Tony D

Then I'm full of crap on that one John. I did the conversion on Jeff Ellis' 1978 Fairlady Z in 1987 before he shipped the car to Florida. Last I heard he was working for an airline down there. I could put that car in second gear and simply lay on the throttle and P195 60-14's would break free and boil. No clutch kicking to spin a donut, and it was all-in at 5500 rpms. The car was very drivable when short-shifted. Sometimes you can tailor a vehicle to a persons driving style, and while it may not be 'the ultimate setup in your mind' --- for the customer they LOVE IT! There are several 'satisfied customers' with similar setups simply because L28 Manifolds used in sedans didn't fit well under the Z Hoods, or line up as needed, so I did several conversions like this. The engines were torquey at the bottom end, moreso than the big runner engines. But over 3500 and to redline the bigger runnered engines pulled harder. Jeff sent me a letter and was very happy once he returned to the USA. The ability to lug the engine at 45mph in fifth gear made for nice mileage and overall he was very impressed with the results. And it still went 120+, so for him that was all that mattered. Sometimes people need to put aside their predetermined thoughts on what is 'acceptable performance' and realize people want what they want, and if it's not what YOU want, then you have to live with it. This is probably one of those situations, John... Feel Free to look up Jeff Ellis, maybe you can get his take on the car. On the same subject, slipping links on the timing chain is a horrible way to kill the top end power, but it does similar things to moving the powerband around. Did that, too. Some guys loved it because they grew up with Hydraulic Liftered V8's that floated the valves at 4500 rpms and shifted religiously at WOT at no more than 4000 rpms. "Getting on it" for them involved a WOT run to 3500 and upshifting on the way to work most of the times. I've said it before elsewhere: For about 85% of the people posting on these forums, you could substitute a Diesel Jetta engine into their Z-Car and they would NEVER know the difference. They take being shifted at 3K very well, and you can run them to 5K at 140KPH in 3rd gear for a hoot. Hell, I videoed it last time I had one in Spain!

Loadings in compression are not that big a deal. If you hit something with the road wheel hard enough to damage the frame, you've bent the TC rod into a "U" anyway. I have a 240Z that is 3/8" shorter on the left side than the right. Door gap is less than 0.020" front and back---had just the situation I mention above---hit HARD and compressed the frame backwards. The whole car flexed because that section of the frame rail is so stout! The Firewall flexed so far the back of the throttle linkage for the SU's popped out! I've got them on my 73, but when they go together again, they will have a real ball-socket type arrangement like VA engineering makes, or something with a heim joint on it (is that what Techno Toys sells?). Really deflecting the bushings isn't the most precise way to do it, and it can screw with the spring rate of the wheel drooping. A ball or heim let's it pivot freely and doesn't affect suspension movement. Just my .02

The big question is did you pull the pan for an inspection BEFORE you put the engine in the car. It's totally possible the skirts were broken like that when you installed it, and nothing you did contributed to it at all. I have run across several Turbo engines where that was the case... They will run quite well with no skirts. I think Bernard was doing 11's in his car with all six broken off and laying in the pan bottom! But he's off a bit. LOL

I wouldn't say 400 HP is the limit of the platform, but for a stock head gasket and bottom end it likely is pretty much the upper limit for durability of any sort. I mean, if you think about what you have... You could buy another junkyard engine for $450, put it in and run it. Cheap. When it happens again, repeat. Somewhere down the line, you will either have plenty of cores to build the thing the right way after getting your tuning rock solid tuned correctly, or plenty of prospective wine racks when you swap to a V8... Either way, for the current price of L28ET's I'd get another and go on a-boostin! Maybe put the feelers out for anybody getting rid of L28ET stock pistons and rods as a set for a 'rotating exchange' sort of setup between two engine blocks...

I could sell John C the Mill, and you could send it to him to do it right then!

You will be sorely disapointed with a 'stroker with tripples' after what you had Bo. Drop the boost just a tad and live with only 390HP than doens't cause any problems. I ran a max of 350HP, and turned it back to 275-300 and have put well over 40K on a stock N/A L28... not that it's run for 10 years... but that is beside the point. When one of my turbos lost a thrust bearing and lunched, I drove it for a while with tripples only...and was sorely disapointed. Once you feel the power of the dark side, going back to the ways of a common villager is hard... your only option is to go bigger, or boost higher...

Woah woah woah here! If you have a 260, I'm referring to an L26. The camshaft is decidedly different than what came on L28's. If you have an L28 in your car with a stock cam, 5500 is about 300 rpms past your power peak. They will rev higher, but if it's EFI that is falling off, you have dirty connections in the injector circuit. The discussion was about carbs, and in a 260Z which has different characterisitics from a 240, and from a 280. One of the biggest things you can do to 'wake up' an L28 is find one of the earlier cams from a 240, and install it. Moves the power band around a little bit, and if you have taken steps to bump compression to comparable to what the 240 had, you will be pleasantly surprised at the outcome. But new 240 cams aren't really forthcoming, they are junkyard finds now.

Stock Exhaust? Mine was giving me fits for some years, I'd dismissed the exhaust concentrating on fuel. Before MSA this year, and after having driven it daily for a while, I changed the exhaust to the MSA 2.5", and viola! Car went back to revving up to redline again. I'd removed the resonator (premuffler) some time ago...I couldnt' believe only having the stock muffler out back would cork it like it did. I haven't pulled it apart yet, but plan to just to sate my curiouisty on what happend inside the muffler to cork it up so bad...

I ws thinkin' Centruy Big Red Buzz Box for that welding job...maybe some ER6013 rods they always make such a nice weld...

The stuff we put in the container was a 'no residue' spider killer made for something like 3000 square foot house. It was a little cup you filled with water and then dropped the cannister into it. Got it at the local Ace Hardware Store. It was next to the Red and Yellow four-hour foggers (which we also used...) Hence my relabeling it 'Spyderkon Z' (after the wonder Zyklon B, which was activated similarly...) A cople of those on a little cardboard boxtop in case the stuff boils over, left to simmer overnight with the windows rolled up should do the trick inside the car. If you have a driveway, you can take the whole box of them (there are three or four in the box as I recalled) put one on the floorboard inside, two under the front, two under the back, then cover the whole car with a piece of plastic 4 mil dropcloth and put sand down around the edges to seal it (like tenting the house for termites). That should kill everything on the car. If you only have dirt, I'd wet it all down, then cover it and drop the pellets to send the Spiders to their Valhalla. My suggestion, when doing this: Play Wagner Operas during the gassing time. I don't know, maybe it's my German Heritage, I have a knack for gassing animals. You should see the tailpipe conversion for a garden hose to stuff down gopher holes! Hell, I even use a Volkswagen to supply the gas! Just for historical accuracy and link to the past... LOL I'm over the edge here, aren't I?

Any 45 minute phone call with LA Sleeve or Darton will open a prospective L-Builders eyes WIDE. Follow that up with a discussion with Brian Crower, and you likely will never make a concrete statement as 'since 3.2 is the limit' ever again! This comes from discussion based around "E" displacement Land Speed Racing. The decision to try to make an L Engine legal up to 3.5 L for running in the Production Class, rather than buying another chassis (240 Coupe) to run in "GT" class where an RB30 and G35 engine would be legal was worth the effort. The torque provided by six cylinder engines makes for some advantages compared to the V8's that run out there. Having torque arms that can pull the next gear makes for a good top speed run. And torque, as you know, is nice on the street as well... All it takes is a couple of phone calls to knowledgable vendors, and being willing to front the money to have them do their magic...and the sky is the limit. Like I said above, if you are needing Nissan Metal to run upon---if that's your bag, then you may well limit your options. And in that case the choice of the F54 would seem silly. But if you are open-minded, and will let the block simply act as a support for some professionally designed liners there is more available than most people think. Spuncast ductile iron can be pretty tough...if they can hold the cylinder pressures of Nitro-Burning NHRA Cars with 'X' wall thickness---who is to say what a normal street engine on gas with 30PSI of boost needs? They can tell you, and it's thinner than what many people think! To put a point on it, my 'beef' was with someone making a statement like it was a 'fact'---that 3.2 was the 'limit'---period. It's not, and nobody should be saying it is, regardless of the conditions they might place on it when a 'no budget' build is being discussed.

"Mandatory Time off Without Pay"---I'm not sure of any other way to spell furlough. Furlow is something altogether different, and is crawling all around the Orchard Towers each evening...

Excuse me please: Johore Speaking of "Johore", I ended up at the Orchard Hotel, right across the street from Orchard Plaza in Singapore....(google...) More importantly, Muddy Murphy's Pub is in the basement, and tonight at 7PM they will be airing the Turkish F1 Race. I know where I will be tonight! Woo Hoo!

Really the only effective difference I have noticed is that they jacket a standard core and make a multi-pass water flow through a standard Air-Air core. Take a good close look at the photo 510 Six posted, and the larger Eclipse unit looks to have been just that. Having seen them making up the Ford Lightning Prototypes at Garrett R&D, this is more than truthful as to what the end unit looked like. Really, the mose efficient method for doing it is to flow the water through the AIR side of an Air-Air cooler, and then flow boost through the core in one pass...but with much thicker core (think like an A/C Condenser). These people aren't making dedicated water-air coolers, in most cases they just jacket the air side and pass the air through where it already went. Paxton flows through the tubes I believe, but when you knock it down...without the jackets you can use it either way. Thermal Transfer makes most of the Intercooler Core Blanks for general industry and is an OEM supplier for most of the automotive truck brands. When you start looking around at their offerings, most are not dedicated water cooled exchangers (multi-pass air flow over tubes) simply because mobile installations do not permit the space for mounting those kind of coolers. So they take what is normally sized for the application and make a water jacket for it.

Frank 280ZX imported a whole containerload of Black Widows (along with six Z-Cars) from my back yard to Holland some years back. Took another container with a couple cases of smuggled bug bombs to kill off that which was exported. This last shipment we fumigated the container heavily. How Heavily? The shipper was all upset that we fumigated it (I guess he would have been better with Marble Sized Black Widows hungry after a month at sea crawling everywhere and working through webs like the Munster's house on Mokingbird Lane...) So when they opened the doors on the 28th, the sniffed with some special atmosphere testing apparatus, and left the doors open, but backed against the building so nobody could get anything out...for two days! Then, the guy said "How much did you put IN here anyway? There's still residue in there---it's not good, but we have to return the container!" We packed that container the day after MSA and shipped it off. Perhaps the 'Spyderkon Z' bubbly containers right at the back end of the container caused them concern. Frank said just like the last shipment, there were dead spiders all over inside the container. That answer the question on 'how they got there from South Africa' as well? Blam Frank 280ZX and his transoceanic shipments. They don't bug me much. Unless they are active I let them go about their business. They eat the little scorpions that hide in the grass...

I think there's a Korean make sold domestically "DONG-IL" if you had a skilled inkman I know where you could have that put... But you couldn't show us the photo here. Nor would we want to see it!

Are we limiting ourself to the F54 Thin Walled Casting? That, to me would seem far sillier than using the most suitable block for overboring... As to 3mm wall thickness, depends on your 'liner' material; plan on using stock Nissan Metal for the cylinder walls, or using the block merely as a positioning guide? What is the distance headbolt to headbolt diagonally? And who says the bore is the limiting factor in Displacement... There are 2.8L Air Cooled Type 1 VW's now in the original stock case dimensions. It's only your imagination that limits you once you determine the physical dimensions really 'really' constrain you in the build. Reading what everybody else 'says' may not be the most prudent course...unless you're capable of reading Japanese. Methinks their thoughts of physical constraints are different from US definitions which were more a function of racing series rules than anything else. The US was not a hotbed of street-L-engine development. In Japan I'm sure there are a lot of guys telling you the limit for a SBC is one thing, when you now know you can go 454CID in that little package (at least here in America you can...)

What the hell, it's the most recent that I have available:

I went through ASE certification in MICHIGAN of all places, but having had numberous VW engines apart it always raised questions as to why American OEM's did what they did. When I got exposed to Japanese Engine Guts, it was all over again new... Growing up under the wing of Big Daddy GM and Ford who donated copious ammounts of engines, cars, whatever to the local Auto Tech programmes at the high schools, I got spoiled. We had guys directly from Champion Spark Plug in Flint come up and give presentations to a high school auto shop class... And when the more advanced students showed interest in what was going on, the guys were more than willing to take some time to go in depth on their subject expertise... Really, I think they were cultivating their next generation of field trainers and seminar presenters... but it was all good. The biggest mistake my old high school made was turning the auto shop and machine shop (and likely the wood shop as well) into a computer lab. I personally know of at least three people that came from that program in two years attendance that were taken into GMI, or other 'feeder programs' for the Big Three OEM Representative grooming programs. Yeah, that's roughly 1% of the population that graduated from the school those two years. Had I accepted my apprenticeship to M-B that would have made 4 out of 259 students going directly to OEMs straight out of high school. Over 2% when you consider the guys that went directly to dealerships to work, or on to feeder technician programs. What do those guys do now? Sit behind a computer and get bored stiff waiting to get outside and work on their cars? It's a shame, really it is...

All I got to say to that comment is 'who says'? Having been run around in a 3.3L L-Engine in 1985 in Japan, (and maybe it wasn't a 'real' 3300 cc's, maybe it was a 3268cc motor, or maybe a 3251cc motor...) I'm thinking I want to know the sourcing of the claim that 3.2L is the 'limit for the block'.

When I lived in Japan, my Japanese Friend who was into Mustangs kept quizzing me about things he thought were 'odd' about building the Ford engine...the biggest thing that irked him was the fact that you had to make the rings fit! He never understood, and always asked me why they weren't like Nissan or Toyota rings that 'fit right out of the box'... I also couldn't answer another difficult question he had at that time, which was why contentious UAW workers were chanting 'shut em down'---he says 'If the company closes, won't they ALL be out of work? Why do they want to do that?' This was 1986 when he asked me that question... I couldn't answer it then, still cant! Best I could do in both cases was say 'It's always been that way with them!' American Piston Rings and the UAW, that is!

Converting a core to water/air is not that difficult and there likely is some efficiency in actually flowing water over the I/C cores to carry away heat into the thermal mass. Then again, putting an external water pump (Like the Bosch Water Pump for the Ford Lightning I/C setup) to a sparger tube under the 'radiator' side of the core and tapping off the bottom of the cooler would probably impart more than enough water flow over the core to make it for all intents and purposes just as efficient an intercooler. Likely with an Air/Air Core at the front of the car to drop some BTU's out first, the one in the water chest will result in more than perfect intercooling, and more than likely make for air considerably cooler than ambient going into the engine. Denisity is your friend! I have seen an L-Engine setup where the turbo went to an Air/Air up front, and then went through a supplementary Paxton Air/Water unit just before the throttle body. Through the Paxton unit, there was a water wetter/water mix circulated from a 21 Qt Dry Sump Tank mounted near the Right Rear corner of the car. The Dry Sump tank would be filled with water/waterwetter and ice. Air densities (especially on dyno runs) were quite interesting! F1 cars in the 80's actually used I/C bypass systems to keep the air at a standard density for proper fueling and fuel atomization. On one make, they needed a 130F intake air charge in order to keep their fuel in a light viscous form---any cooler and they would have 'fuel' that acted like sprayed syrup! Stationary engines also use thermal control to the intercoolers to make for consistent air inlet temperatures regardless of ambient variations/fluctuations.

This is an impossibility, anybody who has spent time on the track knows there is nothing regardless of cost, that can't 'go away' in 30 seconds on the track when you least expect it! Also...what 'track'---that build which is suitable for a drag engine would never hold up for a 24 hour enduro event or boat service (don't laugh, there are L-Series Boats out there!) And that which is suitable for Weekend AutoX may be too light duty for open track use on longer sessions (like mini batteries and flyweight alternators with poor regulation on a heavy EFI-Dependent System). I mean, what is your specific application? What is 'good' for you will likely not be for the next guy unless he's doing exactly what you're doing...and what's the chance of that??? Is this basically 'What are the best parts for this type of build?' kind of thread...

You don't want any sort of bellows style piping on the pump inlet, it causes too much turbulence, and anything picked up off the bottom of the sump in operation could become lodged in the 'pleats' and dislodge later to be carried into the pump. The Nissan external oil pump modification used A/N Spec -10 medium-pressure hose from the pickup to the pump cover, and bypassed (plugged) the smaller internal gallery. Discharge from the pump also bypassed (again, it was plugged) the internal block passage, and instead went from pump discharge to the oil filter inlet in the side of the block to feed the engine from there. It was up to you to add filters, coolers, etc between the pump, and the block. Basically, the pickup was almost identical to the stock screen covered unit, but with 15mm tubing in it, which came directly out the side of the oil pan, with the -10 AM Male fitting on it for hookup to the suction hose going to the modified pump cover. I don't see any reason a -8 Stainless Hardline couldn't be routed similarly externally, though it's I.D. would be slightly less than the -10 flexible. From my understanding of the modification, the big suction line really helped with the flow capability of the stock L-Pump, and I would assume it holds true to other models pumps as well, pumping losses are pumping losses! Good Luck, hope this was of some help.

Looks like a visit to Castle AFB to visit my old friend will be in order, thanks a lot for that! I have officially been outdone as well... That guy in Ohio who has 'pieces of the B36 being used as storage sheds' on his farm is definately got it worse than I do... I mean, I would love to have the opportunity to bid and buy something like that, just to stick in the back yard and PO the neighbors when I'm 80 (er... or 50...) but MAN! To actually live the dream! TOO cool. That is a definate 'one up': "Yeah, well I got a disassembled Strategic Bomber in my back yard!" LOL