370Z Drift Comp Car

ChrisDrift

Got the 350 engine into the 370 chassis today and it went relatively smoothly. Ignore the cuts in the lower aluminium brace - that's certainly not required to get the engine in but it just made things easier with the engine crane and we're replacing that brace with something else anyway.



The 350 engine fit perfectly into 370 subframe, still on the same mounts we had in the 350. The transmission mount from the 350 was nowhere near though so we had to grab the one off the 370 transmission. That still wasn't at the right height though until we swapped the rear section (the bit that holds the shifter) from the 370 transmission onto the 350 transmission, as otherwise that part hits the top of the trans tunnel. After that things looked a lot better but we did have to widen the trans mount holes slightly to get all 4 bolts through and into the threaded holes in the chassis.

So then we stuck the 370 prop shaft in (think in the US call it the drive shaft) and that fit perfectly between the 350 gearbox and 370 diff.



Oh also took the stock fuel tank and fuel lines out, ready for the Radium tank to go in later



Now we're onto trying to figure out exactly where we want to mount the turbos and route all of the intake and exhaust pipework so that we can do a bonnet exhaust. The main reason for bonnet exit is weight saving but also frees up space for other things under the car like coolant lines going to rear radiator, plus saves having to get exhausts back past the manifolds and steering column etc. Having said that, it is turning out to be a lot harder than you'd think because we're trying to fit a muffler in somewhere as well. The drifting series I compete in has got a lot stricter on noise regs recently so the last thing I want to do is spend months building this thing and then find out it isn't allowed on track and we have no room to fit a muffler without re making the entire turbo setup.



Looking at good ways to route the exhaust manifold through from the side of the engine up to the front, we decide we're going to move the power steering pump from the top left to bottom right and that makes life much easier. Obviously will be a bit of a pain mounting it and might need to add another idler, but not the end of the world.



So yeah, still lots of things to figure out but I think tomorrow I'll just start cutting the stock chassis legs and headlight bracket stuff out so that I can see how much room we really have. Obviously we'll replace the chassis legs with some pretty strong tube, but that will take up a lot less space.

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Me drifting/crashing my 350Z and 370Z: https://youtube.com/ChrisDriftVideo