Anyone new to the site and wants to mod, please read this!
04-25-2014, 11:53 AM
#1
Here's my generic response to new members who are looking to get into modding. It's a little overwhelming at first, here's a breakdown of the various mods:
Here's the cliff's notes Version 5!
1. Aesthetic Modification
Everyone disagrees on which external mods look good. However, popular mods people do are:
Exterior Mods
Body kits (IPL/Aero, Top Secret, Black Bison, Zele, Tommy Kaira, Impul)
Wheels(Vossen, Stance, Velgen, VMR, Forgestar, Forgeline, and Enkei are popular brands) Check threads to see if they'll clear your brakes instead of just posting up a wheel fitment thread.
Lights (180 Customs, RaulG, DIY, TheRetrofitSource, DiodeDynamics) People change the lenses to TSX lenses, swap the bulbs, paint the housings, delete amber corner, and add LED rings/Iron Man lights)
LED interior light swap (diode dynamics or other companies offer kits containing all the LED's you need)
Fog Lights (DiodeDynamics) switched to HID, they are less useful in actual fog, but good for looks
Carbon Fiber (Outkast Garage, IGT, AIT, and Autokits X) Most things are available in carbon fiber, VIS and Seibon are popular mid-price brands
Smoked/Tinted lights
Debadging
Spoilers (front chin, rear decklid, rear wing type, roof mounted spoiler)
Diffuser (autokits x, status elite, carbon fiber element, other companies)
Plastidip (hideous, don't do it)
Interior Mods
Trim Replace the wood or aluminum trim with carbon fiber accents.
Steering Wheel Add an aftermarket steering wheel, modify the existing one to increase padding or size, buy flat-bottomed race wheels.
Radar Detector (Passport, Valentine) Install radar detector, and hardwire to homelink kit
Start Button (GTR, Impul) Popular mod to install is an aftermarket push-to-start button. GTR button is a direct replacement.
HVAC/Stereo ***** (CARSMO) (https://www.myg37.com/forums/showthr...ghlight=carsmo)
GTR dome light lenses The front map lights in the G37 are compatible with the clear lenses of the GTR.
Aftermarket Shift ***** (Welcome to WC Lathe Werks)
2. Horsepower
The best HP performance mod you can do is Forced Induction. These cars love boost, and any bolt ons (exhaust, intakes) will see only marginal HP boosts.
Cold Air/Short Ram style Intakes (K&N, Sillen, Takeda, R2C, Injen, Greddy)
As far as intakes are concerned, the two main types are long tube style, or short ram style. Short ram has the benefit of being simple to install, does not require bumper removal, and adds minor sound changes)
Long tube intakes pull cold air either from very low in the engine bay, or from in front of the radiator. These typically see bigger hp gains, but require modification to the radiator shroud on occasion. You might also need to add the slim washer tank.
Intake Manifold (Motordyne, Z1)
Header (Fast Intentions Long Tube Headers, Z1 short tube, Stillen short tube)
High Flow Catalytic Converters (Fast Intentions, Berk, Stillen, among others)
Test Pipes (same companies as Cats)
Catback Exhaust (Apexi, Tanabe, HKS, Greddy, Borla, Fast Intentions, Motordyne, Magnaflow, Top Speed, others)
Tune (either dyno professional, road professional, email tune, or handheld tuner unit)
Grounding kits (DIY)
Forced Induction (GTM twin turbo, GTM twin super, GTM single super, Stillen Super, Fast Intentions twin turbo)
3. Suspension mods
Sway Bars (Hotchkis, Cusco, Stillen, Eibach, Whiteline) biggest bang for buck mod
Front Tower Strut Bar (Cusco, GT spec, others)
Various chassis braces (may not be compatible with whatever exhaust you choose)
Coilover Brands: Ksport, BC Racing, Megan, Tanabe, JIC, HKS, Stance, Fortune, KW, and Tein
Spring Brands: Swift, Eibach, H&R, others
4. Tires
Most dealerships have OEM Bridgestone Potenza tires for their sport models. The factory toe and camber specs tend to make very short work of the OEM tires, plus their tread rating isn't the best. The favorites on the forum as far as summer performance replacement tires would be:
Michelin Pilot Super Sports $$$$
Bridgestone S-04 Pole Position $$$
Hankook Ventus V12 Evo $$
OEM Bridgestone Potenza
Falken, Eagle, Etc.
Tire Links:
Monsters of Grip: Nine Summer-Performance Tires Tested Comparison Tests - Page 10 - Car and Driver
http://www.tirerack.com/tires/survey...ay.jsp?type=MP
5. Brakes
For 99% of your average Infiniti owners' driving, the OEM, non-sport brakes are perfectly fine. They still provide great stopping power. The other 1% are those that NEED the akebono big brake kit, for racing/track purposes. To that end, popular brake mods are:
Upgrade your non-sport brakes to sport brakes
Upgrade your soft rubber brake lines to stainless lines (technafit, stoptech, most others are a rebrand of one or the other, i.e. Z1 "premium" and "non-Premium")
Upgrade your rotors to drilled, slotted, or drilled + slotted.
This is worth taking a minute to discuss. The idea behind slotting or drilling your rotors is to great a channel that will "wipe" or move air to disrupt the breakdown/application of brake pad material to the rotor. Ostensibly, this prevents you from depositing more pad material than you break down, and ending up with juddery brakes and brake fade.
I've heard rumors or drilled+slotted brakes failing from the stresses of track, or race applications, and I'm going to caution you against going that route unless you just like the looks and don't plan on tracking the car.
Upgrade your rotors to premium aftermarket rotors (centric)
Upgrade your brake pads
Race Spec (squeal, lots of dust, not great breaking when cool)
Hawk HP+, Carbotech, Cobalt, Infiniti R-Spec, Project Mu
Street Spec (not as good bite as race spec, more brake fade, easier for daily driver)
Stoptech Street Performance, OEM pads, others
Flush your fluid (Motul RBF 600)
6. Lowering
Springs
Yes, you COULD just put some springs on the car. There are three main ways to lower your car. The cheapest is to put springs on the car that are shorter, and stiffer than the OEM equipment. This means the lower you drop, the harsher the ride, as they need to increase the spring rate to prevent you from bottoming out. Springs will decrease the life of your struts, as the struts will be in compression more and the damping will have to be harder. It won't immediately cause them to blow out, though. At any rate, if you blow out your struts, you can always switch to aftermarket koni yellows or something similar. Major spring manufacturers would be swift, H&R, eibach, and tein.
Coilovers
Coilovers provide many forms of adjustability that are not possible with springs. A coilover replaces the spring AND the strut. The coilover body provides adjustable damping, as well as adjustable ride height. This means you can tighten up your car's suspension for track use (full stiff), then soften it for the ride home from the track (less damping). Coilovers are more expensive, but allow you full adjustability. This is what I have.
Airbags/Air Ride
The third method for lowering your car would be an air suspension. Basically, you replace your springs with inflatable bladders, then run air lines from a compressor/air tank to the bladders. You can increase, or decrease your ride height at will.
An air ride system will require the most modification to your car. You will need a tank to store the air, a compressor to refill the tank, valves to inflate/deflate your bags, the bags themselves, some sort of management system, and air lines to connect everything. The benefit of an air suspension is the relative ease and fairly wide variation on heights the user can have.
Stoof has an excellent writeup here:
https://www.myg37.com/forums/brakes-...ion-101-a.html
Alignment
Any of the methods above will lower the car. The important thing here is how to lower the car without damaging other equipment. When you lower the car, a natural byproduct of the lowering process alters your wheel and tire angles relative to the ground. This is camber and toe. Lowering the car typically increases the amount of negative camber, meaning the part of the tire that meets the road is farther away from the car than the top of the tire is. This can cause wear along a specific patch of the tire and will reduce tire life. Toe is how much the driver/passenger tire on front or rear angles in towards each other (negative toe), or away from each other (positive toe).
The car comes from the factory with a small amount of negative toe (good for keeping the car straight), and a small amount of negative camber (good for cornering). Increasing this causes excessive tire wear. You can lower your car, which increases the negative camber, and bring it back into spec by installing a camber kit. A camber kit is an aftermarket A arm (front), or camber arm (rear), that allows more adjustability than the OEM equipment. There's no hard and fast rule for determining exactly whether or not you will need a camber kit. Since I run premium tires, I don't want to be buying new sets all the time.
When Do I Need a Camber Kit?
Tentatively, if you drop your car more than an inch, you will probably need a camber kit. The front of the car has absolutely no provision for adjusting camber from the factory, the rear of the car has SOME camber adjustability, but this is typically maxed out when you drop it beyond 1".
There you go, now you're an expert.
Welcome to the forum, watch your head!
Here's the cliff's notes Version 5!
1. Aesthetic Modification
Everyone disagrees on which external mods look good. However, popular mods people do are:
Exterior Mods
Body kits (IPL/Aero, Top Secret, Black Bison, Zele, Tommy Kaira, Impul)
Wheels(Vossen, Stance, Velgen, VMR, Forgestar, Forgeline, and Enkei are popular brands) Check threads to see if they'll clear your brakes instead of just posting up a wheel fitment thread.
Lights (180 Customs, RaulG, DIY, TheRetrofitSource, DiodeDynamics) People change the lenses to TSX lenses, swap the bulbs, paint the housings, delete amber corner, and add LED rings/Iron Man lights)
LED interior light swap (diode dynamics or other companies offer kits containing all the LED's you need)
Fog Lights (DiodeDynamics) switched to HID, they are less useful in actual fog, but good for looks
Carbon Fiber (Outkast Garage, IGT, AIT, and Autokits X) Most things are available in carbon fiber, VIS and Seibon are popular mid-price brands
Smoked/Tinted lights
Debadging
Spoilers (front chin, rear decklid, rear wing type, roof mounted spoiler)
Diffuser (autokits x, status elite, carbon fiber element, other companies)
Plastidip (hideous, don't do it)
Interior Mods
Trim Replace the wood or aluminum trim with carbon fiber accents.
Steering Wheel Add an aftermarket steering wheel, modify the existing one to increase padding or size, buy flat-bottomed race wheels.
Radar Detector (Passport, Valentine) Install radar detector, and hardwire to homelink kit
Start Button (GTR, Impul) Popular mod to install is an aftermarket push-to-start button. GTR button is a direct replacement.
HVAC/Stereo ***** (CARSMO) (https://www.myg37.com/forums/showthr...ghlight=carsmo)
GTR dome light lenses The front map lights in the G37 are compatible with the clear lenses of the GTR.
Aftermarket Shift ***** (Welcome to WC Lathe Werks)
2. Horsepower
The best HP performance mod you can do is Forced Induction. These cars love boost, and any bolt ons (exhaust, intakes) will see only marginal HP boosts.
Cold Air/Short Ram style Intakes (K&N, Sillen, Takeda, R2C, Injen, Greddy)
As far as intakes are concerned, the two main types are long tube style, or short ram style. Short ram has the benefit of being simple to install, does not require bumper removal, and adds minor sound changes)
Long tube intakes pull cold air either from very low in the engine bay, or from in front of the radiator. These typically see bigger hp gains, but require modification to the radiator shroud on occasion. You might also need to add the slim washer tank.
Intake Manifold (Motordyne, Z1)
Header (Fast Intentions Long Tube Headers, Z1 short tube, Stillen short tube)
High Flow Catalytic Converters (Fast Intentions, Berk, Stillen, among others)
Test Pipes (same companies as Cats)
Catback Exhaust (Apexi, Tanabe, HKS, Greddy, Borla, Fast Intentions, Motordyne, Magnaflow, Top Speed, others)
Tune (either dyno professional, road professional, email tune, or handheld tuner unit)
Grounding kits (DIY)
Forced Induction (GTM twin turbo, GTM twin super, GTM single super, Stillen Super, Fast Intentions twin turbo)
3. Suspension mods
Sway Bars (Hotchkis, Cusco, Stillen, Eibach, Whiteline) biggest bang for buck mod
Front Tower Strut Bar (Cusco, GT spec, others)
Various chassis braces (may not be compatible with whatever exhaust you choose)
Coilover Brands: Ksport, BC Racing, Megan, Tanabe, JIC, HKS, Stance, Fortune, KW, and Tein
Spring Brands: Swift, Eibach, H&R, others
4. Tires
Most dealerships have OEM Bridgestone Potenza tires for their sport models. The factory toe and camber specs tend to make very short work of the OEM tires, plus their tread rating isn't the best. The favorites on the forum as far as summer performance replacement tires would be:
Michelin Pilot Super Sports $$$$
Bridgestone S-04 Pole Position $$$
Hankook Ventus V12 Evo $$
OEM Bridgestone Potenza
Falken, Eagle, Etc.
Tire Links:
Monsters of Grip: Nine Summer-Performance Tires Tested Comparison Tests - Page 10 - Car and Driver
http://www.tirerack.com/tires/survey...ay.jsp?type=MP
5. Brakes
For 99% of your average Infiniti owners' driving, the OEM, non-sport brakes are perfectly fine. They still provide great stopping power. The other 1% are those that NEED the akebono big brake kit, for racing/track purposes. To that end, popular brake mods are:
Upgrade your non-sport brakes to sport brakes
Upgrade your soft rubber brake lines to stainless lines (technafit, stoptech, most others are a rebrand of one or the other, i.e. Z1 "premium" and "non-Premium")
Upgrade your rotors to drilled, slotted, or drilled + slotted.
This is worth taking a minute to discuss. The idea behind slotting or drilling your rotors is to great a channel that will "wipe" or move air to disrupt the breakdown/application of brake pad material to the rotor. Ostensibly, this prevents you from depositing more pad material than you break down, and ending up with juddery brakes and brake fade.
I've heard rumors or drilled+slotted brakes failing from the stresses of track, or race applications, and I'm going to caution you against going that route unless you just like the looks and don't plan on tracking the car.
Upgrade your rotors to premium aftermarket rotors (centric)
Upgrade your brake pads
Race Spec (squeal, lots of dust, not great breaking when cool)
Hawk HP+, Carbotech, Cobalt, Infiniti R-Spec, Project Mu
Street Spec (not as good bite as race spec, more brake fade, easier for daily driver)
Stoptech Street Performance, OEM pads, others
Flush your fluid (Motul RBF 600)
6. Lowering
Springs
Yes, you COULD just put some springs on the car. There are three main ways to lower your car. The cheapest is to put springs on the car that are shorter, and stiffer than the OEM equipment. This means the lower you drop, the harsher the ride, as they need to increase the spring rate to prevent you from bottoming out. Springs will decrease the life of your struts, as the struts will be in compression more and the damping will have to be harder. It won't immediately cause them to blow out, though. At any rate, if you blow out your struts, you can always switch to aftermarket koni yellows or something similar. Major spring manufacturers would be swift, H&R, eibach, and tein.
Coilovers
Coilovers provide many forms of adjustability that are not possible with springs. A coilover replaces the spring AND the strut. The coilover body provides adjustable damping, as well as adjustable ride height. This means you can tighten up your car's suspension for track use (full stiff), then soften it for the ride home from the track (less damping). Coilovers are more expensive, but allow you full adjustability. This is what I have.
Airbags/Air Ride
The third method for lowering your car would be an air suspension. Basically, you replace your springs with inflatable bladders, then run air lines from a compressor/air tank to the bladders. You can increase, or decrease your ride height at will.
An air ride system will require the most modification to your car. You will need a tank to store the air, a compressor to refill the tank, valves to inflate/deflate your bags, the bags themselves, some sort of management system, and air lines to connect everything. The benefit of an air suspension is the relative ease and fairly wide variation on heights the user can have.
Stoof has an excellent writeup here:
https://www.myg37.com/forums/brakes-...ion-101-a.html
Alignment
Any of the methods above will lower the car. The important thing here is how to lower the car without damaging other equipment. When you lower the car, a natural byproduct of the lowering process alters your wheel and tire angles relative to the ground. This is camber and toe. Lowering the car typically increases the amount of negative camber, meaning the part of the tire that meets the road is farther away from the car than the top of the tire is. This can cause wear along a specific patch of the tire and will reduce tire life. Toe is how much the driver/passenger tire on front or rear angles in towards each other (negative toe), or away from each other (positive toe).
The car comes from the factory with a small amount of negative toe (good for keeping the car straight), and a small amount of negative camber (good for cornering). Increasing this causes excessive tire wear. You can lower your car, which increases the negative camber, and bring it back into spec by installing a camber kit. A camber kit is an aftermarket A arm (front), or camber arm (rear), that allows more adjustability than the OEM equipment. There's no hard and fast rule for determining exactly whether or not you will need a camber kit. Since I run premium tires, I don't want to be buying new sets all the time.
When Do I Need a Camber Kit?
Tentatively, if you drop your car more than an inch, you will probably need a camber kit. The front of the car has absolutely no provision for adjusting camber from the factory, the rear of the car has SOME camber adjustability, but this is typically maxed out when you drop it beyond 1".
There you go, now you're an expert.
Welcome to the forum, watch your head!
Last edited by GoFightNguyen; 08-19-2014 at 02:37 PM. Reason: Version 5
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05-23-2014, 12:24 AM
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05-23-2014, 11:07 AM
#8
I welcome forum input on this, if there's anything you disagree with, I would love to hash it out with you and add to this guide so we can finally have a one-stop shop reference for ignorant new members and just plain stupid old members :]
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06-01-2014, 05:38 PM
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I just bought a 2011 G37S convertible. One of the things that seems a bit peculiar about this car is that the suspension options are completely different for each submodel. Each car is the cross product of {awd, rwd} X { coupe, sedan, convertible } X {normal steering, 4 wheel steering} seems to have completely different options. I wonder if it would be possible to put together a list of suspension successes for each? (Huge undertaking, I know.)
I've been trying to assemble what my options are for the convertible and it looks like there are no "springs plus shocks" options because there are no aftermarket shocks/struts available (no kyb, koni, bilstien at least). A camber kit also seems to be unavailable so alignable ride heights seem limited < 1" under stock. The BC coilovers with a < 1 inch drop and no camber kit seems like it might work and there seems to be some good experience with them on the forum. Are there decent shock/strut and camber kit options that I just haven't found, or is that about the size of it for the convertible? Does anyone have experience with the BC running a minimal drop, say 0.25 - 0.5", the Hotchkis sway bars and Michelin tires. I'm guessing that this would give something reasonably stiff but still a good street ride and be closer to critically damped than the moderately underdamped setup that comes with the factory sport suspension.
Are there other decent options that I just haven't found?
I've been trying to assemble what my options are for the convertible and it looks like there are no "springs plus shocks" options because there are no aftermarket shocks/struts available (no kyb, koni, bilstien at least). A camber kit also seems to be unavailable so alignable ride heights seem limited < 1" under stock. The BC coilovers with a < 1 inch drop and no camber kit seems like it might work and there seems to be some good experience with them on the forum. Are there decent shock/strut and camber kit options that I just haven't found, or is that about the size of it for the convertible? Does anyone have experience with the BC running a minimal drop, say 0.25 - 0.5", the Hotchkis sway bars and Michelin tires. I'm guessing that this would give something reasonably stiff but still a good street ride and be closer to critically damped than the moderately underdamped setup that comes with the factory sport suspension.
Are there other decent options that I just haven't found?
