Daeron

I think that I shall never see a YouTube as musical, as a 20-B Because the sound of nine plus grand gets better the closer that you stand (with thanks and apologies to Jim Downing, wherever you are) (LOL @ BellSouth Mobility) Somewhere my youngest brother has a chunk of the body off of this car from the 1997 October Speedfest at Sebring, signed by Jim Downing and his entire team. EDIT Okay wrong car, the car in the photo is the FOUR rotor.. my brother got a piece of the three rotor car at sebring.

supplement or no, it might spin over but you are risking your engine, especially if you actually try to drive it under load like this. Remember, you are asking a 30 year old computer to do these things.. the only reason it even works on the L28 is because the tasks were very rigidly defined within a narrow band of functionality. The VE of the KA (like rontyler mentioned) is so utterly different that you are seriously going beyond the boundaries of what the L-series ECU expects and can deliver, as far as fuel, air and spark demands are concerned. The theory behind your setup is not entirely flawed; but it is more flawed than you might think. What makes you so urgent to run this engine before you have all the parts to it? In a fuel-injected vehicle, the ECU and associated sensors, etc are as integral as the intake manifold is to either an FI vehicle or a carbureted vehicle. Maybe the manifold from the BMW will fit on the RB.. but maybe not....

I can't recall the stock compression for a turbo engine, but wouldn't it run dog-weak, therefore causing you to put more foot into it? Even if the difference in compression is not that substantial, it probably plays a factor.. Methinks you would gain fuel economy not just by switching to megasquirt, but also by installing a turbocharger on that thing Alternately, you MIGHT be able to use the megasquirt to tune in an ULTRA economy setting and get her up to 30, 35 mpg.. I have been giving alot of consideration to an ultra economy L series engine, and what it would take to do it. Seeing what you could do with a lean fuel map for a lowball block would be interesting.. and is certainly nothing that cannot be changed later.

NEVER too much!!! You sure landed in this thread with a splash! I think this engine is probably one equipped with the Coates spherical "valvetrain" (forgetting the more precise terminology for it) and those things are just so COOL on paper... no clue how things actually work out, but I remember thinking when I first heard about it that it might just be capable of revolutionizing some things. Naive impressions of a fifteen year old as for the W9...

as I said in the thread he linked to, I have seen heard of this same thing happen when there was absolutely no cause to suspect any internal engine failure UNTIL a clogged filter, caused by collapse, impeded oil flow. Orange Fram. I drive a POS econobox subaru and i care enough about my engine to have changed it within a week or two, because buying and installing it gave me the buyer's remorse anyhow.

When I read this: I was just about to say exactly this: and this couldn't be any more true. I call it the "Wal-Martization" of America, and we have done it to ourselves from day one. I won't delve any further into THAT topic, but I WILL say that I have seen an EXTREMELY potent and expensively built Subaru EA82T engine (the engine in between the BRAT and the recent EJ series thats been in every subaru of the last 20 years) that did the EXACT same thing: FRAM orange filter collapsed, spun a bearing, motor was toast. N-E-V-E-R again will I buy a Fram product, of any sort, for just this reason. WIX all the way, unless I'm broke.. then its any reputable brand that I can find that weighs significantly more than the Fram. Seriously, I will find a Fram and compare my other options; if I can't find one heavier than the Fram, I go to another store. As for people running Royal Purple, or Amsoil.. they probably change their oil when it tests bad, or every 10-15K miles, whichever comes first. I would. If you test the oil every 10K and replace the oil every 5K, AND you are using something like royal purple in the first place... I've gathered that you are in the clear. Until I am convinced otherwise, this will be my opinion. Sucks about your motor, man!! I do my level best to spread the bad word on Fram Orange Filters everywhere I can.

I like your thinking

Gotcha, and I can't argue with that.. I just wanted to make sure that wasn't a "final plan." At one point, I know that I, personally, used to think that the improved stopping from simply the rear discs would suffice.. but now that I have driven more vehicles in general, and specifically a few Zs with some real brakes, I no longer feel this way. Good luck with the build.

Damn, beat me to it! Good delivery.

Late model GM products come with Maxi-Fuse blocks for their high power distribution items. They are blocks of like, 8 or more maxi fuses, but its a junkyard source of parts for you to put things back together again. Click on The link that reads "fusible links blow" in my sig to read what happened to me after Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne!! Looks ALOT like your car! (and I haven't driven her since! )

step one, go to http://www.rockautoparts.com or http://www.thepartsbin.com and do some research. Look up nissans and suabarus of recent enough model years to be nice, but still available in JYs. I found that late 80s maximas came with 90 amp alternators, and once I swapped the pulley it was essentially a straight bolt in. (to tell the WHOLE story, I realized that the 60 amp internally regulated alt on my old subaru was the EXACT SAME CASING as the stock alt from my 75 280Z, and wound up installing a 90 amp maxima alt in the soobie.. i've bolted it into the Z-car but never installed a belt or run the engine with it. To ACTUALLY install it into a running Z MAY take minor minor bracket modification, but nothing serious.) Anyhow, back to my point: find a modern Inifinit, or Pathfinder, with a 110 amp alt in it. Pull it. $40 from a greedy junkyard. When it goes bad, rebuild it; chances are your rebuild will be at LEAST as high-quality as the "sweat shop" rebuilt alts that sell for upwards of $100. I don't know how strong an alternator you can find this way; 90 is ample for me, and its super easy to find an 89 maxima in these parts. Installing an internally regulated alternator in place of your externally regulated alternator is a conversion that has been done MANY times, and written up almost as many. HTH

you won't get ALL the way up in your power goals, but a good running set of SU's will let you break in your engine and give it enough fuel to give you some NA fun by all means.... Just a thought, I don't know if you have any SU hardware around or not but if you DO, they WILL work on the stroker. They might want to be re jetted (I am not really a carb person, I am just regurgitating what I have picked up elsewhere) but I know people have run 3.1L with them in the past. You may also be going too aggressive with the camshaft selection.. High lift, high duration camshafts do not just make for more power, they move power up in the band (obviously you already know this) and ALSO DESTROY power lower in RPMs (ie, takeoffs are NOT quick; rolling starts are.) A big, lopey camshaft like that will also kill your fuel mileage, and at $4/gallon the difference between 15MPG and 22 is the difference between paying 270 in gas every 1,000 miles, and 180 in gas every 1,000 miles. (UTTERLY CRAZY when you think about it that way, but I checked my math three times.) I can't tell you those are precise estimates of what MPG you might achieve, but there will be a difference. To REALLY squeeze that power, AND that life expectancy, out of a stroker engine, REALLY requires a top-notch cylinder head, built by the best. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Just keep that in mind and read EVERYTHING you can about cylinder heads, and look at lots of pretty pictures of combustion chambers, and unshrouded valves. Building a powerful, naturally aspirated, carbureted engine is a true art form; don't get discouraged if you wind up coming to the conclusion that you have to settle for less than you want right now. This is the reason so many people opt for the turbocharger... With boost comes instant gratification! (well, once the boost kicks in anyhow ) Some of us do still believe in the delayed gratification available in having your throttle instantly available. Quite the dichotomy, eh? Turbo lag comes hand in hand with instant gratification, and discipline, dedication, and perseverance result in instant throttle-up!

Once Upon A Time, when I still had my 280Z Daily Driver, I, too, had plans of converting to rear disc (solid rotor 280ZX, had all the parts ready to go INCLUDING JY maxima brackets, but my brother threw it all away, @#%$%#) In all the testimony I have read being both an internet geek and a Z-car nut for these last ten years (Z-car my whole life) I have come to the conclusion that you will see MUCH more impact doing SOME sort of front brake upgrade, and simply getting top-notch shoes for the rear drum brakes (ie, "Green Stuff" or something along those lines.) As for the long term maintenance, obviously rear disc is the easy button, and SO much nicer looking behind those wheels, too.. but to leave stock front brakes and to upgrade the rear to discs is not likely (from what I have gathered) to provide too much of an improvement to braking performance. In other words, I used to think the EXACT same thing as you stated regarding brakes; nowadays I think alot harder about getting some toyota calipers and 300ZX rotors before concerning myself with rear discs. Most, if not everyone here probably agrees with me deep down. After all; THEY are the ones who convinced me (without even trying) that I was misled in my initial approach! Now, IF you were to do the entire rear subframe swap as mentioned above, then THAT makes a WORLD of sense, and I kinda like the sound of it... The rest all sounds about right.. I have never heard anyone complain about standard level Energy Suspension components, but if you want to spend a few extra bucks for some graphite I suppose it couldn't hurt. It's amazing, building one of these cars has become almost a formulaic thing, yet EVERY BUILD is still different.. gotta love it!

The best? In my experience, I would say that rebello 3.0 liter engines run best with Green turbo chargers.

I ask you this: have you gone through the stickies, and the FAQ links to offsite web write-ups, and the various threads discussing the head build? There is a TON of very very detailed description about this, and why you should and should not do it, and how it is done correctly. This thread, as thorough and concise as it has been, hasn't been anywhere NEAR "complete," so as long as you have done your reading then all it takes is patience and care, just like any proper performance head would. I wish you much success, and look forward to seeing your results. BTW, I only threw the term "quench" in there because thus far, THAT entire can of worms had not yet entered this discussion.. so I thought I would open it up

I think that the overall point of jeffp's posts has been that the p-90 shave job is NOT a light weight modification, and at least by some standards is too highly modified for utmost reliability at the ragged edge of performance. Top-funded projects, expecting top-quality performance and maximum reliability, demand properly assembled components, and shimming the towers up like this is a liability, if not quite a "risk" or an "issue." Electramotive (sp?) wouldn't be shaving P90s; if anything, they would be welding N42s. The focus of the misunderstanding is on the fact that some of us (like me) ARE budget-builders, and some of us are most assertively NOT, and ALL of us inherently have differing levels of craftsman's standards in our work. Put three guys in a shop, one will try to do the job as quick and dirty as possible, another will want to go to every expense to "do it right," and the third will be more moderate. Which guy is right? Typically its the second guy that winds up working for Porsche or Ferrari, or a Formula 1 team. All of us lie somewhere in between. FWIW, my amateur opinion is that I want to shave a P-90 and play some games with it; so I read every project that involves one and already know where to borrow copies of my Datsun engine books (honsowitz, and the other guys' too.) I have no illusions as to the righteousness of the build though, and I also have plenty of head cores to opt out to in the future if I decide I'm barking up the wrong tree. Now, on a lighter note, I am going to throw a chair into an already angry mob..... "Quench." :willy_nilYou may all go berserk now.

ShaggyZ: *IF* I am understanding everything rightly (and I am 99.99% positive I am) then the simple version is that there are two distinct sounds; the "exhaust note" and the actual firing of the engine. Picture a bugle being played by someone with eight lungs, each individually controlled (sorry, metaphor stretching) Since the "180* headers" tweak the pulses into the same order entering the pipes as the single plane crank would, the "exhaust note" is being played by a pair of lips doing the same thing.. BUT, underneath, the lungs are still bapping out from an "uneven" order, so the overall sound of the engine doesn't land quite in the same ballpark. In other words, the mechanical running of the engine in this even-fire order makes as much of a difference in the overall note from the exhaust, as the "exhaust note" achieved through header piping does. Also, the high revs go hand-in-hand with this "budget flat-plane SBC" idea, not for any particular reason to do with the crank; its a tad more complex than that. from what I have gathered, these flat-plane cranks are not easy to balance at high displacements, so Braap wanted to de-stroke it both to lower the displacement, but more importantly to reduce the linear speed that the pistons and roads move within the cylinder block. At 6000 RPM, a piston with a 4 inch stroke is moving 48,000 inches per minute; the piston with the 2 inch stroke is moving at half that speed, 24,000 inches per minute. This reduction in speed both lessens the sidewise-forces that needed to be balanced in the first place, AND allows for much cheaper, widely available parts to be used in the rotating mass. In short, the motor Braap is kicking around is not a high-revving, low-displacement, single-plane V8, made out of a SBC.... it is a "high revving low displacement single plane V8 made out of a SBC." (ie, not a motor with various attributes, but a set of attributes that combined make up a VERY particular motor) I hope this cleared something up. In all seriousness, if its total gibberish, someone please just delete this post send me a PM letting me know that I wasn't quite right enough to be any help.

Honestly, not much.. It was used in a failed F1 attempt in 90 or 91.. more info can be found here, and the engine earns a mention in the wikipedia article for "flat 12" but I suspect that may be due to a fellow subaru forum members passionate involvement in wikipedia... Sadly, it was apparently overweight and underpowered...(a mere 600 bhp) but that photo just LOOKs so COOL!! If more information was available on it, it would likely be disappointment.. but I'm sure the engine SOUNDS sexy.

Braap just turned me on to this thread (thanks paul) and I am 160 posts through, but I suddenly remembered this when the Subaru H-6 came up and just HAD to post it....

Now we know the REAL reason you insist on tapering the ID of your intake runners.... "maintain air velocity" indeed!!! Sick, Sick man. On a different note, this photo: definitely looks like the engine is older than I am, but I don't know my American Iron. To make a semi-worthy contribution to the discussion, here are a couple photos of an unidentified (I'm guessing SBC) V-8 ITB manifold that I had in a box in the back of my Zcar.. Whoever tells me what this goes to gets a cookie, with sprinkles on it if you can ID the funny thing with all the hoses on it, or that front cover; they were in the same box, so I snapped them in the picture so I had it on my PC for posterity's sake.

I have a four page FSM wiring diagram scanned into a pdf for the 75 280Z, and also three gif files that are excellent wiring schematics, but I do not know how complete the three gifs are relative to the entire actual vehicle.. PM me your email address and I will send you all files I have.

intake manifold might be a worthy investment too, if it isnt too expensive. Lucky.. I wish one of MY junkyards had a diesel maxima... but i don't feel like driving 250 miles to steal your find.

Yes there is.. a full shop or two loaded with nothing BUT Z-cars and roadsters, both road cars and race cars of each. Its not very pretty, or I would get a picture or two... but its sweet.

the E31 head was the original performance head on these engines. They can very easily be worked into very VERY potent pieces of equipment; many 240Z racecars have to run OE, year appropriate heads and as such much development has gone into the E31. Honestly, if you plan to go with the more "modern conventional" P90/N42 route, selling these two cylinder heads might generate some fundage for your project. Looking at the pictures, I almost want to say that the spare heads looks like it has been milled in the past, and I cannot ID the valves by size, but they may even be the later, larger valves. You might want to try to find photos of a known-stock E31, and take measurements on those valves.. I may be blowing smoke, but an E31 head CAN be a little gold nugget in a parts collection, so it is worth looking into. The car looks rough, but its a good find. You may have stumbled across a rare score here.. If *I* had picked this car up, I would be tempted to get a gasket set, pull the engine out and tearing it apart just to investigate what all it is made of.

....it goes over to a nasty, grease-stained Prestone bottle underneath the passenger side inspection lid.