It's removed. It's a older pic. Thought it wouldn't matter.

I removed all that stuff

And you haven't had any cooling issues?

I ask because apparently the windshield/hood junction is a HIGH pressure zone, and I assumed it would be a LOW pressure zone. Thus removing that seal would assist with removing air from the engine bay. I was planning on making a gurney flap of sorts for the trailing edge to create an even lower pressure zone there, but my windshield wipers are rubbing the hood because i fckin broke the mount when removing them for work... :(

Ridiculously expensive to replace that part, too.

What have you guys that have removed the cowling done to safeguard all the electronics gear on the passenger side from water? And the big *** vent hole that the blower drew from?

Pictures? :)

FWIW, I did remove the big rubber strip that seals the upper edge of the engine bay. I figure regardless of which way pressure/flow is going, more air exchange there has to be good for cooling.

I haven't noticed any cooling issues. I know its a low pressure area on a 240z, as my hood would suck up if it wasn't latched.

As for the electronics gear, I don't drive in the wet and I store the car indoors.

Same here, but I'd hate to get caught out in a sudden downpour. I guess a car cover will help with that, assuming it doesn't happen while I'm actually driving.

Changed the oil. Had Red Line 5w30 in it, seemed to be a good oil, only got to put ~500 miles on it though. It'd been in the crankcase for a year, had to go.

Giving Mobil 1 0w40 a shot. It's the "European" formula that's actually made in Germany I believe. I know on the oil forums, it had some of the highest numbers for ZDDP and Molybendum, which are high in the Nissan Ester Oil. Difference this stuff is $22 for a 5 qt jug... Yes please.

And I never thought I'd say this, but damn is that Pure One oil filter nice. It's just a damned oil filter but geez, it's so nice I almost hated to hide it under the car... ha. It was $6 on Amazon Prime, can't complain. The stupid canister refill filter on my Mazda cost $12 at WalMart, highway robbery. Did the oil on that beast too, it had about 9K miles on it so I figured what the hell. Interestingly my "finger test" tells me that the oil was still perfectly usable, would take a EOA to tell me for sure how worn it was, but meh.

I would hate to miss out on driving in the rain. :) I enjoy the wet when it isn't too all standing water.

Yeah me too. Driving in the rain takes finesse, and can really sharpen your skills as a driver. It helps to be on good tires though, I found that slicks don't work really well :)

With the traction control on it is really easy to drive in the rain so I usually leave it on until I get tire temps up and then switch it off and then destroy the typical "fast" cars.

I've yet to have an opportunity to drive in the wet/damp on slicks. We did get some sleet in April about half way through a 20 minute session. That was fun. :P

Built some fang-fed ducts to feed air to my intakes and replaced my secondary radiator cap with a 30 PSI unit.

When I was doing some driving over the weekend, I got the impression that the engine was still pulling hard when I shut it down @ 7500, so I raised my limiter to 8100 (fuel cut, resume @ 7900) and took her for a drive with logging on.

Holy moly, the sound that car makes @ 8000 RPM will make a man out of you. Feels like it pulls hard to redline, the dyno will tell on Saturday.

Logs indicate that the radiator and oil coolers are doing their jobs splendidly, so that's nice. Intake air temps went down to where I expect them to be for this weather, so the ducts are working as well.

I'm pretty sure I'm shooting flames out of the back of the car when I downshift. Wish someone could follow me with a camera... heh

Did you do the motorsports oil pump upgrade?

No, but I don't plan on making a habit of spinning it that high. My built in 'up shift' instinct kicks in about 7400 or so, I have to really be focusing to make myself spin higher than that. It's mostly for the dyno that I wanna spin it that high, afterwards I'll probably drop it back to 7500.

^ Yeah I'd put it back down afterwards too. On-track I often bump the redline and even peg it for a second or two, just because there isn't enough room to up+down shift before the next braking zone. Just depends on the track and situation, but I'd hate to have one more potentially catastrophic thing to manually watch for when there's so much else going on.

The NISMO pump is < $350 so I've been thinking about it. Just looks like a bit of a pain to install. On my dyno runs currently I'm making peak power right at 7500 rpm so it would be interesting to see how much more it could carry power wise.

If I ever take the radiator back out I'll likely do the oil pump just as insurance (and water pump while I'm in there!), but I'd still be hesitant to run an otherwise-stock engine out to ~8K regularly. I imagine you build up heat a lot faster that way, and other components may fail faster, etc. Maybe I'd feel different if an engine builder had gone over the thing and beefed up and balanced some of the components, etc. Maybe I'd set my limiter at something like 7.7 or 7.8 to give a little more headroom before shiftting in places, but maybe not. Right now I run it at 7450 on the soft-limit and 7550 for the fuel-cut, IIRC.

Where did you saw that hr/vhr nismo pump at 350 $ .??
Everywhere I look they were listed at over 1000 $

I'm interested too. Butt dyno says it's still pulling, but the butt dyno also says my real power band doesn't start til almost 6.5K... which I know can't be accurate.

Since my last dynos, I've added the under drive pulley, the FI exhaust (replaced Nismo OE CBE), wrapped the headers to keep heat out of the engine bay, upgraded the radiator and replaced the nismo dry filters with big *** 'Green Filter' filters. As well as created the ducting to route fresh air directly do them.

All of these things have a potential effect on horsepower, so it's going to be interesting.

I leaned up my tune a little because my logs showed it running a touch rich, and that's new.

I've been running mine to 8200 fairly regularly on the track for the last two years. No problems yet (fingers crossed).
The tach seems to accelerate from redline to 8000 almost instantly though, but the engine isn't. The needle just seems to jump once it passes redline.

Having blown my VVEL then the Oil pump 200kms later ,, I wouldn't be afraid to still rev that high (8000rpm) ! .. as long as my Accusump is activated and the engine helped by some baffles I made in the oil pan !

my engine failure was caused by spinning out which included a tankslapper.

as far as getting into the 8200. There isn't an issue with the intake valve spring since they are pretty stiff and unfortunately cant be ordered alone!!!!! . but the problem is on the exhaust side which I wouldnt go much higher than 8000rpm agressively and risking to float the valve.

The VHR exhaust valve spring are the same as the Int.Ext on the HR from the measurement Ive done and also recording to the FSM.

If I blow it, I take a year off the track and put an LS in. Its probably cheaper than what I spend on the track in a year between tires, brakes, hotels, gas and registrations anyway.

GTM will be releasing a V8 for our cars. They just got done putting one in last week. Fits great but they will have to make different exhaust manifolds for it. And it will work with our tranny. All about timing now.

Any details on that V8? VK?

I'm betting it's a VK45 with some Zytek-style upgrades. The P2 class engines make near 600HP without restrictors, so yeah. :yum:

Did someone say Zytek? If I was made of money, I'd ask them for one of these, I bet it's a sweet engine for the Z: ZRS03 « Zytek Motorsport :) 275 lbs 3.4L V8, 530hp, 330ftlb tq, 9250 redline!

haha the FRRenault engine is cool... still rather have the VK45 though.

Whatever it is GTM is building, you can bet that it will be ridiculously costly.

hmm.. probably less costly than an LS engine/trans combo and all the associated extras to make them work in a Z

If at some point I say that my engine is blown or has a spun bearing or something, noone tell my wife otherwise!

I dunno man, these are the same guys that sell stroker VQ's for 24 grand.

You're gonna spend 5-7K on the LS and tranny, 500-1000 on a drive shaft and maybe 300-400 on motor mounts... a little on some gauges (can vary wildly depending on how cool you are) and after that it's all labor.

Labor is the expensive part.

Not when you do everything yourself. (Like me)

Comparing strokers to LS motors are a BIG difference. Strokers are very expensive for there not common for one thing. All the parts are custome made down to the block themselves. Not to mention the heads. There you have 10K+ in parts alone.

LS swap is not cheap either. I have several friends with kits. The motor/ tranny can be 9K-12K. Then custom driveshaft, harness, plus other odds and ends.

In the long run it's all costly. But more importantly is the direction you want to go. I feel the GTM V8 will be best bet. If you could find a blown VK for super cheap with the block in great condition would be your best bet. Avoid a lot of cost instead of buying a new bare long block for GTM. You wont catch me dead with anything other than a Nissan motor in my car.

Empty Nest Syndrome... Car is with the cage builder this week. :excited:

So I need to adjust my tune. Hoping to get an hour on the dyno when I go to pick up the car. I'm down about 20 HP from before I got the exhaust and changed filters.

The street logs I did showed me running pretty rich, as well as a rather alarming imbalance between right and left banks... There is some cylinder correction baked in to my tune, so I'm going to zero that out and see where we stand. That plus the engine speed calibration being off for my pulls (the dyno thought I was spinning to 9.2K RPM...) makes the graphs look truly depressing! I was able to do some conversions and plots using my old graphs as a benchmark... We should be talking about some serious power, assuming I can get the curves back to looking like they used to.

Here's hoping!

That was the price quoted to me by courtesy parts Nissan. It is possible that they gave me the wrong price so who knows, I gave them the part number night out of the nismo catalog.

if you end up ordering it and it happen its the right one . don't say anything online ! and let me know ;) I will order 2 ! hehe

Okay I will order it and see what I get, it sounds like the right one - we shall see!

Well, end of week 1 of cage build (was only supposed to take a week) and as of this morning, he says he's waiting on material and the dies for the bender to come in...

Well, ****.

So I guess we're waiting another week...or two... :-/