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Heyooo, so I hated the brake feel immediately and decided to play with some cheap OEM components as a fill in for some more fluid needed for the increased piston area. Low and behold, the 1in G35 MC bolts right on up to the booster, uses a dual channel output, and only required pretty minor mods to get it working.
I grabbed one from ebay, as well as a spare RX8 booster for mock up while I got everything working. The goal was to have as little tearup from the stock system as possible so that if my brakes completely and utterly fail to be good, I can slap back on the stock stuff in an afternoon.
Started by measuring the plunger depth to pushrod and managed to find a standoff on McMaster that would fit perfectly height wise. I believe the part number was: 93655A254. M6x1.0 14mm 26mm total legnth. This would let me drive in the standoff and the stock pushrod all the way for a perfect clearance, and a nice hard material that would be the interface with the MC.
Once I had that on the bench working, I had to grind it down to clear the inner part of the G35 booster that you can see in the background as the 13mm hex portion needed to be < 10mm.
And as much as I love angle grinder mods... I decided to chuck another on the lathe at work to make sure it wasn't ugly.
When I popped the MC in the vehicle I had the realization I needed a bracket for an external reservoir for the clutch system... and literally as I am typing this now, I realize I could have likely swapped over the RX8 reservoir instead of using the Nissan one... so... maybe more on that later hahaha!
Either way, I CADed up a design for a mount that would bolt on to the booster mounting and offset a Wilwood reservoir that was an overkill size. Still trying to finalize that one, but I have a rudimentary steel bent piece that works for now.
I bent up some lines, which took waaaay more time than anticipated, because using my Autozone flare tool made me want to jump off a bridge, so I splurged on the Eastwood bench mounted one. 10/10 tool, would recommend. What I had failed to do was give the lines enough length to fit in the jig to flare the tubes with the hardware on it, so I had to redesign my lines twice.
On the hardware note, it is a huge pain in the *** to find M12x1 1/4in inverted flare fittings. I could only find bubble flare fittings or fittings with a hole size of 6mm. 1/4in is 6.35mm, so they didn't fit around the line. I ended up using the fittings that came with the G35 master.
On the fittings note too: The Bosch ABS system uses bubble flares, and the G35 master uses inverted flares, so make sure if you end up doing this, you get the lines and fittings right. Either way, struggling on dumb things aside, I am really happy with the result.
When I went to bleed the system, I had one HELL of a trim trying to get it to bleed. I ordered myself a new motive adapter for the G35 res (which leaked like a damn sieve, by the way) to try to get some pressure in the system, but could only ever get the secondary channel to bleed. I took it out, spilled fluid all over, and tried to bench bleed it, but it just wasn't taking any fluid in.
Now, I've never actually taken apart a master cylinder before, but they are pretty simple and I figured that if I had a blown seal or the like on the primary, and I fucked up servicing it I'd be in the same boat of needing a new one, so I popped off the snap ring and tapped the plunger out along with the first stage.
Pretty damn schmooy.
Cleaned it up, popped it in, and it bled instantly. I figured that the reservoir feed port was clogged with some goop, so it was finally able to suck in fluid from the res. Easy once it works!
With everything bled decently, and completely flushed with VERY fresh brake fluid (thank you 2L of ATE type 200...), the brake feel was MASSIVELY improved, and based on my math it should be pretty perfect to work cohesively with the whole system.
Moved the car out and drove it up and down the driveway (more stuff is loose I need to wrap up before test drive), but the brakes work and feel phenomenal. Blasted the engine bay down to get the copious amounts of brake fluid out of every crevice, and now that it's off the lift I can finish up a bunch of little stuff.
Had some issues late last season with glare, and I've always wanted an excuse to give this a try. Really, the excuse was just wanting to live out my WRC car interior dreams, so to say I did this because of glare is a pretty large, but not entirely unfounded stretch. I figured this car was the perfect candidate for a flocked dash, and I wanted to do it on a car I didn't care too much in order to learn how to do it nicely.
When I was researching, the right way to do this is with an electrostatic gun... which I considered fabbing up.. but in the end I just wanted a quick single day project. I used a kit from Flock It, which seems to be the goto. I should have grabbed a small paint roller as the brush they give you is really not made for large objects like the dashboard. The flock applicator in the kit was fine enough for the job.
Pulled some stuff apart, taped some stuff up, slapped lacquer on it, and sent small bits all over the place. Looking back, I would have had a friend help apply the lacquer as part of the way through applying the lacquer I was worried about it drying up and sorta globbed some on and rushed the process. I did also miss some spots, but all in all am happy with the results. I'd say overall it's a 4/10 job, and the passenger airbag cover will definitely need to get redone but is quite a low priority. I'd also like to do the top of the cluster piece, but again was really just rushing through the job and didn't want to mask it off. Your outcome is always pretty proportional to the effort level haha.
04-16-2024, 06:20 PM
