Articles by Soarer-Dom
Toys and Gadgets
19/08/20
I know it has been months since my last post… I’ve just been busy despite it being month #6 of lockdown. This is a kit that I wanted for a while, but I figured I already had too many kits. It was a good thing I bought it because it would turn out to be one of the best kits out there.
Toys and Gadgets
21/07/20
Today’s review is a vintage kit made by Aoshima. I first saw it online in the Yahuoku auctions and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Nissan Leopard kitted like this before. Being one of my favourite cars with an interesting retro bodykit, I decided to buy it.
Toys and Gadgets
14/07/20
This build was inspired by a post I made on CarThrottle - my latest dream car. Ever since I discovered the Soarer many years ago, I have wanted one. The only issue is that for half the price you can get an A70 Supra with all the same offerings and with a shorter wheelbase in a smaller package. After all, the Soarer is a large luxury coupe. Today’s kit is the Fujimi Soarer 3.0 GT Limited - a very popular kit among Soarer enthusiasts.
Toys and Gadgets
21/06/20
It wasn’t long after I got into cars that I started building model-kits. They are a bit like Lego, but accurately reproduced in 1/24 scale, as opposed to blocks/bricks. Now that I have posted just about every cool box art, I think it is time to go through all the kits I have bought and built during 2020. This kit is very cool and very well reproduced. The body is the typical mold plastic by Hasegawa that feels more rigid that the other brands I have used. I didn’t like decals at all, but after assembling this kit I now love them.
Japanese
20/11/19
The car of choice for me is the Toyota Soarer Z20. It has a perfectly proportioned long-nose luxury coupe body, matched with the running gear and underpinnings of an A70 Supra. The style is so perfectly 80’s that, in my eyes, it is on par with the Ferrari 512 and DMC DeLorean. Unlike these two, it doesn’t suffer so much from that Italian/French/Irish unreliability - being a true JDM car means it was fitted with the finest parts Toyota could offer its home market.
DIY
10/09/18
Too many times I have heard of people tightening nuts so much they they snap the stud off the car. This isn’t funny, it’s pure idiocy. On every vehicle I have worked on, someone has been so scared of their oil filter magically falling off that they have tightened it so hard that only Thor himself came loosen it. This made it difficult to remove every filter that I haven’t installed, but much so on my friend’s Peugeot where it meant damaging his radiator to get his filter off. They literally say “hand-tight” or 6nm on the box.
Bikes
10/09/18
After all these attempts at getting the bike up and running, I decided to just get another engine for the bike. So where did it go sour? Parts availability.
Bikes
10/07/18
As you might know, I recently purchased a Hyosung GT250R EFI to replace my FZR250R while I work on fixing the engine. Being a new bike with only 36Km on the odometer, I assumed nothing could go wrong and that a new bike will be good and reliable. Oh was I wrong.
Nissan Skyline Forum
04/01/18
Despite being one of the most reliable cars out there, interior parts in Skylines do wear out - the three worst examples are: The air conditioning vents The seat bolsters The handbrake leather The steering wheel What generally happens with the steering wheel is the top of the rim gets sun damaged and worn out from contact and eventually splits open. This happened in my R33, while in my R34 the outer layer is starting to disintegrate - every time I go for a long drive I get little black specs in the palms of my hands.
Opinion
04/09/17
Mercedes-Benz has AMG, Fiat has Abarth, Ford has FPV and Dodge has Mopar. These are the marques that turn ordinary vehicles off the production line into blistering fast performance vehicles. Nissan on the other hand has a lesser-known marque called AuTech (Automobile Technology). One could try to argue that NisMo (Nissan Motorsports) is Nissan’s performance vehicle brand, however Nismo is a sector of the Nissan brand much like Audi’s RS class.
Japanese
17/08/17
Like a younger sibling, these engines are from the same family as their famous counterparts, but are just as capable, and are usually the second choice. This list will show you what the alternative engines you should consider are. Toyota 1JZ-GTE The 1JZ-GTE is the smaller version of the JZ engine. It was slightly smaller than the 2JZ, being only a 2491cc however on paper it made the same output of 280HP.
Euro
02/08/17
It’s been a while since I last posted one of my dream cars, but that doesn’t mean the drooling has stopped. A week ago I was just roaming through the classifieds when I spotted this.
Opinion
29/07/17
Hi. There are a few cars that many people love, but I just can’t see what people like about them. To start off, the best-looking car ever designed, according to many magazines:
Mitsubishi Lancer EVO Forum
20/06/17
When someone mentions a Mitsubishi Evolution, there are two images that appear in one’s head: A stanced Mitsubishi A rally car When someone mentions it to me, what I think of are the show-offs who drive them, the high Mitsubishi mileage, and the time a bunch of bogans chased my Subaru down the highway to throw bottles at my car from their Evo. And then I think of my friends who own them - a fvckboy and a criminal - and then I think of a video game I played 15 years ago called V-Rally.
Japanese
17/06/17
Previously on my dream car: I worried about the compression on the R34 and started looking at other cars to replace it. Today I have what some of you will see as an anti-climax. This is the Nissan Leopard, better known as the Infiniti M30 (if anyone even knows what that is).
Japanese
15/06/17
A work colleague of mine had been looking at getting a sports car across the ditch. Since no-one can actually check the vehicle for him, he sent the seller on a wild goose chase to get as much information about it. Despite having a rebuilt engine, that 25-year-old Nissan had low compression on one cylinder. Hearing this, it made me wonder what would I do if my R34 had low compression. I immediately jumped onto a few websites to consider my options - Pulsar GTiR, Leopard, Gloria, R31.
Japanese
12/06/17
Almost every car-person can tell you what an R34 is. JDM fans will tell you that an RPS13 is a 180SX and a PS13 is a Silvia. The Autech 260RS is a WGNC34, and an R33 GTR is a BCNR33… wait just one minute… the Autech Stagea is a Skyline - so why isn’t it a BCNC34? In this highly technical post, I will inform you of what these prefixes from the 90’s and beyond mean. Unfortunately the codes prior to the 80’s were a bit of a dog’s breakfast with the merger of many brands, and amalgamation of different models.
Nissan Skyline Forum
31/05/17
Active Aero is a system seen in many new supercars and sports cars that are desperately trying to claw their way into the supercar segment (Ahem Porsche). The way it works is that when the car reaches a certain speed, the wing at the rear will rise and/or change angle to aid in downforce and change the aerodynamics of the vehicle for stability. In some cases a front spoiler or splitter comes out from hiding to see the world fly past at 100miles an hour - this is how it works in Skylines.
Nissan Skyline Forum
21/05/17
After yesterday’s success, I decided to go ahead and plasti-dip the R34 like a real car-person. It was a year ago in early February when I asked CarThrottle what colour to paint my B-Pillars since they were looking a bit rough. After taking the CT’s advisory, I headed off to SuperCheap Auto to get me some paint from the team that I was much acquainted with, having needed to source many tools for my car project.
DIY
06/04/17
Last weekend I traveled up north to my hometown in Northland, in the North Island in the Southern Hemisphere. I had my tools up in my parents garage, and my car had been running a bit inefficiently so I figured it was time for some new spark plugs. I’m not an expert on spark plugs and never planned on writing about how to replace spark plugs or what to look for, but I took too many photos.
Japanese
06/12/16
During the mid 1980’s Nissan was developing two engine families which would become the basis for the 90’s Japanese sports cars. These were the RB straight six and the VG V6 engines. In turbo form, these engines were on the edge of 280HP - the limit of what was the Gentleman’s Agreement at the time. Although they are best known in sports cars, the RB and VG were also used in more family-friendly sedans such as the Cefiro, Laurel,Skyline, Gloria, Cedric, and Leopard - the Cefiro later jumped from the RB to the VG.
Photography & Videography
28/07/16
Last time I talked about the differences between small-format and medium-format cameras. Today I will talk about choosing lenses for your DSLR. This is a tutorial that I wanted to write a year ago, however circumstances led me to putting it off until now. Above we have two of my 3-piece essential kit: my “pancake” lenses. They are compact, lightweight, prime lenses. The lens on the left is a 20mm ultrawide, the one on the right is a 50mm, and the other part of the trio was used to take this photo and is a comparatively large 100mm macro.
Nissan Skyline Forum
20/07/16
Last time I talked about the chassis codes. This time in this short guide I will talk about the models and clear up myths about the names that have spread like wildfire about this well-yet-little-known car. Wikipedia has been known for false information, and the Nissan Skyline is no exception. Since everyone knows about the GT-R, I will omit the special versions such as the V-Spec, and focus more on the non-GT-R models that are still relatively unknown to many of you.
Japanese
13/07/16
While these are rather popular everywhere else in the world, it is rare that you see even one for sale in New Zealand - I should know, I spent 3 years looking for one. And just when I’ve run out of funds, a whole bunch of them came up in various conditions.