Well my friend (kuppler8 on here) got an amazing deal he couldn’t pass up on some brand new 5 lug hubs, and a front sway bar about 2 weeks ago. This week we decided to attempt to tackle the job ourselves in my garage.
The vehicle:
1992 Nissan 240sx s13, with a JDM silvia front end conversion.
From the write ups we researched it sounded like a full days project. We started at about 8 at night a few days ago, and figured the whole thing would take us till the next afternoon if we worked non stop. Turns out things didn’t really go that way…
I started on the front hubs by myself because they are much easier than the rears, luke and joe decided to tackle one side of the rear at a time together.
The front hubs consisted of pulling off the pads, rotors, caliper, and caliper bracket. I used string to tie the caliper to the coilover to keep it out of the way whilst working on removing the old 4 lug hub.
After the brakes are off and out of the way you have to remove the dust boot to get to the hub nut. Once you remove the hub nut you can pull the entire hub assembly off quite easily. At this time we also decided to remove the rusted dust shield off of the car.
Once the hub is off I just cleaned everything up, and popped the new hubs on. We replaced the old 4 lug rotors with OEM s14 se rotors and new pads.
The reinstallation of all the brake parts was obviously super easy as there is no other modifications needed to use the stock calipers.
The rears were not so easy… To give you an idea, I had both fronts done before Luke and Joe could even figure out how to pull the rear hubs off.
Unfortunately there were no pics of the front being done, as I didn’t think to take pictures till after I had finished the fronts and was bored with researching more on how to pull the rear hubs off.
After I finished the fronts I decided to move onto installing the larger front sway bar.
The OEM sway bar is much, much smaller than the one that Luke had picked up off of craigslist. I first got under the car to see what was involved in getting this bitch off the car. Everything seemed relatively simple as I had figured. It is only attached by the sway bar end links, and 2 bushings that are attached to the chassis of the vehicle. If I recall correctly there is 2 14mm bolts per bushing that need to be removed, and the end link bolts were also 14. For the end link you need an open end 14mm, and a 14mm socket or else the end bolt will just keep spinning and never come off:smash2:
Once I got the OEM piece off I took a couple pictures in comparison to the new aftermarket piece.
Installation of the new sway bar was kind of a bitch in a sense. The bushings provided are obviously larger than the stock so they fit the bar, but they also protruded about an extra inch which made the bracket that wraps around the bushing and bolts to the chassis an inch too far away. I had to use a band saw to cut down the bushings to the correct size so they would reach the chassis and bolt up properly. After that the installation was smooth sailing.
Once I had finished that I decided to help them with the rear hubs. It turns out that we had hit a brick wall. We realized that we needed a hub puller for the rear because the hubs are pressed onto the axle splines, and we also realized that we needed a MASSIVE socket for the rear axle nut.
We decided to call it quits for night one at about 3:30am.
Our nightly fuel:
The next night after I got out of work at about 10pm we decided to get at it again. We first found out what size the axle nut for the rear was. Turns out it was a 36mm! At this point every store around was closed, so we decided to call everyone we could possibly think of. No luck. I look thru my phone one last time and decided to give newman a call. LUCKILY I had caught him about 10 minutes before he was about to hit the sack for the night. He was generous enough to leave us the socket on his car for us to pick up. Downside was he is about a 20 minute drive from where we were:meh:
Once we got the socket back to the garage we popped the axle nuts off and then had the pleasure of attempting to remove the rear hubs without a puller. The only puller we could get ahold of was at Lukes friends cousins house in alden and couldn’t be gotten till the next day. We tried to improvise and remove them via beating the piss out of them with a hammer. We got part of it loose enough to the point where the dust shield would move but could not get it any farther than that for the night. Once again we decided to call it quits.
Day 3.
We started today at about 11am and tried to finish everything up. We got the hub pullers and them onto the old hubs and went to town trying to remove them.
We tried for several hours but ended up only getting them to move about 2mm on each side, literally. Joe had a good idea to try heating them with a torch. Back to his house to grab some torches to try and loosen the bitches up.
After some heat and pounding the fucking piss out of the hub it finally gave in and decided to break free.
as did the other side:
At this point everyone felt the same as I did about this car 
After a quick break we mounted up the rear hubs.
Mounting the new hubs was fairly easy. You match up the splines on the axle with the inner section of the hub assembly, push the axle from the back so you can thread on the 36mm axle nut and torque the axle nut down to suck the axle thru the hub and pull the hub into place.
Once this is done you can reinstall the remaining bolts that old the rear hub assembly in place.
We realized once we went to reinstall the rear brakes that someone had stepped on the brakes and popped both rear calipers out. We weren’t sure if we would need new calipers, but we decided to give fixing them a shot since they are $70 per side, and no store had them in stock locally.
We went to my work (advance auto) and luckily we were able to salvage the old calipers with the brake caliper kit loaner tool we have there. We also picked up some brake fluid to re bleed the brake system. After that whole mess of shenanegins we mounted up the s14 rear rotors and the new brake pads and reinstalled the ebrake cable ends, and the brake lines. Luckily it worked out perfect! We also realized that for the wheels that Luke purchased we’d need “tuner” lug nuts that were thinner walled so they’d fit into the rims. We ended up getting a set from advance pretty cheap and used those to mount the wheels to the car.
The wheels:
17x8 Kosei RT Penta’s wrapped in Falken Azenis.
Once we added more brake fluid and bled the rears we mounted up the rear wheels and took the car off jackstands. We pulled the car out of the garage and once out the brake pedal hit the floor. The car looked much better but it turns out we had to re bleed the entire brake system which wasn’t too big of an issue. Afterwards we took the car for a test drive, and realized that the front right was rubbing on the coilovers. The smell of burning rubber and the metal on metal noise we heard after going over a bump kind of gave us that indication that we had predicted when we first mounted the front wheels.
We brought the car back to my garage and make some adjustments to the camber which were JUST enough to clear the suspension. The car is currently running about 3* negative camber, but will be fixed with the addition of 10mm spacers he is going to pick up from Bing soon. We also noticed that when we bottomed out we scraped up the gas tank some. Maybe too low? NAHHHH not low enough yet:mamoru:
All said and done the car came out pretty good. I’d never want to do it again, especially for free.:lolsign:
It was a fun experience and a good way to be productive with friends and keep occupied.
Finished product:
In the last picture you can see where the car dropped and crushed the rocker on the jack:(
The car sits dumped on Stance Coilovers.
Enjoy.
lol
