90TSIAWD Posted November 20, 2009 Share Posted November 20, 2009 Alright, well I'm a long time reader on here; figured I'd finally post up my project. I apologize in advance for the formatting, essentially I just copied/pasted all of my posts from the local forum and put them all together... enjoy. This is all you hoosers get for now... Got it running! Here's some new pics now that it's mobile and on my property. I excluded the interior for now as it's pretty ratty and full of stuff, I'll snap some later. Alright, well I figured I should post since the donor car just arrived last night. I'm getting really excited. It's a 91 with 158,XXX miles in pretty decent shape. Tranny doesn't slip at all thankfully and I have new steel timing chain guides that will get here monday to replace the shitty, ticking time bomb plastic ones that came on the <93 q45's. For being a cruise ship this thing actually moves pretty good, gives me hope for what will happen when it loses 1,500+ lbs. Progress has been slow lately trying to get ready to head back up to Moscow for another semester... Anyways, motor and trans are out, still have cleaning of the bay to do but you get the picture. So combine motor of Q and engine bay of Z and you should have a decent idea of what I'm going for here in case you didn't already. I ran the numbers and just the stock motor in the Z chassis should be good for low 12's/high 11's with some DR's. Also, I took the exhaust kind of off the q today so it's running open after the pre-cats... already sounds decent, so an x pipe, no cats and a decent muffler and I'm hoping it'll sound alright. Haven't updated this for a long time and I don't have a lot of progress to report being 300 miles away and all. But I've gotten closer to getting the drivetrain ready to pull out of the Q... that wiring harness is intense! And I'm about ready to just take out the ABS unit with a sledge, it's completely in the way and seemingly impossible to remove. ANYWAYS, I do have pics of the old motor on the trailer before I sold it and that's about it, but may as well put em up. Alright, I know it's been a loooong time and honestly I'm saddened by how little I got done this break. Mostly I just got the motor and tranny ready to come out of the Q early summer or maybe spring break. But here's a few pics of what little I did get done. Stock exhaust that will not be coming with the motor. What the picture doesn't show is that there's a pre-cat in each manifold too, so that leaves 2 cats per side, 1 muffler per side and a final muffler... restrictive anyone? VLSD rear end And I know it's just a driveshaft, but the size and build quality on this thing surprised me. It's much bigger than most non-diesel truck driveshafts even. size comparison to a can of liquid wrench Nice thick splines on the yokes Oh, and I never posted this here either, but it's a vid of the old L28 running with a holley 4 barrel a day or two before I pulled it out. Alright so I got depressingly little done over spring break, mainly because on a short trip like that I'd rather hangout with friends than spend all day on the car. But I FINALLY got the damn wiring harness out, what a pain in the ass in that car. Glad this thing doesn't have a ton of electronics or anything... Just the ends on the engine harness... the chassis one is WAY worse so stealing TCS and CC is going to rock early this summer. Almost ready to come out... This... ... is why getting the harness out sucked. The engine harness was intertwined with all of those others in the picture and the whole rats nest was behind the AC evaporator and blower motor assembly for the heating/ac systems. Anyways, just thought I'd throw up a quick post about what little I got done the last week. Come mid May I'll be back and can really start to attack the project. Alright so it's been a long long time since I've really been able to get any substantial work done on the project so I thought I would post up the recent happenings. Got the motor out Went and cleaned it up a bit, I'll clean more later when I tear it down to do the timing chain guides and what not I'm glad this thing has breathing room A little more progress COP area all nasty... Disassembly begins... Cleaned up the valve covers a bit and you can see the upper intake manifold, kinda looks like a dead spider on it's back. Here you can see the tops of each of the lower intake manifolds... every runner is exactly the same length from plenum to valves this way. Ok... so Nissan decided that in the early Q motors they would use plastic timing chain guides which when they wear out have a bad habbit of breaking and taking other things with them.. namely the whole motor. As I was starting to take the motor apart I mentioned to my dad that I thought one of the guides was pretty worn and it was a good thing I got to the motor when I did... turns out I couldn't have been more right, I found these... ... in the oil pan. Those are the remnants of one of the timing chain guides. Don't worry, I'm replacing them all with steel backed ones so this can't happen which is the whole reason I was tearing it down in the first place. Alright, got the motor a little more torn apart and talk about scary close... this thing was a ticking time bomb... Notice the piece of plastic on the chain closest to the camera Yea... it's not supposed to be there, that's another piece of broken timing chain guide on it's way to destroy the oil pump chain. Timing chains are supposed to be under tension right? Oh and that piece of plastic just above my finger is where the rest of the timing chain guide should be... Notice how far my finger moved inwards? The rest of the parts got here friday before work so yesterday I put the timing system back together with all the new chains, guies, tensioners, etc... Sorry for the blurry pic, I was crouched/balanced in a really weird little area between parts. Alright so it's been a while... my bad... Either something really good or really bad is about to happen... Took some initial measurements, looks like the oil pan is going to be the biggest stumbling block as it is a front sump design and really needs to be rear sump in order to clear the cross member and steering rack without needing a ridiculous cowl hood which I really... REALLY don't want to do. So hopefully in the next few days real moch up can begin and we'll see where it goes from there. Almost there Thursday 11/12 an RB25DET swap set will be arriving at my house and the project will resume. I wish the VH was a better fit, but the bay of the S30 chassis is fairly narrow and A LOT of modification is needed to make that V configuration DOHC motor "fit" in there. I'll post up some pics when the motor gets here. The RB got here today! 2 days earlier than I was expecting but I'm certainly not going to complain. Alright, well... while I'm waiting for this... to get finished up and out of the way I decided I'd clean up some parts on the RB from sitting. Nothing really exciting but it's something and really all I can do until the space is clear. Although I did order my new "freddy" intake manifold today. You can see in the original pictures of the RB what most of the piping and heat shields looked like before. After... I was going to go further with the intake piping... until I realized that it wasn't going to be used at all with the new intake manifold... so I stopped prior to final sanding and painting, hence the remaining oxidation. Removed some of the accessory drives I can't use/don't need. Also removed the fan that I won't be using. As you can see, this motor is much narrower than the RB especially down low where it will be between the frame rails. Also, my new intake manifold got here today, slapped it on real quick just to see... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boatdude13 Posted August 29, 2011 Share Posted August 29, 2011 It's a shame you gave up on the VH swap. It's what I just started. One small correction, the factory q45 exhaust used high flow cats and is actually not in the least bit restrictive. No one at V8 nissans has been able to get any more power out of the exhaust Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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