seattlejester

Hmm what fuel pump? Do you have an inline fuse for the pump? Stock ECU? Some thoughts. Smell of fuel sounds like a simple fuel leak. Click click sound, sounds like you could have snapped an impeller in the pump. Probably not the case since you say you an still hear it priming. No voltage with initial key on sounds like you may have blown a fuse. Except the pump runs on initial key on, probably your ECU not running the pump, that is pretty standard for most ECU's after priming if the engine is not sending a crank signal. Fuel pressure gauge would be before the regulator on the feed line pretty much anywhere. You should have pressure before and during cranking, granted some regulators don't hold residual and will drain fairly quickly after the initial priming. If you don't then that makes me think you dropped a fuel line somewhere. After getting the fuel pressure gauge installed, run a positive 12volt constant connection and run it to the fuel pump and see if you build any pressure. If you do, then your ECU or fuse is preventing the pump from running. If you don't build any pressure I would think of a loose fuel line fitting, crack in the hose, or something physically wrong with the system including a potential bad fuel pump. Word of advice when you do things like run constant power, make sure to throw a switch in it so you can shut it off from the engine bay so you don't have to run all the way to the back of the car if something goes bad.

Preaching to the choir! Can't wait to actually put some hard miles on the suspension that I put in. I theory crafted myself into my setup. Would be nice to know how it plays against reality.

I mean regarding the nose diving, as you said it is all pretty relative relative we aren't talking about inches upon inches of dive here it is still a relatively stiff spring up front at 200-225, we're talking about just a bit more load for that initial turn in, of course too soft and you risk upsetting what the rear is doing or even overcoming the traction of the front tire with too much shift. I'm in full agreement there, but the reference was to I guess more shift then dive in this situation. I would say a macpherson can have quite a bit of anti-dive, depending on the caster. An E30 has macpherson struts up front but still manages a great deal of anti-dive. Granted an S30 is not going to have nearly as much given our shock tower limitation and just physical wheel placement limitation, just pointing out it is possible to get it though. Will do, I found it when I was looking up spring rates and it was complete enough to make sense to me. It may take a while though given it was one of the earlier posts. Regarding the frequency. Yes a higher spring rate is going to have a higher frequency in reaction to the bump in the speed it rebounds, but I guess I feel frequency is kind of strange word to describe the situation. It is an oscillation, but with the damper factored in we are talking about one stroke maybe some other residuals, but still the main return rate. It is a stroke vs time which I suppose the correct unit is indeed hz, but feels odd to talk about one oscillation using the turn frequency. Bottom line is that you want to combat some rear roll. I think rather then upping your spring rate, adding an anti-roll bar would probably be a good starting point along with the suggestion of looking at a smaller profile tire for the CG and roll characteristics mentioned. Looking into tuning spring oscillations without dampers on a road car without a spring dyno seems like going to far technical here. Granted you could just try out a heavier setup and find it suits you more. Fun discussing this stuff, granted I'd very much more like to do more practice then bench racing.

Hmm your current setup sounds fairly ideal spring rate wise. Although I think for track driving T3 was saying 225/250 would probably be better. I would be wary of comparing to 510 springs rates, they look to have a more compact design in the engine bay which would make me thing they could support the additional spring rate, the rear suspension also reminds me of the E30 which given the cantilever type of setup can run surprisingly stiff springs fairly comfortably. I'm obviously not as experienced as others, but off the bat I would suggest getting a rear sway bar, the ST sway bar with the alignment fix is a pretty good piece, and possibly upping the front sway bar. Upping the spring rate will improve the body roll, but will be more or less a harder ride all the time, where as with thicker swaybars you could maintain the same ride quality while getting a little bit more help in the corners. I would kind of stay away from the stiff spring/no sway bar group. You can get there, but usually the spring rate required makes the car quite harsh unless you have some really good dampers. I would imagine if people did get there with the Z's it would be more of a trailer to and from kind of car just based off of what I have been in. Currently lacking the rear sway bar means that the suspension doesn't get any help in the corners so it would make a fair amount of sense you have quite a bit of roll. I think that spring rate is with the assumption that both bars are in play no? Curious who is running without sway bars and the spring rates they run. Additionally, upping the front spring rate is going to have a diminishing effect after the 225lb/in rate unless you have some bracing as the chassis deflection will start to come more into play. To quote the late John Coffey "What works on a 240SX does not work on a 240Z. Unless your 240Z has a very effective roll cage that ties in the front strut towers, spring rates over 300 lb. in. on the front are questionable The problem is that the front structure itself starts to flex at spring rates over 300 lb. in. (seen it and measured it). I know some road racers with 8 point cages have made 350 lb. in. front spring work with just a strut tower bar but I'm skeptical." The tire aspect ratio seems a bit on the tall side as chicken man suggested, I was running a 215/55/15 and hated that, felt really tall and rolly. I would shoot for a 225/50/15 or something of that nature, if you step down even further to a 225/45/15 you can even run the bridegestone g-force rivals which are quite sticky. Your reasoning is a bit off. While the spring does rebound and such you have to remember the damper is there to prevent the frequency, so more so think of it in terms of weight. When you accelerate and the weight shifts back having the slightly increased rear spring rate helps keep the car on neutral footing. Under braking you want your car to roll towards the front when you brake to load up the front so having that softer is beneficial. There is a good post/article on the reason the weights are what they are on the Z cars as most newer cars run backwards of what we usually see (higher springs up front, lower in the rear), I'll have to see if I can find it at a more sane hour.

Oh gotcha, I didn't realize you had the MS3x, the 3.57 board usually made me think MS2. You do have ITB's so you could run per cylinder tuning if you wanted to go insane, but that would require even more o2 sensors. Honestly even two seems overkill to be realistic.

If it was carbeurated and you could get the paired cylinders then it might be useful to tune the carbs. For EFI it depends on your fuel control. I think my MS3.57 only has two channels for fuel although I don't recall if you can run them independently. I seem to recall a setting like that for things like V engines or dual injectors so it may be available. So if you did split the channels for 123, 456 then you could basically monitor the fuel and trim the fuel and treat the car like it has two 3 cylinders in regards to fuel. Downfall would be if you wanted the most out of it you would have to look at two logs and tune two maps basically, then run two O2 sensors. If you wanted to keep track of them that would also be two wideband o2 gauges as well.

Chicken man is onto something although one would assume your AFR gauge and your ECU are reading off the same o2 sensor. You have to answer the questions man, questions that have been fairly repeated at this point. I think I'm out here.

That makes so much more sense now. You are tuning via FPR... Also the reason why you can't supply duty cycle numbers voltage correction etc. You don't have access to them. Where is your boost reference to the boost gauge and to the FPR from, are they from the same spot? Have you checked the oil? If the excess fuel isn't coming out of the exhaust via black smoke then it is being washed down into the oil. If you aren't going to switch to a tunable ECU which I think nistune would be the easiest and if AFR bothers you, turn up the boost. Granted if the ECU has a boost scalar then you are never going to get ahead of it. Keep in mind if this is for a Z31 then it is for a different motor the VG30 which is going to have a different efficiency not to mention different displacement off the bat. It really isn't running strong. Most turbo cars make the most power from 11.5-12.5AFR so you are definitely in the rich camp and probably leaving power on the table. You could actually be hurting the motor with that "tune" by washing the cylinders of lubricating oil and diluting your oil supply, I hope you change the oil often.

I think I get it now. At idle 30psi of fuel pressure At 20lbs of boost 61psi of fuel pressure. You are basically making 10psi out of step with your boost. Playing the video really slowly screen by screen I am seeing the fuel pressure spike to what looks like 40psi at around 0lbs of boost. Then rising in a linear fashion with boost more or less. RRFPR's aren't suppose to play an affect under non boost conditions, but it seems like yours is going up 10psi before you actually get into boost. That makes what NewZed was saying earlier suspect, where are you getting your vacuum/boost source for the gauges/FPR? Edit: Disregard I'm an idiot, but I'll leave it up here. At idle you are in vacuum which helps suck the fuel in basically equating to the base pressure plus the vacuum so 40ish psi. At all points it seems like your system is functioning correctly At idle with vacuum -10-15psi of boost 30psi of fuel pressure, total pressure at injector face 40psi Starting to build 0psi of boost, 40 psi of fuel pressure, total pressure at injector face 40psi Boost built 20psi of boost, 60psi of fuel pressure, total pressure at injector face 40psi So the FPR seems happy and the fuel pump seems happy and it seems like your lines are working in this instance. I'm kind of back on board with my original though of injector sizing or an injector fault. What are your injector duty cycles? Another thought would be the charging system. Do you have a voltage correction table? Does your voltage in your system change at all while you drive? If you do have a mis calculated voltage correction table you could be compensating additionally which may cause the system to inject more fuel into the system. Lastly was this car tuned? Since it seems your fuel system is functioning and if it isn't a fault then logic dictates that fuel should be pulled from the system.

Wait are you trying to tune via fuel pressure?

So data points from what I can see on the video: 30psi fuel pressure off boost 62psi fuel pressure at what I am guessing is 30+lbs of boost, tapering to 61 psi as boost tapers down to 30psi (hard to tell on the gauge) The only thing that seems odd is that when you hit what looks like 34-35lbs of boost your fuel pressure gauge does not go all the way up to 64psi it stays at 62 psi. Suggesting maybe you are maxing out your fuel pump or as mentioned above you are dumping fuel. Have a duty cycle table we can look at? The pressure seems correct for the level of boost you are running assuming you are running a RRFPR or a FPC.

Well not that you run out of injector, but if the injectors stuck open like a really high duty cycle you wouldn't be injecting as much as hosing. I've seen dyno runs where that happens and they just basically run pig rich when it sticks open although that is usually accompanied by fluctuation at the FPR, usually solved by going to an uprated injector and running a lower duty cycle or turning down the boost. It sounds like your FPR and your fuel pump are working if you aren't loosing fuel pressure in boost within a certain margin of error. Have you tried to lean out the tune?

Goodness 27psi, what power territory are we talking about? What turbo out of curiosity? Do you have your duty cycle on the injectors? We might definitely be in the territory where you are maxing out your injectors and they are basically just dumping fuel instead of injecting. That does seem quite a bit to be running through the factory fuel rail with the bends and the hoses and things like that. Have you had the car tuned to try and lean out the map? Or is this more of a sudden occurrence?

I would think they would hold up fine given that they would mostly be under compressive forces given their angle short of a wheel going off track and trying to pull the car back on I don't see any real stretching force applied. If say the tie rod was inboard located at the TC bucket and a solid clevis used I think it would still function well. Using the solid clevis turns this setup basically into an A-Arm of sorts locking the tension arm to the main control arm during suspension travel. During braking the force will be transmitted directly to the bucket and has no risk of collapsing the arm as there would be with two joints as I understand it. I'm not sure the sway bar comes into play here. The only concern I may chime in with would be material thickness and strength. I want to say the T3 arms employ some very large threading more in the 3/4 range if memory serves for the threaded bits.

65psi is really a lot of fuel pressure. You might be maxing out the flow on the lines already. Factory says maybe 36 or something if I remember correctly. The only reason I would see to turn up the pressure was if you didn't have enough flow out of your injectors and you wanted to force them to spray a bit more fuel.

Oh yea, when I flipped the mount plates I got like an extra inch of adjustment vertically, I spaced the passenger side a bit, and modified the driver side quite a bit. Engine sits about maybe 3/4 of an inch above the steering rack right now, pretty darn centered. One of the big benefits to this is that I can reuse my stock exhaust which tucks into the trans tunnel. Big 3 inch with a bullet muffler and if you look under the car you can barely see the muffler sticking out slightly under the floor, but still above the frame rails.

Congrats on progress. Goodness gracious your floor/frame rails look pretty beat up lol, hopefully plans to address that in the future? I thought I would surge ahead here, but seems like you are going to beat me to the first start up!

For me it was pure maintenance driven, a couple pumps of a jack and you are off the ground with threaded body coilover. Performance wise, no difference, other the the fact a non threaded body coilover could have more traction on an off camber corner, whereas a threaded body coilover would be more likely to lift a wheel off the pavement.

Those pictures are hilarious Ereschkigal. I knew they were off, but wow. I've also seen a car with 15x7 and flares. He was running 2 inch spacers, looks really bad from the back. If you are getting flares because you want the extra track width, then go with what ever is cheapest and make it fit, if you want a really nice finish without having to dick around I would say to run MS. I saw a guy running MSA flares, and you could visibly see through the gap between the body and the flare. Said he couldn't risk bending it more without cracking, so had to put washers between so he could tighten them down without putting tension on them.

Welcome to the forums. Don't forget: atlanticz.ca for some really good guides xenonzcar.com/ for FSM's and popular mod guides The decision on driveline is going to be up to you. It is something you are going to have to live with after all. From the resale perspective it seems nissan engine swapped Z cars sell easier then other swapped cars . From the layout perspective I like toyota motors for keeping the intake on the driver side giving you all the room to work on the passenger side without worrying about steering columns, master cylinders, etc. From the price perspective an american V8 is hard to beat hp/$, parts are cheap and plentiful. I could walk into a local machine shop and have them build me a 500+hp engine in a day or two as they keep all the parts in stock or can walk to a speed shop and have all the parts the next day. Also keep in mind that with upgraded power you are going to have to upgrade other driveline components to compensate. A single turbo LSX in my mind would be a waste unless it put out at least 600hp and torque. At that level we are talking some pretty expensive parts for axles and stub axles alone, costs that would probably trump the cost of the engine, bits, and transmission. The allure I see up there is you have access to GTS-T cars and can take all the driveline components. Using a T3 rear end swap kit, Mckinney engine swap kit, you could have a pretty bolt in affair.

Jegs, Summit, Coleman, just about any race oriented place will carry generic 2.5 inch springs in 6, 8, or 10 inch lengths. Given that you will have to cut your perch off to get the clearance you would have to know exactly the ride height you were going to run if you didn't run an adjustable collar and adapt up top to a collar that would retain the 2.5 inch spring. I think the only place that provides a 2.5 inch spring for stock strut assemblies is cosmo, in one of their installs they don't even cut the factory perch so in theory you could shave an inch off the inside, not have to do any welding, and get clearance, granted given the spring is now even shorter it is stiffer which means normal shocks are not going to be valved to deal with that.

Yea, you need to come up quite a bit. As someone else said your setup is basically a pump right as the fuel sloshes it pushes fuel in the vent and just flows straight down, each subsequent pulse acts like a pump and keeps pushing fuel Through the loops and eventually out the vent. Where the tee is you need to come up like a foot or so before going down, give some of the gas that flows in a chance to flow back into the tank.

Well thanks for taking the bullet for us, nice to know there is an option for handling power with say Derek's head and a bit of boost.

You can swap the left and right cable after the equalizer and the first retaining tabs if memory serves, basically shorten the cable by making it run a longer route. Alternatively you can take the long rod out and put more threads on it. The upper one can technically be adjusted, but it is more so there to release the equalizer. Not much thread there to play with to start as well.

I played around with how the engine was sitting probably 4 times or so, lifting up one side, loosening the bolts, dropping it. Loosening all the bolts and trying again. Basically for it to be perfect would mean modifying the driverside mount again, really not too concerned with a little bit of lean. Decided to swap out the water pump, because no matter how many times I looked at it, it definitely looked wrong and old. Not wanting to mess around with getting the wrong back half, I ordered a complete non vvti water pump. You can see that this pump is held in by 4 bolts not just one and that the bolt holes line up. One thing I didn't realize was that the water pump pulley bolt spacing is different. By my guess and what background I remember, the PO having done a few JZ's probably had a spare VVTI pump that was in decent condition and decided to swap it onto the motor. So I tracked down a water pump pulley on eBay and bought it. I did some other bits like clean up the oil filter adapter, I was tempted to run just a union bolt, but really the adapter wasn't what failed, it was the adapter to the adapter to the remote oil filter line that worked its way loose that failed. So stock it stays for now. With some the accessory bits done, I started moving onto the big pieces. I put the ARP studs in hand tight, then put on the cometic 2.4mm gasket. I'm reading more and more about people having them leak, so there is a bit of concern, but I am ever hopeful especially since the 2jz-ge non VVTI runs a 0.2mm gasket which is ever so tiny and basically means a uniform starting surface and I had my head machined flat so I am hoping the seal is good. I read some reports of people installing gaskets upside down, but the 2jz has an oil port on the near the firewall on the passenger side, not sure how you can install a gasket upside down when there is an offset hole. Then came the head. I really should have waited for someone to give me a hand, but I just couldn't wait or be bothered to try and bother someone. The loaded head was probably 40lbs or so. Not too bad, but being long made the balance hard to hold. Glad to say I didn't drop it, although I did have to rest it on the studs, I made sure to not scrape across the surface. Once lined up the head basically dropped into place guided by the studs. On the 2jz and I think 7m as well you have to remove the cams to tighten the head bolts. Turns out in addition to removing the cams and towers, you have to remove the stud to put on the ARP washer. I backed them out one at a time and placed the washer then reinstalled the stud. I think it was probably better to do it the way I did so that you know 100% the gasket is aligned, but at the same time with the indexing guides on the head and block probably could have saved myself some grief. I threw some valve covers on for the time being. I have to go back and tighten everything, but was dead beat having leaned over the engine all day. Looks like it lines up better then I thought. I'm working on the attachments while I wait for some important parts to come in to finish the water system, timing belt, and accessory belt. Ordered my turbo and that apparently has a 3-4 week back order so I have time to mess with the turbo manifold later. Currently working on the FFIM and the lower intake runner. Going through craigslist to find an aluminum welder that can weld in my vacuum/boost reference block and my throttle body adapter once I figure out which one I want to use. If anyone has any recommendations would love to hear them.