So i’ve wanted a 300zx ever since i was 14 as a project car. Unfortunately… as anybody who knows me knows… I tend to dream big and never really get to where i want with my project and usually get in way over my head. So this time I’ve been actually focussing on my project and thanks to a deployment to afghanistan and an enlistment bonus ive actually been able to get somewhere this time. So this is my Z as i got it… a light blue, non turbo, 2+2, 5spd, with blue interior… pretty much stock other than a short shifter and a STILLEN catback:
It started off with small mods. Anything i could aford to do at the time that would make the car feel or look better in any way. Usually my buddy Nedim would come by and help out… or we’d just stand around eating pizza and talk about how cool it would be to work on our z’s. haha. first some excess intake piping needed to be removed… this actually gave a significant increase in throttle response. i was pretty surprised.
Nedim and our fellow Z enthusiast, Booger (RIP) reinstalling the front bumper.
Excess piping removed… Z sounded more throaty and had a noticable increase in throttle response.
The next course of action was to install some HID’s… Not only for the baller effect… but also because unless you have the $1500 Jspec Xenon lights… the stock headlights on the Z32 are TERRIBLE!
Ballasts in place under the nose panel, away from the super hot engine bay.
BAYDAYSS!!!
And then… out of boredom… and not liking how bland the stock brakes looked… I pinted the brake calipers red with white nissan lettering. Call me rice, but i think it looks nice.
desperately needs some new rotors though. :Idiots
Some pictures Nedim and I took:
A week or so before i left for basic training at Ft. Benning, my engine started knocking… Pretty badly… So i pretty much put the car into the mom’s garage for storage until I could continue to work on it. Shortly after arriving at my first duty station I processed my initial entry bonus and then deployed to afghanistan for a year. The whole time i was researching what i needed and buying parts online to swap my eninge for a twin turbo. When i came home on my mid-tour leave in Feb, I had a few parts waiting for me and I went to go track down an engine.
I also began to change the color of the interior panels to black as part of a plan for an overall interior scheme, and put in a flip up touchscreen head unit. I had to gut the old Bose amp boxes for each speaker to use them as speaker mounts for larger pioneer speakers all around.
About time you made a build thread for the Z! Can’t wait to wrench on this thing again
when i got home from afghanistan for good I had a lot more parts waiting for me at home, and a lot of work to get started on. I started with the suspension.
Varrstoen TE-37 replicas (18x8.5 front, 18x10.5 rear) wrapped in Falken Azenis (235 fronts, 265 rears).
Concept Z brake upgrade.
KYB AGX adjustable gas shocks with Eibach Pro .75" lowering springs.
Everything installed… Energy Polyurethane bushings next to be installed.
Haha thanks Ned! I may have the TT engine in the car by the end of tomorrow. We’ll see… If not… then def by the end of this week. We gotta hit up a car show together when it warms up before i roll out to the stan again. oh and ill be up there from the 17th to the 2nd we should chill meng
wow sweet car man. what kind of numbers do the TT engines put out? any plans on tuning it and what not?
thanks! the stock vg30dett motor puts out 300hp from factory. the non turbo was 222hp. the stock internals are said to be good for 600hp but most people say the stock turbos are only good to produce 400hp maxed out. ash at ashspecz is in the 500-520 range on the dyno though, using stock turbochargers with other mods such as larger diameter piping and such. im running similar mods to his 500+hp z… so who knows? i’d be happy with 400 for now though, until i decide to build another engine or buy bigger turbos at the very least. Right now i’m just trying to get the car running before I start to install my other goodies, to try to make troubleshooting a bit easier if it comes down to it.
There were more parts left in the wake of my overseas ordering spree.
Prosport guages with a tripple din cluster and a tripple A-pillar cluster for monitoring vitals.
To run more boost you gotta feed the need. Haha. So i have an adjustable fuel pressure regulator, walbro 255lph fuel pump, and some bigger injectors to keep up with the fuel demand.
Making it easier for the turbochargers to take in air is a big step since the stock intercooler piping is incredibly restrictive. So I upgraded to ConceptZ’s 2.5" diameter intercooler piping with silicone couplings, Z1 blow-off valves, and larger Godspeed Racing side mount intercoolers.
Then there are the electronics to help out with keeping my engine swap alive. APEXi AFC Neo to control the air/fuel ratio and make sure it doesnt lean out too much, HKS turbo timer to help prevent premature turbo failure, and Turbosmart E-Boost electronic boost controller to control my boost levels and adjust as needed (or wanted).
Helping get the power to the wheels is a lightweight flywheel, a stage III clutch (we’ll see how well it works), and a Z1 lightweight 1 piece driveshaft. The one piece driveshaft not only saves weight but also eliminates the pesky center carrier bearing of the OEM 2pc shaft… which is prone to failure.
As for the exterior… I definitely did not want to go crazy and rice my car out… I just wanted to add a little more agression to the look of the 1999 Jspec Fairlady Z’s and apply it to my car. The blue is cool… and a rare color… but just isnt fitting my style. so i ordered everything to paint my car the black obsidian as is used on the infiniti g35’s/g37’s:
1999 Jspec Z32 front fascia, 1999 Jspec z32 rear spoiler, Stillen sideskirts and door fillers, Ionic Dynamics carbon fiber foglight ducts (to better feed the larger side mount intercoolers), 1999 Jspec Z32 corner lights
Test fitting the front fascia and sideskirts. Keep in mind the front of the car isn’t lowered in this picture but the rear is.
Wheel fitment looks pretty sweet in my opinion. Super wide stance. Camber plates to be installed (still in the box).
this things pretty cool, call me gay but i like baby blue
My NI**A SCOTT!
The engine pull began with nedim and i looking at the engine bay scratching our heads. thats a lot of hoses and wires to just jump into. the vg30de/dett is no simple machine thats for sure. he and i dug into it and we started tracing connectors to sensors and actuators and figuring out what they were and started labeling the connecotrs in conjunction with where they were to go, as well as vac. and water lines. i wasnt about to try to figure it out later on when it came time to throw the new engine in. the engine bay looked like medusa. But Ned and I got it all done.
Not much room in there to move your hands around.
Nedim removing the balance tube and fuel lines.
me tracing wires to the VTC solenoids behind the motor. just about everything was damn near impossible to reach in this car.
My friend Josh came over and helped me with ripping the actual motor out. He was way more experienced in swapping engines than me and he was a tremendous help, as well as my friend Eric who would stop by from time to time to give me a hand when i was stuck.
Me taking a cut-off tool to some stubborn exhaust bolts that just didnt want to move.
Josh under the car ripping off accessories so could start getting the motor out.
All this was done over my block leave and I ran out of time so i had to pack it all up and get it ready to ship. meanwhile i flew back to ft campbell and started calling shipping companies so i could start to work on her again.
haha thanks. it really is a pretty cool color… it started to grow on me more and more… especially since i have only seen a few in this color, but i just dont think it goes with the style of how I am doing the outside… and the paint is in rough shape and needs to be redone anyways… and ive always wanted a black car. 
the baby blue is sweet though… But the blue interior… hell no…
AWW SH**! This one’s for you chris!
So A company finally came to pick up my car, parts, boxes of parts, tools, and extra engine. the guy who wrapped everything up to ship had a car story of his own. he was telling my mother about his time in the military durring vietnam and that he had a corvette he and his dad had gone half on for him. when he came back from the war he found out his father had sold the car because they didnt think hed be coming back. he found the guy they sold it to and tried to buy it back and explained the situation but the guy wouldnt sell it back. to this day that car still goes to car shows. pretty sad story haha… he took pretty damn good care of everything and went through a lot of extra precautions to make sure nothing was damaged. my car looked like a pillow when it arrived.
The flatbed coming to pick up my car to take to the warehous.
vg30dett getting brought out to get bubblewrapped, rathet strapped, and blanket covered haha. my car arrived wrapped in mattresses and pillows.
Back with my car in the storage lot at the self-serve hobby shop. Thanks to Webber and Tylka for coming out to help me download it and all the rest of the stuff from the truck.
i wanted nothing more than to get back to work on my car. Some friends of mine were once again interested in helping out and it was great to have them there to help out.
Potvin and Stone snapping off some more stubborn exhaust bolts so we could rip the manifolds down and get the exhaust out of the way. This was WAAAAAYYY easier with a lift and a brandon bar(potvin)
Potvin and I went back for more. We dropped the tranny, the driveshaft, and pulled the old non-turbo engine out in a few hours. Awesome night.
Victory…
Now time for a REAL powerplant!!!
The engine I bought had some rough spots from when it had been pulled out for sure. I looked over everything to make sure no oil lines to the turbos or anything like that were damaged. And yes i got a compression test on the engine before buying it. But it had the usual “we took a sawzall to the car to get this engine out” look.
The fuel hardlines from the twin turbo (bottom) had been twisted and bent and were just all around jacked up. It was obviously in need of replacement, Luckily it’s exactly the same as the ones from the non turbo motor (top) so I already had a swap ready to replace it.
The balance tube from the TT engine (bottom) also looked damaged. It had some pushed in spots on it and in a couple areas it even looked as if it had possibly been breeched. I didnt want to risk having a vac leak so i decided to replace it… again… it just so happens to be the exact same part as the balance tube from the NA engine (top)… which only had some minor scratches in the paint. Lucked out again.
The VTC solenoids were also obviously f***ed… They had been bashed in, wires had been cut and stripped… and they even looked a little… melted… (one im holding was in the TT engine… the one installed is the replacement fromthe NA). Again the same exact part as the NA VTC solenoids. I swapped both of them out. The only other issue was the connector on the ECT sensor had snapped off… again… same part… swapped it out as well…
so now i had to finish prepping the engine to go into the car. i didnt want to risk crushing fuel lines or the good balance tube so i left those off until the engine gets dropped in.
first I installed the clutch and flywheel. This was no easy task. The TT engine came from an automatic car. The back of the crankshaft had a pressed in bushing that wouldnt allow the installation of a pilot bushing. At first I tried prying it with a prybar and screwdriver, then i even tried splitting it with an air saw and a chisle. It was going nowhere fast and I didnt want to risk damaging the crank so I finally bought the 60 dollar puller and the bushing came right out.
Then i had to remove all the mangled remnants of the old TT harness. When I did I found that the connectors on the fuel injectors were pretty corroded so those are on a deep cleaning list but everything is in tact and the connecotrs are all the same as the ones on my NA harness. At first i was a little scared to get into the wiring of the car… but it turns out that the pinouts and harnesses are pretty much the same. In fact Z1 Motorsports advises you EPROM your NA ECU and tune it for boost. I plan on going this route, but since I’m running a stock injector setup for now just to get the car running and make it easier to debug, i will just be plugging in the TT ECU to run stock settings. The only difference is the TT ECU has an extra wire for the fuel pump which gives it variable speeds… But my fuel pump is smaller than the stock TT one (which is good for 700hp) so i wont be needing quite that much umph… yet… haha.
New engine cleaned up, simplified, repaired, and ready to be dropped in.
Megan Racing divorced downpipes to go onto the turbos, leading to a cat-less turbo-back exhaust.