Widebody GTR Stagea Build

Yup, time for another build thread.

So back in 2018 or something I picked up a Stagea body for $500 nzd and then spent the next few months browsing Yahoo Japan to find all the parts I would need to make my own version of the R35 GTR face swapped M35 Stagea.

Some of you who follow my other builds probably saw that thing sitting in the back behind the shed for a few years.

Well some projects ended up getting out of hand and that Stagea took a back seat until eventually I just didn't care enough to even touch it anymore. Fast forward 3 years and I'm trying to store all these damn mx5s in my garage but there's a pile of GTR parts in the way that have been steadily deforming and accumulating dust so I figured screw it, I'll buy a new chassis and actually get these parts out of the way.

Enter the new base:


This is a 2007 Nissan M35 Stagea Autech Axis model with the 3.5L VQ35DE motor and slightly annoyingly a 5 speed tiptronic gearbox instead of the manual that these models were offered in.









The previous owner had done a few mods that I'm happy to not have to worry about like upgraded 350z brakes and Tein coilover suspension.



This car is probably the nicest vehicle I've ever owned. I'm starting to feel like an adult now, moving from 80's and 90's Japanese shitboxes up to late 00's ones.

I'd also like to quickly thank the user s15-newbie who is also doing one of these conversions for helping me out with a bunch of questions I've had on the process and some measurements that I was after. You can check out his build here:

https://www.driftworks.com/forum/threads/my-stagea-chronicles.282084/

What I'm going to be doing to make mine different is actually a result of both laziness and stubbornness. All the best R35 Stagea conversions will also include widening the rear of the car to match the new width of the GTR fenders. S15-newbie has done an awesome job on this by using clay to sculpt an entire new side for the car. I've also seen other people use foam as a base to make a fiberglass part that is then blended into the panel. But one thing about me is that I'm kinda not a fan of the moulded in look. I'd just much rather have a panel that can be removed by undoing a few bolts than have it permanently bonded to the car, and so that's where my idea for a bolt on widebody came in. And here you can see a photoshop mockup of that idea:







The widebody is sort of loosely inspired by some modern Pandem kits as well as some oldschool widebodies I used to see on R34 sedans back in the day. I will play with the lines in real life once I have all the wheels and panels in place and I know what I've got to work with but that is the rough idea.

I've also got no idea which wheels I will be getting so it sure would be crazy if anybody that works for one of the leading suppliers of one of Japan's best known wheel brands would stumble across this build.


So now to finally get started on the build, I brought all the boxes up to the barn and began stripping down the Stagea.









The Tein coilovers look almost brand new so I'm stoked to not have to replace them.

With the car stripped down I could finally have my first look at these parts I ordered sight unseen from half way around the world over 3 years ago and throw them on the car.













And in the next post I'll get started on fitting the bonnet so keep an eye out for that.

I've also started getting a bit better at this whole social media thing and so now I document all of my build on YouTube as well as Instagram. I don't really go in for that classic YouTuber over-hyped drama style of video and do all of mine with no dialogue at all. I'd still say this thread would be the best place to get comprehensive information on all the tiny little details but the videos are good if you want to watch me meticulously measure and cut a bonnet hinge adapter plate over 3 days in complete silence.

Consider checking out the channels
https://www.youtube.com/@tofuautoworks
https://www.instagram.com/tofuautoworks/

 

Cheers mate! I'm definitely trying to up my game with my builds now and keeping this one road legal has definitely forced me to do everything to an even higher standard.

Following on with this, here is a super detailed account of everything that went into getting just the bonnet to work on this conversion, something that everybody I've ever seen has just skipped over.

I figured that this whole front end swap is going to take a lot of back and forth, moving the parts around to get them all to play nicely with eachother and so it was tricky to figure out which panel to start with or to do them all at the same time. The only thing I knew for certain was that the bonnet had to be centered and so I started there.

First up were the hinges. So unfortunately they didn't bolt straight up so there was straight away going to be some custom parts needed.



The bolts on the GTR bonnet were about 120mm wider apart than the stagea ones and so adapter plates had to be made. The bolts on the GTR bonnet also taper in towards the front meaning that there was a bit of tricky measuring to figure out what angles the new bolts had to line up at.



There was a lot of back and forth with the cardboard templates to get a design that worked. To determine how far back the bonnet was going to sit in this initial placement I did a rough test fit of the panels to see what sort of space there was for the front bumper and headlights.

Conveniently it ended up working out that you want the bonnet about as far back as possible because the curve that matches up with the windshields are different on each bonnet, and by having the GTR bonnet as close as possible to the windshield you can hide most of that ugly gap. I used the windshield wipers to tell me how far back was too far and positioned the bonnet until they just barely opened without touching the paint.

Then I was all good to make the adapter plates out of steel.







For this I plug welded 2 M8 bolts to the backside of the plate and ground them flush so they would sit flat on the bonnet. I also had to drill out a rivet on each side but there were definitely more than necessary anyway.

After finishing up the adapter plates I had front and back distance sorted, then I needed to make the bonnet latch to line it up in the center and also work with the existing Stagea latch mechanism.

The main hoop was simply bent out of some 8mm mild steel rod and then heat treated and annealed after also being plug welded from the back side.



As I mentioned, my goal with this car is to keep everything on it completely road legal and so after speaking to my certifier, I made sure to add the secondary catch as it is a legal requirement for any road car in NZ to have 2 independent bonnet catchments. (Ironically that also includes a pair of $20 eBay hoodpins) but we're doing things properly here.



The latch was origami'd by hand using some 25mm mild steel box section, cut and folded to match the factory shape and then trimmed to the height that would work for the new bonnet.



Then here is all the finished pieces





Finally they could be test fit on the car to confirm everything was sweet before getting a coat of etch primer.





Then it was all bolted up and aligned to dead center.



For the height of the bonnet there were 2 main things that determined it. The downwards slope, (rake) and the resulting height of the front bumper. I could tell from the test fit that I would want the bumper as low as possible to get around the impact support beam that I will have to leave in place.

In a perfect world I may have put the bumper slightly higher and have less rake on the front end but the goal is to keep it road legal and this is the best solution for that.

But with that in mind, the bonnet was set up so that at it's lowest point it sit's 10mm above the highest point in the engine bay which from my investigation was a bolt on the top of the front composite core. (FYI to anybody doing this in the future, go ahead and cover those bolts in foam tape so they dont scratch the shit out of your bonnet while you're test fitting it all)

The next thing to tackle will be front bumper and headlights as leaving this bumper wrapped up for 3 years has deformed it slightly and it needs some support to get it back into shape.





I'm working on the bumper support and headlights at the moment so will have that update up in a week or so.

In the mean time feel free to check out this episode over on my YouTube channel. Remember to turn on subtitles for extra info.

 

So updating this thread now that I've got a little bit of free time.

For those that missed it part 2 of this build went up on YouTube so you can check that out if you're interested.

But on to the post.

So with the bonnet sorted out I shifted my focus to getting the front bumper and headlights test fitted. Since I expect that once the guards go on I might have to shift things around I'm putting off making anything permanent until everything has been test fit and I can confirm I don't need to shit things around.

I made a quick and dirty wooden brace for this bumper and played around with shims till I had it lining up nice with the bonnet.







And with that I was able to get a really good fit along the bonnet edge.



At this point I realised I was missing the super fancy GTR rubber trim that seals the gap between the bonnet and the front bumper which mean that there should be about 5mm of space between these two. I made sure to leave the gap but I will be sourcing my own piece to go in there.

Next challenge was to get the headlights to fit.



They contacted a lot of this upper front core support so some of that would need to be trimmed to get them in.

Luckily I have a donor chassis that I didn't have to be so careful with and so I used it to figure out how much I needed to cut









The top of the headlight presses hard against the upper frame rail in order to sit nicely. In the end only a small amount of the upper rail needed to be trimmed down.

There is a small plastic mounting tab on the headlight that gets in the way of the upper core support. Since there's no real way to actually use it to mount the headlight it serves no purpose anymore and so it can get trimmed off.





This was a bit of a concern regarding keeping the car road legal as frontal impact standards are a big deal here. After a bit of back and forth with my cert guy though we figured out how to do it in a way that would retain the factory strength and so then I transferred everything back over to the proper Stagea to trim it for real.





This was all that needed to be trimmed of the upper frame rail in the end. Just a bolt point for the fender and a small part of the pinch welded tab.



The goal was to leave as much of this core support as possible to I spent quite a while slowly trimming and test fitting to make sure I had a nice snug fit before tidying up the edges.







Pretty happy with how tight the fit was.

Then in order to keep the thing road legal I had to put in exactly 3 plug welds to join the upper rail back together where it was trimmed.





The reason this whole thing was such a process was because there were 2 failure points designed in to the frame rail right where I had to trim and so the surrounding area had to be exactly as strong as designed originally. My initial plan was to trim the whole tab off and weld up the seam but this would have actually added to much strength to the join and acted as reinforcement which could have lead to the failure points not working as intended and shifting the point of failure further back towards the driver in the event of an accident.

This is the level of stuff we have to deal with in NZ but at least if this shows the conversion is possible here it should be doable everywhere else in the world.

The last step was to tidy up the welds and prime the panels with some epoxy primer and spray the inside of the rail with some cavity wax.







And then the finished product:







Next up will be making the custom fenders.

It's going to be a bit of a relief since I know I'm going to be making widebody fenders that will cover these anyway, so I don't have to be perfect with the finished part. But knowing me I probably wont be able to help myself.

 

Thanks man. My goal with this build is to make the whole thing look as OEM as possible underneath.

Cheers mate!


Alright so I've got a tiny bit of time free to update this.

Same with last time, I put a video up over on my channel that covers most of the work that went into this one, feel free to check that out if you want.

The goal after getting the bonnet and front bumper fitted was to get started on honestly probably the most challenging part of this whole build, stitching the GTR panels onto the Stagea ones.

Luckily I had 2 sets of Stagea fenders thanks to the donor so I got started by cutting away material on that to leave only the important parts I was going to need for the new fenders: The door line and lower mounting points, and the mounting points for the upper rail along the bonnet line.



With the Stagea fenders cut I could start marking out where I was going to have to trim on the GTR fenders.





One of the things that makes my conversion different to the existing swaps that people have done, is that instead of using the whole GTR fender and changing the lines of the Stagea to work with it, I wanted to keep the lines of the Stagea instead. This might not look as good to some people, but the point with my conversion is to make a kit that doesn't require the entire car to be re-bodyworked and painted.

Because of that I decided to trim the entire vent section off the GTR and opted to make my own with the Stagea fender.



Another thing I had to change for my version compared to others, was I wanted the angle of the bodyline that comes down this vent to be a bit steeper. The GTR has very long guards and so the line is quite shallow, but to work with where the new wheel is I wanted the center of the arch a bit further back and so the line had to be adjusted.

once I had that all good I used panel screws to hold everything in place and then double checked all the gaps and made sure that all the bodylines worked well with each other.









Once I had everything perfectly lined up I tack welded the panels together. I set the welder as cold as I could get away with and did my welds intermittently around the whole panel to avoid putting too much heat into any one area and warping the metal.





With the outside of the panel welded together I could shift my focus to the upper mounting point. In order to get the GTR fender to line up with the hood the upper mounts had to be trimmed off. The new fenders sat out much further than the Stagea ones and so some extra steel was welded on as an extension.













With that last bit of welding done the first panel was finally all in one piece.







Because the panel was only partially welded however, and there was a lot of tension in the piece from how it was all held together. I decided to apply a few heavy layers of fiberglass to the back side of the fender and then leave it to set once back on the car.



Doing this meant that as well as reinforcing all the unwelded pieces of steel that would probably move around when I started to apply filler, this fiberglass has set the flare into an incredibly rigid shape meaning that when it comes time to make moulds, I can make them off the car and not have to worry about them being at all twisted or deformed.

But the biggest thing about finishing the first fender was that now I had a width I could use for measurements and finally order some wheels for this project.







I played around with these spacings until I had around 25mm poke from the GTR fenders. I figured this would be the minimum thickness I would need in order to make a nice looking set of overfenders to go on top of these flares.

Using these offsets I was also able to get my first look at how wide the rears would need to be.



Honestly not too bad. It ended up being around 65mm wider than stock on the rear which feels like a good increase in width without going as extreme as my MX5's +100mm widebody.

 

Cheers mate!

So for the update for this week. Was able to get a fair bit of work done on this despite being sick and unable to do anything for a few days.

Started off by quickly smashing out the second fender. This one went together in no time since I'd figured out where to make all my cuts and I new how it all matched up.





With that I officially had both fenders welded up and with fiberglass reinforcement to help keep them rigid when it comes time to make the moulds.



With the metal work now all finished I could start sanding the panels begin the long and tedious shaping process.















Was quite liking how things were looking at this stage.

Also a reminder that as with all these updates I've got a video over on my channel where you can watch this:

But back to the build, now we could finally get started icing this cake.





There was an insane amount of body filler that had to go in these to get them to start looking respectable. With the filler and the fiberglass on the back, these things are like rocks.











There is still a crazy amount of work that still needs to go into these. I'd love to have them finished for mould making soon but at the same time I'm not going to risk rushing anything and getting something I'm not proud of.

Also for any kiwis reading this and know about the Mx5 I've got in its own build thread over here, I'll be attending Mad Mike's Summer Bash this December so if you want to check out the mx5 in the flesh then come check it out at Hampton Downs on the 3rd.

 

It's been a while since my last update. Happily though there has been really good progress on this build and if you're keeping up with the videos I've been throwing onto YouTube then you'll be up to date. But here's the quick run down.

So in the last update I was finishing up the shaping on the fenders







It took a while to get the fenders to a stage I was happy with for mould making but eventually they had a coat of primer on them and we could see the shape for the first time.













There was still a little bit of work I had to do to the fenders to get them to 100% but once they were good I could start the moulds.







Then the moulds were sprayed with a 2K epoxy sealer. I'm going to be making a lot of moulds over the next few months so it's probably wise for me to invest in a proper sealer designed for mould making. Should help speed up the process and mean I wont have to wetsand the moulds once they are popped off the plugs.



The plugs were then wetsanded and polished up to a glass finish to make a good release from the mould.





After polishing, wax, and PVA, tooling gelcoat was brushed on.



Left that to cure overnight and then came back in the morning and applied the skin coat, 1 layer 30gsm tissue and 1 layer 225gsm chopped strand.



Then the bit that I was really looking forward to, I invested a bit in some special tooling resin for mould making.





It costs almost 3 times as much as the standard resin but the advantage is you can build up all your layers at once and it has fillers mixed in, meaning instead of the normal 6 - 8 layers of 450gsm that I would typically apply, here you only need to put on 4. And instead of taking 3 days, applying a max of 2 coats at a time, you can do it all in an afternoon. Then on top of all of that, it's dimensionally stable, meaning you don't have to worry about it slowly distorting over time like regular resin. So all in all, for the time and fiberglass it saves, it actually comes out better in the end than using the regular stuff.


After the first side of the mould was finished up I could lay up the other sides.













As usual I've been uploading the whole build over on YouTube. Latest episode covers the first bit of the mould making.

Feel free to check it out.

 

Cheers guys, really happy with how the build's coming now.


So, update time.

Those of you following along on Instagram and YouTube will have already seen most of this update, it's getting harder to find the time to keep this thread up to date but build threads have always been my preferred way of following a build so I'll try keep this one going to the end.

Anyway, we left off with the moulds all fully laid up and ready for trimming, so the next step was to split them off the plugs and trim the flanges.





They were actually a pain in the ass to get them off the plugs cleanly. I ran into an issue with this new method and my guess is because this new tooling resin that I'm using allowed me to build all 5 layers of 450 in one pass rather than having to do them in a max of 2 layers at a time, the extra heat generated must have reacted with the epoxy sealer on the plug or maybe the primer underneath and cause it to fuse with the mould surface.

Unfortunately this meant that I had to scrape a bunch of leftover epoxy sealer off the mould which resulted in it getting a little scratched up and needing to be wetsanded and polished.

After all of that though I was really happy with the outcome.













So with that the moulds were done. Happy to have the first part of this kit ready to eventually make it possible for people to do these conversions on their own.

After a couple days to cure and the obligatory building up 8 layers of wax and a coat of PVA I got started on the first set of fenders.









Standard recipe for these fenders. Gelcoat in the evening, followed by coupling coat in the morning; 1 layer 80gsm tissue and a layer 250gsm, then let that cure and apply 2 layers of 450 gsm.

These ones came out of the mould super easily and if you haven't checked out the video I'd recommend just skipping to taking these out of the moulds. So satisfying, it's like unwrapping presents on Christmas.





The flanges allow these parts to be made via vacuum infusion in the future if I ever decide to make them out of carbon. But either way, the flanges were trimmed off and the fenders were sanded to final shape.









Then the moment of truth. After months of shaping and designing the completed fiberglass fenders were finally fitted to the car.









I could not be happier with the overall fitment on these. The panel gaps are all spot on both down the door and along the bonnet. Even the section underneath the bonnet came out really clean and will look like factory once painted up.

 

Since I've got a bit of a stockpile here I'll follow straight on with the next stage of this build which was tackling the sideskirts.

So the issue we had was the front lip was sitting around an inch lower than the original stagea front bumper and sideskirts. Obviously I want this conversion to look as clean as possible and so I had to find a way to extend the factory side skirts to match the new height.



For the past few weeks I've just been holding the sideskirts up with a block of wood. I actually used these blocks to measure the height of the lip and the sideskirt to figure out exactly how much I needed to drop them buy.

Once I knew what I had to add I ripped the sideskirts down the middle and added a polycarbonate dam so that I could extend them by 30mm. There was a little body line that ran down the sideskirts that I wanted to keep so I was sure to cut on the other side of that (didn't really make any difference in the end with the rivets I'll have to reshape and sand the whole thing)







That was all super quick to be honest, only a couple days work for that.

Unfortunately in messing around with these after finishing them I got an idea of just how bad the bond between fiberglass and plastic is. I mean I already knew it was bad because I've done this in the past, but if it's worth learning and forgetting once, then it's worth doing it as many more times as it takes.

I was hoping that these would at least hold up long enough to use as plugs to make the final moulds, but I doubt they'll even make it that far before cracking or warping so I'm actually going to have to remake them out of fiberglass before even starting on the plugs.

In short, I've got to make a super quick and dirty mould for a one time use part and then I'll have to make another set of moulds once I've actually finished these.

But, it did finally give me an opportunity to get the car outside and get some nice photos before it goes back in the barn for the next few months while I pour the foam to shape the widebody.





















The last few photos really show off just how much higher the GTR fender sits than the original Stagea one. I get a lot of people suggesting I leave the car as is but there's no way I'd be happy with that difference in arch height even ignoring the massive difference in offset this kit is going to need.

As always, there's a video up over on YouTube covering this section of the build, feel free to check it out:

 

It feels like it's been forever since I started this thread, how is still not even over a page yet haha.

Well we are a couple months out of date here so time for an update.

Starting off with the fun stuff.

I want to thank the team at Driftworks again for helping me sort out wheels for this thing and getting them here pretty damn quick despite NZ Post's best efforts to lose them in transit.



Finding wheels that worked perfectly for this build was a mission and took countless measurements of the fenders to get wheels that would give me the exact amount of poke to let me make the widebody.

We ended up going with a set of 19x10.5 +12 Work Ulitmate Kiwamis.











They look absolutely badass, always been one of my top 3 wheels to pick in any racing game growing up and to actually have a set in real life is pretty sick.

Fitted to the car they look wild and really show off the difference in widths between the OEM Stagea rear and the new GTR front end.















We're looking at around 20mm of poke on the front fenders after dropping the car down, and then 65mm on the rears.

It's going to mean that when I make the widebody for the front it will be just enough to get away with the bolt on look that I'm after while still being wide enough to actually justify it.









With the excitement of the wheels out of the way it was back to the actual build. This was months ago now, but in the last update I'd gone ahead and fiberglassed the sideskirts together to extend them. I really wasn't happy with how they were holding up and even though I knew I would be making a mould of these down the line once the widebody was made, I just couldn't deal with working with these and so I started on a quick and dirty intermediate mould just to save myself a lot of headaches.

That meant that I had to brace up these flimsy plastic things and while I was at that I got them straight for probably the first time in their life since they were spat out of an injection mould at a Nissan factory.

 

Quick and dirty sideskirt mould time.



Because I'm only going to be using these moulds once I didn't bother making any special flanges, just tape was more than enough. I also couldn't be bothered wetsanding and polishing so I just put a layer of packing tape over the rougher areas, put down 1 heavy layer of wax without buffing it off, and then absolutely coated the thing in PVA.



Even though it was just a single use mould, there'd be no point in any of it if it wasn't straight and rigid so I did end up adding some simple wooden bracing to it.









The layup process was pretty straight forward:
-spray the gelcoat in the evening
-come back next morning and put down 1 layer of 80gsm tissue followed by 1 layer of 225gsm chopped strand
-after that's cured, sand it down, add 2 layers of 450
-let that layer cure, then add another 2 layers bringing to a total of 4 layers of 450
-cut all the bracing and then come back and put 1 more layer of 450, then the bracing, then add a few strips to join them together.

So if you were to cut through the mould you would see:
gelcoat
80gsm tissue
225gsm chopped
450gsm chopped
450gsm chopped
450gsm chopped
450gsm chopped
450gsm chopped
Wooden bracing
450gsm strips

Then with the finished moulds I prepped them same as the plugs and began the layup for the sidskirts













Then it was just the process of tidying up these sideskirts so that I can use them as the base for the next step of mould making.

While that was going on I got tyres fitted to the new wheels and was able to confirm fitment













And also happening at this same time, some moderately sad news, the Beige Baguette is now sold and in the care of it's new owner.





I was really happy with that car and the new owner has heaps of plans for it including a 13b swap so I'm glad that somebody with a little more free time and money is able to give it the attention it deserves.

 

A little bit of filler on the sideskirts to get rid of all the ripples from riveting them together originally.









Then they got a layer of primer followed by more sanding and more primer.













All up it actually wasn't that hard to smash these moulds out and remake the sideskirts out of glass. And it is definitely going to make things easier in the future by having them perfectly solid.

Gave them a test fit and even though it was quite a bit of work to extend these sideskirts by only 30mm, but the fact that they now line up perfectly with the front lip just makes the whole build feel better and more cohesive.

Added benefit that it makes the car appear lower which means I can run it at a usable ride height around here and it doesn't look like hot garbage.











Still got to add the rear lip to finish the whole thing off but that will be after the widebody.

You'll notice the old wheels are back on. Rear fenders were rubbing on the tyres and so I'll have to cut them before I can fit the new wheels for good.