Extended and baffled sump

In my first post I mentioned an extended sump. The reason behind this upgrade is the standard sump on the RB26 is fine for a street-only vehicle, but if you take it to the track and push it hard enough you'll run into oil starvation problems. Oil starvation is obviously a bad thing. A spun bearing is usually the end result, requiring a rebuild - this is where things get expensive.

In a nut shell, high G forces from cornering, accelerating and braking will cause the oil to flow away from the pickup and climb the walls of the inside of the block.

The Garage101 extension and gated baffle setup looks to be a very well thought out solution to the problem especially when combined with other fixes to resolve the other oiling issues the RB26 suffers from. In addition to the sump and gated baffles, I've also got a Garage101 Head drain to fit at the same time. There is a lengthy discussion on the Skylines Australia forums in the Forced Induction Performance section about the why the "head drain" works. Looks to be not just a drain, but a pressure sump to head pressure equalisation solution to allow the factory oil return galleries to work better. Worth a read: http://www.skylinesaustralia.com/forums/Oil-Control-Rb-s-Circui-t110680.html

At present my sump/diff is off having the diff put back together with all new bearings and seals by a differential specialist. The GTR's front diff is integrated into the sump as you'll see in the photos below.

Sump dummy fitted to a spare motor up-side-down on an engine stand:

Gated and winged baffles that need fitting inside sump:

(Note: the wings stick into the left and right sides, facing forwards)

Winged, gated baffles with top cover plate sitting on top, extended pickup sitting in the centre:

Photo of head drain block.

A summary of past events

The '89 R32 GTR Skyline is one of the most technologically advanced cars for its day. More boxes of electronics scattered around the vehicle than you could conceive of. For a car released 20 years ago it was well and truly ahead of its time.

Luckily for me I work in a highly technical field. I'm a Systems and Network Engineer dealing with ISPs and hosting company network and server infrastructures. I'm used to highly technical.

I originally bought this car way back in August 2005. It was completely misrepresented from the get go. Was listed as 'good mechanical condition' It was far from it (for example, compression was down on two cylinders, top end rattles became apparent not long after I got it, a bearing on the input shaft in the gear box was as noisy as hell, 4WD system wasn't working front wheel bearings were shagged etc etc). There was also significant rust in the body that needed fixing prior to road registration.

After months of persistent negotiation, I got a pittance of a sum from the seller to go towards the rust work, and he also paid for a really very good half cut to replace the rooted engine, gearbox and rear diff.

Getting someone to do the work proved to be a challenge. At first I took the car to a known good panel workshop. It sat there for 6 months until they went out of business. I was lucky to get the car back. An employee who was also a GTR enthusiast took my car back to his rented house. I bumped into him by chance when I went to the then out-of-business workshop and caught him as he was leaving. I suspect he was attempting to thieve my car.

Quite a few months later I found another automotive workshop to do the work on my vehicle: Steve's Shed, located in Malaga. 

Steve eventually was able to start after he moved to a new workshop in Wangara. The GTR Spent approximately 18 months in the workshop until it was ready for me to bring home and finish off prior to road registration. Work included quite alot of rust repairs - re-engineering the strength into the doorsills and floorpan area as well as fixing all the mechanical issues by transplanting all the good bits from the half-cut into the now rust free and painted body. Both myself and my Dad, Terry, spent a considerable amount of time at Steve's workshop helping to do the work. We got our hands dirty throughout the job doing welding, structural stuff, panel work, a bit of painting, and the mechanical works. I personally gained alot of knowledge and experience and now know the car back to front and inside out, barring the insides of the engine or gearbox.

The car was finally road registered in December 2008.

Since then, I've done a few mods, electronic boost controller was the first, a high-flow cat to compliment the 3" straight-through high flowing exhaust system, and the latest was a set of Tomei Poncam B's with adjustable cam gears that are still yet to be dialed in. The Poncams are designed to be a 'drop-in' replacement for the factory items and to a very large degree they are.

I've just had a Import101/Garage101 sump extension welded onto a spare sump. This is now off having the diff rebuilt with all new bearings, seals etc and I should have it back next weekend ready to fit.

Cheap DIY Network enabled video surveilance

After discovering some relatively inexpensive IP enabled Pan and Tilt cameras on Deal Extreme (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.14272) I thought I'd see if I could get them working with ZoneMinder (http://www.zoneminder.com/) - a free Linux based video surveillance recording package.

They were relatively simple to setup and get working. ZM works great with these cameras with the motion jpeg stream, and only requires a little bit of modification to make the Pan/Tilt functions work. ZM's motion detection works great and its sensitivity is very configurable but can be fairly complex.

One big caveat is the amount of CPU required to do all of this. Two cameras doing monitor only (no motion detection) used 60% cpu continually on an old Athlon 1400 test server. Motion detection on even one camera shoots cpu to 100% and things really suffer. It seemed to be able to achieve about 20 FPS, but this may be a limitation of the MJPEG server. I tested dropping the frame rate in ZM, but that didn't help CPU usage at all. I suspect a lot of the CPU time is spent receiving the video stream from the camera and whatever processing happens here. I figure for the purposes of this project I can live without full motion video - 5FPS should be plenty, so I figure I may be able to use the single jpeg frame grab functionality so the ZM capture process has a bit less work to do.