Gollum's Never Ending 280Z

[Leon]

Nice, glad you made it! Trekkor and crew always run a great event. A few of my coworkers went (the silver S2000 in the background of your photo and the other in a Model 3). I'll be running at Sonoma Drift for the first time this coming Wednesday, in case you or @stupid_fast plan to be there.  

 

Gonna guess that radiator is from an LSx vehicle.

[Gollum]

I was a bit surprised at the number of Teslas present. We ended up working the course at the same spot as a couple in a Tesla.

 

I'd love to turn up Wednesday actually for Wednesday Night Drags, just to put a time down but not sure I can swing that this week. If so I'll have to dig around to see if I still have a number to reach you at.

 

Oh, and that's a nope on the radiator. In the ballpark at least, but no.

[Leon]

Well looking forward to finding out! Perhaps an Ecotec?

I'll PM you my number.

[Leon]

Will send PM when my donation status changes. You should've received my cell number if you look in your email notifications.

Edited September 25, 2019 by Leon

[Gollum]

@Leon Hit me up on facebook

 

https://www.facebook.com/nathan.shobe.94

 

I didn't get any email

 

If you get this soon enough, we can meet up for a late lunch/early dinner if you're heading to the track early enough. I work in San Rafael lately and I'm crossing 37, so I can meet up on either side of 37.

[Gollum]

More parts for upcoming powertrain swap:

 

If you're on facebook you might know what this is and what's going in front of it.

 

Also, bottom radiator mount is made, and upper support replacement welded in (and likely to be redone at a later date). Need to fab some upper hold downs and finish off the hoses before cars and coffee this next weekend.

 

[Gollum]

Update:

 

So I got the radiator "good enough" to make it to cars and coffee.

 

The next weekend was spent tearing into the donor car and bringing parts home.

 

 

 

It's a 2003 Crown Vic PI motor. Heads were ported and polished by the venerable Modular Head Shop (MHS). This is their stage 2 package, so it should be good for 320+whp with appropriate supporting mods. As far as mods, that's not the factory intake or TB/Elbow. I'll be running OEM manifolds for fitment, so I'll be giving up 10-20hp there from what I could make, but I think 310-320whp might still be achievable without much drama.

 

Along with just the motor I've got the harness, throttle cable (and pedal), full exhaust from the car (never ran), and engine cradle (that sadly doesn't fit very well, will have to cut and reweld some of it), fuel pump module driver, marauder MAF (will run SD+MAF), and other various bots and doohickies.

 

So in what "spare" time I have before Christmas break starts at work, I'm going to see if I can get this thing at least close to ready to drop in, which means getting the wiring harness roughed out enough for me to be ready to pin the ECU side, along with handing the plumbing. I might delete the EGR just to save the output and reduce complexity, and I'm not going to have a heater so I need to reroute those lines. I also need to order the appropriate idler wheel and belt to delete the AC and PS accessories.

 

Summary of justifications:

Most of you know or can see I've been on hybridz a long while. You can dig through all my posts, and you can see I've long supported the L28ET swap for it's budget and potential. I still have a warm spot in my heart for the L engine. But they're not nearly as widely available as they used to be. I want to race this car. Maybe not super competitively, but I don't want to miss half or all of a season because of blowing a motor and struggling to find another combo to put back into the car. The more you modify your L engine, the more difficult it will become to replicate it. By swapping to the modular V8, and specifically using the MT82, I've future proofed myself for a long time to come. Sure this one is ported and camm'ed, and thus difficult to replace 1:1, but a 260whp mill is available all day every day right now. In the long run, the 5.0 will be just as available (nearly already is as easy to get a hold of) and the prices will not be outrageous. The 5.0 has the same mounts, so the main hurdles to swap to the coyote platform will be new mid pipes for the exhaust, and converting to e-throttle. All in all, I don't even WANT huge power numbers for the NASA class I plan to run in long term, so having a readily available factory mill I can just plop in has huge value for me. Someone at cars and coffee suggested the SR instead. I think that really shows how much some people won't get it. The weight savings if a turbo 4 is of interest, sure, but reliability and availability are king in budget independent racing. The SR might live a long while at 250-300whp, but I'd have to always keep a spare motor on hand, and I'd rather not dedicate garage space to spare engines.

[HuD 91gt]

From the time I started reading you wanted to do some racing with this car, it always seemed like a risky choice.

 

I applaud your choice and glad to see some clarity in your thought.

 

 

[Gollum]

I promise I've making progress. Not a whole lot going on that's worth noting imo, just typical engine fitting stuff. I did finally come up against something worth sharing though...

 

 

If you're using the MT82, unless you can get the motor REALLY LOW, you're almost certainly going to have to massage or cut the transmission tunnel just forward of the factory opening. The MT82 top shift linkage mounting point fouls.

 

 

Otherwise, I cut the factory ears out, the MIGHT clear but it's tight enough I decided just to ditch them.

 

If you can get the engine block basically up against the firewall (would have to remake and reroute brake lines, ditch the vacuum booster, etc) then you MIGHT be able to get that part into the factory opening, but you'll also then have issues fitting an over the counter shifter in front of the back of the opening. So it's a problem to be dealt with.

 

 

Now, for the record, I'm at 2.9 degrees transmission tail down (compared to the rocker being "level") and the diff is 3.3 degrees nose up (compared to rocker being "level). Technically, I need to bring the transmission "down" a touch, but I'm already in the ballpark of workable dimensions. The struggle I'm facing right now, is that my pan is LOW, and I still have some space in the front of the engine to come down a little (about an inch). As it is, I'm likely going to need to make a skidplate, and it'll need to land about .75-1.00 inch lower than the OEM "frame rails" on the floor to bring it lower than the oil pan. The pan can likely be chopped and welded, but I'd rather not do that right this moment ,especially as the pan will be relatively easy to remove down the road with how little of it sits over the cross member.

 

At any rate, it's getting really close to fitting in order for me to start welding mounts.

 

And hey, the hood fits, right?

 

Technically....

 

Yeah... If the front drops down that inch, that will get me close... but then I'll likely need to drop the rear at least another quarter inch. In theory if I welded it as-is there might be enough sag to be "safe" but then any motor rock will bump the hood. So better to get it just a touch lower.

[Gollum]

Since I couldn't find information I needed, I figured I'd post here once I'd answered my question.

 

"How much clearance or interference should you run on polyurethane bushings?" Well, it's quite difficult to figure out from looking at the cross reference chart on energy suspension's website what size tube is expected to be used.

 

Well, my first guess turned out perfect, so it's at least one data point. I bought an energy suspension 2.2120(R) which has an OD of 1.265". I bought DOM tube that's 1.5" OD and .120 wall, so 1.260 ID. So 0.005 interference. At first attempt the bushing seemed just a touch tight to get in but I went ahead and cut my length (about 2.5" for this bushing) and cleaned up the cuts. Added some grease, and it all assembled with minimal effort but nice and solid (light tapping with the dead blow to get the pin in).

So there you have it. Data. By my guess, for 1-2" bushing diameters, you probably want at least .001 interference, and probably not more than .008. I'm sure if it were 0.010 I'd have had a hell of a time ever pulling it apart once assembled.

 

Caption: I just had to know as soon as it all arrived

 

 

Assembled:

 

 

Using a 2.5" cut I've got about 1/16th of an inch or less of a gap between the two halves. And about 1/32 of poke out you can see in the picture on each side. Some might feel the need to "compress" the bushings and make the tube a touch longer so that when the bolt is tightened it puts some compression force on the bushing. While that's likely not a bad idea, this will be for engine and transmission mounts, already way overkill, and that would just cause faster wear in my mind. I figure let it run a touch loose so that any violent engine movements don't just want to sheer my mounts off the chassis. Or maybe I'm wrong. We'll see.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Gollum

[Leon]

Hey Nathan, I'm not seeing the pictures but from what you're describing, the size of the bushings you're using for engine mounts sounds really small. I'd expect them to give you very little isolation and more or less act like solid mounts. You may also run into durability issues, depending on how hard and how often you drive the car.

[Gollum]

Should be fixed now. Seems like hybridz is having some issues with copy/pasting images directly into posts. Now they're just links to google photos urls that seem to render properly.

 

This size bushing is about the same size turbo yoda uses on the cars he makes mounts for (skid factory youtube) and is on the larger end of what shackle bushings are readily available.

 

It might feel like solid mounts, and I'm okay with that. I was actually pretty close to just fabbing solid mounts... You gotta remember, this car doesn't have glass, interior, a dash, etc. It's perfectly fine if it's a bit rough on the NVH, but I'll be sure to report back. Regarding durability, these bushings are intended to hold the weight of a jeep across four of them, with constant change in angular deflection on where the internal pin is pushing as the suspension moves up and down. If four of these can handle holding up the rear half of a jeep, I think four of them can handle my engine and transmission. And the nice thing, is that it's a "standard" part that's now easily replaceable, and I can carry a set of spares that would work for either the transmission or engine.

 

[Leon]

My concerns on durability were more from a lack of isolation from low amplitude, high frequency vibrations (i.e. fatigue loads) coming from the engine. As long as the metal that joins everything together is strong enough, you're fine. It'll be buzzy for sure!

[Gollum]

13 hours ago, Leon said:

My concerns on durability were more from a lack of isolation from low amplitude, high frequency vibrations (i.e. fatigue loads) coming from the engine. As long as the metal that joins everything together is strong enough, you're fine. It'll be buzzy for sure!

DOM tube is .120 wall, and the plate I'm using is 1/8th". So as long as I engineer the gussets to support the tube properly it should be okay. I'm also going to engineer the chassis side of the shackle bushing receiver to be a box u-shape so that in a bushing failure mode the chassis will catch the engine mount preventing it from falling more than a quarter inch.

[Gollum]

Serious lack of updates:

 

I moved.

 

Long story but I'm now in New Hampshire. Took about a year and a half to find/buy a house out here, car was in a storage unit during that time. Just got a welding machine and some welding gear. Will be starting back up on this shortly.

[rossman]

Glad to hear you're still at it and looking forward to updates!

[Zetsaz]

19 hours ago, Gollum said:

Serious lack of updates:

 

I moved.

 

Long story but I'm now in New Hampshire. Took about a year and a half to find/buy a house out here, car was in a storage unit during that time. Just got a welding machine and some welding gear. Will be starting back up on this shortly.

 

Moving is no joke! I'm out of the country now. Just did some work on mine for the first time in 6 months and I thought that alone was long enough

[Gollum]

I'm not dead, promise. 

Finally doing engine fitting work again, it became apparent that the transmission mount support definitely needed to come out, so I did.

 

Definitely will have to come back with the MIG and patch it up, but it's at least out of the way now. Just need to massage the firewall a bit at the top of the transmission and I can refit for the umpteenth time.

 

The "good news" is that I think I can get the engine far enough back and up as to not be too worried about ground clearance and still git it under the factory hood, and also have enough space to fabricate exhaust manifolds/headers. The engine/transmission was much easier to fit with the engine lower, but the exhaust ports are just inches away from the "frame rails" in the engine bay. I'd be looking for something tighter than a 2" radius to make the turn. Even logs would be horrendous to make work. Ground clearance was also a serious concern. I've got an aftermarket Moroso pan which even comes with a pickup tube spacer because it's so deep. But even if that's 2" (which is not), if I removed the spacer and cut the oil pan down, I would still be hanging the sump as one of the lowest parts of the car. Getting the engine up higher starts to solve all this, but the transmission starts to get impossibly tight at the rear. The MT82 is nice and fat where the shifter attaches, but I'll see if I can get some better pictures in the next fittment.

Edited November 6, 2023 by Gollum

[Gollum]

On 5/24/2020 at 4:18 AM, Leon said:

Hey Nathan, I'm not seeing the pictures but from what you're describing, the size of the bushings you're using for engine mounts sounds really small. I'd expect them to give you very little isolation and more or less act like solid mounts. You may also run into durability issues, depending on how hard and how often you drive the car.

 It looks like the pictures died... again. No idea what's going on.

Here's the bushing I'm using (attached).

 

I probably could have gone with smaller bushings for the transmission mount but it seemed to make sense to just make four of the same due to challenges finding the appropriate interference fit. These seem to work out nicely, so I figured I'll continue with them, despite being oversized for the trans,
 

[Gollum]

Oh, also potentially of interest, I don't see my having mentioned it before. I did this weight almost a dozen times, and this was the heaviest reading. If I had to guess, I think on an accurate crane setup (easier to omit balancing issues), I think actual weight would come in around 123lbs.
 

Considering what a T56 weighs, and that these are "generally" okay up to 500whp, and still shift decently up to around 7k, it's not a bad "little" transmission. A pretty good weight-conscious way to get into a 6 speed transmission. In a perfect world, I'd love to have a TKX 5 speed, as they shift great at high RPM, and are fairly bullet proof, and have some really great ratio options. But for what I paid, and that this thing was less than 2 years old with less than 30k miles on it... I'm not upset.