Oddmanout84

The L28ET is a great "starter" motor to work on because of its simplicity and well, its already there in most cases. However, this is also its downfall. Because its simple and older, its not as efficient (i.e. combustion chamber design) and more difficult to extract higher power numbers. Good aftermarket parts are getting increasingly hard to find. This ends up being quite costly in a lot of cases. However in the power levels mentioned (250-300hp) it is pretty damn reliable and easy to work on and is enough to push an S30 chassis nicely. I can't say whether it would be "cheaper" in the long run to extract higher hp numbers from an RB. It is more expensive in the initial investment, by far, than the L28ET or SBC. However you get a much more modern combustion chamber design, an extra cam, 12 extra valves, crossflow, and higher stock hp with greater potential. AND, you get to keep the awesome sound of a straight six. You will pay for the huge aftermarket support with an expensive JDM tax. An American V8 will give you the greatest bang for your buck and will blow these previous options out of the water in that respect. High power numbers cost a fraction of what the Japanese motors will. I'm not a big fan of pushrods or externally balanced engines, but that's for you to decide. The sound of one of these motors under the hood of an S30 is a love/hate thing.

Like I said, you don't NEED to attach the flywheel, just make sure its perfectly balanced itself. Balancing it with the crank is just a form of redundancy. Costs can vary, but my full rotating assembly balance probably cost the most out of anything else I did.

Balancing is ALWAYS a big thing for the rotating assembly. Its absolutely crucial. The key is that Nissan made a lot of these components very well so often when they're balanced at a machine shop 20-30 years later they're still within tolerances. However just because they're usually good doesn't mean you should just skip the process. The force a few mere grams of imbalance exerts is hundreds of pounds of force at higher RPM. It will severly reduce the life of the crank if not destroy it all together in very short order. The L6 series engines are all internally balanced, so you don't "need" to balance it with the harmonic damper and flywheel installed as long as they themselves are perfectly in balance. I had them balanced, then also had them balanced again as installed on the crank just as a form of redundancy.

2 5/8" seem to "fill the holes out" a little better, plus I personally like the idea of a remote button rather than pushing directly on the gauge. Still, I wonder what it would be like to go with the smaller ones. Its annoying that they only offer the A/F ratio gauge in 2 1/16". That's my two cents.

Very easy. Just a few cuts and some new holes drilled. And of course a lot of mocking up the pieces to make sure they were straight. Now that I have a welder, I might go and patch up the reverse light hole that's still there, but its not an absolute priority.

Thanks! That was a pretty good read. Actually, its Duplicolor/Rustoleum 500 degree rattle can engine paint (with "ceramic"). I've used it to great success a number of times, as has my uncle on his 944. It seems to hold up on the block surface and valve covers really well, though I wouldn't dare trying it on anything hotter. Finish is durable and shiny as long as the surface is prepped well. My uncle actually uses it on just about everything under the car, including suspension pieces.

I have tried masking with grease as my uncle taught, but have had very limited success. Perhaps I've just been using the wrong grease or technique. It always seems to "seep in" and mask the areas that I don't need masked.

It really is amazing how much the littlest thing can contaminate something. Usually I'm pretty good about not touching the surfaces, even if they're covered in protective oil. To be honest though, I think what HowlerMonkey mentioned is probably closer to what happened. The garage WAS heated during most of the drying time, but I unplugged the heaters before I went to bed the second night to preserve electricity. Temperature dropped from about 60 degrees to about mid 30's or low 40's. Though it LOOKED dry when I removed the tape the next morning, water had probably condensed on the surface under the tape. I've since bought better oil for the job along with another 100 count box of nitrile gloves to replace the one that went mysteriously missing a while back... I had always thought about storing my stuff in cosmoline, or some other grease readily available. Are you sure using moly isn't overkill though? I was under the impression that the molybdenum additive was mainly for lubrication.

Thanks for the tips guys! I have worked with scotchbrite before, and was afraid it would be too aggressive and messy for the application, but it worked just fine. You can't really even tell the stains were there anymore, and now the surfaces are coated in Marvel Mystery oil. Smells minty. The surface is so true that I can't fit anything under my straightedge. Not even light. I'll probably end up flushing the oil passage again though just to make sure no bits got in there...

I'm PISSED. Here on the cape, we've barely gotten any of the monster snow that you guys have been getting in "mainland" New England. I have a massive snowblower from last year (bought after the only huge snowstorm we got last year) and its barely seen any use. I did use it once this year just for justification of its purpose, but only on about 3" of snow...

So I've been carefully prepping my block for the past couple months in order to rebuild my L28ET. The block was hot tanked, rebored .50mm over and the gasket surface was trued. Since then I've been carefully cleaning every passage, wiping down the bores and keeping it coated in WD40. Two days ago I cleaned off the outer surfaces to remove the oil coating so I could paint the block, and taped the machined surfaces to protect them from overspray. The head surface was particularly hard because I left a thin film of oil that made the tape a little challenging to stick. Eventually I succeeded and painted the block and its been drying in my heated garage for the past 24 hours. This morning I removed the tape and found this. I'm furious. No matter how careful I've been, it looks like flash rust STILL found a way to work its way in and piss in my cheerios. I'm hoping I'm not completely screwed and have to get the gasket surface redone at the machine shop. Its bad enough that I have to find a way to clean it all off and then was the block off AGAIN to get rid of any residue. I guess what I'm asking is, is there any better method I can use to clean the surface without messing it up, and dry it so it won't flash again? And, at the same time, how can I remove this stuff without destroyed the gasket surface? So far every time I've pressure washed it, I've immediately coated it in WD40 to disperse the water, blasted it with compressed air to shed the water, then wiped the surface with a cloth and applied another coating of WD40. So far its not working.

I guess one of my last questions would be do you experience any "popping" sounds while driving around from the roof flexing, or is it pretty solid?

That's actually really good. I wouldn't count a 3 angle valve job as "block work", which is why I didn't mention it. But that's a really good price. Add "balance rotating assembly" to that list of things to do, and plan on spending just a bit more in case they need to deck the block or resurface the head to fix possible warpage.

Yes, exactly.

I'd still weld some metal back into the voids just to gain back a little strength.

Take everything you can off the block, and reinstall the main bearing caps and torque them to spec (this helps if they need to bore). Its going to need to be hot tanked and cleaned. Remove all the core plugs and main oil gallery plugs to assist this process. Have them Magniflux inspect it too to check for cracks. I'm assuming you didn't do any measurements yourself, so make sure they check them. The deck for straightness/flatness, as well as the bearing bores. Get a "rebuild your Datsun OHC" book just in case the shop doesn't know the specs. Don't have the shop rebore your block unless the cylinder walls are tapered out of spec or seriously damaged. Most of the time they just need a new hone.

I've seen some of those "knock off" ebay top mount manifolds on some guys cars work pretty well. HOWEVER, one of the recurring problems seems to be that (depending on the turbo size), it will sometimes allow the turbine section of the turbo to butt up against the valve cover. Sometimes the clearance issue is serious enough that people have had to grind away a small amount of material from the turbo and the valve cover just to get it to fit. It seems to be a hit or miss thing, but I sure as hell wouldn't want an item that regularly glows cherry red directly against that part of the engine.

Thanks for the responses guys. That's actually the first time I've seen a picture of one of these rails other than the one I bought. I don't know what happened to the search engine on this site, but it went completely south at some point recently. Searches that normally took a few minutes with some key words now either come up with zero results or 22 pages of irrelevance that matches maybe one of my key words (which means nothing by itself). But I digress. The mounting system in that picture of the black rail looks pretty wonky. No bracket attachments per se, just a strange loop. Dunno if I like the idea, unless there were some isolators between the two. I can see the cutouts where my extra threaded holes are, but there appears to be nothing in them. Odd. Noddle; that's the bracket setup that SHOULD be on the rail, lining up directly with the 10mm holes on the intake. Why they decided to move the holes in between the outer two injectors instead boggles the mind.

I've been trying to get my hands on a Pallnet O-ring rail to fit my Rx7 injectors for quite some time now, with no success. I kept having to delay my purchase for one reason or another, and when I was ready to order there was a problem with the machinery which prevented making the rails. A few weeks ago I saw this on ebay and jumped on it because it seemed like a pretty good deal. My L28ET swap came with a JSK barb fitting fuel rail, so I felt comfortable getting another even though I still would have preferred a Pallnet. The item arrived as described from the seller, but I was a bit annoyed that he never answered the questions I asked about some of the holes on the bottom. As you can see there's two extra threaded holes on the bottom between the outer two injectors, which go all the way through the stock and into the fuel passage. I figure they must be for mounting brackets, though it seems a bit odd that they should penetrate all the way into the passage. No brackets or hardware for these holes were included. The area cut around the bolt holes is also rounded, which also seems a bit odd and will make it a bit harder to fabricate brackets. I've test fit the rail against my injectors and the fit is very tight. However I'm ASSUMING that an o-ring rail shouldn't be held on the injectors by friction fit alone, so hopefully someone out there has some input. Don't be afraid to tell me that I'm dumb and the rail is a piece of **** either, I'd rather that than have my engine bay become a raging inferno.

This has gone way off topic...

Thanks! Yep, that's one of the options I was referring to. Yours and another guy with an orange Z are the methods I've seen documented. He skinned the whole roof and rewelded at the original spot welds at the columns. Your way was the first that I had planned on doing. But to be honest, I was worried about using your method for a couple reasons. One was blow through and warping as you mentioned, the other was accurately measuring the "plug" that you put in the existing sunroof hole. How easy was it to measure and can you notice a difference in the roof once its finished/painted?

Ok, so my 280z came with one of those awful moonroof abortions when I bought it, and I've wanted to get rid of it ever since I first rode in the car. It leaks something terrible, can't find new gaskets for it, and it makes HORRIBLE whistling sounds on the highway at speed. Its time to go. Almost a year back, one of my buddies got a '73 donor car parked in his driveway and we swarmed it like a colony of fire ants. With essentially a "you remove it, you keep it" policy going, I claimed the roof and we sawed it off. It was a pretty good donor besides a small rust spot, but I didn't have a car to take it home at the time. It sat in the yard a couple months until I could borrow a scooby to haul it home. During that time not much changed, but I found the small rust spot on the front edge was a little worse than I thought. Now that I have my own handy dandy little MIG welder (Hobart 140), I can finally get around to this. I've welded my entire exhaust together so I'm not a complete newbie when it comes to MIG, but I will have to practice a bit on some scrap as its been about a year. I still feel pretty dumb for painting the car two years ago only now to ruin it, but the paint was cheap and I thought it would be harder to find a donor. This one sort of fell in my lap. Now I suppose I should have mentioned at the beginning, YES, I have searched and read other threads on how to do this swap. So far I've seen two methods: Option 1: Measuring and patching the big stupid hole itself. Option 2: Skin the recipient and donor roof a couple inches down the columns by drilling out the spot welds. Reweld donor roof in place of original. With my case, I've seen another couple possible options, and I'm wondering if they're feasible. Additional Option 1: I drill out the spot welds on the donor and cut out the rotted bits. After patching the new skin in I then weld in sheet patches for the rust spots and smooth them out. Additional Option 2: This is the one I'm a little more comfortable with. I cut the donor roof and my current roof at the line in the picture (which is still forward of the current sunroof hole) and patch the skin onto the spot welds in the rear, then weld the front. Like this. Hopefully this is clear enough. What I'm concerned about the most is what is going to be the easiest to align, will be blended back into the body with less effort, and would be better for avoiding warping. Though I feel the most comfortable cutting the roofs and welding them in as per the diagram, it would really suck if it didn't line up at all... Any thoughts?

Well, now I know how I'm going to make my future R32 proper for driving on the RIGHT side of the road.

The reason more often than not is because its JDM tyte, yo. Really, the SR isn't *that* much better, its more just a different animal than anything. It has less displacement, less torque, inferior rocker arms (to KA shim over bucket). It has higher horsepower and a higher RPM limit, but it baffles me that this is another reason people insist its a better drift motor... because torque is more responsible for breaking the wheels loose. SR's are better out of the box, but a turbo KA has more potential for a lower price. You can have a stock $2000 SR20DET swap or a dirt cheap $500 KA24DE and $1500 left for mods. Frankenstein was the name of the man who made the monster.