CasperIV

Since I'm sure a lot of people who have been messaging me think the project is dead and all the images are broken, if you are interested in following this project you can catch it on my YouTube channel AmbiVe or my website www.ambive.com as one of the featured projects. It maybe taking forever, and possibly cursed, but I will finish this project!

For all those sending me messages/emails, sorry for the long down time. The owner of the shop I was working with for fabrication decided to retire and close his shop which necessitated some quick shop juggling to get my parts and car to somewhere to get odds and ends wrapped up so it would be able to come back to our shop. Now that the car is home I'm working to knock the seals back into the car and get it buttoned up for washing, then the paint guy can do his touch ups and wrap up his work that's been delayed for months.

I decided to try McKinney Motorsports new offering of a customized harness as it is virtually to OEM spec for weight, wrap, etc. I hate a lot of custom harness work because they rarely use high quality and "excessive" durability wire. If I hadn't already ordered the wiring harness back January I would have been interested to get in touch with them. Hopefully this harness is as good as promised, otherwise I will be extremely pissed off waiting this long and double pissed if I have to go with another vendor in the end. This is already a compromise as I would have liked the first job had worked out because it would have been a nicely tucked and would have seemed almost as if it were OEM. That looks like quality work. If this falls through I'll give him a call. The SR harness is an ugly blob.

Just an update for everyone asking what was happening with the project. I put the project on hold this winter while we moved it to another shop and the wiring harness is sorted. Unfortunately I hired a shop to do the work on the harness and it never happened, so I had to order another one through McKinney Motorsports... but now it's been a couple months and I can't get a hold of them either. Hopefully McKinney will get back in touch with me at some point or I'll find out what happened to them so that I can get back to making progress.

As for the 6 speed conversion, I actually have that on the list of potential upgrades. Initially I just want to get everything tested and bullet proof, then I'm going to pick an upgrade to do, test the heck out of that, then move on. I'm setting this car up to be as rugged as possible so that I can jump in and beat on it without worrying about having to fix it along side the road. It's been a long time since I posted my initial build plans. Having spent some time talking to the guys at Full Race through email, I think I may very well do a twin scroll setup. I think the first phase will be to move to do ECU replacement so that I can get some time playing with it and tuning before I make big changes to the boost or fuel systems. The new Haltech Elite has me drooling a bit, and I maybe willing to delay buying other parts just to get that ECU and do some playing with it on the bits that came with this engine before I upgrade. It will just depend on the wife and how much money I can spend and how quickly before it becomes a "conversation" Unfortunately my car was back burnered until this winter while we wrap up my Dad's 55 Buick, but it's almost done and then mine should wrap up fairly quick. The same guy doing work on his car is who was going to do my fab work to convert my spare tire well into a tool box and the wiring harness, but I gave up my spot in line for the Buick. His car just got a full undercoating, powder coated frame and suspension bits, fully rebuilt suspension, brakes, and engine. Right now the engine is going back together and some little touches are being done to give it a little something special before it is out the door.

A few things I would consider: header designs are rarely patented/protected by IP, people often source generic parts/designs to make kits, and people often double up generic images of products. Another thing to consider, what if CRX has McKinney "mass produce" the headers? It's quite possible that some of the products CRX sells are good, some are garbage, but it's the poor customer service pushing the needle into the hate zone. McKinney also aren't making their radiators, intercoolers, and most of the random other parts, so it also wouldn't surprise me if they were sourcing headers/designs from somewhere else and happened to overlap with CRX. I have done business with McKinney and their customer service made all the difference with the couple issues I had. I knew I was spending more money for things I could fab up or buy piece meal, but the service and time savings were worth it to me.

I don't see why the wiring would be hard. Diesels are typically easier than gas engines, and either way, the simplest way to handle it would be to wire the engine standalone from the chassis other than a power feed. That is what I planned to do with my SR but the owner of a shop I work with wanted to make a new loom to swap from RHD to LHD and look factory, so I'm letting him do that right now. The challenge I would think would be dealing with the torque. The S30 chassis isn't very stiff, so you would want to probably brace and stiffen what you can even before you put the engine in, and will likely want to replace the diff and axles. One of my biggest complaints about most of the built v8 swaps I have driven is the chassis tweak that happens if not caged and otherwise stiffened... and that is with an engine that comes into torque much later. Considering the OM606 tubo starts around 250ft-lbs of torque and you are talking about building it up, you would run into the same issues.

Personally for my build I just went with a 10k SpeedHut tach. The adapters people have mentioned already have worked for others, I just decided to go with new gauges anyway, so I figured I would get a tach that was adjustable and had head room depending on what kind of build I do in the future.

Just used the stock Z unit because it was pretty much new when I pulled the L engine.

Sorry for being away, I have been extremely busy. The engine mounts are the McKinney mounts on my car (there are a lot of similar mounts). They are a basic cradle design that just rest on the frame rails. In my case we installed them both with welding and hardened bolts. Basically we wanted a fail safe in case it came a part under hard driving at the track or on a long road trip. Here are some pics I have of the mounts. There are actually some lighter versions that I would have liked to use from JWSportCars.com but they didn't have any available when I started my project.

Turbo systems add a lot of weight that people don't think about. Take your intercooler, turbo, piping, larger exhaust, etc, and toss it all on a scale. Then there are all the other items that get heavier due to the extra power like brakes, wheels and tires, driveline, diff, transmission, suspension, etc. It adds up pretty quick. It's one of the reasons going from NA to turbo isn't worth it unless you are going to be trying to gain a reasonable amount of power. I often wonder how much weight I could save on my SR if I went with an EFR turbo, titanium manifold and exhaust, and changed to a short v-mount IC... anyone want to give me money to try it out? The F20 is a good candidate for either boosting option. It just depends on what you want. If you aren't adding a lot of power or don't care about constantly pushing the limit up, the supercharger is probably a better option. It's less complex, lighter, and has less peripherals involved. I never did decide how I wanted to boost my S2000. After driving a few turbo S2000s and a couple supercharged ones, I kept going back and fourth. I liked the instant response of the small turbo cars, but I could get the same from the superchargers with less weight. I liked the pull of the larger turbo cars, but I hated the loss of response and general slowness during transitional periods. Either way you go I'm sure you will be happy as long as you don't melt a piston.

It's always worth trying something new. No matter what design you do, with tools like that on hand you will be able to make a nicer unit than what you can buy off the shelf. Good luck!

The mounts should be interesting and I'm excited to see what you come up with. When we did the SR in my car I went with the traditional cradle design McKinney had, but there are a lot of little things that could have been improved. One nice point of the cradle on rail design is that it allows you to move the engine mounts to whatever position you want (forward/backward) before locking them in place. It looks like your placement of the F20c is almost exactly the same as the SRs (which would make sense because in general they are roughly the same size). We actually had to do some fab to let the oil pan pass through. When we did the first measurements it was with the stock pan, but swapped to a stainless custom pan that was a different shape right before final drop in.

^ This There are people driving around every day with neither proper alignment, functional shocks, or even brakes on their cars and not wrapping them around trees. Heck, there are entire subcultures around deliberately ruining a vehicles camber and alignment. If you do a halfway decent job, make sure things are tight, and nothing is left over sitting on the bench when you are done, there's no reason you couldn't drive to the shop at a minimum. I have personally driven some pretty screwed up vehicles quite long distances when I have bought them and needed to get them to my shop. Just take your time and don't push your luck.

Seriously, waiting is the hardest part. Always waiting on parts, paint/body work, etc. I just want it back in my garage so I can start wrenching on it myself again.

Mini-update: Just a few pics when the car came back from paint. Unfortunately you can't see all the sparkle in the paint in these pictures, but it's amazing. Later I will get some video and high quality pics.

I figured I might as well post these wheels up here for reference sake. These are Ridler 695 wheels I believe. I needed some cheaper wheels to put on when we replaced the 4 lug hubs but I'm not sold on the style for a Z. The sizing on these are 18x8 in the front, 18x9.5 rear. I don't remember what the offset of the rears are, but the fronts were 0. Tires fitted were Continental ExtremeContact DWS XLs: 225/40ZR-18 front and 235/40ZR-18 rear. These are the Arizona Z car brakes with the 5 lug adapters so take that into account. Also ignore the weird angles on the wheels, there's no diff and almost nothing underneath was tight. We were just rolling it back after paint.

That's my take. If I'm doing everything else to make sure my car doesn't try to kill me, why not do one of the cheaper options I was just curious what the 4 lug 4 cyl cars were. For instance there aren't many RWD 4cyl cars that can get to over 500HP without moving to full race car other than a handful of SR20DET swapped cars. Most cars that are half modern 4 cyl cars capable of high HP are already 5 lug like S2000s. The 4 lug trend somewhat ended when cars were readily pushing nearly 1g skidpad and running around with over 250HP. I was just curious what branch of cardom I wasn't taking into consideration.

Here would be the counterpoint: why wouldn't you run additional lugs? Why would you beef up the engine, diff, axles, etc, then deliberately create a weaker link? Even on a "street car" the forces/stress level is being changed. That would be like someone saying they are going to build the engine but leave the brakes OEM because they don't plan to ever use the power. I would be very curious to know what 4 lug, 4 cyl, 800+ rwhp vehicles, your friends have. The only thing coming to mind that fits the bill would be SR 240s, and it would be very unusual to hear anyone doing that much work to an SR to make that power and choosing to stay 4 lug (unless it's a disposable missile car that they are just plopping the engine in until it breaks).

Here is my take on this discussion. Stress is stress. All these things you are talking about are adding stress. More power from the engine is more power through the wheels, which are held on by the lugs. More traction is more stress on the lugs during cornering, acceleration, and braking. Moving the center of the wheel away from your mounting surface is adding stress due to leverage change, again, on the lugs among other things. I won't try to say that you do or don't need to go to 5 lug, but I will leave you with this. In theory you are distributing the force over each lug, so it is 25% of the stress per lug per wheel. Adding a lug reduces the stress per lug by 20%. Consider how much you are increasing the stress on the lugs over stock with your other changes do you think it makes sense to not make an effort to improve this distribution (especially since the power change alone is over 650%)?

Is that a piece of PVC pipe functioning as a re-circulation line?

That's a really good idea. That would be a great way to try to find the leaks if you can generate enough draw with the vacuum. It's odd that a stock car wouldn't have the issue unless the exhaust exit is in a radically different place though.

This sounds very strange. If the exhaust is getting into your car through the windows while moving it must be horrific standing next to the front of the car at idle. Personally, the description makes me think you are getting a massive leak under the hood/front and it's being drawn into the car by the air passing by the windows causing a pressure differential, but that is pure speculation. Have you put the car on stands and checked for leaks? Is the turbo boosting properly? Have you removed breathers/emissions parts without properly rerouting or blocking them off? As far as I know, the stock ECU will already be trying to correct AFR if everything is stock. The sensors (such as O2) will be sending it the information it needs to adjust within the allowed map. Do you have all the sensors wired up and do you have a wideband you can use to test?

I think it will be close. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I believe there's about 4.5" backspace allowance stock suspension size. If that's correct, your rears are looking at 4.4" backspace and the fronts are a bit safer I think at about 4.1" backspace. Pull a wheel, measure what backspace you have available, and do the math. You can use a tool like this site http://www.rimsntires.com/specspro.jsp to check backspace results and you can refer to a chart like this to understand what measurements you are dealing with.

I'm looking to go EFR as later this year after I get the basic package tested and any other bugs worked out. Right now I think I'm going to go with parts from Full Race, a Haltech, etc. I was looking at cams and the last ones I was planning to look into when the upgrades start are the Jim Wolf 260 S3s... but really it will depend if I am staying true to a small turbo plan or if I end up going bigger. With the gain in response of the EFRs I have a feeling I might go somewhat larger than I would with a traditional turbo option, which may also make me want to look at something 270 or so. Have you played with any SRs with EFR turbos?