CasperIV

Yes, go with McKinney, they are great to work with. I don't know how many pics I have of the engine mount and such, but I put some of what I had with some other random SR20DET swap info onto a work in progress web page I started: www.sr240z.net. Hopefully I'll get more pics/info up there soon. What year your car is will make a difference. The transmission mount either bolts vertically into the body or horizontally depending on the year. Mine happened to be a 73, which made it a bit weird as there was a transition part way through production that made me have to order the older style rather than newer style tranny mount.

Actually the fact something is dictatorial is not inherently political (the politics comes into how you handle or if you agree/disagree with the policies)... and we don't have the pot, that's the next state up It would seem we just use all our parks lands to grow it for export at this point. http://www.registerguard.com/rg/news/29849329-76/smokejumpers-site-carlson-fire-growers.html.csp If you register your vehicle as a custom built car, do the same regulations apply or does it just have to pass DEQ standard tests?

Plastidip seems to hold up pretty well, but we don't have as much sun up here. I have a buddy who used it on his truck bumpers and such and another that used it on the wheels of his Audi. It looks decent and held up really well against the weather and rock chips from what I saw. I was thinking about doing it over the top of my new paint to protect against chips/scratches during track testing. It peels off pretty well (at least on wheels) so I think it should work fine on my paint as a temporary bra.

Wow, I'm extremely glad I don't live in that dictatorship lol. That explains why so many people are moving out and moving up here.

Yes, but how would they find out? I'm just curious because for instance up here, there is no good reason for them to have any idea what is under your hood if you don't have to pass smog. I guess if you were parked with your hood up and the cop knew that the engine was for a fact not US available they could make the case it isn't DOT approved. Of course, things are pretty strange down there in the dictatorship of Cali

Sounds like a good idea, and maybe you are one of the people that is naturally good at paint. It seems to be one of those things that you can work really hard at to get "better" but never be great at unless you have a natural aptitude. I don't have it, so I pay those that do when I care about how it looks. It also doesn't help that I took an auto restoration class that taught me to look for all the flaws... What has been seen can't be unseen! I look forward to checking out your progress. I really want to do my next Z in flat black with flat white stripes.

I normally like to do the work myself, but for the money I'm investing the in the rest of the car I wanted A+ quality and receipts. Couldn't really justify dumping $15,000 into a project and spraying it myself. When I make a new dedicated race/hoon car I will be going back to doing my own fabrication/paint... but it won't be pretty

Thanks. It certainly is expensive going this route, but the car should easily last another 40 years in good condition. Once it comes back from paint it will have no body filler on the whole car and everything will be gapped properly. It should be clean... then later next year I will revisit a more expensive paint job (just doing white for now on the outside, will be white with blue pearl) and all House of Color.

Yeah, I don't understand the wing on an NA car that you are talking about mileage for, I would have sold that to a Honda kid right off . If you lose that and do some of the normal drag clean up that the high speed guys do, you can get a lot better fuel economy.Do you have a pic of the front of the car so I can see what openings there are still up front? Just curious about how much more you can de-drag the front.

What is the cut off year for smog regulations in Cali? I'm glad we don't have crazyness like that here.

We ended up decided to restore the car from the metal up before we add the flares, so we stopped the installation and sent it to the body shop. It should have new paint in a couple weeks and we can throw the engine in. Since we have a little more time than planned we threw the engine on the stand again and are doing clean up/upgrades. Doing the S15 oil pickup, Circuit Sports oil pan, new water pump, plugs, etc. Basic improvement/tune up items.

A KA is not a low compression engine. Tuning is critical in making a KA-T that doesn't eat it's self and vomit parts all over the road. Also, your pricing is not looking at what it takes to make a KA-T correctly. You need a quality turbo ($800 to $1200 starting), a manifold ($500 to $1200), injectors ($250 to $500), computer ($500 to $1600), exhaust ($200 to $800), IC setup ($250 to $900), and more random little things unless you are a good fabricator. Then with all that bolted up you will then need to pay for a dyno tune, dial in the details, and still just have the basics to run the system. If you don't care about blowing the engine up, you can push it a bit, but you will probably need a water/meth injection kit. If you want to make it as reliable as an SR, you will need another couple thousand in internals and labor to drop the compression and beef up the internals. The reason the SR costs more is because it already comes with all the requirements of a turbo engine. If you want to DIY a turbo engine, you really need to understand that it is extremely easy to have $5000 into the engine just to get it stable... and there are still no guarantees that it won't randomly pop a weak part. An SR will run all day long with around 300HP on stock everything (assuming a T28), but will start to cost the same in upgrades as you push the envelope (after all replacing turbo, injectors, computer, etc will cost the same for the SR as a KA). The key is what you plan to do with the car. Are you shooting for 400HP+ or just looking to double the power of the L24? If you are going for 500HP it doesn't matter which you choose because you will be basically rebuilding both engines to support that power. I would suggest looking at the website I started tossing together about things to think about when doing an SR swap, it's not complete, but it has a lot of information: http://www.sr240z.net The SR is a turbo engine, so it is much more "bolt on" than a KA-T. Neither bolts into the car directly, but when it comes to upgrades, the SR already has low comp pistons, oil squirters, etc. The KA was never designed to be boosted, so it is extremely tune dependent or requires rebuilding it to handle the power. To get 300HP from an SR is generally under $500, to get 300HP from a KA will be $2000+, but once you build it you will have a larger displacement turbo engine to work with. Typically people see a KA-T running 400 HP and say "OMG LOOK AT THE TORQUE!" but then never see the engine again... and this is because it destroyed it's self the next week due to detonation or melt down. In case you haven't noticed, most people run E85 on KA-T builds that have a low budget to help offset detonation risk. It is very possible to run a turbo on any kind of engine, but if the engine wasn't designed for it, your experience becomes critical in keeping it running. If people tried to do the idiotic things they do with SRs to a KA-T you would never see them on the road.

The problem is that it is actually quite hard to measure braking distance. I am going to attempt to do so once my car is back from paint and put together, but I remember doing so with my S2000 was a PITA. The problem is that GPS isn't always very accurate on the move for positioning, so calculating from the point brakes are applied to when motion ceases doesn't work very well. Likewise, measuring with static means (stop cones and a measuring tape) is more of a guesstimate as it is very hard to the driver to start applying brakes exactly as they cross the cones. Beyond those issues you then have to be able to really use the brakes at 99% so that you can stop as fast as possible without locking and adding distance. I would be very interested to see what people can get number wise, but I don't believe it will be very definitive without some decent equipment. I personally am looking to setup a cone braking zone while also using a G-Tech Pro and just doing as many tries as I feel it takes to get a good test... but that means A- having a place to do it and B- having a $200+ tool to verify data with. There will also be significant differences in stopping distance due to tire size, composition, pressure, suspension stiffness, and weight distribution. My results may not be overly useful to everyone as I will be doing it with a car that has an SR20DET swap which will change things a bit.

Not on this car, POR15 is a more smooth finish/sealent. This is a 3M product that is more of a thick almost rubbery textured material. The actual buy code is a dealer specific order code, but it also provides a bit of a sound deadening quality as well as industrial rating for wear. I'll see if I can snag a picture of the containers when I'm back at the shop.

Some suspension hanging... Brakes are making their way onto the car... Wheel just set on to see how it looks (looks better in person than pics)... More pics to come. Unfortunately we need to move it to a new location, so James is going to throw wheels on it and get it moved before work resumes.

Here are some pics of the car undercoated... Cross member is powder coated and trimmed a bit to ensure it doesn't mess with the SR's oil pan.

I also wanted to make sure I didn't rush the build, but at the same time didn't want it to be a multi-year project, so I selected a local Z guy and shop owner James Whitman (http://www.jwsportcars.com/) to do work I didn't have time/tools for. Part of the build was intended to extend the life of the car another 40 years, so I worked with him to powder coat pretty much everything under the car that could be removed and undercoat the rest. Unfortunatly we didn't start taking pictures until we were well under way, so I don't have any of the underside ground down before the spray. A little test fitting... Shifter placement after shoving it as far back as possible (it will be replaced with a short shifter when we finish it up).

I wanted to use as many pre-made parts as possible so that I could get a realistic build process for those who don't have tools for serious fabrication available. To this end I sourced my mount kit, FMIC, radiator & fan, full exhaust, and a few other parts from McKinney Motorsports (http://mckinneymotorsports.com/) (great guys to work with). I then sourced brakes from Arizona Z Car (http://arizonazcar.com/) (again, awesome). I went back and fourth on the suspension trying to decide if I wanted to jump to coil overs while I was already tearing the underside a part of go with shocks and springs to test first. In the end I decided to use a Tokico kit. Here's the heart of it all... (James drove over night to SoCal to pick out an engine with the most freebie upgrades and healthiest compression/bits) The pile of parts... Transmission brace from McKinney. I don't really have a pic of just the engine cradle but it's a simple cross pipe with mounts and weld/bolt in angle mounts on the end. Some Arizona Z goodness... McKinney goodies... Going 5 lug necessitated some new wheels. Since I didn't want to break the bank on wheels before I had even put the thing together I picked up some cheaper wheels that were in +0 that I thought wouldn't look bad. A handy craigslist find...

UPDATE: For those interested, my pictures are all broken in this thread and the information is falling out of date. If you are interested in keeping up with this project you can catch updates on my YouTube channel or Facebook and the long form evolving article at www.ambive.com. This project will be finished, but it took forever to get my parts back from the shops that were doing anything but work on it to finish myself. I got bored with my S2000 and decided I wanted to have another Z. Traded the S2000 in for a BRZ as my wife's car and started this project. The goal was simple, I wanted over 300WHP (hopefully closer to 380WHP) when it was completely done and a solid daily driver/weekend racer. I initially wanted to build a KA24DET but after really digging into what it would take to make it as dependable as the SR20DET out of the box, I abandoned it for now (really want to come back and revisit building a KA24DET or maybe a newer Nissan engine). I started out by sourcing an "almost" rust free 73 240Z that looked well enough that I didn't feel I had to dump money into paint and body. I apologize for not getting more pics of before and after as well some specifics of fitment. I know when I started this project I searched high and low for things like shifter placement, then forgot to take hardly any pics of our mock up. This build could be done for less money if I just fabricated parts as I went, but I wanted to actually try out using pre-made parts and having other people do some of the work (first car I have paid for build work, hope it's a positive experience). Here are the parts I have already bought (or some of the more notable): SR20DET red top with transmission. McKinney Motorsports mount kit. McKinney SR20 FMIC kit. McKinney radiator with fan and shroud. McKinney 3" exhaust and muffler with McKinney SR20 down pipe. Arizona Z Car brake kit with 5 lug conversion. Tokico shock and spring kit. Megan Racing AFPR with ISIS FPR adapter. Megan Racing short shifter kit. Circuit Sports Solid Shifter Bushing Energy Suspension Urethane kit Hallman MBC. S15 oil pickup (to replace the common failure point on the S13). New wheels and tires (since I am going 5 lug). ISIS intake manifold/plenum (Greddy style) GKTech eccentric throttle pulley (S14) Circuit Sports stainless steel oil pan with baffles. We will be using an R200 long nose, and money willing, it will be rebuilt with a Quaife sometime next year once testing is done. Planned performance upgrades to come this Fall/Winter once we test the setup through out this year: EFR 6758 Full Race Manifold AEM EMS v2 AEM Electronics MAP Sensor Kits 30-2130-50 AEM AIT Sensor Kit Circuit Sports DIS Ignition System Jim Wolf S3 Cams 11.2 Lift 260 - SR20DET Tomei Rocker Arm Stoppers The car (I hated the mirrors from the moment I picked the car up). So I changed those immediately... Next up, the parts...

It's been a long time since I have posted here (been playing with some non-Z cars for a while). This project is just an S13 SR20DET swap into a 73 240Z I picked up. Currently all the underside of the car is being resprayed and the suspension/steering components are off to the powder coater and we have almost all the other parts (engine, trans, mounts, FMIC, radiator, piping, exhaust, etc). The car is going to be a weekend car/track day toy so I don't want to stick with the 240's fuel tank. The obvious solution is a fuel cell, but I dislike working fuel cells into street cars (live in Oregon and we can't pump our own gas), and I was thinking it would be interesting to do something different. This leads us to a Z32 TT tank/hardware swap. Do you guys know of anyone doing anything like this? We were walking through it at the shop and looking at a Z32 tank compared to the 240Z while it was apart. It looks like we can make it match up with the fuel door by reversing it, changing the hard pipe a bit, and letting it bulge above the original floor of the hatch. This would allow us to use the TT's in tank pump and level sender. The fabricator I'm working with thinks he can actually make it work reasonably easy and be around the cost of buying a fuel cell, pump, lines, etc. What do you think?

I don't know for sure what size he used, but on my current project I am using 4" SpeedHut Tach and Speedo. I based my choice on a few other people's posts.

Excellent points. I didn't think I would ever go full cage with it (even without wrecking I hate hitting my head getting in and out). I hadn't really ranked the LSD that highly, but it makes sense. I have taken for granted most of my more recent cars had good LSD's from the factory. Thanks for the great info.

Exactly. Before I bought the car we actually put it on a lift and checked the under side. I pulled the carpets and looked where I could for rust, and made a list of basic repairs. All that is in order, but the SU's seem to need to be reconditioned. According to the previous owner there was a little play in the shaft to the throttle which made it stiff (hard to gently rev) and he was right. I can live with this minor annoyance but it will have to be dealt with. As for the seats they are in good shape, solid, but only have factory lap belts... that will be changed as soon as I figure out how I want to do the harness system and how extensive the modifications for the new seats will be. Brakes are all good and peddle is firm. They were replaced not long before I purchased the car and are still in great condition. Brake lines seem to still be in good shape, but I will be doing some deeper inspections when I start pulling the wheels. Engine and transmission were recently rebuilt, engine runs like a top and sounds healthy. E-brake works well. The suspension in general seems good but very dated. I need to get the car back up in the air with the wheels off so I can look for leaks, and start digging. From driving impressions it's in decent shape but I want to replace it. I am a bit concerned about the diff mount situation. Under hard shifting it feels like it maybe a little sloppy. When it was in the air it looked ok, but I was mostly hunting for rust/broken/missing items. Cooling system seems to meet the minimums, but I would like to upgrade it. At 90+ F ambient it was getting about 3/4 toward hot on the factory gauge (which works well) running 4k-6k rpms for about two hours of driving. Engine tune up and hoses were done at rebuild it seems, all look in very good condition. I will be addressing fluid changes this weekend.