its anti clockwise to undo normal thread my 96 car the oil pump seal was leaking !

Remove starter and jum up flywheel then use a 2 ft breaker bar

Update, the amazing electric impact gun, vibrates, makes lots of noise but it seems to either be broken or have a fail safe clutch and wont turn the nut....Deep joy! Also I have finally got the starter motor off (with a view to jamming the flywheel). Cant figure out a safe way to do this without possibly breaking teeth!

Will have to crack out the big breaker bar and try, try again....Sometimes I enjoy working on cars, this isn't one of them!

Nope, completely standard behavior for electric impact guns unless you spend big money. They just don't have the grunt to deal with properly tight fasteners.

Final update for the day, the cam belt is off and the timing marks are errr marked up.

Tomorrow I shall hopefully stick it all back together and probably decide never to attempt anything like this on a modern-ish Jap car again, cant believe how tight the access is to some parts!

Big girl? Harsh but probably fair! Anywho I have most of it back together, ran out of time to complete it and other commitments mean that I wont get to work on the car till the middle of next week, hopefully the belt is on correctly!

A couple of thoughts, I don't recall using any of my trusty 13mm sockets on the car at all, is this a common Japanese thing to only use even numbered bolts?! My 14 and 12mm sockets had gone almost unused until this car came along (I had almost got to the poniut of binning them!). Secondly the little pin cam tensioner thing, who on earth dreamt that up? They need a slap!

The hydraulic tensioner that you have to compress and hold in place with an allen key or drill bit? They are a bit fiddly, but OTOH it means you don't have any worries about setting up the belt tension correctly.

Finally a bit of an update, initially I thought all was well, car started fine, ran up the road, felt good etc etc. Then I got to some traffic lights and the engine dipped down to idle, except it didn't it just stalled.

I re started it but found I had no tickover, now this puzzled me. I got the car home and checked it over sure enough, it would rev but it would not idle.

I figured this was either a secondary problem or I had cocked up the timing.

I did a bit of googling found a procedure to deal with poor tick over (clean out part of the throttle) so I did that, re tried, still wouldn't tick over once warm, so re set the timing using a different method.

Re started the car and found that the different (proper method didn't work at all and the car ran like a bag of spanners. At this point I threw my tools around in disgust and called it quits!

Today I took the belt off again and found all my original markings and re set it as accurately as I could and fired it up. It ran fine to start with, ticked over (cold) and reved up okay but once warmed started to miss and needed throttle to pick the revs up. Any bright ideas?

No it wouldn't. The timing is determined only by the number of teeth on the cam and crank pulleys. If the cam pulley didn't have exactly double the number of teeth that the crank pulley does, the timing would be miles out after just a couple of engine revolutions.

Regarding idling problem, double check the connections to all the sensors (particularly temp sensor, MAP sensor, oxygen sensor etc), and ensure all vacuum pipes are connected with no splits.

Probably totally unrelated to your issue, but when I removed the battery on my wifes car the throttle potentiometer needed resetting after. It gave the same exact symptoms as you. Did you remove the battery?