Basically..

The BCM won't enable the ignition without receiving a signal from the PCB (electronics) inside the SLU.

If anyone is interested in having this done, I will do the conversion for the cost of parts + shipping and $20 bucks for me. :)

Yes. He's hardwiring the SLU in a functioning fashion, removing any parts that aren't needed and reinstalling for a happy ECU.

The vehicle will not work without some form of the SLU still being intact.

Got the dash out, removed blower and ducting. Pared down the rear hatch harness to include only the conductors for the brake light. Going to begin doing the same for all the other longitudinal (front to rear) harnesses probably tomorrow.

Hate that I'm going to have to remove the crash bar to get anything else else out.

Spohn, were you able to get the crash bar out without taking the doors off? lol

Nice driving

Yes you can. There's three bolts inside the door jam. Two will completely remove and the third will back enough to release but not come out completely due to the door.

Thanks man

Spent 3 nights now working on splitting wiring harnesses. Almost done with the driver's side harness... Then on to the passenger side. It's such miserable work lol

I feel your pain :)

I'm about to start that on my 350. Not looking forward to it.

Really? Did mine in five hours. It's easy. Process of elimination.

I'm not cutting any of the wiring, and it's slow going removing the wrap/insulation when you're trying not to cut any of the wires below it. :)

Was able to completely unplug the passenger side harness. Going to patch in a wire to close the door sensor loop so it won't trigger a door ajar message.


Got the crash bar out, removed all the woven insulation.

Stopping today to get heater hose, going to see about removing the heater core and everything tonight.

Dry ice on Saturday to remove the sound deadening material.

Oh and my wife bought me some Race Ramps to use with the car, so those should be in too. Pretty stoked about those haha.

^ awesome man. I still have some fine cleaning to do on the inside. Dry Ice is so awesome. Still hard to do on the tranny hull.

I see no pictures

Wouldn't have even thought of it if not for you, I'd of been in there with a torch...

lol! let me see what I can do... I haven't taken a ton of them but I have a couple quick shots.

Here's three quick ones from night before last.

I got the insulation and more harnesses removed last night, didn't take pics because I suck.

Got the HVAC unit out and the heater core bypass installed (might need to trim the hose up a little).

Just need to get the dry ice so I can get started on the sound deadening.

Woot!

What'd you do to cap off the heater lines on the engine? The one on the driver's side that has a stock metal pipe bolted to it, and the one sticking up in the rear, etc?

Oh, and it was a real bitch getting the passenger side hose disconnected because...

The ******* clip broke! One of the tabs you compress to get the hose clamp off just snapped off... I had to take a damned cutting wheel to it to get it off of the hose. Luckily the new hose went on without incident.

See that aerial view of the back of the engine? See the ~1" black hose going from left to right in an arc? That's the bypass. You can put a hose from one side of the engine to the hardpipe on the other, completing the circuit that the core was part of previously.

Costs 3 dollars worth of hose and a few minutes time (if you have the right pliers, I recommend some long nose, 90 degree angled ones at least 10" long, makes the whole thing a lot easier).

Edit: to clarify, it's 3/4" heater hose, if you need to go buy some. It just appears to be around 1" from the outside. Ask for 3/4" when you buy. Fit perfect, kudos to Spohn on that.

The A/C system is more tricky. I borrowed a charging gauge set from a coworker and used it to discharge the system into a bottle (to catch any lube that came out) before using disconnect tools (also borrowed) to disconnect the lines. They're so damned close together and the radii of their bends so tight that it was really hard to get the lines disconnected from the core unit.

Also, there isn't an intermediate joint on the skinny side (H Side) so I ended up needing to cut the line in the interim since I won't have time to remove the compressor et al until after the cage is in and didn't want the full line flapping about.

I have given up on the crappy disconnect tools I bought and I think I'm just gonna hacksaw the AC lines off. I doubt anyone wants them anyway.

I banged on my rear quarter panels a little too hard this winter and dented them trying to remove the tar. For the front I've been using a razor blade scraper and hammer which works surprisingly well.

Spohn says that the dry ice method works wonders, so I'm going to give it a shot. The other option is a chisel/scraper + hammer, which I'm really loath to try.

Yeah I guess bypass hoses are the only reasonable way to go for now, given how the water outlet routing works. I just wish I could get rid of that double metal pipe on the driver's side of the bay and cap it off at the head there (and ditto for the other inlets outlets related to the heater core and the throttle body coolant).

I want to, too, I'm just concerned about where the coolant goes after the heater core, are they depending on that coolant to cool the engine or is it just going back into the radiator or something?

I need to get in there and see if I can trace the route of the hose. My thought is that they may be using that to cool part of the engine, and if that's so, something will have to be fabricated to replace that hard pipe and route to that side of the engine.

Yea I'd like to get rid of this also. I believe it goes back into part of the engine block passage but not sure. Most everything on a car serves a dual purpose but who knows.

Wish we could get someone familiar with the Doran RC car to weigh in on this, since theirs definitely has that pipe removed.

I should really be more proactive checking the FSM...

Looks like we could block off the heater outlet and inlets easily.

I had the flow backwards in my mind.. also explains why I was having so many overheating issues, my headers are baking that hard pipe as the coolant flows back to the water pump, which bypasses the radiator.

Oh, bad news gents, looks like we can't simply delete that hard pipe all together, because beneath the larger heater pipe part of it is the bypass loop. The heater core flow + that bypass flow is how the engine cools itself when the t-stat is closed.

This gets more and more annoying the more I learn about it.

I'd just like to cut a good bit of it out and install some heater hose so it will flex when I'm working in the area. Butt that might not be good when I get my turbo kit later this year.

:crying:

The joys of DIY...

in for more, and thanks for the pics. I'm sure others appreciate the visual insight!

It seems like one should be able to do this (note 4x red lines where you'd block things off, and 1x blue arrow showing a change of direction from the original diagram):

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...lant-stuff.png

But in practice some of those spots are hard to block off reliably. I think where the stupid double metal pipe enters the side it's actually a female opening on the head, right? But maybe a cut down version of the stock fitting, and then cap it off an inch or two later.

If you were to do what you suggest in the diagram, your engine would last about... 3 minutes?

With those lines blocked off, there is no flow unless the T-Stat is open. That's the purpose of the secondary line back there in addition to the heater line, together they add up to the same flow as the hose going to the radiator.

Once the T-Stat opens, most of the flow will go through the radiator rather than those secondary lines, but until then, that's the engine's life line.

Make sense?

Can we not run without the T-Stat in these cars?

I guess I need to read more, but I don't see how the thermostat really affects any of this much. The inner metal line on the driver's side (the short external loopback on the right of the diagram) could be necessary when the T-stat is closed, maybe, but the rest I wouldn't think. The throttle body lines are too small diameter to matter much, so we can pretty much ignore those. The flow through the heater core would normally be blocked off anyways (when the heater is off).

If anything, I worry about negative effects from putting a straight bypass in place of the heater core. By doing that, your coolant flow is now permanently in "the heater is on" mode, which allows a certain amount of flow to skip the radiator by circulating through the heater core line (which flows even better than it did before - no complex routing, just your bypass hose).

What horrible thing would happen if all the red lines in my diagram were blocked off and the T-stat wasn't open (yet)? I mean, the engine's cold then anyways, is it just that the water can't flow (within the engine) at all?

Another pic from the SM that's relevant:

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...ter-outlet.png

I think at least it should be possible (perhaps even superior) to block off the 4x outlets labeled B (2x heater core), D (throttle), A (says "EVAP piping", but it's the other side of the throttle stuff, I traced it myself a long time ago).

You could truly seal off (like, weld shut) the two extraneous nipples on that rear water outlet assembly (the ones with hose clamps numbered 6 and 1). Then on the driver's side you could permanently plug the upper hole of where Gasket #15 is. It's the bottom hole in gasket 15 taking in bypass water from that #19 bypass pipe that seems like it could still be necessary, maybe...

Oh, I was wrong about the heater flow being cut off when the heater's off. I guess I'm used to looking at this on older cars. When I looked through the related bits of our service manual, it appears that coolant always flows through our heater core even when you're not using the heater, and the blowers and air mix doors and whatnot just control whether air is blown over it into the interior or not.