yellowoctupus

Neat to see another mod-engine buildup. I tend to forget about the project section of the forum for whatever reason. Subscribed for more neat-o action .

I like to run a magnet on my oil pan (stuck on the backside or somewhere it won't get knocked off) just for those little filings that make it through. Granny's right though, There's a good screen on the oil pan pickup that will clog up before it sends pieces of engine back through your pump. I had a 300 I6 with the later model phenolic timing gears; the gears got chewed up and clogged the pickup entirely. (No oil pressure over 1600rpm!) Cleaned it all out, changed the gears and I was all set. I PERSONALLY wouldn't rebuild it, but if you won't be able to enjoy the car or will always have a fear of it blowing up on you far from home, then knock yourself out, get it rebuilt. Then you get an excuse for performance parts too! (at least a new bumpstick, valve springs etc)

Lol, that's probably not the definition of a Posi in anyone else's book. You may want to keep your eye open for another diff then. Driving around with street tires on a welded diff is not much fun, besides the fact it puts huge amounts of stress on your universal joints etc.

Jack the car up by the differential so both rear tires are hanging. Then spin one of the tires, if they spin opposite directions, it's an open differential, if they won't spin or spin the same direction, then you have some sort of posi or locker. Per the automatic trans cooler topic, OEMS generally run your transmission cooler line into a side tank of your radiator which somewhat defeats the point of trying to cool your trans fluid (if your engine coolant / radiator is 200°F+ already.....). It will help keep your temps from going beserk, but you're much better off plumbing in a generic or junkyard cooler, which is like a little radiator that mounts in front of your engine radiator. Basically, when trans fluid goes over 250°, the viscosity drops dramatically, which changes the fluid's friction (and changes the way it interacts with clutch discs, bands etc inside your trans). It's a downhill spiral; your fluid gets hot, the discs start slipping, all that extra wear puts bits and pieces floating around in your fluid, which then pumps around places you don't want little bits of metal and what not. And then your transmission dies.. Ack. I installed an aftermarket cooler and a temp gauge on my Cherokee, and was able to pull a large trailer (4500#) through mountain passes in the summer heat (105°F), no problem. Towing, you have to keep the torque converter locked if you want to keep heat down. Whenever the TC unlocks, you get a bit more torque (it feels like it's downshifting) but it's cranking out a TON of heat. The temp gauge needle will go from 180°F to 250°F incredibly fast if you don't manually downshift it. I know you're probably not planning on doing a lot of towing with your Z, but it was a learning experience for me too.

That car is sharp! Sounds great too.

One other item to consider, you mentioned the engine is 'solid mounted', well that in itself should be changed if you're street driving it...but the other item I was concerned with is the alternator mount on the frame rail. As the engine rocks around (on rubber mounts) you'll either tear up the belt, the alternator bearings, etc. That tensioner arm should be connected to the engine block/heads etc, so they can all move as one unit. Oh...and verify that it actually has a 'posi' unit. Very few people have put them in as it's generally expensive or not straightforward to do so in an R200. It's easy for a seller to claim to have a posi when they sell a car as who's going to open it up to check when they buy it?

If you were worried about it chipping apart worse, you could try to grind/sand/polish the chipped corners down to alleviate some of those stress risers at the chipped edges. At least it might keep some chunks from chipping off later and churning into bearings etc.

One excruciatingly slow step forward... New parts are in. I decided against using my Paxton (A1000) fuel pump, and instead found a guy on Craigslist selling a dual GLS392 setup. I'll probably run them both mounted together, but only run one pump at a time. I'd be lucky to hit 500hp, (rough rating for each fuel pump) let alone 1000hp (rating for two!). AND, I got a GT500 M122 which will be much easier than the Whipple I started with, and the Caddy SC I was using next along the line. One of these days I'll stop screwing around with these: And get back to the Z.

First try, it might be enough to just use the L6 power steering pump from a ZX, or Maxima with the stock Nissan pump. I'm guessing it won't be as high of a pressure, but if the Nissan pump put out (totally hypothetical numbers ahead...) 1500psi instead of 2000psi from the Ford pump, it would still provide great stopping power compared to the vacuum booster.

Do the earlier consoles line up with the later dash / radio / hvac area properly?

http://forums.hybridz.org/topic/97812-460zgt-project-build/?p=978422 With a stock center console, if you forego the switches (in my 78, there's a Haz, Def switch in the way) it will buy you a bit more space in the 'up' direction. Working with those two switches probably cuts 1.5" out of your clearance, I bet. Second thing, I just remembered, the 94+ V6 T5 (same 300ft-lb torque rating as the V8 T5) has a bellhousing/input shaft that is 3/4" deeper, which might help you. Granted, you'd need at least 3/4" of extra slip yoke on your current driveshaft to safely swap them, but if you do, that's a lot of easy space. I have a 94 V6 T5 behind my 351w in my wife's 65 Mustang, and it fit perfectly in that, while lots of guys with pre 94 trans have to trim the shifter hole to get clearance. If you don't have the driveshaft length, you might be able to get a set of universals that are offset, two of them should buy your 3/4" back I'd think. Oh, and there's a Facebook group, "V8 s30 Owners"; on Sept 29th, one of the guys posted up these two pictures:

Ha, I like the double back to back water pump pulleys, very clean.

Such good advise. I cut my first one out and had to make a steel sleeve to fit it back in. I wish Prothane, etc could include just a little slip of paper for instructions like this in the box. What would it cost them, $0.02?

Ha, been there done that. Nice surprise coming out of work with 0V on my battery. I'm sure it was good for it.

Yeah, but you should be able to run basically any 8.8 cover; steel, cast Al, whatever. I guess with a steel cover, you'd have to run some 5mm spacers between the mount and the cover, to account for the steel cover being thin, which would throw the front diff to body mounting holes out of alignment. The issue with doing a 'sandwiched' plate as you mentioned earlier is you have additional sealing surfaces to maintain. (So the whole plate will have to be very flat (±0.005"??) Are you thinking gaskets, or RTV here or what?

FYI, ZCar Depot 8.8 has put together a mount that is a perimeter cover mount, similar to what you mentioned making, I believe. Still not 100% sold on their front mount though....

Wish I had followed this thread earlier, it's was a good read. Something I started doing back about 9yrs ago, and ditched the project to put in my 4.6. Probably a better decision in the long run for me, but I kinda regret not finishing up the M62 setup.

Wow! Cool to see it's still on! One gauge idea is to use 'separable' (non overlapping) Ford gauges. It helps if the Odometer and Trip are on the same gauge face too. Lincolns, Tbirds etc are good candidates. I actually have an extra set I think from a '93 Mark VIII, so PM me when you get to gauges if you're interested. There's more details further on in my build post on getting them to fit, but they look pretty good (sorta stock) IMO. Frankengauges... Anecdotally, I don't remember which engine I was running when you started your swap, but I'm running the DOHC now too. Good choice over the SOHC. It pulls hard into the rev limiter now. Honestly with the '96 SOHC I had I didn't know the ECU even had a rev limiter!

I don't think you'll find any documented swaps here (although this is the place to look...). I put together a list of all of the builds here: Ford Swaps, so maybe there's something in there that would be of some use to you, at least to get ideas from, measurements etc. Some guys used mounting kits, some made their own. You'll surely be in the 'made their own' category when you get to it.

This topic has come up at a few companies that I've worked for when they put their 'QA FAILED' parts into the scrap bin, and get taken away to some mysterious destroying plant that no competitors or foreign nationals could possibly get their hands on to reverse engineer.... RIGHT. I had to break the news to them that scrap yards will gladly let you walk in off the street and purchase whatever scrap they have recieved at 2-10x the price they purchased it at. I've gotten Fox Racing parts, along with a handful of other company's rejects or tooling for pennies on the dollar because they had a surface blem or some other minor issue. Doubtful that happend at GM, but what might also happen is that something like 'early blocks' were purchased by GM's aftermarket sales department, and in the meantime, GM production recognized a problem on the production blocks, fixed the design/mfg issue, but never revisited the 1000 blocks GM aftermarket had already purchased, had in storage etc. Much easier to look the other way and ignore them. Bummer that you got one of these though.

Never would have guessed that.... http://www.tickperformance.com/tremec-108-thrust-washer-f-body-cobra-viper/

Looks like a seal... is it rubber on the inside, with a steel outer? Sorry if that seems obvious but that's what it looks like from the picture...

Thanks! I'm finally getting used to them. So shiny! ohhhhhhhHHHH....

Finally I have wheels I can balance on the car!! My front wheels were stock 14" rims that were so close to the brakes that I couldn't run balance weights in there. That sucked. I've been driving them unbalanced for a long time, and while it's only noticable at 45mph, I'm no longer doing 150mi a day on the highway. Almost all of my driving nowadays is 'around town' speeds and the wobble was driving me crazy. Anyways, I picked up a set of 16x8 Centerline Thrusters from another Z guy on Craigslist. The tires are significantly smaller in the rear compared to my old HUGE ones, so it has a much more agressive gear ratio again, but that will change when I get my 8.8 installed...someday. Only issue I had was instead of 4" backspacing, or even 4.5 which would work fine, these have 5" of backspacing which totally makes the WHEEL hit the spring perch on the front strut. Wah wah..... my 1/4" spacer came to the rescue. I'm not delighted I had to use the spacer, but it's cool I already had them. The car rides like it's on a cloud. You take 'balanced wheels' for granted unless you've driven the last....30k mi with wobbly fronts....