Chris Steinbacher, creator of the ‘B is for Build’ YouTube channel, is famous for making some of the wildest custom cars on the internet. Perhaps none of them are as ambitious as this Skyline GT-R that he’s lovingly dubbed the R69 which is basically an R34 body on top of an R35 chassis. After an intense and lengthy build process, it’s finally finished and Steinbacher is letting us in on how much it cost him to complete.
It turns out that Steinbacher has actually owned the R34 portion of the car for quite some time and had lots of ideas about how to use it. For a time, it was going to end up with an LS V8 just like the Lamborghini Huracan he took to SEMA in the past. Ultimately, the idea to drop the body on top of an R35 chassis came to him after owning the shell for more than a year.
Of course, thinking about it and actually doing it are very different things and the latter required major structural work since the R35 is almost 5 inches longer than the R34. The newer GT-R is also much wider than the older one. Thankfully, some of that difference was made up with the wide-body kit you see on the finished product.
Related: This Nissan Skyline R34 ‘GT-R’ Sedan Is Almost A Dream Come True
He still had to make big adjustments with regard to the interior panels, the dash, the doors, and more. In total, he estimates that he spent a total of $65,113 on everything needed to complete the build. Of course, that’s not accounting for the labor he and his team put into it.
That’s not cheap but consider what he’s got now that it’s finished. The GT-R looks like a customized R34 on the outside yet features all the comfort and technology of the R35 on the inside.
It’s also 100 percent street legal which is something that it’s tough to put a price on. True street-legal R34s are exceedingly rare in the USA right now and are trading for more than $300,000 in the open market. From that perspective, it looks like a pretty excellent deal to us. Steinbacher calls it the R69 because he admits, it’s not really an R35 anymore and it’s not an R34 either.
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