[Making my own EFI intake... The First Casting]

Glass Bead it and coat it with alodine.

 

I went through extended fabrication on a copy of the HKS Surge Tank back in the 80's. Nice tank. Didn't use the sloped front end, as my entry was in a different place.

 

Cardboard mockup seemed to fit well enough...

 

At idle, after a few launches I noticed a crack in my paint, as well as an annoying 'knock knock knock'...

 

Thought it was the compressor bypass valve popping, nope. Saw paint rubbed off the bottom of the hood. Noticed paint on the frontmost corner of the surge box---you know, the one I didn't put a tapered front end on?

 

Hmmm, the box fit with...damn. Mikuini Manifold off, Cannon Manifold back on. Scratch $369.65, stick it in the shed.

 

 

MORAL OF THE STORY:

 

Tie your engine down with a reaction strap or bar. The engine will move more than you think under power and braking and the last thing you want is your funnel forced hard against the hood causing deformation or worse yet cracking something off that ends up getting sucked in when the filter pops out. How much clearance is 'adequate'?

 

My VW Bus has a deformed washer hanging by a bit of fishing line to remind me not to rush during engine reassembly...ever!

[So what does an LD-powered Maxima go for in good running condition?]

Wagon in So Cal running asking cheap $, well under 1000.

Too bad I'm in Morocco now...

There was a 73 240Z for $400 as well...

[Small port heads.]

I saw someone who had that head in a Maxima...caught the casting number out of the corner of my eye passing through the breakers one day... went "Huh?" That's and L20A Casting...

 

Went back, sure enough, someone had put an L20A replacement Japanese engine in a later Maxima WAGON.

 

I wonder how they liked that smaller engine in that larger car...in SoCal? Heh heh heh...

[Making my own EFI intake... The First Casting]

Widened Cowl-Induction style hood out?

[DC Water Jet's 202mph Z-Car]

Heh heh heh, 'adding 500#'.... heh heh heh...

 

I can see the internet 'lighter is faster crowd' frothing at the mouth over that factual statement.

[Towing options (yes again)]

That microsoft birds eye view was pretty neat, clearer view than Google Earth...

Scary too. I thought my stuff was 'hidden' under tree cover, but only from one direction---I didn't realize they could make panoramic views from those Sat-Photos.

 

I need to work on the camo some more. Draping netting from the trees should do it towards the back of the property, the majority of the early cars are in shade when the photos are snapped, but you can still count them. The ones lined up in rows near the house are just too easily counted. Time to make some cover and 'hide stuff from prying eyes'!

 

I'll come back and post a link to a Google Earth Shot if I can get it to work---freakin' internet in Morocco is NOT cooperating with me this evening! DAMMNIT!

[Towing options (yes again)]

You see, that was the argument for the Tow Dolly.

Then the justification for the Enclosed Trailer and Dually...

 

You can use 'if it breaks hard' up to your first flatbed. After that it gets increasingly hard to justify an enclosed trailer.

 

But get the enclosed trailer first and then you can start saying 'I can't load scrap metal in the back of the trailer! How will they get to it with the magnet at the yard?'

 

And thence the flatbed is justified.

 

You gotta make long term plans man! Don't make a mistake and buy something that screws you out of something else later on!

 

Muahahahaha!

[Look at my new toy...Drilling Milling Machine]

Ohh, that is a good idea! Get yourself some good hammertone paint to repaint it and have nice fresh metal... Though some of that industrial stuff has bondo where you least expect it!

 

"I assure you sir, the filler application is only to even out a casting irregularity in a non-stress area!"

[370 cc RC injectors]

The flow rating for the Nissan Injectors is at 100% duty cycle. The 370CC RC injectors will result in 40% more fuel being dispensed at full duty cycle, or at any given pulsewidth.

 

If you look at the HP people get from stock injectors in Megasquirt Applications, you can see a close correlation between them maxing out there pulsewidth and injector flow.

[Small port heads.]

Daeron is on the downlow? Whatsay? Huh?

 

 

...

[Distributor wiring, L20E to L28E]

The Lament of MacTavish....skip to the punchline: "But you get caught screwing ONE sheep!"

 

But back to pressing issues, none of the Z-Cars had the "NAPS" Intake manifold, those were for Saloons. All the Z's got the non-adorned manifolds, even though they DID have the NAPS technology incorporated into the ECU.

 

For instance, I have a 1978 HS130. This car has NO cold start valve, and uses a stepper-motor idle air controller for idle kick-up and stabilization. Full EGR compliance as well as having an O2 Sensor---something none of the US spec cars (INCLUDING CALIFORNIA) got until 1981!

 

From the years 1976 to 1981 at least, the Japanese Emissions Criterion were still in-line with the original 1967 Clean Air Act guidelines and did not deviate from them---as a result, they had a car produced in the home market that was FAR cleaner emissions-wise than even CA-Specification Vehicles. In the US the EPA backed off the regulations because of pressure from the Big Three who apparently 'were having a hard time of it' getting their cars to comply.

 

I'm not going any further down that road...

[Making my own EFI intake... The First Casting]

I wouldn't move the pintile caps. Strange things happen to the injector spray pattern when you do that---unless they are talking about somie sort of pintile/o-ring combination fitting like an MSD GM style injector or something.

 

Nissan clamped their injector bodies down using that big rubber ring, and a smaller flat o-ring on the pintile. I mounted mine using a standard O-Ring on the nose sealing like Nissans design, with the body clamp and everything. This let me the freedom to free float my fuel rail separately due to the close areea in which I was working. I got it all to fint inside, but there has to be an easier way. When I get the time, I'll work on it some more and eventually get it to where I like it.

[urgent need immediate help with aquiring a z.]

Too Bad I'm In Morocco.

Then again, I'm in Riverside as well...but any excuse for a road trip.

[Look at my new toy...Drilling Milling Machine]

I would do the same thing to it, that I do with any Machine Tool I buy new from Harbor Freight: take it apart.

 

Nothing beats a good physical cleaning with burshes, solvents, and proper preservatives and grease upon reassembly. If you plan on letting it sit, after polishing the machined surfaces with scotchbrite coate em all with cosmoline or grease and pack it away.

 

There is a good argument for taking individual parts to a real steam cleaner. If you have access to one, the way they clean parts is incomparable and they can save time. Steam clean and mist them with oil while still warm for the ride back home in the pickup bed. The downside to steam cleaning is that it cleans so well it drives the oil out of the pores of the metal, and the heat induced drys the water off initially...but like Grumpy mentioned, then any condensation that forms starts discolorisation and corrosion immdeiately. This is where a spray of WD40 does wonders for the short ride home. It drives the water out, refills the pores with oil-like solvent, and protects it for a short time.

 

Cleaning it physically through disassembly will also let you set up everything and know what needs attention. I'd likely do it even if it wasn't full of silica beads...

 

For the price, why not? Invest something into it, ya bastard! LOL

[Towing options (yes again)]

I've flat-towed Z's cross country numerous times. You can get by with a much smaller vehicle when flat-towing than you need for a flatbed trailer or even a car dolly. Corvairs in the 70's were always being towed by other Covrairs to and from the races.

 

i'm probably not the best guy to talk about 'opportunistic tow vehicle purchases' since I just picked up a 1990 Chevy Dually with air bags and 24 foot enclosed car transport using that reasoning. In my defense, though, I did transport home in one trip 4000# of Railroad Ties for landscaping my back yard, used it on another trip for 1 3/4 yards of gravel, brought home a 12X36 Engine Lathe, and a 20X24 Elevated Mezzanine (using a small trailer for the 12 foot beams that I didn't feel like piling 6 foot over the bed...)

 

This is in addition to the tow bar that I use, and the Demco Tow Dolly I also have, and use with the wife's Frontier.Problem is that it IS the wife's, and it's BOK BOK BOK if I scratch it doing one of my 'errands'.

 

Flat-Towing is even easier than a tow dolly. You just need four good wheels on the ground to make it work, as opposed to two with the dolly.

 

The Tow Bars are available from Harbor Freight now for under $60, and even the Valley Towbar I bought in 1995 to tow my 240 to the national convention in Denver is still below $150 retail. That thing has been across the country towing Z's and ZX's several times, including a jack-knifing rollover in Oklahoma when the truck pulled the Z onto it's side with the towbar after htting black ice on I40 at mile marker 88. There is an argument for having a heavy tow vehicle in some instances. But the towbar made it through with flying colors and has gone on to tow even more cars since the incident unaffected. For the price it's the cheapest way to move the car if you have four good wheels!

 

During the Denver Convention I have witnesses that my 1990 Chevy G30 Van towed my 73 240 Z at 'go to jail speeds' through the mountains and on flat ground---faggedaboutdit!

[Distributor wiring, L20E to L28E]

BAH-NAPS!

 

If it's an L28 manifold, read the post by "Oz Connection" in this forum about 'small port heads' and the discussion about L28's with L20 EFI manifolds on them is covered pretty well.

 

If the results are sounding like something you might like, then proceed. For a street car not running above 5500 the boost in low end torque is prodigious by the butt-dyno when you put the small runner manifold on, but it's all in by 5000-5500. You loose some top end compared to the stock L28 Manifold. Even the NAPS. If you do swap, and you have the two-barrel T/B, make sure you use the larger L28 unit on the L20 Manifold---it will fit, and the drivability will be a bit better than the dinky L20 Barrels. There is a considerable difference in primary and secondary bore sizes. In US Money, the L20 has a 'dime sized' primary barrel, while the L28 has a 'nickel' size.

 

Roughly the difference between saddling up behind a newborn Ewe and her Mother, to put it in Kiwispeak! LOL

 

Morocco dementia strikes again! I'm Baaaaaaaaa-d. Baaaaaaaaa-d I tell ya!

[late Pathfinder or Quest OBDII ecus on L eng?]

The OBD2 ECUs, ALL of them have a 'short term and long term fuel trim' feature that allows for self-adjustment of the ECU fueling over a FAR broader range than the old systems did.

 

Make no mistake: This is NOT a substitute for a proper fuel mapping in the ECU. If you have a sensor failure, you will drive home on the map you have...NOT the fuel trimmed maps!

 

What the fuel trim is intended to do is accomodate for various wear items and things that would alter the efficiency of the engine to an extent that would put it outside the 10% range of the original Bosch setup.

 

GM has this on their ECU's as well. They all do it. Even aftermarket ECUs are now employing this technology to allow for a 'self tuning' situation where the map is sent with a basic startup map, and you just go out and drive the car over varying conditions...with you able to burn the map at the end of the run, and then repeat the procedure till you have a complete and accurate map without going and individually inputting cels and going back each time to change them manually.

 

The aftermarked ECU's are getting increasingly spohisticated and CHEAP. The one I am referring to above was being sold retail for $1200, complete with Fuel Pump and the ability to run as a non-return line fueling system up to 500HP as they controlled pump speed through a PWM controller resident in the ECU working off a fuel pressure and temperature sensor in the single fuel feed line to the injectors.

[Making my own EFI intake... The First Casting]

I put mine (I only had two injector leads to hide) inside vacuum tubing. I did use Tefzel as well due to my concerns with the heat. If it can lay across the bleed air plenum of a GE F100 Engine in an F15C, I figure it's good enough for me. Aircraft Spruce has it available, shielded as well for those TPS and CAS triggers... It was a very big decision fos me to put the injector UNDER the barrel, instead of firing down the throat as with the stock SU air Cleaner there are PLENTY of hoses running in there that wouldn't be needed with EFI, and more than an easy job to run the injector wires to them. Most of the other sensors were hidden similarly inside the maze of vacuum tubes on a stock 74 SU setup.

 

The injectors should be free-floating. They should be able to rotate. The fuel blocks should be at a fized distance to affect a seal, but not solidly clamp an injector. It should float slightly axially, bottoming before a seal is broken, and should easily rotate when everything is bolted down. A firm clamp will not only transmit a LOT of heat (o-ring being the only thing touching doesn't allow direct metal-to-metal transfer through conduction) it has a chance to distort the body when something grows through heat expansion.

 

As far as 'pissing into the wind' do it sometime and tell me what happens to that stream, and you will get the idea and impetus behind that type of positioning. The heated discussion I got into involved a nondisclosure agreement I had with Cosworth Engineering in Lomita after some site visits to their shop and discussing their Counterflow Methanol Injection Scheme for CART engines. I couldn't at the time tell the person on the 'other end' of the discussion where I was getting my information, but my contention was it was 'common' and spelling out which machines of the past 3 decades employed it (since he was totally unfamiliar with any of them) was counterproductive (old technology doesn't count, what uses it today was what his retort was, I believe...). Rest assured, when the story hit major automotive press, I recalled the earlier discussion and called out his 'what modern engines employ counterflow injection' and pointed out the article. Nothing is more frustrating to me than knowing some high tech stuff, but being covered by a Non-Disclosure. I wasn't in there doing engine development work or anything. I was attending to their compressors and air system in the shop....but when the engineers on the floor realized I was asking cogent questions and understood what they were accomplishing (as well as 'gazaming' over up-close and personal revelations of very cool features of the engines, they offered to give me a full tour...after reminding me that I DID sign a Non-Disclosure as a condition of being admitted to the facility! Then they revealed all sorts of neat things. That ND expired earlier last year matter of fact. Jan/Feb 2008.) Curiously their revelation on injector orientation was not public till almost mid-late 2007! Which is surprising given the fact that as the photo shows, Lucas MFI and others used counterflow long before Cosworth employed it. Hell, they were counterflow injecting the methanol in FRONT of the turbo to aid in cooling.

 

Hmmmm, what does that sound like?

 

The in-head Barrel-Throttle is what got me!

[Lightening a Turbo (240mm) Flywheel]

510's below the L20B use a five hole flywheel and smaller diameter clutch (200mm)

 

The L20B uses the same bolt pattern as all the six cylinder Z's and I put my old lightened L28 Flywheel on my son's wagon with an L20B.

 

I haven't looked into it further than that. The numbers look about right for the way they did it in Japan.

[Small port heads.]

Rather than restricting port size arbitrarily (That is, symmetrically), I'd say bring the bottom of the port UP with a filler like Devcon, this increases the shortside radius enhancing flow. The reduced port sizing will increase velocity, the larger radius on the short-side increases flow...add a very light bit of bowl work to really take advantage of the increased velocity...and I think you may be surprised by how much it picks up on the bottom end, with even a nice bump over stock on the top end.

 

I don't think the smaller ports per se will 'restrict' or 'strangle' an otherwise 'stock' engine. There is porting that can be done to increase flow on the bottom end---it's just usually focused on the top end of the RPM range. Because it takes rpms to get it to the velocity it needs to be at to do the things it does...

 

Pontiac is going under with 'wider is better' right? I always liked smaller holes, personally. They just look cleaner all around.

 

Baaaaaaa!

[Fuel lines....will they work for fuel injection?]

Yes. I used the original 1973 Ticker Style Bendix Pump to suck out of the stock fuel line and fill my surge tank, with the 3/16" line being a 'high point bubble vent' for the surge tank, as well as having a branch that went to a 1/4" line on the tank (the return from the FPR was routed into the surge tank as well, hence needing the 1/4" line out as well).

 

I never experienced starvation problems after setting it up like that using the stock 73 tank.

[Making my own EFI intake... The First Casting]

Ahhh, Lucal Slide Valve Injection...

 

I got SO lambasted for making comments about the way that system injects fuel (take a close look at the injection orientation)...

 

As for moving the injector position, they will have the exact same rotation possibilities as the stock setup did, it's more movement than you think.

 

You could orient them all the same angle to front or rear, depending on 'harness drape' to give maximum visual effect with the loops of injection harness going to them...

 

The only thing different I did on mine (other than mine leaked like a seive and sidelined my project---hint, don't simply think drilled finish is anywhere close enough! LOL) was I put the retention 'ears' for the screws up a little higher using a wider guide and the body of the screw to hold the cap straight instead of putting them at the bottom of the thing.

 

This kept the injector from hitting the 'ears' the screws go through, further restricting movement.

[SU EFI Manifold Update]

I let the comment slide at the time, but now being in Morocco and near midnight the question begs (BRAAP be Praised):

 

"What praytel, would they need freezeplugs in the balance tube for?"

 

Casting Plugs...

Core Plugs...

 

But....freezeplugs Pete?

[EFI or Triple Carbs]

I still am trying to figure out where 'having to rebuild the engine often' comes from... Most stock turbos are in the power range he wants unintercooled and at 10psi of boost....and they run for 300-400K miles without needing an overhaul.

 

I mean, for that HP level, a drop-in stock turbo will give you stock reliability and longevity. He wants better than 300K on the engine between overhauls???

[Fuel lines....will they work for fuel injection?]

I would personally put the HP pump and Surge Tank in the rear of the car, where the stock electric pump goes, but that's just me. With a pusher pump filling the sturge tank, the HP pump is always flooded with fuel so it doesn't 'have' to be a true 'pusher' pump.

 

 

A surge tank external up front will require that pusher in the back. I had fuel starvation problems with mine until I did that. Something has to initially fill the surge tank before the main pump turns on.