I got that from Chase Bays! They're a NICO sponsor and AWESOME. Chase made that power steering hose setup, and has been insanely helpful with custom -AN hoses and other little bits during this process. I highly recommend them!

Here's the website:
http://www.chasebays.com/products/nissan-240sx/

Got a little bit more work done tonight. I put on the intake, which was nice to see. It finally looks like it is actually a functioning motor haha! I got this car 6 years ago, and it's taken me that long to finally get something in it with an aftermarket intake! Doing everything the hard way





Hose Candy quick disconnect hose fittings. Ran a few vacuum lines, and I'm going to use this setup to run some of the smaller coolant by-pass hoses I've messed with and changed in the process. These things are super sweet and just screw off to disconnect immediately!





Fuel Lab FPR

Well, I've been slaving over the project for the past few weeks, and it's finally all coming together. SHE RUNS! Spent the whole day chasing electrical gremlins all over the place. We couldnt seem to get the fuel pump to come on, so we bypassed the whole relay for it and wired in a 10 amp fuse and a toggle switch for turning on the pump. It's not a DD so it won't bother me any.
Everything fit pretty damn well, and Doug at ZFever was very patient with me calling him to ask electrical questions.

NOTE:
If you do this swap and use the McKinney Mounts, you need to bang out the tranny tunnel a bit to really get everything to sit in there correctly. We also had to slot the transmission mounts just a hair to get all of the bolts on the chassis to thread up nicely. Don't be afraid to get dirty!

Here are a few pics of the bay area with the harness and plumbing in place:








And more importantly, VIDEO!!!!! I'll take my flip camera down tomorrow and get a better quality video. Hopefully it won't be raining so there won't be as much background noise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_0qp23Z8rM

very nice work! the vq and bay look very clean!

in, im doing a swap in an s14 looks like you had a great time with yours so far, were did you get the headders from?

It has been a long and painful path figuring out exactly what is needed to make this thing work right, but it's well worth it so far. Now I just have to button everything up so I can go burn some tires.
The headers are made by Mckinney Motorsports. They had never made a set this big before though, and I had to cut and modify the return coolant neck on the motor for the passenger side header to fit.

Yes! A Mckinney kit + Z fever success story on NICO! Congrats! Finally, someone with first hand experience. Glad to hear Z fever seems to have act their act together.

Any opinions or comments for someone who wants to daily a similar project?

Just don't go into it expecting it to be plug and play! Make sure to have a good grinder, a reciprocating saw, and plenty of drill bits...tap and die set too for any of the coolant lines that need to get plugged. I spent a fortune running to AutoZone and Home Depot for tools I didnt have and little bolts and such. As long as you are capable enough to modify things to fit your needs, then you'll be fine. ChaseBays provided me with quite a few sweet products that helped the conversion process a ton, though every kit they sent me was missing a fitting of some sort (Still haven't received some of those fittings)

Thanks for the feedback!

no problem. I'll be more than happy to answer any questions you have when you get your project rolling

Love that you decided to stay four lug, props man the car looks great

Hey man I'm in San Antonio also, your car looks great! Just curious which body shop you used, and is that the factory midnight blue pearl paint?

Thanks

Didn't use a body shop, I did it all myself, with some guidance from a buddy that used to do paint and body at a hot rod restoration shop. And the paint is 350z Daytona Blue, paint code B17. Wasn't planning on a Z motor and paint color when I picked it

Well guys, the car runs, it drives....barely! I had to leave on the 25th, to go work on a cruise ship for another 6 months, so I didn't have a chance to fix some of the problems that I noted while driving it around the block. I need a new alternator, and I need to bleed the whole power steering system. There was so much air in the system, that it was foaming all of the fluid up and spraying out of the pin hole in top of the reservoir. I got the car down on her wheels at like 11:30pm on the 24th, had enough time and battery juice left to drive it gently around the block once, and then put it back in the hangar for storage for the next 6 months! Sadly, the whole damn car was covered in ATF from spraying out of the reservoir...definitely need to fix that situation. Wish I had more time to work out all of the kinks, get an alignment, and go romp on it a little bit, but I don't. So, that means I have a another 6 months to stock up on goodies to polish her up when I get home.
I'm going to get an OEM style carbon hood, and modify it so it clears the motor. Hopefully it doesn't take much! I will be painting it to match the car. If I don't have to put some sort of cowl in the hood, I will be very happy, because I would like to retain the stock body style.
Well, I left town, paid my little brother to wash the car up and pull it outside for a photo shoot with his Z. Here are the last photos until winter time rolls around, enjoy guys!

Man it looks great, congrats, .....

I guess no matter how much work you do you can always find something else to keep doing.

Make sure you redo your fuel lines when u get back. Way too close to the exhaust manifold. I can only see bad things happening when ur buzzing down the fwy and the heat builds day in and out.

There's not space to put the fuel lines anywhere else, but I'm sending the headers out to get ceramic coated, which should cut down on the amount of heat that is transferred. I might also make a heat shield of some sort for them. Even without those headers there, the y-pipe would run pretty close to the fuel lines down near the frame rail. And that rubber line you see coming off the front is for the fuel pressure gauge we had plugged in. Normally, that will just be plugged, with no line coming off of it, so it shouldn't be a huge problem.
And the big line is for the radiator, and has more clearance than that picture makes it look. Though that whole corner is a pretty tight fit with the headers being so huge.

Car looks terrific.

FattyMcBaggins wrote: I'm going to get an OEM style carbon hood, and modify it so it clears the motor. Hopefully it doesn't take much! I will be painting it to match the car. If I don't have to put some sort of cowl in the hood, I will be very happy, because I would like to retain the stock body style.

Ever consider the Origin Type II hood? The cowl is nice & subtle, IMO...

I actually hadn't seen that hood. I'm looking into it right now. It's pretty much perfect as long as it gives me enough clearance. THANKS!

sweet!

welcome to the club. hopefully there will be more of us vq 240 owners showing up.

Hey folks. Just got back in town after 6 months out to sea. I'm finally getting work done on the project again. I had to pull the engine so I could remove and modify the exhaust manifolds a bit. Needed to shorten up some tubing for clearance issues. Anyways, we noticed in this process that a bunch of brake fluid leaked all over the frame rails and sat there for the last 6 months while I was away. It ate through tons of the paint on the frame rail and in the engine bay so we realized we had to do some repainting. Since I we were painting, I went ahead and ordered a set of kouki tail lights. I also decided to paint the valve covers to match the car. I've got some pics, and hopefully next week I'll have the motor back in with a polished coating on the headers.

Did you paint the insides of your throttle body?

The upper manifold and throttle body are both powdercoated. The guys that did the powdercoating didn't mask off the inside of the throttle body so yes, it is coated; lightly, but it's coated. I wasn't too happy with them over this, but it seems to work just fine. I may replace it some day, but for now, it's not a huge concern of mine.

Well, things are coming along bit by bit. I got the headers back from being ceramic coated. They are definitely much shinier now! I also test fit the dash back in, just trying to get an idea for how some other things will go back together.

New shiny headers! MMMMMMM



We went ahead and washed the car down, since we're hoping to have a motor back in it soon. Figured we'd get the first layer of dirt off now. You can also see that we kind of test fitted the hood with the PBM spacers. Obviously we're dealing with some clearance issues right now because of how high up the motor sits. We're currently considering making some 1/2 inch spacers to lower the front cross member a bit. I have adjustable front LCA's and I'm hoping they'll be able to compensate a bit for how that may affect the suspension geometry. (We can always remove them if it doesn't work out. Right now, we're mainly trying to avoid cutting and painting the hood. This paint color has tons of pearl and metallic in it, which makes it a good bit harder to paint match...don't want to paint something big like that until we're ready to strip the whole thing down for a repaint.





Test fit with dash

So, had a busy week on the car! Finally got the motor all buttoned back up and back in the car! YAY! Even better, she starts and runs! Now is when I'm really wishing that I had a wiring guru as a best friend, because we don't seem to be getting a charge from the alternator. We tested it off of the car at Autozone, and their little machine said it's good. But, I've got a spare to throw on to find out. Hopefully it's just the alternator, because some of the wiring is a bit of a mess right now. Whoever own this thing before me apparently had a love of crimp connectors and changing wiring colors when replacing things, so it's a huge PITA to figure out some of the wiring.



My buddy, Arty, helping check on last minute things



Congratulating ourselves on our currently level of Awesomeness


Preparing for Awesome 2.0





Thank God it's in!


The internet is sucky for me right now as I am on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean. I'll upload some running videos and better pics in the coming days. Hoping to fab up a y-pipe to tame this beast on Tuesday or Wednesday when I get back in town. Hopefully the alternator gets figured out around then too. Then it's time to eyeball an alignment and go for a little test drive...a test drive STRAIGHT to an alignment shop!
Oh yeah, and we had to put 2 sets of PBM spacers on the hood hinges to make it fit! So it's "hella street JDM dorifto tight" right now. It's functional because I can close the hood, but we will be working on a hood solution as soon as we can. We'll probably mod a FRP or CF hood so that we can leave the original hood untouched. Then if we ever go back and mod the mounts/Xmember to seat the motor lower, maybe we can get the stocker to fit again. I'd prefer it to be as stock bodied as possible! SLEEEEEEEEPER! Thanks guys, more to come soon!

Here's my shameful hood spacing SAD PANDA




It is kinda cool that I can see the engine from the drivers seat though! haha. I have also acquired something over the past few days that has me a bit scared of what is to come, but I will slowly start getting parts together to put on...................
THIS!






What we have here is a Vortech V3 Supercharger with the mounting bracket for a VQ . All of the rest of the bits and pieces will be pulled together piece by piece. I have quite excited about this though! The kits sell for OODLES of money, but with the main piece in hand, I think I can fab up and piece the rest together for under $2500 (including the supercharger's cost). With upgraded pulley's I can easily put down over 400 at the wheels with that thing. I'll try to stay conservative at around 375-380. I'm not ready to have to rebuild it yet!

Ahhh I'm In love and super jealous I want It

Another startup video. This one's a little better quality. Than the old one that was posted. I'm hoping to get a driving video next week.

http://youtu.be/XtmSnNQ-5nY