Gadgetory

the octane gaming gear combo from Coolermaster features seven backlighting colors turbo mode a vago 3050 optical sensor along with four levels of dpi adjustment now you can po noobs without boning your wallet click the link in the description to learn more hey what's up guys James $0.02 here and we are out of my office because we are doing well I don't know if I'd call it a car review because I'm not really reviewing the car more or less I'm just telling you guys about it I wasn't even going to do this video but damn it you guys were bugging the out of me saying you want to know something more about my car alright so here it is this is my 2004 Nissan 350z in America z33 everywhere else in the world touring model now this thing is 11 years old so it's got a lot of things going on with it that you would expect to the 11 year old car it's got some rattles it's got some clunks it's far from perfect but I almost feel like that gives the car a little bit of character okay so let's go ahead and talk about I guess the performance of the car how I feel about the car my plans for the car and one of the reasons why I didn't even want to do this video was the fact that the car is not where I want it to be now I probably overpaid for this car just a little bit in fact this car you can get them for right around ten or eleven thousand now in good shape this one's got one hundred nine thousand on it had a hundred eight thousand when I bought it but the fact is the drivetrain on this car remains completely untouched it's got the factory transmission in it the factory engine the engine is tight compression is good no trouble codes in fact he even had all the receipts for the work he's done for the car which was a huge thing as a car guy myself the rear end in this thing is actually a 3.37 rear end or maybe 3.35 I believe rear end ratio which is fortunately it's it's not the 373 is like I was hoping it would have had but it still gets up and moves pretty nicely now the thing that people were really disappointed about when I talked about this car was the fact that it is an automatic now I looked and looked and looked and really considered getting a six-speed manual there was a day where I would have been manual or go home bruh but you know what I'm older now I'm a little bit more lazy and to cruise around with my car and traffic just is a bitch in this area now the automatic that's in this thing is actually more of us it's more of a semi-automatic now it does have a completely auto mode and then it has a semi auto mode where you can actually shift up and shift down and override the transmission computer and tell it what to do it's a little bit sluggish it's not as crisp as I'd like it to be but fortunately there are mods that we can do that will actually fix that problem in the future now something I should have probably pre faced with is I'm a car guy I'm a computer guy I'm a car guy and recently a bike guy I like automobiles I like all cars I'm not one of those fanboys that's going to be like oh god JDM no screw JDM it's all about volkswagen or it's all about Euro or it's all about Honda and or Nats flying around I like cars and I like the fact that you can do just about anything you want with a car with the right amount of money but this car had everything I wanted it's got the vq35de engine which is actually a very solid engine platform very sought-after you can do a lot of mods to it they perform really really well when you do even just basic boosted mods the supercharged are still in superchargers vortex turbos they just wake up like crazy and it doesn't cost a ton of money the other thing is it is a legitimate rear-wheel drive vehicle in fact the carbon fiber drive shaft in this thing is Factory I didn't even know that all Nissan 350z scan from the factory with carbon fiber drive shots that actually kind of blew my mind considering you know I'm used to American rear-wheel drive cars that just had big giant heavy steel drive shafts we're getting a lightened drive shaft was an upgrade don't think you can get much lighter than the carbon fiber in this thing now let's go and talk about the wheels here the wheels are a little bit of a point of conversation and they're in their own right because they are xx R which is like a replica brand I don't know what I'm gonna do with these I'm looking at some some Enki rims I'm also looking at some Konig rims but you know I'm not tracking this car yet this car has a lot more work it needs to be done to it before I can take this thing on to the track so I'm not too worried about the fact they're a one-piece cast rim and not forged yet but you might notice in there we do have a Brembo kit now the brakes were one thing that I did upgrade on this car okay now the brakes on this car are actually legitimate Brembos that were factory for this car but not this exact car now one of the things that made the 350z or the z33 depending on where you live kind of unique was the fact that it had a lot of different skews that went along with it you had the 350z base the 350z roadster which was the convertible you had the roadster enthusiast you had the Roadster track no they didn't do a track car but they did have the track car they had the touring they had the Grand Touring there was a ton of different models but Nissan knew that people were going to take this car on the track so they took a lot of the best features that they felt people would have done to the car on their own and made what they called the 350z track model which came with the Brembo brakes and it came with better bushing stiffer bushings in their bigger sway bars and everything about the car was beefed up when it came to the suspension and that's exactly what I'm doing to this car now is I'm converting this thing to a cornering monster now going fast as fun but I'm more about the turns I've always been about Canyon carving Road track I live near Willow Springs I like to road race that's what I'm all about so I've already started doing the white line bushing conversions on this thing the Brembo brake conversion with the 14-inch front rotors and 12-inch rear rotors anyway this thing stops on a freaking dime the only down part is Brembo brakes are not necessarily the quietest in fact they're floating pad they kind of flop around in there a little bit because they're hanging on to posts so they do have some trade-offs whether or not you know they do make some clicks and things and you just got a kit use that they kind of give the car character now before we talk about some of the interior stuff on this car I just wanted to kind of show one of the reasons why I picked this car is this thing survived 11 years without as much as an aftermarket intake on this car in fact you go to the different z33 forums you'll find out that this is one of the best factory intakes on any car that's ever been designed in fact putting what the quote-unquote cold air intake where you actually relocate the filter right here and it's an open fill filament that's in the engine bay has actually dyno proven to reduce the horsepower on this particular model because of the fact that this car is pulling in air from in front of the engine bay from behind the bumper this right here leads right in from behind the intake of the front of the bumper and goes right up into there so it bypasses all of the heat that's happening right here in the engine bay so that's one of the reasons why I haven't switched this out was because it would have cost me money to take away horsepower which really doesn't make a whole lot of sense now unless you got a long intake that actually relocates the pipe through here and down behind the bumper you're not going to gain anything but I also don't think that's a good idea considering one you're going to expose your filter to water and debris and to changing the filter or putting new oil on it when it's behind the bumper is going to be a complete pain in the ass all right so let's go and take a look inside the car alright here's the interior and it's got just as much character as the rest of the car does because it's it's not perfect in fact one of the first things I had to do to this car was take out most of the interior plastics because of the fact that they were scratched cracked it actually a factory radio in it which was really good because a lot of the times you go to these aftermarket radio shops and they do a hack job on the wiring so that didn't have to be worried about but you can see right here in them you know I'm the as they almost kill coconut monkey over there we've got some scratches and things here I have no idea how this happened but at some point it did center-console looks pretty good though actually now the center console looks good because I took all the plastics out and refinished it myself i sanded it all down eye primer Nate i repainted it granted I wouldn't have preferred painting the interior but it was a much better alternative but the center cubby here they did have like an aftermarket TV thing back there and as you can see this is all messed up it's broken they hacked out as a big hole right here with hot glue everywhere so I've got to replace this cubby compartment unfortunately because that's one of the first things people destroy on the interiors that piece is like a hundred bucks by itself and usually it's just a scratched up as anything else but I did put in a Kenwood receiver here this is the d/dx 372 BT nothing expensive it's all touchscreen it does play DVDs but I didn't hook up the parking wire because I have no desire to watch movies in this thing so it can't movies right now but it could I guess hooked up that wire I just wanted something that filled in the double din looked nice and was touchscreen but other than that everything inside works and that was the most important thing seat heaters which is probably kind of dumb look at the 57 Chevy that just drove in actually that's worth looking at yeah that's nice see like I said I'm a car guy I like all automobiles even this camera here this is badass this lady right here she's got it going on uh but you know with everything in here works that even has leather seat or leather heated seats because we all know in Southern California heated seats are a must but it does have one of the dumbest cup holder things I think I've ever seen right here he's got his lab in there with and that's awesome the dogs like do you think American bro now the only real aftermarket part on this car is the HKS style exhaust pretty much it's an HK as true dual exhaust that's a knockoff because it doesn't have HKS stamped on it anywhere but it's pretty much exactly the same I want to step further and I had the resonators removed and I kind of regret that a little bit because it did change the exhaust note makes it a lot more raspy than I like so I'm actually going to be putting in an nvidia Gemini dual exhaust on this thing and no that's not Nvidia like the graphics card its Nvidia we're going to be doing that soon actually so I looked at this video as being more or less kind of a video before the car is done so I decided to do it that way I had something to look back on when the car is done in the next year or two and can say well the car has come a long way so with that let's go ahead and start up the car and let's go for a ride now if I said this car wasn't a rough ride that would be a complete lie with the polyurethane bushings going in it's got Megan Racing coil overs the car is definitely a little bit of a harsher ride especially with a 32-point adjustment on there but I like to keep things nice and stiff not to mention the car is a lot of fun to drive now I think overall Nissan did a fantastic job with this car I've had a lot of fun cars in the past in fact I had a 92 z28 that was completely track ready it was all custom suspension and I had a 95 G SX turbo - klipse but this car from the factory seemed to have pretty much everything I wanted in a car already done to it you know with the factory strut brace in the front strep races in the rear the massive roll bars on this thing the Tirra Tirra the steering is very tight everything about this car was clearly built for handling and I think it does a fantastic job now the steering wheel is a little bit stiff at times they've got speed sensitive steering in these cars actually where the faster you go they stiffen up more so that you don't end up over steering or really overworking the wheel but at lower speeds it is kind of hard to turn actually I recently hurt my right arm and it made it difficult to actually drive this car because of how hard it is to turn the wheel at slower speeds I mean I think Nissan new ultimately that people were going to be using this particular car for a lot of like days and things like that and so they just built a car that I think they've ever won an amazing starting platform for building a car that's going to be all-purpose street strip and road racing or I admit doing the Brembos was probably the best thing I ever did because you never know when you have to stop on a dime you can't deny though the fact that the z33 and the vq35de motor and this platform has just been extremely popular they built upon it with the 370z but of course the 370z is much more expensive but I'm our kit parts for this thing are abundant there's just tons and tons of things you can do to these cars supercharged twin turbos twin screw chargers you just anything you want to do to these cars you can and they're fairly inexpensive to work on now the initial costs on the car about 10 grand it's not cheap it's definitely not you know a person that's on a very fixed incomes type of hobby but the fact that this car for about $15,000 ten ten thousand for the price of the car five thousand put into the car you would have a car that would be so much fun to drive you know this is my weekend car but I find myself driving it more and more so unless I want to rack up the miles I better just start kind of chilling a little bit but this is an absolute blast to drive I was a little worried when I first bought the car that I might have made a mistake because I'm usually an American muscle car kind of guy but the more I think about it now the more I drive the car I have zero regrets whatsoever all right well you guys want to know more about my car I just went ahead and threw together this little bonus video I don't even know how good it's going to turn out but anyway it's time to get out of here have some fun burn little more fuel so we'll see you next time you