An ill-advised 300ZX build

This one goes back a bit. 

In June of 2005, I was driving down the road after pouring another $1200 down the air conditioner of my single-slammer (KA24E) 1989 240SX.  It chose exactly the wrong moment to blow the high pressure line off.  I was exactly across the road from a lemon lot next to the fairgrounds.

Then I saw it: a 1992 300ZX twin turbo, with glorious BBS RS wheels. 

It came with a tiny bit of provenance, in that its previous owner was a fairly well known guy who owned a Ford Lincoln Mercury dealership in town.  He'd kept it at his South Padre Island house.  He was enamored with the Stillen SR-71, which was a package sold by Stillen for a very few Z32s in the early '90s (HKS turbos, 17" BBS wheels, and the bulk of Stillen's parts).  By the time he'd read about it, they were no longer doing it, so he bought the wheels, some 13" Brembo brakes, a JWT tune, a JWT intake, a JWT exhaust, some Eibach springs, and a Stillen short shifter kit.

In my first week owning it, I blew up the clutch (broke a spring retainer in the hub and jammed the spring).

So I did my first clutch job, and then put it on the dyno, for some baseline readings.

I was happy to just thrash it as is, except that in 2007, the driver-side turbo called it a day and sent its bearing down into the oil pan, then started machining the compressor housing, the turbine housing, and both wheels into hot sparkly garbage.

I did a compression test, without any great hope, and found out that my lack of hope was justified: 1, 170PSI, 2, 175 PSI, 3, 170 PSI, 4, 170 PSI, 5, 175 PSI, 6, 70 PSI.

Also, the inside of the plenum was covered in oil that looked like it had spent the night at the strip club, as it was just chock full of glitter.

So, in my 26 year-old wisdom, I decided it was time to rebuild the VG30DETT, but with bigger turbos and bigger injectors and bigger intercoolers and forged pistons and rods.

I used a local machine shop to do the work of: balancing the rotating assembly with the new pistons and rods, boring the cylinders .020" over, align honing the mains for ARP hardware, replacing the bearings, replacing the valve springs and valves, and grinding the valve seats (and lapping the new valves in), and assembling the short block.  I also had the bearings and pistons coated (a thernal crown coating for the piston tops, a dry film lube coating for the bearings and piston skirts).

I got busy doing my first engine pull.

I stripped it and delivered it to the machine shop, then they got to work:

And I got to work buying pieces.

(the spindle pins are for my 240Z, ignore them)

These are GT2560R turbos, a fairly substantial upgrade over the little T22s that came stock, but they spool in a remarkably similar way.  Combined with (then) some 740cc/min injectors, you could say things were looking up.

So, I packed all that stuff up in the back of my 240Z and took it down to the friend's garage I was fadoodling in.

New injectors

Got to cut some strength off of the motor mount so that the turbos would fit.  That was about the time I knew things were going to get spicy.

Then I just went ahead and put everything on.

Supervisor periodically stopped in.  He was about 3 or 4 at the time.

Hung it, put the second new clutch on (this one was a heavy duty unit):

And finally sent it home:

Moar!!!!!

Very nice.

Subscribed.

Love it. The Z32 is by far my favorite of the 90s Japanese performance cars. Though I hear I might change my tune if I ever had to work on one.

So, with all that new stuff under its belt, I got a "chip tune" done by a local guy.  His name's Eric Dotson, and he's had his hands all up in the guts of all my fuel injected cars (though not the Datsun, since it's still carbureted).  He set up his Moates emulator and used a couple long-past-their-prime tools that edit fuel and timing maps, and we came up with this (at 15PSI of boost) and then flashed it to a 27c256 chip:

Which, at the time, was badass.

I elected to take things further and clean up the awful wiring harness to fix and eliminate what I could (like the coil drivers being located on the timing cover, having the wrong fuel injector connectors for my injectors, removing the aux air input valve plugs entirely).

Ready for install:

The igniter was moved into the footwell with the ECU:

Then I came across an HKS EVC 5 boost controller, and I committed the sin of butchering my clock to put it in:

I don't have the dyno run saved for whatever reason, but it was somewhere near 400HP at 17PSI instead of 15, which was about all I was comfortable running with the knock sensor and the boost control being done separately.

Will said:

Love it. The Z32 is by far my favorite of the 90s Japanese performance cars. Though I hear I might change my tune if I ever had to work on one.

The Stockholm syndrome in me says "yeah, it's great, it never hurts me!"

My wallet says "my anus is bleeding."

So then I tried to drive the car in the Great Winter Storm of 2008™, which didn't go my way, and I ended up in the neighbor's Yucca.

I parleyed that into an opportunity to put the '98 J-spec front end on it (along with all the accompanying bits that I broke, which included the AC lines, the fog lamp, several intercooler joints, the undertray, and the fender liners:

I also found the time to nearly ruin an ECU at a bikini car wash.  It turns out, you shouldn't spray down the stupidly complicated engine with old connectors and iffy cavity seals.  It kept blowing the "Eng Cont" 10A fuse, which controls the idle air motor, the EGR solenoid, and the safety boost solenoids.  I went to buy a new ECU from a local yard, asking only for an 8-bit, federal, manual, twin turbo models, which he reassured me was what he had.  It wasn't.  It was, in fact, a 16-bit, California, automatic, NA model ECU.  The only thing that could have been more wrong is if he'd had an OBD-II '96 ECU.

So I opened up my old box, and found the issue: a PWM driver had been crispified:

Fortunately, the new ECU had several identical ICs on board, so I desoldered one and put it in the old ECU, and got it back to fighting shape again.

I'm in for more.

Flash forward 4 years to 2012, and my friend convinced me that we should paint the car, because the clear coat had failed in places, and the red on the bumper wasn't really the same as the red on the doors, and the spoiler was suffering the rot that all the '90-'92 spoilers eventually get.  I also wanted to get rid of the rear wiper and orange peel texture on the rockers.

So I got started.

I eventually adjourned to another friend's spot who owned/operated a body shop and wrecking yard.  I used methylene chloride to strip most of it to bare metal, and then zinc chromate primer, followed by high build buff, then the usual guide coat, sand, fill, guide coat, sand, fill, prime, topcoat.  I used Martin Senour products, because Bill worked with Napa's paint and body supplies, and it was easier to pay him to get things dropped off than it was for me to go stand in lines and invariably forget one thing or another.

But a guy eventually did get his poop in a group.  It took me a while, and between the start and finish of this one, I finished my master's degree (computer science) and was diagnosed and treated for metastatic testicular cancer, moved jobs three times, and pulled up stakes and moved houses (same city) once.

I also trawled the hybridz website and managed to snag the last new old stock OEM '90-'92 spoiler from a guy who'd bought it thinking it was an actual aero device he could put on his NA Z for autocross purposes.  He'd left it on the shelf for 20 years, and I scooped it up for $100 plus shipping.  I feel like an actual criminal typing that.

It was a long time, and I'm sure the only reason why Bill let me keep coming around on weekends was because he enjoyed laughing at all the mistakes I made doing the job.  Sure, he eventually set me straight, but he watched me pursue blind alleys for a long time before he'd step in.

The finished product:

And after all that sanding and polishing, you can really see the dead bug in the light fixture in the garage:

Oh and at some point during that paint job, I got rid of HICAS.  There's a local track to me (now called "Suika Circuit") where there's an off-camber transition to a back straight that was always right on the transition between in- and out-of-phase rear wheel steer.  So I grabbed an NA Z32 power steering pump, reservoir, and mount and got rid of about 30 feet of leaky hydraulics, and added this fancy billet aluminum piece that the vendor forgot the helicoil for on the driver's side.

But hey, now I don't end up spinning into the weeds if I'm going too slow around that corner anymore!