Most modern engines run an ignition coil for each cylinder, and since they’re mounted on the top of the engine they run very hot and are subjected to more vibration than a separately mounted coil.

Once they’re heading towards ten years old or so they tend to start giving trouble - usually misfiring under load.

This car, an R34 Skyline GT-T, was showing the usual signs of coil pack failure, and was also about due for a change of spark plugs (which involves removing the coil packs anyway)

The RB25 Neo engine in the R34 conveniently has a plastic cover, a bunch of intake piping, crankcase vent hoses, ignition wiring, and a metal cover over the coil packs and spark plugs!

After pulling all the bits out, replacing the spark plugs with new NGK Iridiums (they last over 100,000km so they don’t need to be done too often!), installing the shiny new blue Splitfire coil packs, and putting everything else back together the engine was running nicely and the misfire was gone

A friend got the job of moving a large laser cutting machine from Brisbane to Sydney, and being at least a two person job I went along to help.

It’s about 7m by 4.5m with a cutting area of about 6m by 4m. It’s designed for cutting fabric for making blinds, and the cutting table has a vacuum system to hold the fabric in place.

This is how it looked when we arrived:

Due to its size it wasn’t possible to move it in one piece, so we basically had to dismantle the the entire thing, taking plenty of photos along the way!

The first step though was to make sure it actually worked before we took it apart - especially the LASER itself:

Testing the laser involved wiring up power as some of the leads had been cut, and working out how to get the control software to fire it.

Since we didn’t have a compressed air supply it wasn’t safe to run the laser through the machine’s optics (the very expensive lens can be overheated without the cooling air) so we put some tape on a steel ruler and sat it in front of the laser’s ouput hole. Firing the laser left a nice burn hole in the tape, so it was definitely working!

After the laser test, it was time to pull everything apart.

The whole machine was bolted together fortunately, so we didn’t have to cut anything. There were a lot of bolts though, and some of them were damaged due to the machine being dragged across the floor previously.

This photo shows the vacuum trays which are under the mesh surface of the table (which is held on with seemingly millions of small screws!)

The divider plates in the middle can move back and forward to section off the vacuum to the area where it’s required.

Here are two sides of the frame remaining while the last of the vacuum trays are removed by forklift.

All the parts took up an entire semi trailer, and a ute!

After a few days off while the parts came down on the truck, we got stuck into putting the machine back together in its new factory in Sydney. Note the large vacuum box in the corner:

We had to replace a few bits, and repair some damaged parts and cables.

We also pulled the laser’s optics apart and cleaned the mirror and lens, before readjusting and testing it.

Eventually the whole thing was back together and working!

Now there’s just a bit of fine tuning to do before it’s making blinds again.

A popular upgrade for the Silvia series (including the 180SX) is the larger brakes from a Skyline (R33 GTS-t or GTR).

The front brakes pretty much just bolt on, but the rears are a bit more work.

The Silvias use the brake caliper for the handbrake as well as the main braking, but the Skyline setup has a small drum brake in the middle of the disc for the handbrake.

All the parts can be installed on the Silvia, but the handbrake cables are different.

By mixing and matching the right bits it all goes together, but the original mounting holes for the S13 cables are too far back for the Skyline ones. The simple solution to this is to make up a bracket that moves the mounting points forward enough to get the correct cable tension.

My turbocharger based home built jet engine has been running with a combustion chamber way oversized for the turbo.

A while back I bought a couple of large turbos from some sort of earth moving equipment. Apparently the original engine had four of them!

I plasma cut a flange to bolt onto the turbo, and welded a short piece of 100mm exhaust pipe between that and the outlet of the combustion chamber.

A new air pipe was made up using 75mm aluminium intercooler pipe and a CNC cut flange, which should give really good air flow from the turbo to the combustor.

The oil plumbing needed a couple of minor changes, and the whole setup was bolted onto the test frame.

I’ve found that the usual leaf blower starting setup won’t work with this turbo, so I’ll need to sort out a better leaf blower or mechanical starter.

This thing should make some serious power (noise!) when it’s up and running

The water taxi rebuild project is finally done! (well, mostly)

After a bit of a flat out week finishing off the wiring, doing some hull repairs, and making covers for the front, it was ready to go on the water.

The day after launching it was still floating