The Making of "The GTR Run Tokyo" by HartnettMedia (and my role in it!)

 A few months ago, my friend Dino contacted me - "hey you want your 33 to become the most famous 33 in the world?" with "Pennzoil wants to do a little something, so I am working on a project"

Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. But the end result was this:

Ok so here is some background information.

First, Dino and Alec had me show up VERY early to the Hakone Turnpike. That is where Dino introduced me to Ben Hartnett and Chris Hofstaetter.  The guys drove a Nissan Serena minivan that Nissan had lent them, and Dino of course came in his 34.  A few minutes after I arrived, Sudo-san pulls up, NOT in his 32, but driving a flatbed truck that carried his 32! 

Then our first challenge of the day - it turned out that the original section where Dino and Ben wanted to film was closed to the public - apparently Ferrari Japan was renting it out for their own video shoot! Undeterred, we took some side roads and found some other good places.

Then, we had to also find a place for Sudo-san to park his truck where he could unload the 32. But after that, the magic happened.  

Here are some photos I took while waiting to be told what to do and how to drive.

Closer up, but without Mt Fuji in the background.

After a few back and forth scenes, we parked. This is where we tried to choreograph getting into our cars at the same time. Clearly, we are neither actors nor coordinated.

Same shot, I was experimenting with the exposure setting. Was hard to balance getting the background to show while keeping the foreground coloring accurate. 

Trying another angle...

Around noontime, I actually had to go back into Yokohama as I had meetings at work. Lucky for me, the cars were running out of gas and so we headed into Atami to get gas.  It was then when I decided to not bother driving back but have Chris take over - turns out he is a 33 fan so was THRILLED at being able to  drive my car.  All the evening shots of the cars on these roads, that is him driving, not me!

And of course, having been dropped off at Atami station as they went to look for a gas station, I  took this train back into Yokohama:

But of course, this was only part of the plan.  The next day, Friday night, I found myself driving my car at night, meeting up with Dino and crew at a Parking Area outside Tokyo.  Somehow, several random Japanese Skyline GT-R owners were also there, so we invited them to tag along and include them in the night filming.

All I will say is, it was FREEZING cold... which made for great turbo boost of course. But the Japanese guys were super excited about their luck, and one youung guy just happaned to be an avid Ben Hartnett fan and was literally gushing with joy at being able to shake Ben's hand and take a photo with him.

Ben and Alec plotting

Yep, we have seen this 33 before... original LM paint, too!

Lots of waiting. It reminded me of the one time I was an extra in a movie.  Many retakes, from various angles, with most of my time spent waiting.

Staying inside the car to stay warm!

Obviously no shots of me actually driving at night since of course I was boring and followed all the speed limits, driving in a safe, controlled and mature manner, as befitting my job and position in society. Right...

Anyway, we called it quits at about 0500 just as the sun was about to come up. I can see from the finished project that a lot of what we did not make it into the final cut, but that is to be expected in the editing process.  Still, I had fun and it really is nice to be memorialized in this way by a real professional cinematographer.

Thank you Ben, Dino, Alec and Chris!! Hope to meet up with you guys again soon!

New Mine's Silence-VX Pro Titan III Exhaust! (Mine's Visit, Part 1)

Sitting pretty at Mine's after a bunch of new parts!

So I have to admit to not posting much these past few months, because of course I was planning a few things for my car.  Of course I am busy at work too, but that excuse gets overused.

In any case, as I hinted in this post from September,  there are some newer parts at Mine's that I have been interested in lately that I think will help to further improve the car (yeah, it never ends...).  One of these of course is their new Silence-VX Pro Titan III exhaust:

Courtesy of Mine's

So even though several years ago, through connections at Tomei Powered, I was lucky enough that my car was used as the jig for their Expreme Ti full titanium (off-road spec) exhaust system, and further lucky enough to have my car featured in their catalog, it was time for a change.

So that's my car representing the 33s!
Courtesy of https://www.tomei-p.co.jp/catalogue/ti-gtr/

Change in that there was nothing wrong with the exhaust. It was just loud. Very loud. Clearly designed for the racetrack such that I could feel how free-flowing it was.  Unfortunately some shops in Japan (like Nissan Prince Tokyo Motorsports Division and Nismo Omori Factory) will usually refuse to work on cars that do not have JASMA certified (and thus street legal) exhaust systems.  Never mind it was always a problem starting up my car on an early weekend morning in order to go for a nice drive.  As readers know, I ended up installing not just an electric valve to try to muffle the sound for in-town use, I eventually even installed an aftermarket exhaust bung as well. This allowed me to get down to close to street legal levels, after which Omori Factory kindly chose to not make a big issue of the legality of the exhaust...

In the past, I had told the guys at Mine's that there was bound to be demand for their titanium exhausts from 33 owners, which until recently were available only for 32s and 34s. So I was pleasantly surprised to first get a phone call from Takayanagi-san of Mine's giving me a heads up that they had developed one for the 33 due to popular demand, and then thrilled when during my earlier visit to Mine's Nakayama-san promised me that I would be one of the first, if not the first, r33 customer to have this new titanium exhaust installed! 

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, when we had arranged for me to drop off the car.  For posterity, I wanted to record what the Tomei sounded like, so...

And then of course Nakayama-san again took my car into the famed garage.

And then the fun began!

So it seemed like I was the only customer that day - yes, I felt special, like this was a historical moment! In any case, I wanted to test fit the new exhaust, just to see how it looked.

While a couple of the Mine's mechanics began to prep the 33 so they could unbolt the Tomei from the car, Nakayama-san gleefully opened up a very long box.

And pulled out a very large, very beautiful piece of art!

Look who happened to be in the neighborhood.  Of course he had to take advantage of this instant so

He was mumbling something about Speedhunters. I guess we will eventually find out if this photo gets published on SH.

I'm no pro, but here is my photo taken with my Sony Xperia 1 Mark III:

Another angle:

Very tasty!

Meanwhile the other mechanics had jacked my car up, and were trying to figure out how to remove the diffuser.

A few bolts here and there, and voila!

After which it was relatively easy to remove the Tomei exhaust, and temporarily install the Silence-VX

I say temporarily because, unfortunately there seemed to be a clearance problem caused by both the diffuser brackets and the extra oil capacity rear diff cover. 

Realizing that this issue wasn't going to be solved in the next few minutes, and because I had asked Mine's to install some other tasty bits, I then decided to go home and save a few hundred yen by hitching a ride with Mr. Dalle Carbonare to the nearest train station.

In my next post, I'll discuss some of the other parts that got removed and the new ones that got installed. Stay tuned!

Cabinets for the Garage (Garage Series)

So after I installed the slatwall, things were looking better. But yeah, things were still not as organized as they could be. Plus, I really wanted a workbench of some sort for small projects.  So again it was Alibaba to the rescue, and I was able to order a full set of garage cabinets directly from the Chinese factory, for a very low cost (a fraction if I bought from the USA, or any other country).  And again, similar to what I had encountered when researching slatwall, the closest I could get to garage cabinet sellers here in Japan were cabinets for clothing (locker room cabinets) or super industrial looking ones which were not only expensive (I am sure well made) but not in the color I wanted nor of the dimensions that would fit nicely in the garage.

So after placing my order, my garage looked like this:

But when the factory told me that the cabinets had arrived in Japan and were ready to be shipped out of customs and directly to me, I hustled and cleaned up the areas where I wanted to have the cabinets.

First was this area along the shorter wall:

As well as this area in front of my first floor office:

BEFORE

I figured this could work as a space for a bench. Maybe with some cabinets.

AFTER

So you can see I was already experimenting with the slatwall accessories (I eventually decided not to hang any bicycles here).

And then lo and behold, TWO 2-ton trucks arrived and unloaded a bunch of boxes. Here are photos of the ones they kindly placed INSIDE the garage....

And then luckily my buddy Dino came over to help me unwrap/unbox everything.  He actually enjoyed using my hammer to yank out countless nails as he dismantled the wooden framing. He said it was therapeutic!

Showing off his nail extraction technique

After we unpacked everything, the cabinets were preassembled, so it was all about lining it all up, then making small adjustments to make sure it all looked good.

Here I am wrapping the steel leg pieces with soft tape to prevent scratches on the floor...

After the main cabinets were set up, then it was time to set up the work bench. It has a nice back board plus overhead cabinets, which required some assembly.

I'm smaller so I of course squeezed back to screw the cabinets onto the frame. Dino is holding it all up with his fingers

And the final result of the workbench:

Later I got the lighting to work and added some items to the pegboard.

The tall cabinets lined up nicely along the shorter wall behind the door.

Still alot of work to be done, check out that mess on the right.

And then basically put all of my cleaning/detailing items into the cabinets... it's still a work in progress, but from left to right, it's 1) cleaning materials, 2) drying items, 3) polishing items, and 4) other stuff such as spare parts, lubricants, paints, etc.

With the smaller cabinets taking up space in the garage where I would normally park (and leaving my vehicles outside!), I decided to hurry up and finish adding slatwall on TOP of these tall cabinets, and then hauled up the smaller cabinets for even more storage space. Of course, I bolted them to the ALC walls and also used those anti-earthquake poles that fit between furniture and the ceiling. 

And the workbench now? Well as you can see I currently have several projects underway...

But indeed it's very nice having a bench and tool cabinets to store all of the small stuff one accumulates over the years, in a somewhat organized fashion.

And yes, this mess is anti-thema to my OCD, so it will get cleaned up... eventually! Anyone have any suggestions?

I DO still have other garage stuff planned for the future, but right now I'm happy with this set up.  I also have a lot of stuff to get rid of as well, because for far too long I've been accumulating various parts and materials so I'm gradually unloading them as we speak. Either trash or Yahoo Auctions or send to people who want/need it (maybe I should have a list somewhere?)

Next post - back to the car's interior! Stay tuned, post coming soon!

Picked Up From Nismo Omori But...

So while I did pick up the car from Nismo last Wednesday, I'm not going to write about it here because I have a long overdue Speedhunters post on the event coming soon - I'll post here when it goes live. Meanwhile because there are other things going on with the car, I will gloss over the pick up (for now) and talk a bit about what I did after leaving Nismo Omori Factory and then in my next posts a bit about future plans for the car.

Obligatory shot of getting ready to say goodbye.

Anyway, first order of business was to head over to the car alarm specialist that Ochiai-san had found. This shop specializes in a variety of car alarm brands, including the one that was installed by Worx. Given the shop's willingness and confidence in being able to remove the wiring, I was looking forward to finally getting rid of this cancer in my car. 

Because every drive in my car could be my last, instead of putting the car on carrier truck I elected to drive the one hour to Yamato City, where Pro-Tecta Shonan is located.  I was able to experience some high way speeds, along with some usual inaka (countryside) stop and go traffic. What an awesome car! So easy to drive, so raw and direct! And yet, it feels so much more civilized now, with the ride much less jarring (and yet still very firm) now, and yes the roof insulation that the Nismo Omori techs installed REALLY making a huge difference! Combined with the very quiet Pilot Sports 4S (compared to the previous tires I had on before), dare I say you can have a conversation in the car at speed without raising one's voice now?

Felt like the middle of nowhere... definitely not Tokyo or Yokohama!

The owner, Mizutani-san was waiting for me and immediately began to inspect the car.

He immediately recognized that the alarm install had a back up siren, as well as some other options

And then told me to come back on Sunday to pick up the car.

There was also a white R33 GT-R there also for an alarm install, I didn't think much about it at the time (so no photos)... meanwhile I traded contact information with Mizutani-san before I departed.  He assured me he would of course be super careful taking the car apart to find and remove the wiring. Just in case, I asked him to message me if he found anything weird.

And he did:

Mizutani-san was surprised to see this and sent me this photo...I told him that was nothing given the other crap...

So on Sunday afternoon, I went back to pick up the car.

Slow day...?

At last, I got to check out the headache of an alarm.

All in all, it weighed about 1-2 kg!

As I made it a point not to bad mouth Worx too much, Mizutani-san was able to give me a fairly objective report.  He said that he could tell that the installer was skilled (Mizutani-san has more years in the business however) and that the install was done with minimal cutting and splicing.  Finally some good news (relatively speaking), but as I told him, it was mainly in the OTHER areas where I found a lot of problems due to Worx Nakamura's questionable decisions and failure to let me know what he was doing.

So does that mean that the guys at Nismo were in over their heads? My interpretation is that they simply did not want to learn alarm wiring on my dime, so that is fair.  It is after all a business, and I'm not a rich man like some I know, so a line had to be drawn somewhere before it became too costly for Nismo to continue.  Plus as we all know Nismo is basically OEM, so that is their comfort zone. And that of course means not everything at Nismo is the best... or better stated, what Nismo does isn't for everyone (hint of possible future post).

The lesson here friends, is avoid installing Japanese-brand car alarms. They have too many features, and place a premium on flash versus ease of use.  My old Clifford alarm remote had two buttons, this one had 5, and so many cute graphics that the battery quickly wore out in a month (and they must have known, as it was super easy to change the batteries - no special ones needed, just AAA size). I don't recall how many times I changed the battery on the Clifford remote on the other hand... Plus I would like to think that US brands probably have more experience against car theft (a good thing) due to more cars being stolen in the USA (a bad thing).  Mizutani-san agreed that Cliffords (he installs them too) were easier to use, but said that they tended to break more so there wasn't a perfect solution.

Mizutani-san also told me that the owner of the white r33 GT-R that was there when I dropped off my GT-R was also a Nissan employee, but over at the Technical Center (an engineer or designer I'm guessing).  Apparently he spent about an hour checking out my car, remarking that I must have spent a lot of money on it so far... I told Mizutani-san to have the guy contact me and I'd be happy to discuss all things R33 GT-R!

Anyway I said my good byes and drove home.  I cleared out the other vehicles from my garage, and immediately did what I had to - give the GT-R its first wash in several MONTHS!

I could actually see the dust on the roof of the car....

I thought it was weird that they didn't wash the car at Nismo Omori Factory, but then again their ceramic coating contractor took a look at my car and told them the car was too clean to make it worth his while to do any work on it. And knowing that they know how OCD I am, I think not washing my car was probably the right thing to do (they wouldn't want to be accused of scratches done in the course of the wash)...

Epoxy floor, weather proof concrete walls and interior faucets means a wash out of direct sunlight!

So now that the car is back in my garage, is it done? Nope, a few more things need to be done before that can happen... this journey isn't quite over yet...

Fixing the Interior, Part 3 (Glove Box Door and Handbrake Boot)

So the mistake by Nakamura which upset me the most, was the damage to the leather interior that Cesar had worked on, taking several months to do so.  I mean, my car would be the first R33 GTR in the world to have a hand built, bespoke interior, and I was really looking forward to getting the car back and showing it off in its full glory.

Unfortunately, because Nakamura KEPT THE CAR 6 MONTHS!!! by the time I got it back, at least one tuner here in Japan had started offering a full leather interior as an option.

While I've previously shown the two bumps on the front, and explained why, I found these pictures on my phone which show you how those bumps came to be.



See those two small screws?  I took them out to find:


So you can see that these screws were actually cut SHORTER than they originally were.  In other words, Nakamura KNEW that they were too long, and instead of leaving the bracket loose or come up with some other way, went ahead and drilled away. Never mind that the screw tips were cut unevenly, thus resulting in a knifelike edge.

In any case, these two screws caused the glovebox front to gain these two dimples, likely due to plastic from the glovebox door being forced into the leather.

Anyway, once I had discovered these two screws to be the cause of the two dimples, I emailed Cesar (the guy who did the bespoke leather work for me, just in case you didn't follow the project earlier) for advice on what I should do, hoping maybe the application of a heat gun might be enough to fix the problem.

Cesar, however, immediately wrote back and offered to fix the glovebox door. One issue, however, was that he was worried that he might not have enough of the original "Cardinal" leather we had obtained from Wildman & Busby left. But, since we had not used the Bentley OEM leather due to imperfections, and we have two hides of material, we decided that might be an acceptable alternative. Being the perfectionist he is, he sent me the two follow photos showing the difference in leather, for my approval (left is the Bentley, right is the Cardinal):

And here is a close up of the texture:

CLOSE ENOUGH? I sure hope so...

But unfortunately, the glovebox door wasn't the only item that needed to be redone. As I mentioned here in my blog, while Cesar had initially used red stitching on the handbrake boot, after we consulted we decided to switch back to a boot using black stitching, in order to match the OEM look. In any case, Cesar had included both the red stitch and black stitch versions of the handbrake boot, just in case I later changed my mind.

Looks super OEM! But all REAL Leather... (OEM the boot is pleather)

Unfortunately, while Nakamura had my car in his custody, he THREW OUT this custom black stitch boot, presumably thinking that the above black one was the OEM one... AGAIN WITHOUT TELLING ME. FUCKER. So when I got the car back, it had the red stitch but no sign of the black stitch boot (I even looked in his pile of junk but couldn't find it).

Left side green arrow points to the red stitch handbrake boot. Right side shows unfinished key surround.

So, Cesar also kindly offered to redo the handbrake boot, using the Bentley leather, with black stitching.  Further, he offered BOTH A REDONE GLOVEBOX DOOR and HANDBRAKE BOOT at NO CHARGE.  CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW NICE HE IS?? Of course I wasn't going to allow that...(so yeah of course I paid him - totally worth it).

In any case, I sent him the damaged glove box door and the red stitched boot, a few short weeks went by and voila! A box from Mexico appeared at my front door.  Of course I had to wait for the weekend to open it up and enjoy perfection, but I was not disappointed.

And when I opened it:

Not only did he send back the Alcantara I had sent over in order to redo the glovebox interior...

The two handbrake boots! The red stitch one I had removed and sent over as a template, and a brand new black stitch one!



And of course, the redone glovebox.  Isn't it beautiful?

No more divots!

So of course, I jumped to fix as much as I could. First, I installed the black stitched parking brake boot.  Unfortunately no pictures of the install, but here is a better photo of the tab that I discovered had been snapped off when I removed the red stitched boot.

I used some plastic epoxy type glue, hope it holds but even if it doesn't the leather keeps things together... for now.

The bigger problem, at least for me, was how the glovebox door had become deformed due to the wiring needed for the ETC reader and the boost controller, that Nakamura had routed in the back.  As a reminder, previously the ETC reader had been in the center console, and further the wiring for the boost controller did not have heat shrink wrap around it - meaning that those cables could be passed through into the glovebox in a fairly flat way. But Nakamura's method of bundling cables for both devices now caused the front right side to sag.

How to fix this...

Given the newly repaired glovebox door, I wasn't going to rush trying to figure out how to fix this panel gap.  Initially, I tried to be very gentle.

It worked, kind of...

First, I used some spare weights to hold up the sides while putting pressure on the middle section, where the latch mechanism is.  I left this in a sunny room, hoping that the warmth would gently allow the weights to deform the glove box back into the proper shape. I figured if the latch mechanism was pushed outwards, the ends would be pushed upwards. In other words, I wanted to purposely have the ends too "tight" so that the latch would how the door closed snugly.

Unfortunately, after about a week, when I tried out on the car I did not see much progress. There appeared to still be about a millimeter of give on the right side where the gap was.


So, I decided to use a heat gun. Being VERY careful not to melt anything. I would heat up, and at the risk of burning of my fingers, try to bend the sides back up. I repeated this, sometimes even removing the glove box door in order to put more pressure on the sides.

Eventually, I got this:


Ok I took the photo at night - actually just a few minutes ago - sorry about the resolution but I was too excited not to share this with everyone. Finally looks flush, and there are no rattles either !

So am I done with fixing the damage done by Nakamura at WORX? Not quite, and I have a few more posts coming up soon to explain.

Thanks for the patience and understanding, everyone. I am finally starting to feel a bit better about the whole thing, in that there are fewer and fewer reminders about the problems each time I get in the car...