Disclaimer: the following post is only vaguely chronological Anything after this post will be truly chronological.
October 20, 2017:
What do you do when your beloved daily driver goes bang, you have nowhere to fix it and it has a resale value of approximately one case of Landshark? You take the money earmarked for repairs and sink it into a better car. Welcome to the most reliable cheap four-door RWD manual car with minimal rust and a stated 1/4 mile trap speed of 100 MPH or greater. Okay, that's a very dubious superlative, but my car ownership history is nothing if not dubious, so please play along. With less than 182,000 kilometres on the clock (around 113,000 miles in freedom measurements) and the carfax only showing one owner from new, this 2004 Infiniti G35 marks the only year you could get the 6MT transmission with the torquier non-RevUp engine and the factory vLSD in a sedan. It also already came with coilovers, a Stillen intake, a heavy-duty clutch and a lightweight flywheel. For someone used to horrible shots, this one was a bulls-eye. The plan was to just do maintenance and repairs and not mess with it at all. Can anyone guess how long that lasted?
November 7, 2017:
Eighteen days! Not terrible by GRM standards. It required a few small things to pass safety so those were taken care of. Granted, some lighting modules aren't huge upgrades, but they certainly modernize the back end of the car. Oh yeah, it was also around this time that I started building my performance exhaust system and I undercoated the frame rails while I was at it.
March 15, 2018:
I know what you're thinking. Did this guy really go four months without doing anything to his car? Yeah. Well, the snow was finally gone so I ordered and threw on a front lip because I was tired of this car's weak-chinned appearance. It lasted a few weeks before it fell victim to its own crappy mounting hardware. Oops.
March 26, 2018:
Since my factory wheels had winter tires on them, I needed summer tires and wheels ASAP. These and a few cans of satin bronze paint (Duplicolor Wheel bronze) were cheap and looked decent. An oil change and K&N filter cleaning were also done at this time as scheduled maintenance.
May 10, 2018:
Pothole: 1, wheel bearing: 0. No pictures of this one, although it was an easy fix.
May 19, 2018:
Caliper slider ran out of grease on the way back from Windsor and I never noticed. My bad. Another cheap fix.
Sometime in July, 2018: I got tired of looking at the scratched and faded door card accents so I wrapped them in gloss sparkle black. It doesn't show dust and fingerprints, unlike piano black. Sorry, no photos of this.
August 29, 2018:
And this is what an Infiniti G35 looks like when loaded within a few pounds of GVWR. Handled it like a champ and didn't bottom out the coilovers over the skyway. Nice.
October 2018:
Pizza floor mats! Oh, and my replacement free-flowing tail-section was done around this time too. Good sound (not super raspy like most VQs), awesome weight reduction over the stock tail section. The factory radio also failed, so I replaced it with a single-DIN Kenwood Excelon X502 to shed even more weight and gain bluetooth audio streaming and a vast improvement in sound quality. To top off the fall, I did another oil change and sprayed some more Formula 3000 inside and around the frame rails.
March 24, 2019:
New front lip mounted using more a permanent (if slightly uglier) mounting solution. Looks decent, eh? Also the hideous amber reflectors are no longer amber. Sometimes it's the subtle touches that help refine a design.
April 2, 2019:
Helloooooo, nurse! A set of rare Nissan Stagea Autech Axis wheels imported from Japan and wrapped in 235/45R18 Firestone Firehawk Indy 500s look and feel the business. New front rotors and pads work a treat, too.
May 2019:
Roof spoiler and rear brakes, and I'm finally happy with how my car looks. New serpentine belt's good too. Now for more performancey stuff.
There's probably additional stuff I'm forgetting about, but the past year and a half has mostly been maintenance and subtle improvements. However, it looks like I'll be doing a differential brace and maybe some angle mods for faster steering and tighter u-turns in the near future and I've already ordered in adjustable front upper control arms just in case I end up doing more track stuff and want to play with the front end alignment. I also have a 5/16" plenum spacer to throw on in an attempt to pick up a few horsepower, although that can wait for a cooler day so I don't have to work in the heat. It's been a great daily driver and I'm excited to keep driving it for years to come.
