So here it is, after six long months of waiting and literally dreaming about this day, Aaron (@aaronspandora) hit me up and said the kit was ready for pick up. Lucky for you, you only had to wait the 20 some odd minutes of reading this blog (unless you skimmed all the way through it- I still appreciate you) to feast your eyes. It was an incredibly busy day, I had to prep the FRS for a drift event and run errands for a huge party at Rizza’s place, but I still made the time to run over to Wolfreign in Oakland. When I got there, they had just unloaded their container so the place was incredibly packed. Aaron had to climb over a mountain of parts brought over from the motherland but before I knew it, Uras was mine. We loaded up the Sequoia and off we went, you don’t know how anxious I was, I had so many irrational thoughts of someone rear ending me and demolishing the kit but we got home safe and sound. I dropped off Rizza at her party and went home to test fit. Surprisingly enough I was able to contain myself and open the packaging like a civilized human being and not a kid on Christmas. I took everything out and mocked up the kit onto the car. This was the outcome, nothing short of perfection:

I didn’t grab many more photos because I had to rush to the party but the following week, Jeff helped me out with mocking up all of the aero pieces as well as some Chargespeed overfenders I snagged a while back for $500. To this day I’m still trying to figure out if it’s worth saving the stock quarters, I guess we’ll see in the near future. Of course you can’t call them new car parts if they don’t present new problems to address – this fucker is going to be low as hell and my current Fortune Auto coilovers aren’t stiff enough to prevent the kit from grenading at the first contact of the road and the wheels rub on the front portion of the widened fenders.

Two weeks later I found the time to see how the car sat off of jackstands with the kit on. I didn’t put the overfenders on because it would’ve looked odd with the 50mm gap. Unfortunately I wasn’t even able to drive it around the block due to the front caster issue, so after these shots it returned to the garage. Please enjoy some of my favorite iPhone shots from that day.

Now that the kit is finally readily available, the car has to undergo even more preparation before it’s completely road worthy. I can’t wait to drive again. Current total: $17,336 + $500 = $17,836

 

I forgot to mention that when I took off the OEM rear bumper I learned that the car didn’t have a bash bar. Not too sure if it’s not out of the ordinary to delete safety components but I managed to find one for free in LA from Pedro (@lowborghini). It’s pretty funny, back in the day meeting people through the internet was such a taboo concept but now interacting with some of the coolest people is made possible via the internet. He also hooked me up with an OEM hood grommet ($55) which made a world of difference.

With the exterior of the car nearing completion, I decided to start bringing the aesthetic of the interior together. I wanted everything to be relatively simple: black and silver – two buckets and a cage with full interior.  Rhyss (@rhyss) conveniently had a Bride passenger seat rail and sold it to me for $100 and Tim (@not180sx) hooked it up with a Shirts Tucked In headpad to match the driver seat. Super excited to see both buckets in the car!

While the car was in the air I figured now would be the best time to take out the roll cage and door bars to send them off for powder coating. It was complete hell taking it out, but after a couple smashed fingers, a few hours crouched in the back seat, and a lot of brute force and ignorance, I got it out. I found a local place called Reliable Powder Coating and they were willing to get it done for $350, I’m not entirely sure if that’s cheap or not but hey, why not add to the ever expanding hole in my pocket?

I also ordered some bent ISR tension rods ($175) to address the front caster issue, don’t think anyone cares about that though. OH and I got this suck ass URAS turndown tip from Pedro too for $100.

After a couple weeks the cage was done and I started piecing everything back in. I forgot to tell Reliable Powder Coating to mask off some sections that slide into eachother on the cage so I spent a good amount of time grinding before I was able to start putting it back in. So if you ever have a cage powdercoated, don’t be like me and be smart about it, think ahead! Anyway, after even more brute force and ignorance than removing the cage, I got it in and I couldn’t be happier!

A lot of a little can create a day and night difference when building your car, be sure to focus on the little details as much as the drastic changes! A lot of a little also adds up to a lot in terms of money: $17,836 + 55 + 100 + 350 + 175 + 100 = $18,616

Yeah… I did a thing, let me explain! Alright so for months my friend Pete (@s14pete) has been telling me about his friend’s (@ilya.okunev) hood that he’s been holding for a while and how he’d buy it if he sold it. Me, being the impulsive buyer I am said if he doesn’t buy it to let me know immediately. Well, the stars aligned and Ilya ended up selling his car and Pete didn’t want it! So I jumped at the opportunity and drove all the way up to Sacramento and picked up this beautiful MSPORTS hood for $600. It’s definitely not perfect but drop vents are FUCKING sick. This thing definitely complements the vents of the BN fenders which is great!

I found that my rear driver side coilover was leaking so I figured it was blown – I needed new coils anyway since the car sat so low so I ordered some brand new 16k Front / 14k Rear BC Super Low Spec coilovers for $975. I ended up maxing out the rears but they didn’t go that low, not that I wanted to be tucking the rear end I guess!

With the new suspension installed, it was time to finally mount up the kit. I’ve never really had an actual body kit so I was unsure if I should actually mount it up or just zip tie it into place. I ended up bolting it up and taking it out for a drive around the block and everything went fine aside from the terrible alignment! With all the aero ready, I wanted to start prepping the car for paint so Rizza and I got to wet sanding everything down to 400 grit.

As aggressive as the Uras Type 2 kit is, I thought the car looked a bit silly with a wingless trunk. I had a couple options in mind, OEM Kouki and Uras Drag – both were such common choices, I wanted my car to be more one of a kind so I took a bit of a shot in the dark and ordered a Uras 3rd Dimension wing and Uras Drag stays. I’m not sure why low mount GT wings aren’t as popular – they look amazing. I looked all over the internet (Google search page 2) and couldn’t find a single S14 with this wing setup so I wasn’t entirely sure if it would even work, let alone look good. It cost about $500 with a 3 week wait time but once it came and I mounted it up, well:

It’s perfect

I took a drive out to Justin’s (@justinzenki) house for whatever reason, snapped a few pictures and left, everything went great up until I got into my driveway and clipped a small piece of dividing wood on my lawn. I was ever so elegantly introduced to the wonders of fiberglass integrity. My driver side sideskirt and fender was ripped and so was my heart. It’s always the first time that leaves a scar, eh?

I took the car to get an alignment at Motorsport Techniques ($125) so I could make the 40 mile drive to Sunnyvale Maaco to get an estimate for my paint job. I got it back to the original specs of -7 front and -1 rear camber and adjusted the caster to match at 7.5, the car looks MUCH better. You can see the rip in the fender in this photo, actually.

Also, here’s that rear bumper support Pedro (@lowborghini) gave me.  I picked up a sweet Advan coverall and Jeff (@notae86) and I had an impromptu import model shoot. 

Current Total: $18,616 + 600 + 975 + 500 + 125 = $20,866!

 

 

In a sense I guess it was a curse and a blessing that my aero blew up prior to paint for two reasons: I’d learn how to repair fiberglass and I’d learn how to repair fiberglass on unpainted aero. Can you imagine if I cracked my aero two days after painting it? Now that I had a feeler for how low the car sat and what to avoid doing – like driving over planted pieces of wood – I had more of a sense of confidence with driving the car. This would probably mean I wouldn’t be as scared to drive around with the fresh paint down the road. Anyway, on to the repairs!

Per usual, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I didn’t know what to buy, what to use, how to use it, where to begin so of course: Justinzenki to the rescue. He told me what to buy from Walmart and I went off to begin the reparation process. I got to Walmart and found a security glass full of Bondo goods. Side note: Bondo is a company not a product, kind of like how we call Lysol wipes, Lysol wipes and not disinfecting wipes. This is news to me. Anyway, Bondo has a fuck ton of products. I’m the type of person to hoard and overstock so… I bought pretty much one of everything. I just hate going back and forth to the store unnecessarily, it’s such a drag. Okay, on to the actual repairs, to begin(this is a very high level overview, honestly not too sure why I’m even writing this out): you have to mix the fiberglass resin and hardener with a brus- fucking hell I forgot to buy brushes. Back to the store. Alright, to begin: mix the resin with the hardener yada yada ya, it’s essentially like paper machete.. mashay.. mechete? Hold on- yeah paper machete. Cut the fiberglass mats and lay them down, brush it, and repeat, then let it dry over night. Simple. As. That.

Fast forward to the next day and the resin didn’t dry up because I didn’t use enough hardener. You can pretty much jump to the top of this post because I had to do everything over again, but guess what! I didn’t fuckin’ dry AGAIN. So this last time we went to town on the hardener and it finally decided to do what it was made to do. I didn’t take many photos of this process because of how messy it was so here’s a photo of Garcia (@justinzenki) and I slaving away on the job. 

I took the car to Maaco with the assistance of Garcia (who else, right?) and disassembled it in the parking lot, body kit, fenders, headlights, taillights, and let them do their thing. In hindsight I probably should have taken off the ganadors during the prep but they’re never coming off any way (we can just call that my excuse for being a lazy bum). Anyway, Maaco was going to take care of everything from there, all I had to do was wait a couple days. 

So… are you ready to see it? I dropped it off on a Monday morning and while I was at work the following Wednesday, Maaco gave me a call and told me the car was ready for pickup. The drive to Maaco took almost an hour and a half because of the typical California traffic. When we arrived it was damn near pitch black but there was a single street light illuminating what to me was the most beautiful thing I had ever laid my eyes on.

It came out exactly how I wanted it to. A blue so dark that you couldn’t even tell it was blue on camera. I’ll spare you the details and dump a bunch of photos for ya:

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With the Good Luck League just around the corner, I wanted to have the car shot by an actual photographer so I’d have nice photos of it in case I smacked into a wall or something. I asked around and ran into @lensprophet who did an amazing job with it. I will say I am kind of bummed I decided to leave the wing’s endplates off for the shoot because now that I look at it again, it looks weird. Oh well, you live and you learn. He charged me $100 but I threw $15 more at him because I ran incredibly late which subsequently meant he was on a time crunch. Nonetheless, the photos came out amazing: 

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I just wanted to mention that, although the car looks amazing on camera, it is by no means perfect in person. As impatient as I am, I wanted the car done and one color as soon as possible so this put me at a deficit. There are a bunch of visible imperfections that the dark blue does a good job of hiding. I’m well aware of the ugly behind the pretty so feel free to point them out and laugh at me if you ever see it. I’ll even list them out: the hood has a bunch of high and low spots, I didn’t do a good job at smoothing over the holes that were filled, there are a bunch of dimples on the quarter panels that I missed, and well, orange peel, because Maaco, among other things. Even if it isn’t perfect, I’m still incredibly happy with how the car turned out, maybe one day I’ll brush up on my body work skills and have another go at it but for now it’ll do. Everything always looks better on the internet anyway, right?

Also forgot to total everything : $20,866 + 400 + 140 + 500 + 115 = $22,021

The reason I was on a time crunch with the car was because I wanted to make an event at Thunder Hill called The Good Luck Leage (@goodluckleague) hosted by Lucky (@luckyakalaurante). I’m not entirely sure if it was a good idea to drive the car, let alone drift it two days out of paint but who cares – it’s a drift car right?

Typically, with any drift event I go to I’m a complete disaster filled with anxiety because I can’t afford to trailer so if anything goes wrong I’ll be both shit out of luck and probably even more broke than if I had rented a trailer. Since nobody hates me more than I hate myself, I love making my life harder than it should be so I always take the gamble of driving there, drifting, and driving home. Prior to this event I’ve always gone to Drift Central which is only 94 miles away – not too bad right? Well Thunder Hill, on the other hand, is damn near 230 miles away. Good Luck. 

Needless to say, I didn’t get as lucky as I’d have liked. The day started off great, I loaded up the S14 and drove out with Sal (@sg14k) to go pick up my buddy Igor (@metallist). Despite the anxiety I was ready to show off my hard work at Thunder Hill! As we’re cruising north toward Oakland on the beautiful, poorly lit 880 highway at 5am in the slow lane, I notice a metal plate far too fucking late. Sheer panic inhibits my body as I swerve right narrowly missing safety. Unfortunately a protruding nut or bolt of some sort clipped my side skirt causing god knows what to start flapping and rattling violently. Conveniently we were right next to an off ramp so we used the park anywhere button and assessed the damage. At this time it is cold as fuck so my diamond cutters are in full effect and I can’t feel any portion of my exposed skin. Not entirely sure what was flapping around but I opened the door to remount the skirt properly and shut the door on my thumb to see if everything looked good. Thankfully the damage was on the underside in the wheel well area so the car still looked great, so from there Sal and I decided to get back on the ro- wait holy fuck my thumb is actually inside the door jamb. I didn’t feel it initially because I was too focused on the damage and it was cold as hell. If there’s any silver lining in this situation my nail was unaffected by the whole ordeal and since it’s so cold I didn’t feel it just yet. Anyway Sal and I get back on the road and we meet up with Ian (@longboi.wav) at a nearby gas station.

Surprisingly, these were the only issues I ran into throughout the course of the drive to Thunder Hill. We met up with Max (@themaxpowa) at Walnut Creek and it was smooth sailings from there!

Thunder Hill Big Pad is an absolute blast. This event was my first experience with third gear initiations and “tandems” (very loosely used since we weren’t very close with each other) with both Ian and Max. I assume my misery is the most entertaining point of this blog so this is for you, you fuckin’ bottom feeders : my shifter was quite literally squirting transmission fluid throughout my cabin and at one point it got stuck in second gear for whatever reason, somehow my dumbass managed to lose my car keys – you know, the keys for the car that I was drifting, the one that I needed to start the car to drift, yeah that one – for a whopping 20 minutes (they were under my jack somehow), OH and I hit a cone dead on at the top of second gear!

All in all it was an amazing day with tons of seat time, here are a few shots and a video! Shot by @seajae_ , @danielhasacamera, and @curryisadrink!

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This was an initial run of the event, I have a really bad habit of only recording warm ups. Later in the day I initiated third through the sweeper and downshifted to second for the rest of the track – this allowed for wider transitions and faster runs which was much funner!