I worked on my Silvia this weekend. The reason I restarted this website was to document this process so I can look back on it one day. So here I am, documenting.

It has been so long since this car was discussed here that I feel like I need to reintroduce it.

It isn’t the same chassis as I started with, but it’s essentially the same project. In my mind, this is the car I got about 17 years ago at a guess. As a very quick history, the original car had a CA, that broke, got one built, drove and modified and tuned for a while, decided to go SR, realised I didn’t know how to do that half way through, sold everything incomplete, bought this chassis with SR already in it, changed everything else over, had it painted, changed aero twice, had the front repaired because it had rail damage, put the engine and everything back in, still didn’t know how to do that, didn’t run right, put big wheels on, drove it once around the block, car stopped running mysteriously one day god knows how many years ago and it has been parked since.

So now you’re up to speed. There are a lot of (long dead) hopes and dreams in this car, and I feel an obligation not just to the car but to my former self to finish it. So finish it I will, this year(ish).

I’m not going to make any grand claims or promises with this car other than to say it will be the best Silvia I can build. I hope I can muster the love I once had for these cars to ensure that I do justice to the years I have in it.

When you have a car for this long you find yourself redoing everything a few times as your means and your standards change. My 86 was a huge step forward in what I could achieve, so the process with this car is now undoing a lot of the old fake parts and DIY rubbish that were the best I could do at the time but now fall well short.

This weekend was exterior. Probably the first Japanese exterior part I bought for my car was SuperMade tail light lenses. Even though I never fitted them, I’ve been attached to the brand ever since. I think the first thing I loved was the name, and then when I saw the Instant Gentleman line of aero parts it expanded my world. It was a completely new way of looking at Silvia styling and it struck a chord with me. SuperMade means individualism. This car is now, above all else, a chance for me to pay homage to the inspiration that Takanori Yoshida gave me all those years ago. So it is being treated to as much genuine SuperMade as it can handle with some Origin in there for good measure, and this weekend was a chance to start mocking up how the car is going to look when it is assembled, and getting a reference for tyre sizes and height and suspension arms and stuff. Nothing is mounted so it’s all crooked and falling off. But it’s there, it fits, and it feels like progress. Like a rebirth just beginning.

Fitting these SuperMade parts was a bit of a moment for me. I’ve been coveting them for maybe 15 years, so to offer them up to the car for the first time was a milestone and an achievement.

Updates will continue sporadically until the car is finished. Thanks to Fiend Garage and Corporal Industries for the supply of SuperMade and Origin parts respectively.