New to z32's but have faith in the n/a's

[pchris]

hows it going everyone im new to NICO but have owned my 1995 z32 for acouple of months now, i got it with what i was told a "rebuilt" n/a motor. i dont know what it consists of but i do know i can beat on it and not be afraid. first off id like to start with a quick background, i am a commercial/industrial electrician so i am by no means a professional when it comes to cars, my skills with tools are above par but it is my lack of car knowledge that is slowing me down. i had a pretty well built 2005 evo 8 mr that was last dynoed at 450 whp before this but unfortunately there trannys are built like glass and it became to expensive to keep (not to mention my mechanic was f*** me over pretty hard).
i got mine z32 for about 5000 and unfortunately i kinda jumped to it and got alittle screwed over when buying mine and cant just sell it and buy a tt because im the 8th owner, it has been in 3 accidents, has been totaled, and now has a rebuilt salvage title and i put about 3 grand into it (this includes rims, tires, coilovers, evo 8 recaro seats, new steering wheel and mods like ud pully, z1 driveshaft, light weight flywheel, short shifter, pop charger, headers and greddy tc-i exhaust, front tower bar, front and rear adjustable control arms, egr delete, mission cf lip, new radio ect....) and have done all the work myself, so i could 1. prob never sell it because no one would want it, 2. if i did, not get anything close to what i want so i plan on keeping it and trying to make the best of it. i use this site for 90% of my research (i also got banned for life from 300zxclub.com) so believe it or not alot of you are the reason why i feel this way. iv seen other threads like this but people tend to stray away from my wants so im doing this for people have the same wants as me.

onto why im creating this thread. i want to make decent power with my n/a and still have a durable car. simple as that. im pretty sure the most dragged out question on the entire internet is either "how can i tt my n/a or how can i make alot of power with my n/a" and what iv realized is that the easiest solution is .......... TT SWAP. BUT i dont have the time, money, or know how to do that. and way down the road when this motor goes i want to do a ls1 swap, becasue if im going to do a swap i think id be cool to have something thats not supposed to be there in the car. my power goal is 290-300 whp. most people on here say yea good luck or your going to be spending alot of money to get there. i believe that it is possible to do it without turboing the car or spending more then a tt swap.
in my research iv seen people try to single rear mount turbo and blow there motor, put nitrous oxide in which i dont know anything about but have heard it makes the motor pretty unreliable and basicly strip there whole interior and thats not what i want. i want a full car, thats durable with decent hp. iv been led to believe that the n/a motor is mostly forged or something relevant and it could take a beating and thats why its so heavy. iv also learned that to make more power you need to take the good air in and let the bad air out. so i plan on trying to get more air in and out of the motor and when you do that you need to also add more fuel.
in the near future (within acouple of months) i plan on dynoing my car the way it is to get a starting point (since i have most of the recommended mods minus the ecu upgrade) and then add parts that i believe will get me what i want and posting results of my success/failure. again i understand "dude dont waste your money just do a tt swap" but i believe that the n/a motor can make more power then most people believe without dumping ALOT of money into it and fully rebuilding the motor. i plan on doing things in bulk so i dont have to do the same thing twice so unfortunately for those looking for hp results for specific items im sorry.

input is welcome id love to hear advice, these are just my thoughts threw research im not saying im 100% right but if your just going to flame or tell me to just swap, the back button is in the upper left hand corner all you have to do is click it.
my near future mods are... (doing these all at the same time since i will have the plenum apart)
-(tt injectors) i found some used for $150 shipped (more air needs more fuel to match) no need to upgrade the fuel pump because iv read its sufficient enough for my power goal.
-(ecu upgrade) iv seen this ads about 15whp by itself, plan on using ashspec because of the price and iv heard its the same as jwt just runs alittle leaner. $190 shipped
-(port and polish) doing this myself so itll be free, my intake manifold/ plenum, headers, throttle bodys
-(redo intake piping) id honestly love to just make a custom intake manifold but i know theres alot of math and s*** that goes into that, that i dont know how to do so i will just detour around that and use bigger pipes and find a more direct rout for air flow universal piping on ebay that i can cut, weld, and coupling together myself iv priced somewhere around $120 shipped.
-(electronic exhaust cutouts) these i know wont really give me any hp but i think there really cool and part of me doesnt want to believe dyno results (as stupid as it sounds) because your alowing the exhaust out faster. plan on putting these right after the headers somewhere in the early mid pipe. $320 shipped for cutouts and y pipe
-(cams) lastly for this section of mods are cams unfortunately there the most expensive so if anyone has a set of upgraded cams there trying to get rid of id love to take them off your hands (by that i mean ill buy them from you for a decent price i dont expect to get free parts). these are a huge bolt on mod that is a must for evos (yes i noe the evo 4 banger and the z32 v6 motors are completely difference so please dont get into that) and i know for most cars they add to top end which is what the n/a's need price:..... the cheapest i can get good upgraded cams for.

this completes just the first section of mods i plan on doing and posting results for. plan on spending about 1200, i understand you can get a tt motor for about 1500-2000 but i dont think id be able to take out and completely put back a motor yet, plus you'd still need, intercoolers, piping downpipe, tt fuel pump, oil cooler, oil cooler lines...... so on and so forth so if i were to do a complete swap it would cost me roughly $4000 and only spending roughly 1200 in step 1 of my plan would help me stay way under budget.

my expected whp is about 240- hoping for more. any advice for other upgrades to reach my power goal of 290-300 would be greatly appropriated. trying to keep it a n/a because i have faith and hoping to make others believers.

[scheffler]

Hello, welcome to Nico..

So you got banned from 300zx for life, I hope you will play nice here!!

Anyway.. Of coarse everyone is going to tell you to swap in a TT all you have to do is a swap and you have hit your goals. If you want to do an LS or TT swap I don't see the point of putting money into the NA and wait till it goes. Pull it while it is in good condition and on the new side of the rebuild and sell it to someone that needs a new NA. Take that money and put it into a LS or TT swap.

Also you are going to eventually need to pull the motor. If you plan on building the NA as much as you say you are, you will at some point need to pull the motor. So what better way to learn that then to just do it. Find a friend or someone that knows what they are doing get some beers and some write up and knock it out. The z32 is a packed engine bay and you will need to know how to pull it apart and put it back together or you will get shafted at a shop. I own a TT so I am sure that the NA is a little less packed but it cant be much. This car when modified is a true mechanics car or for someone that has lots of cash for shop labor.

As for what mods are out there to help you reach your goals.. Well you mentioned what I would tell you to do. If you are set in your NA goals then you mentioned some others. Rear mount turbo would get you there pretty quickly but the supporting mods for a turbo could be just as costly. Nitrous would be an option,(not one I would recommend) again you will need supporting mods to make it reliable. You could rebuild the motor and put expensive parts in it, balance it and make it a high compression higher reving NA motor. This could get you there with more supporting mods and would probably be the most expensive way to go but would be really sick IMO

There is a lot of good info on this site if you read around. Good luck and keep us posted on the project.

[pchris]

well id love to do a tt swap lol. i dont want people here thinking i dont want to do 1, i miss my evo mostly because of brake boosting but im a young guy also saving for a house so i dont just have that money laying around, i feel if i do it this way the car wont be down for months either, im hoping to hit my goal (with some other worldly magic) with only spending 2000 more. another thought i was playing around with is actually go the other way and lower the compression somehow and make a y pipe for intake and exhaust and do a single turbo to get my goal but then i throw that idea away because i have to pull the motor to work on the block. but on the other hand if i could find cheap used parts it could be cheaper then doing a swap. part of me is trying to avoid the swap also because i want to to do something different then something you could have bought from nissan. in reality im trying to stay n/a and i just have a feeling to reach my goal the secret is in the intake and fuel but like i said im no professional so i could be completely wrong

[scheffler]

Well it sounds to me like you have two different agendas. lol

On the one hand you want to stay NA and keep it cheap and avoid doing any type of engine swap.
The other hand wants to have a good amount of power and have something different then most if not all. Something you cant buy from Nissan..

Well my friend these are very contradictory ideas. You wont be able to reach you power goals with out a good amount of engine work if you stay NA. Maybe you wont have to pull the engine but if you have to take the heads off to do a cam upgrade then you might as well pull the engine. I would pull the engine if I was doing this mod. It is easier to pull the engine all the way out then to remove the heads with the engine in the car IMO.

The other part is that originality that you are after. This is great and everyone want to be original I get it. The thing is that 1. these are 20+ year old cars so there isn't much that hasn't been done or thought of for these cars. Custom stuff cost money and it wont be a budget build anymore.

What you mentioned about the intake modifications is this. The intake manifolds are essentially equal length (or maybe its pulse matched or something)and there has been a lot of engineering by Nissan into the intake plenum. They are very efficient manifolds. I would not recommend building a custom one unless you are highly skilled in fabrication and welding aluminum. Plus have years of intake design and a good understanding of fluid dynamics. Also the money that it will take. If not you will most likely hurt the performance rather than improve it. Upgrading throttle bodies could help you and so could intake possibly but understand this. The intake parts of the VG30 were designed for the TT and are just used on the NA. The intake plenum the TB the MAF the fuel system for the most part. Most of these parts are the same for BOTH NA and TT. I promise that you are not maxing out the flow rate of the intake plenum, so why mod it until you are maxing it out. You could upgrade the injectors and change the map but that will only go so far as the stroke of the motor is not going to change and it will only draw so much air. Not much that can be done about this unless you force air into it, stoke it, bore it out, or change the compression to make more power with the air you can draw. Yes you can change cams and bore them out a little to help get more air in there but these mods aren't cheap and require a lot of work. IMO the NA is not nearly as restricted in the stock set up so the gain obtained by modifying a NA are not nearly as big or noticeable as the same mod done to a TT.

[pchris]

well i was never going to make a custom intake i know it consists of alot of math and know how which i know nothing about my idea was to change the piping to it. what was nice about the evo was the intake was about 8 inches long, and some even did speed density and just put the filter on the turbo, here the air flows from under the nose panel down under the lights, then back up to the throttle bodys (i understand im comparing a turbo to a n/a but im talking about the actual length the air has to travel) i want to try to put the intake closer so it doesnt have to travel as far just to get to the throttle bodys. i know my ideas are contradicting and thats why im doing twice the amount of research and the lowering the compression was more along the lines of something that i never planned on doing. just entertaining the thought. BUT now that im basically contradicting my original thought this still helps my belief in the na block ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tv2hUeODHU ) i understand he has a custom intake manifold and if you look at the other videos it looks pretty built but i was thinking what if i get a y intake pipe like this ( http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wIU41K_kbIQ/R ... /vgs14.jpg )and custom weld the exhaust to mount a single turbo. (obviously id get the supporting mods, oil cooler, bigger injectors, intercooler) my goals are far lower then what he was putting out and if i put it at a lower boost level it should be able to stand it. my z is only a weekend driver so its not like its constantly being beat on. does this sound like its desdend to fail? or as there a small possibility that there is a light at the end of the tunnel? i dont know everything i need to make a turbo work, def plan on doing more research but i know i cant just slap a turbo in there and expect it to work

[twinturbozxtacy]

shave the heads, high comp pistons, add some timing and race gas... could do cams too. but thats the main power set up for na engines.

[scheffler]

Yes you could put a remote mounted turbo on your car with the supporting mods to make it work reliably..

I thought you wanted to stay NA? if you want to do the y pipe like you mention and put a cone filter on it right there in front of the block, IDK.

You would def have to go with electric fans and get rid of the clutch fan.I still don't know if it will help much. Plus IDk if a cone filter will even fit there. It works in a turbo setup because it is a narrow tube as opposed to a fat cone filter. I don't know if shortening the tube will help at all and here is why.

Air is a gas which acts like a fluid. If you think about it like this. If you have a tube of water that is full end to end. If you put 1oz of water in one side 1oz will come out the other, it doesn't mater the length. This is the same with gases and air is a gas. What would be more beneficial IMO would be to widen the intake tubing to eliminate pressure drop. Pressure drop across tubing is dependent on a few things, the number of bends, the ID of the tubing and the speed of flow. When the tube bends the flow is no longer in a laminar state and it starts to become turbulent. The fluid on the inside of the bend starts to run into the fluid on the outside of the bend and you get a resistance (pressure drop). To reduce this pressure drop you can reduce the flow rate, or widen the tube or eliminate the bend. The flow rate at which your engine pulls in air is dependent on throttle position and also something that we don't want to reduce so we will eliminate that as a solution. So if you cant reduce the speed you have to widen the tube or reduce the number of bends. I don't think once the intake pipe is charged and the engine is pulling air that the length matters that much as AIR in would equal AIR out. The best solution would be to run a strait tube from the TB to the MAF with a cone directly on it. So maybe the solution is to get a dual MAF setup and run a short tube right of the TB on each side. However with the engine bay the way it is on a Z there probably wont be room to run it like that.

Also again still wouldn't be talking big gains because a NA engine can only pull so much air. Making the system more efficient will help yes and you will gain power but how much over the current setup?

I own a 240sx also and I did a lot of mods to it like you are talking about. I built custom intake pipes and re routed them and exhaust and pulleys... There was never a real mod that had huge gains. They were all small and did add up but there was a still a limit. Unless I wanted to do lots of motor work. Which I ultimately did, but I built it for a turbo. Once I did that personally I never wanted to go back to a NA

One of the best gains I got other than adding a turbo to an NA was an entire rotating assemble balance with the dampener and clutch pressure plate fly wheel everything.

Power costs money period... so you need to decide how you want to go about it. There is more than one way to reach your goals and they don't cost the same.

[300ZXttZMAN]

Welcome to NICO!

(i also got banned for life from 300zxclub.com)

That site is run by Nazis. Curious, what did you get banned for?

Onto the subject. Honestly, this has been a beat dead horse, beat over and over and over again. The NA VG won't make any amount of respectable WHP this has been proven over and over. By the time you make it to a number even semi respectable it would have payed for a TT swap with bolt ons.

[pchris]

^ they wanted me to post my address for something on the site so i put NY and they said it wasnt good enough so i told them i wasnt going to do it and 1 of the administrators was like "fine you dont do that you dont post easy as that" and i replied "im so glad the administrators could be so professional... another reason why this site sucks balls" so they band me. i honestly wasnt trying to create a problem im just not putting my address on a website for everyone to see especially since they also ask what car you have and and gave me a hard time for that as well because i just put down black z32 and they wanted to know everything about it. thats just asking for your car to get stolen or vandalized. i have no problem giving my address to people im doing business with through pm's or email, i did it with the guy who sold me my exhaust but im sorry im not putting my full address on a website that is car specific and you dont even need to sign in to get onto. the guy who sold me my exhaust asked me why i got band in the middle of the transaction and i had to explain to him the same thing lol and he laughed and said the same thing happened to him and said there a-holes like that

[DCaff300ZX]

Funny...there's such a rep there, but they really don't ask for anything more than you and everyone else at NICO have willingly done- list your location city and state, your vehicle's particulars such as trans and engine and anything else you want to add as you have done, and a few other things a spammer/scammer would not/could not share. They do not want your complete address or any truly personal information, same as here.
Moving on to your NA Z and making power, as Mark suggests the NA engine has been a source of conversation and argument for many many years. Basically the problem is that on a cost basis comparing what it costs for how much power/efficiency earned comparing various motors, the VG30DE simply does not respond as well to really any modification as other motors do. $1K spent on the NA compared to $1K spent on nearly anything else will benefit the other motor FAR more, and so there just is little reason to do much to the NA engine unless you are just dead-set on doing it, and how much power you get is irrelevant...not the usual reasons for building a motor!

[pchris]

Nico just seems like a more professional site anyway iv gotten more of my questions answered threw this site then anywhere else and thats only threw searching. I m now realizing based on what scheffler said about the ability to suck in air is actually the downfall of the n/a's so im doing alittle more research and im lean on single turboing it. I plan on using used parts and ebay parts because they are cheaper and i still have connections with alot of evo people so i can prob pick up a turbo for cheap and i can do all the fabrications myself. As of now i just need to do research on what supporting mods i need to keep the na motor from blowing. Like the video i posted before i feel the n/a motor is strong enough to handle one i just need proper mods to match. I dont plan on reaching anything close to what that guy put out or that amount of psi. Looking into what that guy did who posted on here about the rear mounted turbo i noticed he didnt really have a proper fuel delivery system or air cooling system. People say you dont need an intercooler for remote mount turbos because of the heat distrobution threw the length of the intake pipe but i believe thats false and plan on making sure i have 1 in my build. Threw my evo iv pretty much got a good understanding of the air system in turbos i just need to learn more about the oil and fuel delivery system on them. Any info would be appreciated

[z32loverboy]

You don't lose the heat out of the air in the intake system as easy as that. The #1 to think of is: the cooler the air, the denser it is. The N/A pistons are not forged so if you heat them up very much they'll melt. also the piston rings are not as strong in a N/A engine so if you put too much boost to it you'll only create blow by. The valves are made of a different material in the N/A than in the TT heads, they're softer and have a lower melting point. You'll need a Cometic (or similar) headgasket, stock N/A won't hold the pressure. That's all I can think of off the top of my head. It's not as simple as throwing 2k at it and it's turbo'd. Like they've said, VG's don't respond as well to modifications as other engines. Nissan over-engineered them from the factory. So unless you have some way to force more air in (IE. supercharger or turbo) you won't see the power you'll want with out race fuel, one hell've a tune, n02 and all the upgrades you've mentioned with ALL of the rotating mass shaved down as light as they can go.

I looked into trying to make a N/A motor fast for about a year and looked through everything I could with out S/C or turbo and I was at a loss. Not trying to be a kill joy but these guys are right man. Goodluck with your build and let us know how it goes.

Mods: where's Edgar, doesn't he have the built N/A motor?

[ArticDragon192]

Mods: where's Edgar, doesn't he have the built N/A motor?

I'm back. Lol. And no, not quite yet. Still in the middle of putting it together. Thought I would come back and share my build.