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Early last week I was finally able to order some new front tires since the store I work at opened back up. I think the Tire Rack may be having some shipping issues due to covid-19 because as of Friday my parts dept. still did not have any tracking numbers. I am really anxious to get these on and try them out so that I can stop taking corners so slowly with my snow tires.
These are the brand new Yokohama Advan Apex V601's. They should last a lot longer than my Bridgestones, but I am curious to see how the ride and handling performance compares.
The new front tires go on tomorrow morning and I am pretty stoked. I hope they are about as grippy as the Bridgestone RE-71R tires that I have now, but I would be even happier if they are a bit quieter and ride better.
It's funny... No matter the car or best intentions, I almost always buy tires two at a time.
How much rear tread depth are you going into 2020 with on you summer tires?
I seem to be doing the same thing due to unexpected events like my ABS going out on track and flat spotting a front tire, getting a flat in the rear, and a camber issue up front. I just barely have 4/32's out back and it should be plenty to get me through the summer with how short my drive to work is.
I got my new front tires installed today and they are just what I was looking for. They are significantly quieter and ride smoother without giving up too much grip. Hard to tell on my rainy drive home yet, but I will eventually test the limits of these tires. Right now they are arguably the best bang for the buck for a very sticky summer street tire that could probably hang very close to the top of the pack on a track day. They did however find a bend in one of my rims. 1st rim I have ever bent. Fortunately I have a tire and wheel warranty that looks like it will replace it.
Quite a lot of grip here with big siping for rain.
9/32's in the center, 7/32's in the outer ridge, and 6/32's in the very outer sipes.
That is just the 1"ish thick harnesses that loop inboard of the shock towers, correct? How did you get ingress into the IPDM/ battery area from the side?
That is just the 1"ish thick harnesses that loop inboard of the shock towers, correct? How did you get ingress into the IPDM/ battery area from the side?
After driving on these new Yokohama tires for a fair amount of time now I have to say that I continue to be pleasantly surprised. They are exactly what I was looking for in a tire. They seem to provide all the same crazy grip of my RE-71R tires without the hard ride and noise. I am sure at the limit on the track there is a small difference, but on the street still pushing the limits of grip, these tires seem like a fair match for the RE-71-R's.
It is interesting to compare the two tires back to back as I still have RE-71R's on the back of the car. The other day I was playing around with the car in the rain and was very surprised to discover how much better the Yokohamas were in the rain as well. Part of this advantage is due to the little bit of extra tread depth, but I imagine most of it is due to the much better design of the siping on the Yokohamas.
Another tire I compare to is the Michelin Pilot Super Sport that everyone seems to rave about. I had a set of these on my E46 M3, but they were not super grippy tires and certainly provided nowhere near the same amount of grip as these Yokohamas. I know Michelin has a new performance tire to replace the Super Sport- the 4S I believe. I have driven a few cars with these tires and they are pretty good and provide plenty of grip for most people on the street. However, the Yokohamas seem to be somewhere between these and the RE-71R's in terms of grip.
Hey, hey! Most of my new badges arrived. I should finally be able to do the trunk. I still do not have my Nissan steering wheel cover though and it has been over a month now since JDM parts ninja shipped it.
The idea with these badges is to wrap the flat face of the "Skyline" and "370" in gloss black to match my Nissan badge. This will be the 1st time I have vinyl wrapped anything so please share any tips you may have. Hopefully, it is not too bad since I will just be doing flat surfaces. (Fingers crossed)
I already painted the Nissan emblem and here it is drying. This is actually my 2nd attempt after stripping all the paint off. My goal was to paint the Nissan letters white so they really popped and matched my car, but there is no good way to do it with paint. It was getting way too sloppy for my taste. Now I plan to talk to the local vinyl guy to see if they can cut white vinyl letters. I think that will look much cleaner.
I pulled the Infiniti emblem off of my grille and it came off a lot easier than I expected. (Time will tell on the trunk badges.) I thought it might look ok like this because it looks a bit aggressive with the intake tubes shining through just a bit, but it is still too plain to me. So I ordered another Nissan badge for the front and plan to paint it the same way as the one in back.
This should look pretty good when it is all done. It took a month to get the 1st Nissan badge from a dealer in TX who had to order it from Japan so it may be a while.
I feel like this project will be a good way to finalize the car and make it feel special to me. I know most people don't even know what a Nissan Skyline is, but to those who do this will make the car a bit more special and hopefully get people to take a closer look at all the work it took to make this car as good as it is today. Maybe it will even help convince me to keep the car a bit longer. It sure has been a lot more fun driving it lately with the new summer tires to throw it around corners and finally being warm enough to roll down the windows and hear those great exhaust sounds. Music to my ears!
I'm a little jealous of your white car since the black badges will look so good on it.
Also I'm glad I subbed to your thread. I ended up getting a full set of those Advan Sport A/S+ tires that you ordered and I'm so happy with them already. I think my car was also badly in need of an alignment which may be helping with the joy of driving again.
I'm a little jealous of your white car since the black badges will look so good on it.
Also I'm glad I subbed to your thread. I ended up getting a full set of those Advan Sport A/S+ tires that you ordered and I'm so happy with them already. I think my car was also badly in need of an alignment which may be helping with the joy of driving again.
Well, it turns out it looked better with chrome badges so onto plan B. No worries.
Glad to hear you like V601 tires. Sticky buggers aren't they. It's amazing how much difference a good alignment can make to the handling.
The badges on my trunk were my project yesterday and I am pretty happy with the results.
The adhesive on the right comes off pretty easy with a heat gun. The line of dirt and whatever else on the left came off ok with Goo Gone and a synthetic clay bar. That whole process went a lot quicker than I thought.
I painted this Nissan badge black and planned to paint the Nissan letters white, but I did not have a small enough brush to make it look ok. Lining this badge up correctly took some time because it is taller and narrower than the Infiniti badge. The other tricky part is that the center is not between the middle letters like you would think because the letters are different widths. Oddly enough my eyeball estimates were dead on with the exact measurements so I guess I could have saved some time here.
The Skyline letters come with a template so the only issue is trying to position them correctly. This becomes difficult because the trunk is not flat at the bottom to measure up and the spoiler curves up at the ends to measure down. Another issue is that the blue styrofoam is not a consistent size around the letters to get a good measurement. It was also at this point that I realized the chrome Skyline letters looked about 10 times better than the black Nissan badge. No easy way to remove the Nissan badge. Rats!
I taped off the badge so my low strength paint thinner would not damage the trunk paint. Surprisingly, the black paint came off pretty easily. This made me extra glad I removed the black paint because it made me wonder about the durability.
The 370GT badge had a blue styrofoam surround as well and it was shaped exactly like the trunk. However, if you lined it up that way it had a really noticeable upward tilt. I adjusted it to be straight and in line with the Nissan badge.
Overall, I am very happy with how this turned out. I was surprised by how much better the Nissan badge looked on the trunk than I initially thought it would. I ordered another badge for the front grille. Still waiting for my Nissan steering wheel cover to arrive. I wonder which will get here first. Either way, all of the new badging makes the car more unique and I believe it highlights the fact that this car is a pretty special project.
05-10-2020, 11:05 PM
