The gauges lit up and working look great.
The stock battery was old and dead so we replaced it with an Optima deep cycle D35 Yellow Top battery. The Yellow Top can be close to fully discharged and brought back many times without harm or loosing effectiveness and its spiral wound gell cell construction won’t leak or spew acid.
The Z already had a sweet sounding Tomei exhaust and we simply reused it.
With the car fully assembled, we had it flat bed towed to Specialty Z to be tuned using the ECUTEK tuning suit. ECUTEK allows the tuner to be able to reflash the OEM ECU. It also allows the tuner to use the input from the ethanol content sensor to an unused input to drive the fuel and spark maps to work optimally on any percentage of ethanol.
Our car was strapped down to Specialty Z’s heavy roller Dynojet chassis dyno.
Next it was time for Specialty Z’s tuner, Sebastian Chacoff to get behind the keyboard to initially flash the ecu. Sebastian has a lot of experience tuning the VQ37VHR and he had also discussed some of the tuning strategy for our engine with JWT’s Clark Steppler, two of the best Nissan tuning minds in the country.
15 comments
This entire series was a real treat!! Feel free to put a dyno vid up on the motoiq youtube 🙂
What $/hp gain are we talking about here?
Around $200 per pony. It’s about $14k to replicate this engine build.
Seb tuned my car back in 2014 N/a and the same dyno I made more power and torque N/a on e85 than you did 371hp 291lbft. Except I had a stock rotating assembly and a dry sump. Recently had the car retuned and made 401hp after a switch to ecutek.
For us the owner didn’t want to go to long tube headers because he wanted backward compatibility with the stock exhaust system. He also didn’t want to spend more for a different air intake. Add the 5=10 more hp you get from dry sump and its right there.
I didn’t have long tubes either z1 shorties
That is pretty good, what sort of head work do you have?
Jun 272 cams and a better intake manifold
I’m saying that you spent 3-5k on a high comp motor that could have been used on an intake and an external oil pump to allow it to run past 8000 and been 20-hp higher. There isn’t a need to build these motors NA beyond cams. Only time it would be worth it is for a big displacement increase like Soho just did but even then they made like 3 more hp than my last retune at BTW.
I would have liked to run long tube headers and a different intake, but we can only do what a customer wants to do. To me a dry sump is pretty hard to integrate on a street car with AC and all, not to many customers will pop for that.
Excellent info and cool build! I was wondering why the Moroso check valves instead of a catch can for each bank? I assume the rest of the pcv system is kept as stock? I.e stock pcv valves still in place or the valve was drilled out? A little unclear as to how it was plumbed and why it was chosen over catch cans?
I’d like to know more about the PCV setup. What Moroso check valve part number was used?
With regards to the routing, the check valves are place inline with the rear port with the direction of the flow going from valvecover to intake pipe port. The front PCV valve is kept, along with the factory hose connecting to the front manifold vacuum ports. Is this correct?
I too would like any additional info on the check valve addition vs catch cans if possible.
Because the breather lines are actively part of the sealed crankcase and the VVEL system not being under throttle control and not being able to have an open breather. Routing them to a catch can would be a big vacuum leak and the RPM could run away.
I understand your reply but only see potential of a vacuum leak if you were venting the cans to atmosphere otherwise its still closed loop system. I think this was an initial misunderstanding on my part. I thought the check valves were initially inline with the pcv valve loops. Hence asking why cans were not put inline with the pcv valve loops Instead and doubling valves in the loop.
If I understand the plumbing it looks like those are the rear valvecover breathers crossed over to opposite banks intake with moroso valve inline. Does this balance pressure across banks vs stocks same side rear valve cover breather to same side intake? Looks like the actual pcv valve loops are left alone?