also been running it on 98/99 as much as possible as I think that might be tripping something as well. No other info other than Lambda sensor… So could try replacing those if none of this stuff works after I reset it again.
Another worrying thing is that I was having some fuel cut issues (pretty clear) on low fuel and low gear up a hill if I stomped on the throttle it’d choke very briefly, fully cut and then go again, felt like traction control but everythings off.
Now it’s happening more, but sometimes it’s gradual and it’ll kind of pull but not really and then it’ll be fine after half a second. Need to figure that out as well.
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Well I should probably update this, the cars been great and I have a lot of things planned adventure wise with it soon. I’ll be driving over to france to go to Le Mans, and then 2 weeks after that back over to France, through Belgium and into Germany to go to the Nurburgring for a few days with some friends in equally cool cars.
So since the last time I posted here I have swapped the cats twice (and will do again) because of various things. I swapped from decats to high flow cats to try and get it to pass emissions for the MOT, this didn’t work very well at all as the car was reading 1.2% CO (legal limit is 0.2 for my car) so that wasn’t ideal, everything else was fine weirdly. Part of my original plan was to get the car mapped, so I went and did that, they fixed my engine lights and a few other things underneath. On the dyno it was running 325hp already, so up from 308/313hp standard, we ended up with 330hp at the fly (I can claim 300whp right?)
One of the main benifits was response of the throttle which was much improved as the throttle pedal now was the same as the actual engine throttle at all rpms, so lower down it’s much more punchy.
So I went back to the garage and tried to get an MOT again, only this time it was 0.6%, so it’d been halved but it was still 3x over. Being fairly desperate to get the car on the road again I opted to swap the original cats back in (now welded up and good) and sent it for another MOT. It passed, took three people and a rag shoved up the exhaust that caught fire, but it went through. 0.1%
I’ve sent the HFC back to get a different set to see if that will be better as these have a warranty on them for passing emissions. However my engine light came back which I wasn’t too happy about, seeing as I’d had codes cleared and written out for the bottom lambda sensors. I took the car to a friend and used his code reader (since nobody had ever told me what it actually was other than “lambda”) and turns out Bank 1 lambda is fucked, which explains all my idle issues with emissions. So I’ll be looking to get that replaced when I put the new HFCs on.
I also need to buy tyres for this big euro trip and have settled on getting some Goodyear Eagle F1 Supersports which everyone runs on the 350z.
I have also brought front brakes and pads for the ring as the oem ones suffer pretty horribly when they get hot and past 100mph. I will do the rear ones at a later date, I don’t think it should be much of an issue.
Overall the car is still going strong and I’m enjoying it a lot, very close to completely eliminating this CEL which I’ve been chasing since I bought the car. Getting close to 145k miles which isn’t the highest around, but the highest I’ve seen for a 08.
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Well it’s been a little while since I’ve updated this, and I do have some stories.
To cut to the chase, the car is currently sat in the barn in pieces, without an MOT. How did we get here? Laziness mainly, and cluelessness.
Le Mans
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Me and my dad went to Le Mans for the few days of racing, we took the 350z and stuck a tent in the back. As far as memories go it was fucking awesome, camped with a bunch of Brits and got to go up and down the pits just before the race. The one thing that stood out though, was once the clock goes past midnight the party doesn’t stop, in fact it gets busier. All the bars, food places, inner paddock are full. Completely full, the grandstands are a little more empty but there are people everywhere partying, for all 24 hours of the race.
The car was faultless on the way there and back, and it was a great test for the next little outing I’d be doing.
Also, on the tunnel on the way over I got to see probably one of the rarest road going cars ever. Words couldn’t express what I felt when I saw this.
Nürburgring trip
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This was a trip that me and a few friends did together a few weeks after the LeMans trip, it was really really cool and I highly recommend that if you can afford it you should do it.
Like all people out of uni we wanted to save money where we could, we banded together to rent a villa in one of the villages in the track and it ended up being cheaper than a hotel per night with the 5 of us.
The car list was:
“M” in his E92 M3
“W” in his E36 328I
“L” in his Mazda 3
Myself and “V” in the 350z
We also had another person join us when we drove up, but they didn’t stay with us in the villa.
Here we are before getting on the Eurotunnel, yes we all managed to fit on.
It was a pretty uneventful trip over for the Z, thanks to being able to share the driving between us it only took about 7-8hours from the eurotunnel.
After we had checked into the villa we went and took a photo outside the big sign, because of course you do.
The village we stayed in was this one in the bottom right of the map:
I’ll point out that “L” hasn’t actually arrived yet, as he’s one of my friends from sim racing and actually lives in Germany, having him around was amazing and everyone got on together.
One of the days that we got back we found that our neighbour had parked his car on our side of the road because he couldn’t get the Porsche up the drive, and we promptly blocked him in (only for 30 seconds)
Wandering around after the track was shut at the end of the day was something truly special, track cars, supercars, just anything goes and it was like a car show in itself.
So then of course the real reason we’re all there is to go round the track, which we all managed to do successfully (for 1 and a half laps in my case) and it was a great experience.
This is sort of where my problems start to appear. The car had got new bushings on the front arms, but the vibration from the brakes on track had caused one of them to explode. I’d also lost the rear brake caliper pins, but not the calipers themselves which was lucky
Here’s me looking very proud that I’d managed to break it:
None of the workshops would fix it unless we bought an entire new arm for the bushing to go in, and the Germans are very serious about things and warned us plenty of times to not drive the car anywhere. (good thing I didn’t say we were gonna drive this thing back no matter what)
It was “fixed” thanks to “V”, and we drove it the 600+miles home once the trip was over, I will not say how, but it was in a slightly safer condition than broken.
And since then, I haven’t been anywhere notable. It got new bushings and hubs to try and eliminate the binding of brakes once we got back but other than that the car has sat, waiting for new front discs (again), a singular bolt to tighten up the headers to cat connection and an undertray since I never had one.
I now have new inner fender pieces and undertray, so I can install those, and then I need to take the calipers apart and clean them before I put the new discs on again. Fix the exhaust leak and then hopefully it’ll pass MOT. It’s just I’m lazy so I haven’t taken the calipers off yet.
And that’s where we are!
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That’s a suspiciously looking Mazda 3 right there… 
Really cool trips!