Project 510: Short Shifting

It’s been a hell of a long time since any real work was done to Project 510. In fact, looking back at the archives, it’s been around 2 and a half years since I ripped it apart and fitted my FMIC and supporting mods! In that time I have driven the car plenty of times (including a track day and skid pan), which is what it’s built for, so I can’t complain about that. Let’s not forget I also built a garage recently, so that counts for something, too! (I should probably also mention at this point that my wife gave birth to our first child at the end of March)

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Project 510 – Fast Fours Magazine feature

It’s been over a year since my Datsun was featured in Fast Fours & Rotaries magazine, so I thought I’d upload the full article to the site for those who don’t have access to this particular publication. I would like to once again say thanks to Ryan Lewis for writing the story and Jun Sawa for the photography, it was an honour for my car to grace the pages of a magazine that I was glued to whilst growing up.

You can click on each pic for a larger version, enjoy!

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Project 510: FMIC + more (pt 4)

Let’s wrap this up, shall we? This fourth (and final!) segment will be all of the satisfying stuff. Now that all of the fabrication and test-fitting had been completed, I could move on to the fun stuff; making everything pretty and bolting it all back onto the car.

Part 1  -  Part 2  -  Part 3

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Project 510: FMIC + more (pt 3)

Part 3, here we go. To quickly re-cap, Part 1 was all about relocating the alternator with custom mounts, and Part 2 saw the intercooler and radiator bolted into place, and the intercooler piping tacked together. Now we’re getting down to the finer details.

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Project 510: FMIC + more (pt 2)

When we left off from the last update, I had successfully relocated the alternator and had the crank pulley machined down to one single groove, with a smaller belt fitted to suit. I was now ready to get back to the original task at hand; fitting the intercooler, radiator, and modifying the intake manifold.

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Project 510: RB20DET gearbox

I was standing in the garage today, looking at my car with a bunch of the engine bay torn apart, planning in my head how I was going to document the activities in my next post. Then it struck me, I still hadn’t posted about the last thing I did; retrofitting an RB20DET gearbox to the FJ20. The FJ20 uses a 5-speed gearbox which has one niggling problem, they have a tendency to crunch when changing gears in higher rpm. Apart from that, there was nothing wrong with it, no whining noises, never hard to find a gear, never popped out of gear, but that didn’t stop me from upgrading when I learnt that the RB20 gearbox bolts up with minimal mods…

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