Top end upgrade

[roro4g63]

So I finished my new top end upgrade for my hybrid z. I know some of y'all believe this swap and upgrade is blasphemous, but its my blood, sweat and money so here it is. But for all the purist in the room, I am getting ready to start on my 78 280z project.

 

A little history on top end upgrade. I had the car dynoed last year and I was not happy that the car choked itself at 5000. The motor passes were still strong 314/410ish, and the happy gas passes could of been better 425/625. So this will hopefully put my hybrid z where it needs to be. So here we go:

 

Engine had a water pump leak, and balancer started to pull itself off, which is what started this earlier than expected:

 

So here she is with the motor pulled. I realized even with the minimal amount of wiring, there were too many in the engine bay for my taste. Also, the main harness near my headers started to melt. So, out with the wiring and it was rebuilt and ran through the frame/fresh air ducting.

 

So here is the custom ground cam from Bullet Racing. It was ground to my specs, for my now ported heads, and gasket matched ports (was a pain and timely/messy endevour). The grinding made a mess of my clean room/engine assembly room (with a bathroom ). Now there are the other supporting parts that were added to my stock heads, ie. ARP head studs, new beehive springs/retainers, push rods, lifters, and rockers. Specs to these are in my little black book. I did leave the cam card on pic to those somewhat curious to what this could possibly do. Oh, and if the car was not loud enough, I figured I would throw in a timing gear set. Also, a Single Plane intake was added. The light weight of the car and stall I have should not affect the low end that much. Hopefully enough to prevent me from lighting off my tires, but the top end should be singing now.

 

Here is the powerplant all primed and ready to go back on. Still using my Demon Carb to feed this new monster.

 

So here is a shot of the engine bay with no more wire harness. Only thing there is AC pressure switch, and wiring for new Temp Sensor, Oil Pressure sending unit, Nitrous wiring, and new wide band going in (WUUT? in a carb car). Well I plan on tuning this thing and monitoring the engine parameters closely.

 

And here she is after break in, and initial tuning. It makes me appreciate the efficiency of fuel injection tuning. For example three 3rd gear pulls in my evo datalogged and tune takes me maybe 20 minutes tops. Its all in front of me and I can look at fuel trims, timing, closed loop and open loop running; and I can adjust my car without even opening my hood. This initial tune took me the greater part of the afternoon, and lots of burns (You would think that touching my radiator or valve covers would be self correcting).

 

So there she is. I amazed me how much more air she is taking in now. I had to fatten up the jets quite a bit. So much so that I had to go in and plug/redrill air bleeders(now screw ins), restrictors, and change my power valve. It would of been so much easier and almost the same price to just fuel inject this car. But I had to remind myself that I built this car to thrash, and to remember my roots on building old muscle. It makes my dad laugh that I did this to my Z. He would rather have seen this motor in his Chevelle ;D

 

Anyways, I will do a separate write up on my gauges. But they are ProSport Evo gauges in green. They work great for what I use them for, and the wide band has made tuning this car easier. Just cant go off the typical 14.7 and 12.4 afr tuning. This carb is a competition carb and was never meant to be economical without even more customizing of the metering blocks.

 

Anyways here it is, cant wait to put her back on the dyno to see if my math and logic made a difference. At the very least, there is no mistaking that there is something really not right under the hood. The whole car rocks with the nice loping idle.