The Fun and Chaos of Building a Skyline: A Personal Perspective

As I sit behind the wheel of my car, surrounded by the chaos of tools and parts, I can feel the excitement building up inside me. The Skyline is more than just a car to me; it's a project, a challenge, and a journey that never seems to end. I've spent countless hours working on this car, and each new development brings with it a sense of pride and satisfaction.

One thing that sets my Skyline apart from others is its rowdy personality. The engine roars to life as I hit the ignition, and the sound is unmistakable - it's like a beast awakened from a deep slumber. The rear wheel arches are slightly overfenders, giving the car a more aggressive stance, and the wheels seem to be stretched out just enough to accommodate the tires that will take this car to the track.

Of course, with great power comes great risk, and I've already had to make some compromises to ensure the car can survive the rigors of the track. The front subframe has been pulled out to relocate the rack and prepare it for powder coating. I've also installed an S13 subframe, courtesy of Alberto's expertise, and will be adding GK Tech arms, BC coilovers, and other upgrades to get this car ready for the track.

I'm also experimenting with a new villain setup, similar to what we've done on Nicole's car. The idea is to have a solid, rigid platform to mount the Hambrick (the Skyline's gear selector) on, and then bolt it to the trans tunnel as well. This will provide a secure place for me to mount my gear selector, ensuring that everything runs smoothly and reliably.

The beauty of this project lies in its ability to adapt and evolve over time. As I work on one aspect of the car, another issue arises, and I'm forced to pivot and tackle it head-on. It's not always easy - there are moments when I feel like I've bitten off more than I can chew - but that's all part of the fun.

One challenge I've encountered is the handling of the gear selector cluster from the R32. It's a bit of a mystery, and I'm still figuring out how to work around it. Perhaps we'll have to cut down the handle slightly to make it more manageable in this car. That's all part of the journey, though - problem-solving and adapting to new challenges.

As I wrap up my thoughts on building this Skyline, I realize that there are many more adventures waiting for me. The A/C unit needs a recharge, so we'll head out tomorrow to get that sorted. With any luck, by the time we're done with the AC, Alberto will have finished pulling the front subframe and we can begin installing the new subframe and powder-coating it.

It's days like these that remind me why I'm so passionate about this project. There's something special about bringing together a team of talented individuals, sharing knowledge and expertise, and working towards a common goal. And when it's all said and done - when we've finally finished this car and taken it to the track - I know it'll be worth every moment of the chaos and hard work that got us there.

For now, though, I'm just enjoying the ride. Or should I say, the drive?

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys and welcome to today's video I want to sort of like kind of apologizing I got a little bit later start than I originally intended this morning I kind of played mr. catch up on all the house duties and stuff which normally isn't that big of a deal but we've been having a kind of a large issue in here so if you guys aren't familiar with us or our house or a channel we have like a pretty much brand-new houses built like two years ago and believe it or not we already have termites we don't ever go in this room because it's the guest room and we had a pest guy notice that there were some cracks in this like baseboard down here and it turned out that we had termites all in there that came up from the foundation which is crazy like termites are scary they eat wood and stuff right I really don't know much about him all I know is that the house should have been treated and that there's this thing like it's it's kind of complicated but there's like a termite bond from the company that treated the foundation because the termites were ones that came from the foundation they weren't like in the wood or whatever this is what I've been dealing with all morning but the company that treated the place doesn't want to do anything because they say we never renewed the bond because they never sent us the letters that they claimed they sent us and one person saying one thing another person saying another thing and it's just it's been a bit of a mess so not complaining I'm sure we'll get it figured out hopefully the termite damage is minimal it's just been one of those days where like things just aren't going as you'd want them to go the homies at Street faction sent me another set of their brackets same ones that I have in my s13 and Nicole's s13 and even though I know that this bride has bottomed out I was still gonna try to make it work spent like an hour on it and although it may look on this side like it bolts up the seat is just too narrow for the brackets so it's gonna be a bit more involved and I can't put the bride's seat in right now it's gonna have to hit the back burner for a while even though that's what I wanted to do I should have filmed all my struggling I also filmed myself I forgot to film myself pulling off the spoiler and test fitting a new spoiler that I got I'm not gonna spoil the news for you but and that kind of gives you a little idea of what it looks like what I need though I don't remember on what form of social media it was if it was on Facebook if it was on Twitter if it was on Instagram if it was I don't know what other social media I'm on if it was on YouTube someone hit me up from Florida with an r32 white sedan that wanted to trade me a wingless trunk for my trunk with the wing but I don't remember who you are or how you contact me so find a way to please contact me because I want to trade with you because the wing that I got that I thought would cover up the holes doesn't cover up the holes other than that series of uneventful stuff the only real things that have gotten done in the style and today I had a pretty bad short where my taillights and my cluster lights weren't working and it took Alberto all day and he couldn't figure out where the short was I just rigged it to the brake lights were constantly on that way I could drive around at night in the mean time but he just wound up running a new wire so we're good on that now I also didn't tell you guys but with the rear seat in it did make it so you can virtually not hear the fuel pumps at all so that's really cool there were some holes up here from the speakers before and I just put some like sound deadening there just to kind of obviously like close those holes and now the noise is virtually I don't know we'll turn the car on and see if you can tell but obviously we're in a garage you're not gonna be able to really tell that much I'll just wait and show you when we drive the car tomorrow so a company called ring reached out to me and sponsored this video and sent me one of their video doorbells and I've heard of these for people using them in areas where they have like a lot of package theft to see if anyone's stealing their packages but I actually have a different purpose for it so most of the time throughout the day we're working in the garage and there's this constant problem where the delivery people come they knock on the door and they say FedEx or UPS or whatever I'm gonna run inside to see if it something it needs a signature nine out of ten times it doesn't but that one at at end time I feel like I always miss it and then racecar parts get delayed and then Biltz get delayed so when the doorbell detects motion or when someone rings it it notifies me on my phone and then we can see who's at the door or we could even talk to him hey can you hear me Nicole if you didn't notice in addition to HD video it also has two-way audio so we can like talk to whoever's at the door I just put it in today it literally took me maybe 10-15 minutes tops to install just a couple of wires literally just like plugged right in ring was also kind enough to give me a special offer for you guys on a ring starter kit right now the starter kits really rad it comes with a video doorbell and a floodlight cam great way to start building ring security around your home if you want to check it out just go to ring comm /lz I want to give a massive thank you to ring for sponsoring this video I'm very excited to put this thing to use and once again if you guys want to check it out and take advantage of that special offer it is just ring com /lz now seeing as I don't have a ton to talk about I thought I would address a few common questions that I've been seeing over and over again about this build the number one thing everyone's like oh my god go back to stock taillights the taillights you have her hideous these taillights are actually the taillights they come on our 32s they don't have the cool-looking ones like you guys are used to seeing on coops where the paint like covers the taillight and then you only see the circle of the taillight believe it or not when you put those on sedans they kind of look weird because it has a different like body line with the trunk so these taillights I genuinely think look the best if you are a doubter Google coupe taillights on our 32 sedan and you'll see how funky it looks all you can put a picture on the screen right now if I remember while I'm editing it just looks absolutely not good but I agree with you guys they look cooler I'm thinking about just wiring it so my tail lights are on all the time because then it kind of looks like the other lights because you have those cool gt-r skyline signature circles another common thing I'm seeing which is a very very cool idea but unfortunately not really doable is making this car into a drift taxi and having a back seat where I have you know two bucket seats that I can bring people on ride-alongs and stuff you see that a lot with jzx 100s and other bigger cars but this car is honestly not much bigger than like an S 13 coupe so it's a hair longer this is the legroom that you currently have in the back there's no way that I there's no way that I can fit a bucket seat here and safely have someone where their head isn't like pressed up against the roof and their knees aren't like sandwiched into this seat so this not a practical drift taxi in my opinion cool idea though since I mentioned that we're doing a live Rihanna I'd have seen some questions and some comments and some ideas regarding delivery stuff all I can say is you will like what I'm gonna do with the car delivery is almost done already and it's very well not on the car but like the actual design phase its I could not be more excited for what this car is gonna look like I mentioned it before but as of right now I'm not planning on doing a cage in this car like I've said this is supposed to be kind of like my right hand drive practice car slash replacement for the s 13 so I don't have to keep beating that thing up so it's gonna be a fun car to take the grassroots events and stuff and when it comes to like competitions or more sir just racks that require cages that's when I can utilize the s15 but I really want to enjoy this car kind of like I enjoy the Z where it doesn't have a cage it's really easy to just hop in go drive it'll have AC I can drive it around town and enjoy it but I'm also gonna get down and I'm gonna be the absolute crap out of it because that's when I have the most fun like you guys can clearly see through videos how much fun I have in the Z if this car can stay together I will have 10 times more fun in it than the Z just because of how much more rowdy it is how much more personality it has and how cool it's going to look obviously it's not going to last forever and it's probably going to break more often than a stock Z would so that's when we have the Z as a backup right there's logic to this it might be kind of crazy logic but it's logic I also saw some comments about over fenders and stuff on the car I'm gonna have to do over fenders in the front for clearance when we have angle and have to have the wheels moved out quite a bit in the rear I'm just gonna leave a stock body like -13 I always prefer stock body over having fiberglass in the rear if it gets mashed up then we can go fiberglass plus for this car I think the only real over fenders only like 20 or 30 mil so it's really not like it would have that much more I can definitely add some more roll out of the tires but right now we're fitting a 235 in there and like I wouldn't want to have to be able to I don't really need to fit much more than that the car makes plenty you grip on those tires right now so well we're out of town I don't want the progress on the skyline to come to a halt so one of the things that Alberto is going to be doing on it is pulling the front subframe so I can get the rack relocated and powder-coated and then I'm also going to be putting an S 13 subframe in here so I have one that Alberto just has to fix the threads for the diff on and the Wheldon's of --gk tech reinforcement plates so I can get that powder-coated and then hopefully when I get back home we can put the new sub frames in and I can do all the GK tech arms angle some new BC coil overs and then it should be ready for the track other than a hydro speaking of which I want to mock something up real quick I'm gonna be doing the villain setup just like we have on Nicole's car I just really like how it feels and it looks really cleans all tucked up nice in there their plate doesn't run right hand drive cars but I was actually able to get the pieces that they use to make their plates from them so I can bolt this where the shifter goes on and then have Alberto weld this in place so we can then bolt it to the trans tunnel as well that way we have a nice rigid place to mount the Hambrick however a new idea that I just got since we have all that extra room since the shifters moved far back and I don't know if we're going to room for a handbrake there depending on what CI end up running is if I run a white or see the clearance in here is gonna be kind of tight although I guess now we'd we'd still be good I think I think we'd still be good though it'd be tight but I think would be good since I sit pretty far back but what I was gonna say is we probably have room to fit it in here if we wanted to which would be kind of cool actually I don't think it worked because then the master would be in the way of the shifter so we'd have to do it down here which I think would be pretty rad Hydra would fall oh I didn't even think about that we're gonna have to worry about this whole situation with the whole r32 fancy cluster thing maybe we would cut this handle down to be a little bit lower I don't need it to be super high in this car we'll figure that out I'm getting wrapped up in stuff that I shouldn't be getting wrapped up in right now because there's no point tomorrow we're gonna go get the a/c charged on this thing so we can cruise around town more often because Florida is brutal right now and driving around the car without AC is it very fun that's why I don't really drive around minus 13 if you notice oh yeah that and the fact that its head is lifted right now so yeah we gotta fix that too one thing at a time we're focusing on our 32 right now I want to get that done want to get in a cools car done enough so we can get it to paint and then I wanna get my ass or team back together maybe just maybe all three cars will be in quotations done at once stay tuned hope you guys enjoy this video it's a little bit all over the place I know I'm sorry blame it on the termites I'll see you guys tomorrow when you say thank me when you say nobody knowswhat's up guys and welcome to today's video I want to sort of like kind of apologizing I got a little bit later start than I originally intended this morning I kind of played mr. catch up on all the house duties and stuff which normally isn't that big of a deal but we've been having a kind of a large issue in here so if you guys aren't familiar with us or our house or a channel we have like a pretty much brand-new houses built like two years ago and believe it or not we already have termites we don't ever go in this room because it's the guest room and we had a pest guy notice that there were some cracks in this like baseboard down here and it turned out that we had termites all in there that came up from the foundation which is crazy like termites are scary they eat wood and stuff right I really don't know much about him all I know is that the house should have been treated and that there's this thing like it's it's kind of complicated but there's like a termite bond from the company that treated the foundation because the termites were ones that came from the foundation they weren't like in the wood or whatever this is what I've been dealing with all morning but the company that treated the place doesn't want to do anything because they say we never renewed the bond because they never sent us the letters that they claimed they sent us and one person saying one thing another person saying another thing and it's just it's been a bit of a mess so not complaining I'm sure we'll get it figured out hopefully the termite damage is minimal it's just been one of those days where like things just aren't going as you'd want them to go the homies at Street faction sent me another set of their brackets same ones that I have in my s13 and Nicole's s13 and even though I know that this bride has bottomed out I was still gonna try to make it work spent like an hour on it and although it may look on this side like it bolts up the seat is just too narrow for the brackets so it's gonna be a bit more involved and I can't put the bride's seat in right now it's gonna have to hit the back burner for a while even though that's what I wanted to do I should have filmed all my struggling I also filmed myself I forgot to film myself pulling off the spoiler and test fitting a new spoiler that I got I'm not gonna spoil the news for you but and that kind of gives you a little idea of what it looks like what I need though I don't remember on what form of social media it was if it was on Facebook if it was on Twitter if it was on Instagram if it was I don't know what other social media I'm on if it was on YouTube someone hit me up from Florida with an r32 white sedan that wanted to trade me a wingless trunk for my trunk with the wing but I don't remember who you are or how you contact me so find a way to please contact me because I want to trade with you because the wing that I got that I thought would cover up the holes doesn't cover up the holes other than that series of uneventful stuff the only real things that have gotten done in the style and today I had a pretty bad short where my taillights and my cluster lights weren't working and it took Alberto all day and he couldn't figure out where the short was I just rigged it to the brake lights were constantly on that way I could drive around at night in the mean time but he just wound up running a new wire so we're good on that now I also didn't tell you guys but with the rear seat in it did make it so you can virtually not hear the fuel pumps at all so that's really cool there were some holes up here from the speakers before and I just put some like sound deadening there just to kind of obviously like close those holes and now the noise is virtually I don't know we'll turn the car on and see if you can tell but obviously we're in a garage you're not gonna be able to really tell that much I'll just wait and show you when we drive the car tomorrow so a company called ring reached out to me and sponsored this video and sent me one of their video doorbells and I've heard of these for people using them in areas where they have like a lot of package theft to see if anyone's stealing their packages but I actually have a different purpose for it so most of the time throughout the day we're working in the garage and there's this constant problem where the delivery people come they knock on the door and they say FedEx or UPS or whatever I'm gonna run inside to see if it something it needs a signature nine out of ten times it doesn't but that one at at end time I feel like I always miss it and then racecar parts get delayed and then Biltz get delayed so when the doorbell detects motion or when someone rings it it notifies me on my phone and then we can see who's at the door or we could even talk to him hey can you hear me Nicole if you didn't notice in addition to HD video it also has two-way audio so we can like talk to whoever's at the door I just put it in today it literally took me maybe 10-15 minutes tops to install just a couple of wires literally just like plugged right in ring was also kind enough to give me a special offer for you guys on a ring starter kit right now the starter kits really rad it comes with a video doorbell and a floodlight cam great way to start building ring security around your home if you want to check it out just go to ring comm /lz I want to give a massive thank you to ring for sponsoring this video I'm very excited to put this thing to use and once again if you guys want to check it out and take advantage of that special offer it is just ring com /lz now seeing as I don't have a ton to talk about I thought I would address a few common questions that I've been seeing over and over again about this build the number one thing everyone's like oh my god go back to stock taillights the taillights you have her hideous these taillights are actually the taillights they come on our 32s they don't have the cool-looking ones like you guys are used to seeing on coops where the paint like covers the taillight and then you only see the circle of the taillight believe it or not when you put those on sedans they kind of look weird because it has a different like body line with the trunk so these taillights I genuinely think look the best if you are a doubter Google coupe taillights on our 32 sedan and you'll see how funky it looks all you can put a picture on the screen right now if I remember while I'm editing it just looks absolutely not good but I agree with you guys they look cooler I'm thinking about just wiring it so my tail lights are on all the time because then it kind of looks like the other lights because you have those cool gt-r skyline signature circles another common thing I'm seeing which is a very very cool idea but unfortunately not really doable is making this car into a drift taxi and having a back seat where I have you know two bucket seats that I can bring people on ride-alongs and stuff you see that a lot with jzx 100s and other bigger cars but this car is honestly not much bigger than like an S 13 coupe so it's a hair longer this is the legroom that you currently have in the back there's no way that I there's no way that I can fit a bucket seat here and safely have someone where their head isn't like pressed up against the roof and their knees aren't like sandwiched into this seat so this not a practical drift taxi in my opinion cool idea though since I mentioned that we're doing a live Rihanna I'd have seen some questions and some comments and some ideas regarding delivery stuff all I can say is you will like what I'm gonna do with the car delivery is almost done already and it's very well not on the car but like the actual design phase its I could not be more excited for what this car is gonna look like I mentioned it before but as of right now I'm not planning on doing a cage in this car like I've said this is supposed to be kind of like my right hand drive practice car slash replacement for the s 13 so I don't have to keep beating that thing up so it's gonna be a fun car to take the grassroots events and stuff and when it comes to like competitions or more sir just racks that require cages that's when I can utilize the s15 but I really want to enjoy this car kind of like I enjoy the Z where it doesn't have a cage it's really easy to just hop in go drive it'll have AC I can drive it around town and enjoy it but I'm also gonna get down and I'm gonna be the absolute crap out of it because that's when I have the most fun like you guys can clearly see through videos how much fun I have in the Z if this car can stay together I will have 10 times more fun in it than the Z just because of how much more rowdy it is how much more personality it has and how cool it's going to look obviously it's not going to last forever and it's probably going to break more often than a stock Z would so that's when we have the Z as a backup right there's logic to this it might be kind of crazy logic but it's logic I also saw some comments about over fenders and stuff on the car I'm gonna have to do over fenders in the front for clearance when we have angle and have to have the wheels moved out quite a bit in the rear I'm just gonna leave a stock body like -13 I always prefer stock body over having fiberglass in the rear if it gets mashed up then we can go fiberglass plus for this car I think the only real over fenders only like 20 or 30 mil so it's really not like it would have that much more I can definitely add some more roll out of the tires but right now we're fitting a 235 in there and like I wouldn't want to have to be able to I don't really need to fit much more than that the car makes plenty you grip on those tires right now so well we're out of town I don't want the progress on the skyline to come to a halt so one of the things that Alberto is going to be doing on it is pulling the front subframe so I can get the rack relocated and powder-coated and then I'm also going to be putting an S 13 subframe in here so I have one that Alberto just has to fix the threads for the diff on and the Wheldon's of --gk tech reinforcement plates so I can get that powder-coated and then hopefully when I get back home we can put the new sub frames in and I can do all the GK tech arms angle some new BC coil overs and then it should be ready for the track other than a hydro speaking of which I want to mock something up real quick I'm gonna be doing the villain setup just like we have on Nicole's car I just really like how it feels and it looks really cleans all tucked up nice in there their plate doesn't run right hand drive cars but I was actually able to get the pieces that they use to make their plates from them so I can bolt this where the shifter goes on and then have Alberto weld this in place so we can then bolt it to the trans tunnel as well that way we have a nice rigid place to mount the Hambrick however a new idea that I just got since we have all that extra room since the shifters moved far back and I don't know if we're going to room for a handbrake there depending on what CI end up running is if I run a white or see the clearance in here is gonna be kind of tight although I guess now we'd we'd still be good I think I think we'd still be good though it'd be tight but I think would be good since I sit pretty far back but what I was gonna say is we probably have room to fit it in here if we wanted to which would be kind of cool actually I don't think it worked because then the master would be in the way of the shifter so we'd have to do it down here which I think would be pretty rad Hydra would fall oh I didn't even think about that we're gonna have to worry about this whole situation with the whole r32 fancy cluster thing maybe we would cut this handle down to be a little bit lower I don't need it to be super high in this car we'll figure that out I'm getting wrapped up in stuff that I shouldn't be getting wrapped up in right now because there's no point tomorrow we're gonna go get the a/c charged on this thing so we can cruise around town more often because Florida is brutal right now and driving around the car without AC is it very fun that's why I don't really drive around minus 13 if you notice oh yeah that and the fact that its head is lifted right now so yeah we gotta fix that too one thing at a time we're focusing on our 32 right now I want to get that done want to get in a cools car done enough so we can get it to paint and then I wanna get my ass or team back together maybe just maybe all three cars will be in quotations done at once stay tuned hope you guys enjoy this video it's a little bit all over the place I know I'm sorry blame it on the termites I'll see you guys tomorrow when you say thank me when you say nobody knows\n"