Gollum

On-Call Computer/Network Repair Live Sound Engineering Website Programming Paid Musician from time to time I've done much more than that to pat the bills.

I can play this game. Most of these cars I love because of what they are, not because of what can be contained in a simple picture. Good lord I need to stop finding pics before I have an accident.

I'd just like to say this is the first I've found this thread, and it was a decent read. And for those young ones worried about a S30 being "dangerous" and needing a way to convince parents, I'll just say that a stock 73+ S30 is probably much safer than anything found in the 60's, and it's been well stated here in this thread that small cars will ALWAYS be at a disadvantage. So yes the S30 is small, and will always be at risk from a severe accident, but too much worse off than any little hatchback really. For those saying to get something easier to learn to drive in, my first car was a S130, then I had another S130, and another, and another, and then a S30. I never crashed a SINGLE ONE!!! I know I wasn't an average kid in the sense that I was always learning the limits of driving a car, yet always being as sensible as I could when it came to driving on the street. I never did anything that I later felt was "reckless" and never EVER put someone ELSE'S life at risk. EVER. I'm not the safest driver in the world, and I don't pretend to be. But I will say that my cars are in safer hands with me than most other people even though I can tend to drive them like I stole them. And my last thing I'd like to bring up, is that how safe a car is just as much dependent on how well it's maintained as it is the design or even the driver. I've often thought and still stand by the statement that the most dangerous thing about any old car, the S30 included is that there can be things just waiting to be stressed to break. There's nothing like going down the road and then having ZERO brake pressure... Things like that will get you killed easier than weaving through traffic or poor bumper design.

I have a hard time imagining that it's a piston ring issue. Reason being is that I've seen compression tests on a few bad motors, some with severe ring land breakage, and not a single one of them compression tested all the way down to zero. Even with bad rings there's very little opening area for compressing air to escape through, while a valve that's not sealing just a mere .010" will have substantially more area for air to get through. So my logic says look at the head first, then the bottom end. Maybe I'm just an optimist.

It takes a little bit of work, but it's well worth the reward. Most of the conversion work is in converting over the Z31 CAS into the 280ZXT Dizzy. The biggest upside is that the Z31 can have a programmable eprom installed and then you can run an open source tuning software to recalibrate. Even out the door though the Z31 tune works quite well on the L28ET. The only reason I haven't gone that route is that local yards want way too much money for a wiring harness+ecu, and local part outs normally have no engine and harness. That combined with how much money I'd spend getting a new erpom installed you might as well just go megasquirt for just a little bit of money. A good chunk of a MS2 budget for me is stuff I'd still be buying with a Z31 ecu setup. Overall from what I've seen a Z31 ECU would only save me about $150, and I'd be loosing some easy of use and tune-ability.

You can sell the suspension bits to 510 nuts, as pretty much all of it is bolt in affair. Larger brakes and beefier struts are 100% for them and costs them much less than aftermarket parts. Last S130 I crushed I got $80 for the steel in just the chassis, which was less than 200 pounds worth of metal. Then you also have the hood and other bits which can be recycled as well. Could be nearly $200 worth of scrap sitting there if you're willing to let it go (which I'd image you could since it's a donor car). If you're a man on a budget willing to invest the time like me, save the chassis wiring and cut it up for stock so you always have any color wire and gauge that you want. Keep the relays as they come in handy for spares. If it's a 82-83 S130 than you can cut out the fuse panel off the harness and convert it onto the S30 as it's the blade style fuses, not barrel type. Headlights are the same 7" round, and if you convert the mounting hardware over it's WAY easier to adjust as long as it's well lubed, unlike the stock S30 mounting hardware which is poo poo. You can keep the windshield wiper tank and find a place to mount it for methanol.... It's amazing how far such a small container can go when it's only used as an additive under boost. The 280ZX shift boot can be converted if you want to put the time and energy into the conversion. Only took me a couple hours and some basic tools. I did it mostly to keep out engine bay fumes since I had a gaping hole there, and I only had S130 boots lying around. Some say it looks better than the stock boot... I don't care much. I just did what I could with what I had. Other than the engine, trans, and rear diff not much else is coming to mind. Maybe someone else will think of some other little goodies. As always, be creative and you'll be amazed the resource a scrap car can be. I've used a scrap hood to make block off plates. Quite handy!

So with my own annual BBQ/meet coming up, the pressure is on to get this thing truly streetable again and sort out the last bugs. So the engine was running better pulling air from atmosphere rather than post AFM so I reconfigured all my intake... again... and it was still running rough, but better. I figured it was just off on mixture a taste, so I wired in a potentiometer to the CHTS, but on my way to doing so, I found a lovely 1k resistor already in series.... Lovely. I'm not that upset with the guy who did this, but rather just upset that I've had to go through this car with such a fine toothed comb and overlooked this. This is an obvious mod, and the only thing that hid it was the fact that there was electrical tape EVERYWHERE, therefor the electrical tape on the CHTS wiring went totally unnoticed. So I get the resistor removed, and pot installed and it's running slightly better still, at idle at least. But it was still coughing a bit here and there, and I decided to go back to an old diagnostic I'd done a million times thus far, which was checking the injectors to make sure they were opening and that all cylinders were running well. Well I get to cylinder 5 and pulling the plug doesn't do much... So I plug it in, unplug... nothing. Put a screwdriver on it and listened in and sure enough no clicking. Switched it out today and tada, it idles like a champ. In fact for the first time since I had this engine torn apart I was able to lower my idle adjustment screw back to where it should be. I've normally had the idle adjustment wide open in order to get it to idle at 800. Now it was idling at a solid 1400 and didn't consider dying when coming off throttle. Only..... (of course, there always has to be SOMETHING wrong right?) Though it finally drives around at parking lot speeds great for the first time since the build, it now doesn't like good doses of throttle. My hunch is that it's related to the CHTS. I'm going to get a new plug for the CHTS so I can get enough length to rewire it from scratch and see how it runs without any added resistance. Just to double check I'm going to drive it around tomorrow while it's cold to see how it drives. With the ultra high resistance at cold temps being a little off here and there shouldn't through it off too much. If it's driving a lot better at cold temps then that means it's certainly the CHTS causing it to run rich or lean once it's warmed up. The saga continues.

I also never said that a NA SR should make 190+HP. You're also assuming I agree that the basic calculation Pyro gave is what I'm talking about when I say tuners CALCULATE things. You can take a predicted volumetric curve based on previous data from similar engines and graph out how your cam(s) will interact with your predicted head flow. Then you can take a given RPM, and with the data on hand you'll know how much airflow there will be at ANY PSI, thus about approximated how much fuel will be needed at THAT point with THAT much PSI. You can then run the numbers slightly rich and retard the timing accordingly for what TEMP you think the air will be at. Air is air, and it's easily calculated when you know the volumetric efficiency of an engine. You can't always calculate a winning tune, but you can get in the ballpark which is a heck of a lot better than guessing. Here's an example: I know a B16 is damn near 95% volumetric efficient at peak torque, which occurs usually just after vtec kicks in, and let's say that's happening at 4500. So I now know that at 4500RPM, this 1.6 liter is pushing roughly 120 CFM of air per minute. So now let's shoot for a 12.5:1 air fuel ratio guesstimate. 1 CFM = .0745 LBS/Min. So we have 8.94 pounds per minute of air. In order to keep the math easy we'll work with the lb rating for inejectors, because we're adding fuel based on WEIGHT, not volume. Injector's weight rating though is lbs per hour. So we take our 8.94lbs per minute and x 60 for our hour rating. 536.4 lbs per hour. So divide that by our target 12.5:1 and we get 42.912. Of course we have four injectors sharing this load so our target is 10.728lbs per hour. So IF we were running a 20lb injector on our B16 a 54% duty cycle would calculate to 10.8 pounds per minute, just over our target and acceptable by my standards for a rough tune. Now again, I feel like I need to emphasis something that rarely seems to get understood by people. Even if one turbo might "flow less" at a given psi doesn't change physics. 20psi will always be 20psi, IF TEMPS ARE EQUAL. The reason the turbos that flow less at a given PSI don't make as much power has to do with AIR TEMPS, NOT some magical turbo factor. It's all basic physics. If you take a given volume of air and create pressure, but then lower the temperature of said air than the pressure will drop WITH the temperature. This is why compressor maps are so important, because they tell you the efficiency and how much heat to expect to be adding into the air charge, thus increasing psi without respective flow. So, IF we know an engine's NA requirements like the B16 above. And we know the turbo on the engine's efficiency is fairly well matched for the air flow and RPM range of the motor, then we can calculate the fuel requirements quite accurately. Another factor that should be mentioned, and I think this comes into play with the SR20 we're talking about in this thread, is that most motors never make it to atmospheric during a dyno, and thus we can't calculate power gains based on 14.7psi being atmospheric. This is probably why the "basic" calculations show this SR should be making 190hp. Doing a slight factor adjustment, assuming NA was only reaching 13.7 psi then @ 18 psi it was actually under a 2.39 pressure ratio, meaning under a full atmospheric 14.7 it should reach 179, which seems in the ballpark because when I calculate that to 13.7 psi it's 166. And IF your dyno was reading just a touch high, couldn't that be correct? I didn't fudge numbers to make it match what you said, I used my logical experience of using math to predict what's happening. But based upon MY eductated guess, I'd say that on that dyno with the turbo bypassed you're probably going to put down 166hp if you optimize your fuel and timing for the same RPM range as you ran before. (7k I think right?) If you want to get into finding out more about how temps will affect your flow at a given PSI, this is a good book to start with and covers a lot of basics that get overlooked by most amateur tuners. http://www.amazon.com/Modify-Management-Systems-Motorbooks-Workshop/dp/0760315825

Whoever said that tuners don't CALCULATE for those two psi increments? Professional tuners don't do their job seat of their pants. They do it with careful calculation to get predicted results. ANY quality tuner will be intrigued by an expected result, and will usually have a nagging curiousness to find out what caused it, BECAUSE they know that it's something meaningful when results aren't where they were predicted to be. I've seen tuners pour over engines for days simply because it make 3% more power than expected. I've seen tuners that took a brand new build that's never even been RUN build a base map all the way up to 20psi that was closer to on the dot than many people's street cars they're driving around every day, and yet they still did their first pulls after break in at 5psi, polishing off those cells, then moving on from there in small increments. The point I'm showing is that they CALCULATED the power the engine would create ahead of time, and that got them close enough to not blow up the motor. There's a reason the best tuners are some of the most anal people in the world.

I'll back Pyro's pressure ratio power calculations. Yes they're "just calculations" that might not be 100% accurate all the time, but Corky Bell and others who've written reliable books give out the same numbers for HP per PSI gain. The ONLY reason one turbo might make LESS or MORE HP at a given PSI on identical engines than a different turbo, is because of EFFICIENCY which directly relates to TEMPERATURE. You can also calculate how much temp increase you'll get per PSI to help the calculations stay accurate. Obviously if you're adding water/meth injection then this further skews the math estimates, or you can view it simply as another factor that needs to have it's variable calculated. As to our example here, I've seen NA SR's make a heck of a lot more than 150whp on a stock motor with nothing but an experienced tuner who knows what they're doing. With how well the SR head flows, being a 2 liter I'd EXPECT it to be able to reach 170 wheel HP if it's optimized for premium, which you're normally doing when you're tuning a turbo'ed motor. All I'm getting to is that yes it's just a calculated guess, but the more dyno data you have at given PSI's the more you can predict where you'll be when you up the boost, and some tuners will actually use MATH (oh my, really?) to setup tables ahead of time to best guess how much extra fuel will be needed at elevated PSI levels. They don't just throw up numbers and hope it's right. They calculate it based on previous data. And if you DO know how much power a motor made at 1.5 pressure ratio, and then again at 2.0, you can make a crude graph to predict what will happen all the way up to 3.0 pressure ratio, then you just need adjustment factors for your setup, like what turbo you're running.

There's nothing "wrong" with that combo. And I'd echo others to just run whatever cam you have. If you have a "a" cam from a 240Z head then go with that, as it's actually shown to make good power in turbo application. Either L24 block or L28, 300hp with that turbo and MS2.2 shouldn't be an impossible goal. In fact since it's a GRM challenge I'd be shooting for like 350 whp with a L28 bottom end. Some people have had success with the liner'ed P79, but you can also remove the liners for sanity if you'd like. There's people all over the internet that seem to have really bought into this myth about the P90 being some amazing head that's the "only" head to use for turbo application, and this couldn't be further from the truth. ANY L head can do just fine in turbo application provided the compression ratio is in the ballpark and you've got the means to tune it, which you DO. I've had plenty of P79's and a couple P90's now and I really can't see any reason the P90 should flow considerably better than the P79. I'd even venture to guess (out my guess hole of course) that there's less than a 2% difference in flow which just isn't worth the headache people make it.

I hope Kim isn't in the habit of reading our forums, because I'd be willing to pay $1,000 for those RB's if I was in the market for some wide rims. They're definitely worth every penny as you can't find anything close to the size for the price that will fit our cars.

Could that be because you're in Australia? The $750 price was (as far as I know) only for people in the lower 48 states of the USA. $825 shipped down under still doesn't sound like a bad deal.

The 300 wheel HP mark is so easy to hit with a Turbo-L setup that it's been done quite a variety of ways. That being said, one of the most asked questions on these forums is "can/how I make 300hp with my L28ET?" It's actually quite frustrating how often it comes up. It's like space invaders. It doesn't matter how hard we try they just keep coming! I've seen people do it with the stock turbos. Others that did it with the stock ECU. One guy even did it with stock injectors running over 100psi. The beauty is that 300hp is the sweet spot in which it's quite difficult to blow it up unless you've got some serious tuning issues. You can reach 400 without reaching the limits of the internals, but tuning becomes a knife edge extracting that much power as slight detonation can become catastrophic. On the topic of octanes, I'd just like to state that the octane number isn't a whole complete picture. Ethanol and Methanol aren't just higher octane than pump gas (meaning it burns slower) but they also are able to hold more heat, thus cool the chambers more than gasoline/petroleum fuels do. The both also have a wider air to fuel swing they can operate in (when considering percentages, not numbers). This means that though you need more fuel to reach rich best torque, lean best torque will be a much further swing down than petroleum fuel would be. This is great if you want to spend the hours tuning the low load areas of your map, as you can recoup a lot of the lost MPG in the cruising ranges, giving you nearly the same MPG as you'd have on petroleum, and it's usually cheaper fuel in most parts of the country. It's actually almost humorous to watch someone's first experience with tuning E85 or meth, because it's just ridiculous how much further you can push the timing, even before fine tuning the map. For example, the STI will make roughly 300 whp on pump gas with the stock turbo here in CA (in most cases), and switching to E85 you can get so much extra timing out of the engine because it's running so much cooler that without adjusting the boost, just getting the fuel and timing set close you'll pick up over 40 whp. Then you'll be able to up the boost into new territory you couldn't touch before getting more power even still! When you crunch the numbers this is a LOT more power to be gained than just the "extra energy" contained in E85 at stoichiometric levels. You get a slower burn/higher octane which allows for more aggressive timing. You get a cooler chamber, which allows for even MORE timing, or more boost. You also get more fuel in the chamber per cycle with more energy, thus more power! In the example mentioned, a STI pushing around 300hp on CA premium, with large enough injectors will be able to gain up to around 100 wheel HP when switching to E85. It's THAT much of a difference. And of course methanol is just more of the same as E85, but with an edge. You can also do E85 or meth as a secondary injection system, spraying it only when under boost, which gives you all the benefits when it comes to getting more power, while still maintaining the MPG of petroleum plus unchanged starting characteristics (it's much harder to get a low compression engine to start on E85 as it's so much less volatile). All that said, E85 is complete overkill for just 300hp. Regarding chambers, there's tons of info on this site, but most agree that the P90 is certainly one of the better heads to choose from, especially for force induction. You can even put the P90 on top of a motor with flat top pistons, which gives you basically a 81-83 280ZX NA motor but with square exhaust ports and no exhaust liners. Despite the "higher compression ratio" it's still only around 8.8:1 iirc. It's still plenty low enough to reach 300hp without serious danger of detonation. It might be a bit harder to reach 400hp without extreme care, but 300 is still perfectly doable on pump gas as long as you have good tuning ability with an aftermarket ECU. I'm gonna stop talking now because all of this has been covered many times over, and I'm simply tired of typing.

Which is why I always preach weight reduction. It's something that always transferred to whatever plan you make down the road. Even exhaust might be a waste of money if you end up swapping the motor.

Funny comments since it's widely believed that one of the most impressive street cars on this forum was powered by a 7m... And fairly reliably as I recall... I'm just saying that there's plenty of people saying both. I've met people that have built 7m after 7m with nothing but good luck, but there's also people that can't seem to get them to last. My guess is that they're just finicky motors to build correctly. But if someone has one that's been fine thus far, I'd say go ahead and throw it into a S30 and have a blast.

You'd probably see about as much of an acceleration change by just swapping to a fiberglass hood. Modifications for a L motor that's naturally aspirated is pretty piss-poor unless you're going to get radical and dump 2k+ into a full build. Reducing the weight will also have the added benefit of better handling, better braking, and better economy. It's a much better place to focus your wallet when starting off. If this is a '77 we're talking about and you haven't removed the bumpers that's a huge bonus right there too, especially the front bumper. That thing is HEAVY and it's in the worst place, as far forward as it could get. Between the bumpers and hood that'd be like adding 20+hp to your engine which you might never have seen from an intake and exhaust. Oh, and going up on throttle body size will have next to ZERO HP increase. It'll just make it "feel" faster because you've lost top end fidelity in the pedal travel. The stock throttle is not a limitation on mild builds. Exhaust might net you 15hp AT MOST, and that's assuming it's mandrel bent. Intake would probably net you less than 5hp at best. Your money would almost be better spent adding megasquirt with a good crank triggered timing setup. Not only has your stock EFI probably lost you quite a few ponies over the years due to connection quality degrading, but it's also not tuned aggressively like you can get an active timing map setup like megasquirt can. The downside is that you can easily spend $1000 getting megasquirt installed and tuned. But if you think about it, doing exhaust right isn't cheap either, and this will have a much more dramatic effect. Just my 2 cents. On another note, a L28ET conversion can be done at home (not include tools, so assuming you have them) for less than $500, and considering you can still find motors from time to time for less than $300 then I'd say that's the most bang for the buck you can get. But it's not for everyone. But hey, 200 ponies out of the gate is far better than you'd ever get doing bolt ons to a NA motor.

It makes the engine run smoother, and puts less stress on the parts. It's a turbo car for sure. All the signs are there. If it's a NA block under there somewhere someone went through a lot of trouble for nothing.

I'm not one who's extremely knowledgeable about SR motors, but I'd like to bring hopefully a balanced view of the situations to the table. I read what Matt said and I didn't think he was attacking you in any way. Never once did he come at you telling you what you "should have done" or demeaning you for the choices you've made. He was simply asking for clarification because he has experience that would have lead HIM down a different road, that's all. I see the same stuff with the L motors all the time. People want to "build it right" and attempt to build a shortblock that will hold 600+hp, then they end up blowing up the motor before they even reach 400. Well sad to say plenty of people make 400 on junkyard longblocks. OEM's tend to build motors REALLY WELL. For some of us we'd rather just take our chances with a motor that's never been opened than take our chances at screwing up something worth a lot of money. If it were me, I'd get even more pride from going out there and racing in GT1 with a factory built shortblock/longblock. All the better to prove it's never the parts the win a race, but the builder and the driver. But that's just me. If you were just to say "I need to do this for me since I've never built a motor" then 99% of the people on this board would understand and let you have at it. When 1faztZ wanted to chop up KA heads to throw onto a L motor "just cuz" most people encouraged him, and naysayers were in the minority. But to be fair to Matt, I've read this whole thread an I don't remember you saying anything to that affect, so his comments should never have been taken as a personal attack, just an innocent inquiry. On another note: If you're going to run E85 I'd highly suggest installing the GM sensor and gauge that shows your fuel content percentages, so you know exactly what ethanol mixture you're burning. Ethanol mixes will fluctuate a good 15% throughout the year which is more than enough to be loosing considerable power, or be breaking parts. Most people just make sure to tune on something closer to E70 then just give up the power they're loosing on E85, but having a meter read out allows you to adjust on the fly with each tank to make sure you've got reliable HP.

I feel your pain. I had to replace my clutch MC not long ago and went through three parts before finding one that was remanufactured CORRECTLY... I went through a good bit of brake fluid that day... And of course this meant driving around to THREE different stores since nobody carried more than one in stock. Seems like that's the story with some of these parts, finding them locally can be a total pain. To be fair even autozone has them on their website as a special order item. It means it might take a while, but they WILL get it to you. So they're not really "hard to find", just hard to get on short notice.

The problem with just using a bent (by design) TC rod is that the mount point and angle doesn't change. You'd still need to cut off the old tie in and weld in a new one at a different angle, and most likely closer to the LCA. In order to keep the mounting points stockish on both sides, the TC rod would haveto have two bends in it, in order to get the plane back to where it would have been stock. It'd be more like: --\_/- If it's like: --\___ Then you've completely moved where the rod ends up, and if you bend it in such a way that it makes it back to the original hole then the angle is all fubar. Adapting some of those nice 944 LCA's fixes the issue entirely. Though I personally don't think that's a "full proof" fix to your issues. You'd still be battling limited camber gain and other suspension limitations. But it'd definitely be the cheapest solution to get you on the right track. (haha, get it?) EDIT: Oh, and I would never pay $400+ for LCA's I'd have to do custom fab work for in order to make work. You can find virtually identical LCAs in a PLETHORA of cars in the junkyard. In fact I was just working on my wife's accord and it's very similar up front.

If you really want to do this "right" then you'll end up tube framing the whole front end of the car and ditching the stock suspension design all together. Adding a steering rack with more max turning angle (shorter turning radius) doesn't get you ANYTHING since you'll just end up with rubbing issues. Even if the tie rods are moved a much as possible, which won't be a ton, you still have the frame to contend with as well, which is just as much of an issue. You really want to convert to a double wishbone or SLA type setup. This will not only get you much more control over inherent camber gain, kingpin angle, caster, etc. You might end up with a car that drives like crap on the street, but is awesome when it comes to wide slide angle control. IF you wanted to go this route the "easy" way (which is obviously relative) and keep part engineering as simple as possible, buy a donor car like a miata and design the front tube frame around it's mount points to match it's geometry. You'll need to pick a vehicle with roughly the same track width though.

Most people learn this lesson pretty quick. When I see those car ads with a million parts listed all I read is blablabla blala balala bla bla.

I believe that's your friend's car, yes. I actually didn't do too much work to it at all, just filters and such. I didn't have a ton of time to spend on it. I attribute most of the look to the angle. I purposely played with angle width of the lens to get the right about of distortion I wanted on the pic. Though I did change the license plate for privacy's sake. I'll email the pics to you from the event, but fair warning, there's quite a few and might take a few emails.

Should check out this thread I just posted, has pics from both of your cars. If you want I can email you the full size originals. http://forums.hybridz.org/index.php/topic/101252-4th-annual-norcal-hybridz-bbq/page__p__948783__fromsearch__1?do=findComment&comment=948783