Silence that exhaust!

I can’t quite recall if the xterra was this noisy when I bought it 2 years ago, but one thing is for certain: the noise coming from the leaky muffler has only gotten louder over the days. Mustered enough courage to tackle the cased-on bolts today and this is what we found:

Something leads me to believe that Nissan had some build quality issues at the turn of the century. The stamp line sits upright at a slight angle, causing it to collect moisture and debris. Overtime rust hole formed and now we got a sports muffler.

The local trusty Autozone produced a bolt-on replacement, only to have one of the hinges missing. This gave me a perfect reason to not spend $120 and fix the old one myself! 1 hour later (included 10min of putting out a welding fire):

Good as new!

But wait, let us aim higher…

It has recently come to my attention that if I was going to make an adapter, I might as well adapt something really cool! How does a VQ35HR manifold sound? This is where going VEMS will really pay off. 2 MAFs? pff! MAP+TPS all the way!

Happened to find one on car-part.com for $200 in Fresno. These are relatively reasonably priced given that they are only produced from 2007-2008, since no one can really use them. Need to get my hands on one and blueprint the thing.

The throttle body looks similar to a VQ30DE unit, however with the drive-by-wire mod. I figure slap 2 VQ30DE TBs on there, and use a good-ol motorcycle dual carb throttle cable box to finish things up.

O, the length we go to convince ourselves that we were right all along.

Designing the VQ30DE-K to VQ35DE LIM Adapter

As most of you would know, the VQ30DE-K (00-01) LIM ports are flat-sided oval, and the VQ35DE LIM ports are round. 350Z UIM on your VQ30? no way. nada. end of story.

Well maybe not. No matter how hard I try the 00vi simply refuses to fit under the 240 hood, and I don’t believe in butchering my hood. It all the sudden hit me – why not a 350Z manifold! 2 hours later the following is born:

The piece is supposed to sandwich between the 350Z UIM and the DE-K LIM, allowing me to adopt the odd combination. Some of you might be wondering why I didn’t go with the VQ35 swap, or done the VQ35 head + VQ30 block combo. My answer to that is now I know.

Still need to pick up an actual 350Z UIM and get the actual measurements. Hopefully the old man back in the STL can whip this up for me in ABS for a reasonable price.

BACKDATING PLACEHOLDER

This marks the day that I first got this blog. Since the build started quite a while back, I’m digging through my photos and writing about them as time comes. Hopefully I can get the whole thing documented

Is it shiny?

Just got my manifolds back from Performance Coating Plus They are located in MO and does great work! Give the dude a call and see what he will do. I suspect sending back more work if I don’t find anyone good in California.

Of course this posting is useless without photos! The first set of headers that I’m aware of, built specifically for the S13 swap:

Spend $40 on part, or 4 weeks making it?

Nissan utilizes a 180 tooth wheel on the flywheel, a 2+1+1 sync wheel on the crank pully and a funky timing sync on the cam gear. VEMS wants something simple, so I decided to whip up a Bosch-style 60+2 trigger for it.

It is worth mentioning that this is no rare part, I could have just bought it and saved a month of work, but noooo…

Day 1 – Castrating the crank pully:

Day 3 – Turning out the part on some sheet metal:

Day 34 – Testing version 3 (don’t ask):

Testing involves spinning the crank pulley up to 4000rpm on the mill with a custom arbor, and scoping the output of the stock VR sensor. This is a scary task, if the thing came off I’d have 10lb of out of control circular saw power that is eager to find my fingers.

omg it works, the huge ppv around the missing tooth is caused by some magnetic flux effect that I’m too lazy to explain here, but hopefully VEMS is kosher with that

college intelligence, full machine shop, 6 year old imagination

According to reliable sources on Maxima forums, the VQ30DE rod bolt should be good up to 7200rpm – the oil pump usually goes first. The following dyno from the same poster reveals something very interesting:

With the S1 knockoffs set to 2 crank degrees off base advance, the horsepower looks like it will be at a reasonable all the way to 8000rpm. Heck, even if it doesn’t make power up there it would be interesting nevertheless to go that high. Who is this retard?

Standard cookbook calls for ARP rod bolts. Voila, ARP makes bolts for every Nissan engine except for the VQ30. Some long and hard research reveals that a SB 273 has rod bolts that will almost work, provided that we ream out the rod bolt holes to .3460. This gives us the same amount of interference fit as the stock bolts, although a BE rework is still necessary. Why not:

As it turned out later the bolts needs another couple of tho taken off on a lathe, but they all fit together nicely after the machine shop got done with them. If the VQ flys apart while I’m burying the tach, I think I’d know why.

VQ30DE Torque Plate

Ask anyone that rebuild engines, and they would tell you a torque plate is a must for boring. Fast forward to the VQ30 – no one except for in California or Florida has one! After some futile forum searching, I decided to make my own out of 2.5″ 6061 stock:

This is one made in Taiwan CNC hard at work. It is no HAAS, but having one beats not having one. The 5 fluted 1/2″ end mill alone is worth over $100! Thank you WashU!

This is what you have 6 hours later:

The piece was then drilled for the head studs, and fly cut (the machine shop later fly cut it again to get a mirror finish). All in an afternoon’s work for $150 in materials, not bad. I’m now the only person in the Midwest with one of these.

Clutch break-in!? What you mean?

I mean come on, no one ever reads those little words from the Exedy box. 500mi stop and go before WOT? Gimme a break! This thing saw 200mi highway before a weekend of autocross and track day – who says the KA was gutless? Burn clutch burn!

300SX anybody?

The VQ found its new home in the abandoned 240SX engine bay. If I didn’t know any better, I would say Nissan intended for this combination – it fit like a glove!