the_eagle91 Intro and Build Thread

[the_eagle91]

Hey everybody!

I just made a profile over here, I've been on 300zx club for about 2 years now but I decided to try out something a little different on this forum. My name is Kyle, I'm from Southern California and I have a 1991 Nissan 300zx 2+2 that started it's life as an NA but is now undergoing the process of being TT'd.

Here she is right here while she was an NA



My swap began back in December of 2011. I had taken my Z to my family mechanic who was pretty experienced with Z's (he had done several TT swaps in his shop) asking him to help me figure out some throttle hesitation that I had been experiencing lately with it. It had a surging idle and it would randomly die while I was braking as well. Well when I brought it in to him, he told me he heard some bottom end noise and that I should really start looking into getting a new motor. Well, being young and reckless, I decided now was the best time to do a TT swap. I drove the car for about a week more and it threw a bearing on the way home from a local meet with one of my buddies in the car (who is a Honda guy, so thus began the s*** talking LOL). So a few weeks later I found a local guy selling a USDM VG30DETT and I went and picked it up for a great price, blowing the rear suspension of my DD in the process haha.

Here's the motor when I picked it up, it was VERY dirty



I decided to do a full rebuild on it so thus began the long process. I'll let the pictures do most of the talking for this part of the story

Tore her down to the bare block and sent it out for honing, decking, and to be checked for cracks. Here she is when I got her back ready for paint



After paint. Decided to go with silver to be able to see leaks better



On my old motor I had a never ending problem with the Det sensor code, so here I am expressing my feelings to the new det sensor LOL



Slowly coming together



All new bearings on the polished crank



Got the heads fully machined at Milennium Motorsports in Temecula, CA. I'll talk more about the heads later LOL



It took us a long time to get to this point. We started building the motor in January and didn't get this far til June. It was a drag doing this making $10 hour and going to school but worth it



Got the original AT turbos on



I cleaned, painted and refreshed EVERYTHING on this motor. Here's the valve covers



Got some new style 370cc injectors in an old style rail with the Z1 adapter kit



First timing belt job was a breeze outside of the car



The NA motor FINALLY coming out in August



IDK if this video will work but here is it's last time being ran as an NA before we pulled the motor that same day



The bay was VERY dirty



Plenum on



Fully assembled for the first time



The BEAUTIFUL setrab oil cooler i got from Z1



Installed. For those of you who haven't seen this thing before it is HUGE



Here's the motor in the bay for the first time



Put my TT bumper on



Interior electronics all hooked up Greddy E01 boost controller and oil pressure, oil temp and boost gauges



Almost COMPLETELY ASSEMBLED




Up until this point everything was pretty much smooth sailing, just replacing EVERYTHING with OEM or better parts. When we started it up for the first time it ran perfectly EXCEPT it was blowing white smoke like CRAZY. So I consulted with some Z friends of mine and we figured it was probably blown turbos since I hadn't rebuilt the ones I had gotten with the motor and they had at least 100k miles on them and when I brought the motor home originally there was small amounts of oil in the exhaust side of the turbo. So I got rebuilt turbos from Concept Z Performance and threw them on, put the motor back in the car and there was STILL smoke. I talked with a bunch of the guys on 3zc and they reccomended checking the head gasket since the oil came out like this...



so out she came AGAIN.

But this time she got some goodies

ARP Head studs




So we put the motor back in this past weekend and guess what.... STILL SMOKE! WTF! So today she is off on a tow truck to go see my mechanic who is good friends with the machine shop that did all my machine work since we are pretty positive that it must be a messed up valve seal or something so they can both look at it and I can get a professional opinion about it.

She's got a pretty big mod list at the end of this build, I have it written down somewhere so I'll post it up when I get around to it

Thanks for reading and I'll be updating this when she gets on the road again! Wish me luck!

[t.mcginley.jr]

First off, welcome to NICO!

Damn man this looks like a great build it sucks that you've had such bad luck with it smoking. Milkshake oil is no good at all lol. Hopefully you'll be able to find out why its still smoking. Was it blowing out both sides of the exhaust, or just one side? Bad valve seals would have been blue smoke or any kind of oil burning would've been blue smoke for sure.

[the_eagle91]

First off, welcome to NICO!

Damn man this looks like a great build it sucks that you've had such bad luck with it smoking. Milkshake oil is no good at all lol. Hopefully you'll be able to find out why its still smoking. Was it blowing out both sides of the exhaust, or just one side? Bad valve seals would have been blue smoke or any kind of oil burning would've been blue smoke for sure.

Thanks man. We'll see what my mechanic has to say about it, he's been in the business for over 20 years and he's never let me down when it comes to helping me out on my Z so I trust him 100%. I've done all the work on this build myself except for the machine work and I'm 99.9% positive I have done everything right. All the guys on 3ZC I've talked to seem to be pointing towards a bad exhaust valve seal due to the amount of oil that is shooting out of the driver's side downpipe. It's so bad that we ran the motor for about 20 seconds on Sunday with a towel under it and it covered the towel with oil that was mixed with coolant. It's pretty bad... lol

[t.mcginley.jr]

What all did you get done to the heads??

[the_eagle91]

What all did you get done to the heads??

Valve job, lifters rebuilt, valve seals, heads were decked, and the cams were polished

[BlackWidowZ]

Ya that sucks about the smoke man, and I hope you get it figured out soon cuz that looks like its going to be sweet. Crosses fingers I don't run into same problems. I have a black 2+2m also its going to be kinda like this not with that body kit though i do like the stillen sides. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxcP75TRWNM[/youtube]

[BigTDogg (MA)]

Welcome to Nico sir. Build looks great, sorry to hear about the head luck but hey, we've all been through it!

[300ZXttZMAN]

Welcome to NICO. Hope you get the head problem figured out soon!

[ChaseOfSpadeZ]

Man, the look of that engine bay is something to be envious of!

[DCaff300ZX]

Welcome to NICO, nice looking work so far other than that obvious smoking problem.
Hope you get that figured out soon!

[the_eagle91]

Thanks for all the kind words, the warm welcome and the support guys!

Made some progress these last few days. I got her towed to my buddy's shop so I could get his opinion on what's going on with her and he has a completely different theory than I do. He thinks it might be some bad piston rings on the drivers side that didn't seat properly when I replaced them since when it had been ran for only about 20 seconds at his shop, every piston on the drivers side was FULL of oil. Whether it is that or the head, it's coming out of the car and getting torn down again. This time around I'm going to have Millenium Motorsports, the machine shop I took the heads to, go over both the block and the heads again as well as assemble the short block for me since I absolutely do not want to tear it down again after this LOL.

I'll post up some pics of the tear-down process as I go along.

[Ace2cool]

I'd blame valve seals before I blamed pistons if it was as bad as you describe.

[H1tman]

Welcome to the dark side stranger.

[the_eagle91]

Alright guys, UPDATE TIME!

I've really slacked on updating this thread, and I apologize but I definitely have big news.

I tore the motor down again and to my surprise the ARP head studs that were supposed to fix my head torquing problem were also loose when I went to take them off. I took the heads off and pulled the studs out and to my surprise some more thread came out with the stud. I did some research on 3zc and found that even if one or two small pieces of the thread are missing for those head bolt holes, they will not hold to the required 90 ft/lbs that are required to hold our heads down to.

So fast forward about 2 weeks, I brought everything down to my machine shop and they looked over everything and we decided that it would probably be best to not re-use the block I had due to those screwed threads on the head. Luckily I had my old NA motor laying around so we are going to use that. After further inspection, there was also damage on the pistons that we had not caught before since the shop had never seen the pistons. I don't know if it was there from the start or just recently created, but the need for new pistons popped up, so I snagged the chance and got some OE 0.02 over pistons for the rebuild. I don't have the money at the time for the Wiseco's so that's why I didnt opt for those. Those came in about a week ago. Also after giving the pistons and the blocks to the machine shop, they realized that the oil rings on the pistons on the drivers side of the motor (the side that blew all the oil) were seated incorrectly so thus my friends, we have found the solution to this grand problem LOL.

So currently, this stuff is being taken care of at the machine shop (Millennium Motorsports in Temecula, CA) and I should get it back either this afternoon or Monday in the afternoon after I get back from my trip to Vegas this weekend (WOOHOO! haha).

Here's the list of what all is getting done.

-Bore .02 over and hone
-Wash and deck the block
-Polish the crank again
-Heads were inspected and were still ok
-Check balls in the filter tree on the NA are being removed and blocked with NPT taps (found this trick on 3zc as well)
-Complete shortblock assembly

The original goal was to get this car done by the 28th of April for the MSA auto show, but that's a big maybe now since we are so close to it.

Thanks for reading guys. More updates soon when she's back home in my garage. Stay tuned