After a long long winter, hundrets of working hours, $$$$$ and dozens of hours researching through the internet (often on Nico), I would like to share my project with you. Primarily I decided to do this here, because this portal has helped me a lot during my project ("the search function")
I'm 29, live in Switzerland and work for a big insurance company. Since I was fourteen, bikes and cars have been my great passion and main hobby. In the last 15 years I was able to acquire a lot of farbicating, engine swapping, welding etc. -knowledge. This led my projects' level to increase year by year. The latest project has been the most interesting, expensive and challenging!
Thanks to the internet (and you), I was able to do the most of the work and parts sourcing myself (with the great help of a friend of mine). I would like to give something back, in the form of a writeup of my own RB25 swap. So that other folks can find info and use the experiences I have made.
In the next few weeks, I'll post info and pics on the different stages of the swap, up until today.
It all started with this mint EU-spec 1993 200SX S13 I imported from Germany in June 2009:
German Autobahn back home:
MT, A/C, no sun-roof (FTW), 140'000km, oldschool mesh 16" edition wheels, chassis in very good condition.
The EU-spec S13 come with the underestimated CA18DET, which is basically very tuneable, but often in a bad mechanical shape (not well looked-after). Stock power output is about 170hp, 200hp are easily reached with minor mods.
I imported the car to Switzerland and managed to get it licensed. Before that, I had to do some major de-tinkering, the pre-owner did a lot of electrical installments, it had a f*** up Fujitsubo catback, cheap lowering springs, completely wasted break discs etc...
After that it was a nice and easy ride to cruise through the summer. All I did, was a complete service (oil, filters, spark plugs, fluids. And of course a slight performance upgrade...
JDM turbo cars' performance usually suffers from biiig backpressure coming from restrictive downpipes. This is also the case for the CA18DET, so I bought a 3" knee from eGay and fabricated the downpipe back to the catalyser in 3". Together with 1bar of boost (16psi), the S13 went quite well and had a strong midrange. I would estimate 200hp/280nm at the flywheel.
But the old T25 turbos are very laggy and sluggish, the car felt lazy and needed lots of rpm and time to come into boost. The CA18 usually perform like this when stock...
=> so I researched and compared different performance enhancement methods (incl. engine swaps)
to be continued...
