This car is no stranger to our website. Over the last year or so it’s graced the front of the blog multiple times. For those who aren’t familiar, this Chevrolet LS1 powered Nissan S13 coupe belongs to a good friend of mine here in Texas, Stewart Leask. Hanging out with this guy as much as I do has more than likely doomed my financial future due to the constant inspiration from watching him build this car over the last year or so, reminding me of how much mine is lacking. Recently Stew noticed that at some point his strut tower started collapsing away from the stock location. Once he pulled it back straight he made the decision that that wouldn’t be happening again.

This is how the front end looked before the rebuild:

With the deadline for XDC Dallas only months away, Stew immediately dove into the project starting with cutting off the front end from the strut towers forward and tube framing it. A custom replacement lower tie bar was fabbed up to go in place of the weak stock counterpart. To beef it up even more Stew added corner gussets for it to grab more of the OEM frame rail. The frame rail was then later capped off for additional rigidity. In addition to the lower tie bar, the fender wells were cut out and tubs were put in their place. To ensure that the strut towers didn’t move again, a massive gusseted triangulated strut tower bar was fabbed up and installed.

To finish off the front end, a new crash bar was made along with a new wood splitter to attach to the bottom. I’m pretty sure it’s some sort of law in Texas that requires every drift car to have a wooden splitter.

Moving on to the rear, Stew cut out a huge section of the trunk to house a newly built recessed battery tray along with an ATL fuel cell setup. New metal was then cut to fill in the missing areas and bead rolled for extra strength and to be aesthetically pleasing. With the fuel cell now sitting in the trunk, a firewall was built to keep the interior of the car safe from any ill effects of a fire incident. The metal used for the firewall was also bead rolled and came out pretty damn cool looking. If you’ve never used a bead roller before, trying to create any sort of design is beyond time consuming!

With the firewall and fuel cell knocked out, Stew went ahead and fabbed up a new rear crash bar as well. The new crash bar uses the stock mount locations so it can easily be unbolted if it needs to come off. In addition to this just being a crash bar, it also has a triangle bar coming off of the bottom for a jack point. This is an essential feature on a low car, because now he doesn’t have to waste time removing the bumper to get the car in the air. My favorite feature of this piece would have to be the custom-made bumper height adjusters. The three adjusters can move up or down to ensure perfect fitment.

Keep in mind that he did all of the custom fabrication you see in his garage after work and on weekends. What’s most impressive is that the majority of the fabrication work had never been attempted before this build, so I’d say quite a successful learning experience. Stew also sprayed the bay on the car, which was also his first time painting.

It’s impossible to sum up this entire rebuild in one blog post, so there is a LOT that I’m leaving out. Feel free to head on over to his build thread on Zilvia to check out everything I missed!

Coming up on Pt. 2: XDC Dallas finally arrives