JUN Time Attack R34 Skyline on Ebay!

JUN Time Attack R34 Skyline on Ebay!

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Every couple months or so, I find myself lost in thought over really cool cars that I don’t own but I wish I did. I usually end up searching craigslist in my area for interesting things, and often hit up ebay to see what’s posted at the moment.

Well, today I found myself reminiscing about the Nissan Skyline.

As an avid player of Gran Turismo 2,3 and 4, some of you may have learned about the car as I did, from the video game. I still have not seen anything but the new Nissan GT-R in real life, as state side the cars are about as rare as a Ferrari, since the older models were never imported by the manufacturer. Further, only a host of people have paid the money to legalize the cars here after MOTOREX, the go-to company for that sort of thing was shut down due to fraud allegations. Never the less, every time I have searched ebay, there are one or two skylines legal and registered for use in the U.S.

мека мебелToday, however, a quick ebay search turned up this:

The JUN R34 Skyline

Some of you may recognize this car by the livery alone, the obnoxious 80’s neon lemon/lime paint combo being the signature of none other than the famous Japanese engineering house JUN. A genuine JUN Nissan R34 Skyline. On ebay. Unbelievable.

JUN still holds the world record in the F/BGCC and E/BGMS classes of the Southern California Timing Association for the fastest modified cars on the planet, and competes in the Japanese Grand Touring Car Championship as well. These guys really know how to make a fast car really fast. The mid 90’s were full of Japanese super cars, and you would be hard pressed to find a JUN version that could be beat by anyone else.  The JUN Supra was featured in countless magazines, and the JUN 300zx is one of the boneville record holders.  They have a JUN civic type-r, NSX, Integra type r, and a host of other hondas in their stable. Need a 2JZ, RB26DETT or 4G63 turnkey road race engine? These guys have you covered.

Needless to say, this Skyline is not particularly street legal, and is being sold as a race car only. Minor details. I wonder if they take trades for a lightly used house?

One last thing. Did I mention there is a dyno video? Enjoy!

[youtube H3peM3K6mfY]

Jadclipse plugin not working? Here is the solution and a story..

Jadclipse plugin not working? Here is the solution and a story..

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The other day, I found myself needing to reverse engineer a java class. Some may wonder why, and the answer would be that this jar file composer must not have known about javadoc, and likes to write methods with lots of inputs and vague method parameter names. I thought that it wasn’t going to be such a bad deal because Eclipse has a great plugin called JadClipse that can decompile class files stuck in compiled jar file libraries. Little did I know, the maintainer of JadClipse swiftly left the planet circa eclipse 3.4 release, leaving everyone sorta hanging.

This led me down the road of trying to figure out how to get the whole thing working with older files and all that good stuff. Of course, the last time I used Jad was on a system I no longer have. Well, I tried the handy eclipse plugin system and diligently entered the eclipse 3.4 plugin that someone got sick of not having and wrote. I rebooted eclipse, and low and behold, the stupid thing wasn’t working.

You may now be thinking: “well most eclipse plugins work right out of the box”, and with that statement, you would be correct. This one however, did not.

I started brainstorming what it could possibly be, and a lot of ideas ran through my head such as: “maybe the new guy who took up the reigns of the Jadclipse plugin doesn’t know WTF he is doing, kinda like the guy who wrote this jar file”. A quick jaunt around the web proved this not to be the case, as lots of people claimed to have gotten this new Jadclipse 3.4 plugin working just fine. Next, “could it be user error”? Maybe I forgot to flip the bit that designates Jadclipse the new class file viewer, rather than the OOTB eclipse compiled class viewer, which is less than helpful in my situation. Of course, that wasn’t it.. Jadclipse duly installed itself and flipped its default .class file viewer setting.

Then the epiphany. Jad was a command line decompiler only back in the day. I didn’t have the command line decompiler installed, and the Jadclipse plugin simply uses the output of the jad command line decompiler and then reads the files generated into eclipse.

Simply locating a mirror of the jad decompiler, then placing it in the java path, I now had the command line decompiler working. I quickly checked to see if eclipse was now doing its magic and showing me the source, and it was.

So.. pro tip: if you can’t seem to get the JadClipse plugin working for versions of eclipse later than 3.4 (and probably any version of eclipse for that matter), make sure you have the old school jad decompiler  in your path somewhere. You can tell if it is there by popping a command prompt and typing jad. Good luck!

How to remove a broken exhaust manifold stud

How to remove a broken exhaust manifold stud

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I recently had the distinct pleasure of needing to remove a broken exhaust manifold stud from an aluminum cylinder head on my drag racing car, even when using a torque wrench graduated in inch/lbs. As you may well know, there are only 3 types of people in this world. Ones that have not yet broken a stud, those that have already, and those that never will.

Well, congratulations are in order, because I graduated from class 1 into class 2 in a flurry of expletives. I had just completed a porting job on my exhaust manifold, and in the process of bolting it back up, the last stud (always) decided to break on me. Now, this isn’t one of those “easy break” deals, either. The remainder of the stud was recessed with respect to the plane of the head. So, it is with much reluctance, I now had a research project on my hands.

After searching the web for a while, the conclusion I came to is that the “easy way” is to take it to a machine shop. Well, that just isn’t good enough for me. I figured the machine shop might only charge $40 or $60 bucks for it, but then there are all the gaskets to buy and the downtime to deal with and on and on. There has to be a better way.

Well, there is. And I documented it for all of my readers. Here it is.. enjoy!