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Bens K10. The Second Micra

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Fujiwara-Ben

Fujiwara-Ben

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Time for another update.. urgh.. I've left this for so long i got loads to sort. Right... So i left off with swapping the fuel tank. and i wanted to fit my D2 coilovers before going to JDM Combe.
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Freshly refurbed D2s :)

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Covered with plenty of insulation tape to keep the threads clean.

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Little better than my borrowed coilovers haha

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Brackets on for the brake lines
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And the otherside.

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Very nice :D

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Gave it a wash put some stickers on and all ready for JDM Combe :)

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Need some nice wheels though!!
 

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Fujiwara-Ben

Fujiwara-Ben

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So after JDM Combe i had quite a few things still left to sort. Main ones being my fuel gauge not working, brake shoes to change and my passenger side track rod end to change (so i could finally get my tracking done lol)

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First off was the fuel gauge. Tracked everything back.

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Solder up some wires.
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Put it all back together..
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It works!! Apparently it under reads by quite a lot though, as £20 gives me a full tank on the gauge hahahaha

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Time to get the track rod end off.

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After quite a bit of persuasion it eventually decided to come loose.

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Threads cleaned and greased.

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Ready for the nice new shiny one :)

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Time to move onto the brake shoes. Bought some Mintex shoes for the back. Nice to see factory paint under the cover. Never been touched in it's 26 year life.

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After quite a bit of effort the hub nut came loose, took the hub off to make changing the shoes a bit easier.

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Ta daa. (i did put a new locking pin back in!!) Didn't get any pictures of the other side as i was running out of time and the other side proved to be quite a bit more difficult for some odd reason.
 
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Fujiwara-Ben

Fujiwara-Ben

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Right then...
So I left off with preparing for Japshow 2017 (which was on 8th/9th July). After doing all the mechanical jobs I then turned my attention to some of the finer aesthetics, one of these included fitting my spoilers! Both top spoiler from the 1L Super and my mid spoiler acquired from some bloke in Gloucestershire.

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Spoilers ready for priming and painting.

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Both of them were covered in lots of crap and required some major sanding back to get them smooth.

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The top spoiler was faded pretty badly too

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Mid spoiler all ready to go!

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Same for the top spoiler :)

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Ready for a coat of paint! Somehow i missed actually getting a picture of painting them lol

But i did mess them up a bit, so got a friend of mine to help me sand them back and respray them!
 

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Fujiwara-Ben

Fujiwara-Ben

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So after getting them painted up it was time to fit them to the car! This was pretty tense as all we had to go on was how it looked by eye. Top spoiler had all the proper brackets so quite a few holes needed to be drilled. Mid spoiler was a bit easier all that needed was two bolts and lots of double sided foam tape.

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Back at my mate Mats house, all taped up and holes marked out ready to drill the boot!

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First lot of holes drilled and brackets also in place to be drilled. Since the top spoiler was fitted like factory it's not going anywhere anytime soon haha.
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Somehow managed to miss the entire process of fitting the mid spoiler :(
But that was done more by eye as less holes needed to be drilled.

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Also asked his brother very nicely to borrow my old set of speedlines from my first Micra! Looks good (rear arch lip did need to be rolled though)

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Yes!! Looking awesome :D
 
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Fujiwara-Ben

Fujiwara-Ben

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Right time the interior fitting there was quite a lot to do wit the black 1L Super interior as well as the car! The interior needed a bloody good clean and a wet vac and the car needed a clean and wash inside haha

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With the new interior loaded up it was time to get to work.

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A few shots of how the old interior looked

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A few years ago i had removed quite a bit of the interior and never got around to putting back in and then lost haha

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At least it looked clean, well on the top anyway.

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Starting to take it all apart and yeah it's a bit dirty underneath!

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Seats out! For about the 7th time probably.

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Nice bit of grot there...

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All plastics removed and the rear not door door cards (i've no idea what they are called) are removed. So you can see just how little metal there is in a K10!

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Carpet out for the first time since it left the factory in 1991 (along with the smell of old people, not sure if that was factory though)

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Gave a good attempt of cleaning out all the crap from under the carpet. Came out alright.

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Boot area cleaned out again. Remnants of my failed external fuel pump placement can still be seen. Glad i got the Figaro tank now!

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Carpet laid out and ready to be cleaned and wet vacced.

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Come up really nice, the amount of dirty water that came out was crazy.

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Turn of the seats next.

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They came out ok, but are still stained. At least they are clean though.

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Drivers door card fitted and given a wipe down.

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Grey door car ready to be removed.

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Back seats in! Looking really good already.

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Drivers seat in and plastics replaced. Got a bit more luxury now with the surround for the gearstick!

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Passenger seat fitted! Had to keep with the brown belt fixings as the black ones felt rather worn out and i didn't trust them. (100k miles use, compared to the 52K of the brown ones) Used the brown mats but black ones were on order!

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Rear not door card door cards fitted!

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Ohh and a set of black seat belts to match :)

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Boot plastics cleaned and ready to fit.

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Before.

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After!

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Yes!! Looks like a proper car again inside now! (Not a massive fan of stripped interiors, and it's not like the K10's interior is particularly heavy)

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Parcel shelf fitted and tools in the boot :)

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Some pictures of me on the Saturday of Japshow! The MSC were quite impressed with the K10 which made me feel good as that makes the hard work all worth it :)
 

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Fujiwara-Ben

Fujiwara-Ben

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So I think it's about time for another update :p (only took a few months)

Anyway back to August 2017 and I had booked a week off work because it was my birthday and I wanted time to work on my K10, and since i'm a slow worker i needed a week. Plans for the week were, engine out, remake chassis mount, fit 5 speed box, new LUK clutch, Frank special flywheel and my set of Tomei Cams :cool: (was also going to spray engine bay but ran out of time for that one lol)

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Into my mates unit for the week ready and waiting.

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Engine bay before the mods started.

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My original rear gearbox mount vs the new one. When i packed the old bush out i had no idea it was in the wrong place haha

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Everything removed and engine ready to come out. Engine bay desperately needs a good tidy up.

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Engine out!

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Engine bay is ok but it's a little beige and full of stuff that doesn't need to be there. Ahh well this one is for another day.

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Original MA chassis mount removed ready to be repositioned for the CG.

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Mount off the chassis.

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Original CG10 flywheel and 160mm clutch plate. Turns out this one could not cope with twice the power. Hopefully the LUK kit does a little better!

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Doesn't even look used, would have been fine if i wasn't running near twice factory power lol.

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One of my better purchases/finds. A genuine Frankspeed special flywheel. It's an extremely lightened version of a preface CG10 flywheel. One on the right is how it would have originally looked!

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Top down view.

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View from the back. A lot of material has been removed from this!

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Another top down comparison. Really wish I had weighed this tbh.

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New flywheel now on the engine with my nice shiny LUK kit :)

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Interesting gap!

Part two to follow as I could not fit all the pictures on one post.
 
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Fujiwara-Ben

Fujiwara-Ben

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Excuse the two month gap! I really need to get back into my posting grove lol Currently working hard on the 10 with some yet to be announced mods. So back to August 2017, jobs left to do are to move the engine chassis mount, fit my MA12 long ratio 5 speed and my tasty tomei cams :cool:

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With the mount now off the chassis it was time to line the engine up as best as possible ready for the mount to be rewelded on. In hindsight this actually went in the wrong place lol.

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My MA12 5 speed long ratio gearbox. It will be nice to finally be able to cruise at 70 without doing 4K+! Fun fact the ratios are the same as the MA10 4 speed but 5th is sort of an overdrive.

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This is my old 4 speed was quite surprised to see that it was actually smaller than the 5 speed, probably has something to do with missing a gear.

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Time for my cam swap, until this point i had never removed a set of cams from a CG but knew how to do it in theory. Easy to remove but took about 2 hours to figure out how to line everything back up haha.

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On the top of the picture we have a standard CG13 inlet cam and on the bottom we have a Tomei cam. It's not a regrind but actually a whole new cam, main difference is the duration is much greater than the standard cam, allowing much more air into the engine!

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A close up of one of the cams. The Tomei cam does not look quite as pointy as the standard CG13 cam. For awhile I thought that my very expensive cams were not as good as standard until I realised they are not pointy because of that thing called "duration". While i'm certainly far from being a cam expert. What i can gather is because the Tomei cam is less pointy (but still lifts the valve down the same amount) it holds the valve down for longer, meaning more air can get into the engine meaning more power!

From what i've been told these give you a nice 12hp increase.

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I also changed the top tensioner. Think mine was the one on the right and I the one on the left was from one of my old CG10s i had lying around (as you do haha). So i swapped it over and it did make a difference.

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While I was on the idea of trying to loose spinning weight I also fitted a CG10 crank pulley. These I was told are a whole 600 grams lighter than the CG13 pulley! Also has the bonus of removing the harmonic dampener (which is just a bit of rubber than can degrade and make your crank pulley fall apart).

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All back together and ready to go! Along with some nice new exhaust gaskets :) At some point I will clean and paint this engine
(a year later it's still on the to do list....)

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While I was busy fitting cams my friend had welded in my engine mount. A bit rough and ready but "it'll do".

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Time for the engine to go in.

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Engine in. Unfortunately it turned out that my mount was in the wrong place causing the engine to sit on the tit and cause me problems with second gear. (or at least i hope that's what is causing it)

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Gave the battery tray a quick wire brush and a coat of paint so it looked a little bit nicer.

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The radiator got a pressure wash to clean all the dead bugs off (eww) and flushed though all the old crap. Surprisingly it was pretty clean. Also it turns out a facelift MA10 rad is actually really good at keeping my CG13 nice and cool.

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All back together! Got a GA16 airbox fitted while I was at it along with a support bracket and a cable tie to hold the box down to it!
So that's about all i manged to get done in my week off. I gotta remember what I did after this so i'm sure i'll have another post at sometime.
Micra went quite a bit better with all these new mods and i got a nice lumpy idle too :D
 

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DEdgeMac

Buy & Sell Member
Although lighter/ened crank pulleys obviously allow a faster rotation there is a reason why they're dampened-to protect the longevity of the crank.
The rubber on stock pulleys dampens/absorbs the shocks through normal road use and without that it could speed up deterioration of block internals.

In my own experience-

On my 2JZ-GTE JZS161 I bought a 2 piece Titan crank pulley. It was lighter than the original whilst also still being balanced to offer protection within the rotational movement of the crank.

On my GTO mk2 tt I had a cheapo non balanced lightweight pulley and although it sometimes effected my electrics due to the huge amount GTO's had a long with a sound system I ran it as my daily for 2 years and the engine was faultless- it ended up going to Germany so can't comment on the long term effects (if any) it had though.

Thought it was worth mentioning because although it's debatable as to how much damage it can cause and at what rate, it's worth considering if you're spending a fair amount on your engine and it's used regularly.

Btw where did you source the Tomei cams and how much did they set you back if you don't mind me asking?
 
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Fujiwara-Ben

Fujiwara-Ben

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@DEdgeMac Cheers for the info on that. I was thinking it should be ok as it's a standard crank pulley for the CG10 but it's weird how only the CG13s got the dampened pulleys.

I bought the cams from a friend of mine who used them in his rally car. He bought them from someone on the MSC facebook page who had bought them years ago when the MSC did a group buy to bring costs down.
Normally they run around £600 but I was lucky and picked mine up for £250.
 
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Fujiwara-Ben

Fujiwara-Ben

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Few well...
This is a bit of a post revival. The K10 is still alive (just) been off the road since around 2019 and looking quite sorry but hopefully i do plan on changing all that.
See if i can be bothered to keep on top of my blog posts now :ROFLMAO:
 
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